AIMBY Certification: The New Parameter for Purchasing Offices

Purchases of raw materials, semi-finished products, finished products or services are an important part of the budget of companies, where professional activity, understood as competence, research, quality of negotiation, creation of reliable relationships, can bring great benefits to companies.

If we start from the main axiom of many entrepreneurs, where "every money saved is a earned money ”, we can say that the function of the personnel that deals with purchases is among the most important in the production system.

From 1 January 1995, with the establishment of the WTO (World Trade Organization), the era of commercial globalization officially began, through the which the objective of the companies in the most advanced nations was to minimize the purchase costs for raw materials or finished products and, for developing countries, to have a much wider market, without more duties, in which return their goods.

Commercial globalization seemed to be primarily a question of politics, equity and democracy among peoples rather than economics, from an expansive perspective of the international productive fabric.

The purchasing departments have thus had the opportunity, buying in different countries than in the past and, often, much further away from the production site, to reduce, sometimes in substantially, the unit cost of the goods they bought, bringing an immediate benefit to the supply chain of the economic margin on the product.

This has started an incredible flywheel in the field of transport, especially maritime ones, following the dizzying increase in purchases of finished products and industrial raw materials worldwide.

What used to be easily bought close to home was then bought thousands of miles away at a lower price with similar quality.

I don't want to dwell on the industrial and social consequences that this phenomenon has brought all over the world, where, in the most developed countries, the flow of orders began to be diverted of goods and raw materials, from their own countries to China, India and other Southeast Asian countries, with a collapse of the local medium and small-sized productive fabric.

There was then a second phase of commercial globalization, in which we all learned the word "relocation", where the engine was no longer represented by savings on materials raw materials or semi-finished products purchased in distant countries, but by the reduction in the cost of labor, which served to counter the drop in the prices of finished products on traditional markets, caused by producers who came from countries whose general cost of production remained lower than that of Western factories, despite the transport.

In the past, the environmental cost resulting from the new system of circulation of goods, in terms of CO2 emissions, had never been considered and, if had it been, it was just an academic discussion of little interest.

Today things have changed a lot in various production areas, starting with the use of recycled materials, the use of sustainable energy, the behavior of finance, which rewards the greener companies through loans and suspends them from companies that have an “old-fashioned” environmental impact.

Within companies many working methods have changed, many new professionals, linked to sustainable production, have appeared in the company organization charts, the communication system of the marketing offices has turned towards a complete vocation to the circular economy and environmental protection, to give answers to customers who ask for more sustainability.

But another step could also be taken in the purchasing department, investigating new paths linked to the sustainability of the product and the company system, promoting the transition from the of purchases mainly NIMBY (not in my area) to a prevailing phase AIMBY (all in my area), returning to the past, through the purchase of raw materials, semi-finished products and final products close to home.

This is because, in agreement with the marketing departments, the AIMBY certification on the production chain, can lead to further positive recognition by consumers, in which savings of CO2 that is generated in intercontinental or extra national transport, can be claimed as a green badge on the products offered on the market.

AIMBY is a lifestyle, like using the bicycle instead of the car, the train instead of the plane or reducing the use of meat on our tables or drinking tap water instead of bottled water that comes from hundreds of miles away or reducing the use of food in disposable packages, or like many other virtuous behaviors.

Furthermore, the reduction in the transport of goods by sea will reduce by percentage the possibility of accidents, collisions, fires, sinking of cargo due to breakdowns or weather conditions, which they cause widespread and dangerous states of pollution of the seas and beaches on the route of the ships.

We can all do something to help the planet and, all of us consumers, through our choices we can address the market and the productions of the items we buy, none you can escape the laws of the market and the market is all of us.

Automatic translation. We apologize for any inaccuracies. Original article in Italian.