PSA Wins Prestigious CIPS Award for ‘Best Sustainability Project of the Year'

CIPS’s Best Sustainability Project of the Year goes to PSA! Project Greenstone brings to life PSA’s Sustainable Strategy and Sustainable Procurement frameworks, by providing stakeholders with an all-in-one platform to engage and embed new ways of working.

Combining PSA’s carbon management for Enterprise (Scope 1, 2) and Value Chain (Scope 3), has been ambitious given PSA’s global footprint of over 80 Business Units (“BU”) in ports and supply chains. The team went a step further to integrate supplier ESG assessment as well from its flagship operations at PSA Singapore, making this a complete game-changer on how PSA intends to drive and monitor its sustainability progress.


The Problem

As PSA’s international portfolio grew, it was important to procure new solutions to track sustainability impact. They had to:

  1. Digitalize the Scope 1 and 2 carbon tracking spreadsheets.
  2. Define the Scope 3 reporting approach and deliver the 2022 baseline.
  3. Embed elements of PSA’s Sustainable Procurement Framework (SPF) into its pre-qualification and supplier management processes.
  4. Reframe the carbon reporting to add value to management and customers.

As players develop cross-market capabilities, ESG and GHG emissions management segments were fast converging, making it a challenge to assess the technical capabilities of unproven solutions. A hard deadline meant PSA had to decide if solutions should be developed in-house or externally as customisation capability and seamless future integrations had to be considered, and whether a single generalist platform or multi-platform solutions was more ideal.

The Approach

PSA came up with several principles for their Request for Proposal (RFP) evaluation, namely:

  1. GHG management will be prioritised over ESG management due to external reporting compliance.
  2. A single comprehensive platform is needed to minimise onboarding, platform costs, and maintain plans centrally.
  3. ESG assessment needs to be catered towards the suppliers’ maturity levels. Survey agencies were deemed more suitable for this reason.

PSA subsequently awarded the contract to Greenstone+ in May 2022.


The Challenge and Overcoming It

Combined sustainability and procurement experience is not common, given this evolving space, and the key enabler to this project was the appointment of a project manager with a proven track record for program delivery. The energy and can-do attitude of the project manager and the rest of the project team was instrumental in moving ahead.

There were several technical and program challenges PSA had to solve, including the need to manage historical emission data, as well as organizing and gathering scope 3 emissions internally and with suppliers.

Due to the varying ESG maturity of its suppliers, a decision tree was drafted to cater to 3 different approaches (product-, activity-, and GHG Wizard), allowing more mature suppliers to provide better data while assisting suppliers early in the journey with a means to assess their emissions from consumption data.


The results

The project was executed within the approved budget, and PSA remained on track schedule-wise to meet internal management and external reporting deadlines. Pertaining to Scope 3 from PSA’s suppliers, ~80% of spend was sampled and this was extrapolated to provide 100% of emissions by spend (mapped to the 2019 Defra emissions database). The ESG survey, comprising 100+ curated questions on key elements of the SPF, was endorsed by internal experts in various domains. As PSA invests heavily in joint ventures, formal reporting is done on an equity basis. Greenstone platform enables automatic carbon reporting in both 100% and equity share basis.

The Learnings

The ESG program implemented needs to be in line with the company’s and supplier’s maturity levels for interpretation to be aligned.

Scope creep needs to be handled well with manageable changes. Nice-to-haves are usually encouraged, but it can trigger heavy customisation, resulting in major costs and schedule overruns.

“Our partnership has fully exploited the Greenstone team technically and systems-wise, and has deepened our own confidence and capabilities.”
- Matthew de Villiers, CEO, Greenstone


Congratulations to PSA for winning the Best Sustainability Project of the Year!

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