THE TRADE COMMISSIONER SERVICE: Helping Canadian Companies Succeed Abroad for

THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF SUPPLIER DIVERSITY

By Kristin Malek, Director of Business Diversity, CDW

Over the last two years, the Covid-19 pandemic’s impact on businesses, communities and families has laid the foundation for an unprecedented reassessment of how we live and work. That reassessment presents us with an enormous opportunity to advance our diversity, equity and inclusion goals.

I lead the Business Diversity Program for CDW, a Fortune 500 company that provides technology products and services for businesses, government and education. Since its formal launch in 2007, CDW’s Business Diversity Program has grown to become a cornerstone of our diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. In 2021, we facilitated around $3 billion in spending with diverse partners, bringing CDW’s total legacy spend with small, women and minority-owned businesses to more than $20 billion. That number is impressive by any standard, but it’s the “multiplier” effect it has produced by supporting job creation, increasing wages and boosting local economies that has been truly transformative.

At a grassroots level, when a company partners with a small, woman or minority-owned business from an under-served community, it means that more Moms and Dads are earning, household income increases and they can afford a better education for their kids. That better education, in turn, serves as a talent incubator and means we’re planting generational seeds that will give us a richer, deeper and much more diverse slate of talent to hire from in 1015 years’ time.

While every one of us has faced unprecedented challenges in the last two years, there is no denying the fact that women have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic’s economic and social fallout. The good news is that we are seeing more companies than ever before actively revisiting their diversity and gender equality goals. Many of these companies are looking to their supplier pool to help meet those goals – and that presents a significant opportunity for WBEs. What gets measured gets managed and targets for hiring, promotion and executive participation will continue to be a critical tool for companies who want to create more diverse and inclusive workplaces and communities. But the economic multiplier effect means that businesses who factor suppliers into their diversity and inclusion efforts have the opportunity to make real and lasting progress towards our shared goal of creating a more diverse, inclusive and equitable world.

Kristin Malek is the Director of Business Diversity for CDW, a Fortune 500 company that provides technology products and services for businesses, government and education. In 2021, CDW’s Business Diversity Program facilitated over $3 billion in spending with diverse partners, bringing its total legacy spend with small, women and minority-owned businesses to more than $20 billion.

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THE FUTURE OF WOMEN-OWNED BUSINESSES AND SUPPLIER DIVERSITY IN CANADA

By Selsey Brown, North America Supplier Inclusion & Diversity Manager, Accenture

At Accenture, we believe inclusive procurement creates long term value for our clients and our communities and helps us run a responsible business. At the same time, these practices help our suppliers grow their representation and influence in their own markets, contributing to our collective shared success.

Our Supplier Inclusion & Sustainability Program is global; to drive a more inclusive marketplace, we reached 21 countries in fiscal 2021 and plan to expand into more countries in fiscal 2022. The program also works closely with our Accessibility Center of Excellence to establish sufficient accessibility roadmaps for our webbased technology. We categorize diverse suppliers as minority, women, small- and medium-sized, service-disabled veteran, veteran, historically underutilized, people with disabilities and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) enterprises.

We monitor our diverse spend most consistently within the United States and Canada. In fiscal 2021, our U.S. diverse spend increased from 31% in fiscal 2020 to 32%, while our Canadian spend was 25%, an increase from 19% in fiscal 2020. Since 2006, we have put our commitment to supplier inclusion and diversity into action by mentoring diverse suppliers across the globe through our intensive 18-month Global Diverse Supplier Development Program (DSDP) initiative. This program matches senior Accenture executives with diverse supplier companies for holistic mentoring. This year we evolved the program by expanding the mentorship pool to include clientmentors, in addition to our Accenture experts. In order to graduate, our DSDP mentees must attend monthly meetings with their mentor/sponsors and participate in online training sessions. They must also demonstrate their progress as a diverse supplier by completing business health assessments and quarterly progress reports throughout the 18-month program.

In early 2021, we set a new DSDP goal: by the end of fiscal 2023, we will graduate 250 diverse suppliers. As of the end of fiscal 2021, a total of 196 have graduated. In fiscal 2021, DSDP graduated 19 suppliers in South Africa and seven in India (our first virtual class, which is looking forward to an in-person ceremony in fiscal 2022). In fiscal 2022, we launched our program in Australia; and we began our seventh class in the United States, which helped mark our 15th DSDP anniversary.

This past fiscal year, we unveiled the DSDP Sustainability pilot program, a new sustainabilityfocused program based on the Ten Principles of the United Nations Global Compact and the

THE FUTURE OF WOMEN-OWNED BUSINESSES continued...

17 Sustainable Development Goals. The DSDP Sustainability program will help suppliers accelerate their transition toward building their own responsible business models. These models help suppliers deliver the right products and services for their customers, contributing to improving their overall sustainability performance and demonstrating their commitment to climate action and human rights.

At Accenture, our goal is to create a culture of sharing learnings, experiences, and resources to drive collaborative successes. Each year, we continue to evolve our DSDP program. In fiscal 2021, we successfully launched a digital tool to give small and medium-sized enterprises easier access to information and opportunities for diverse partners. Developed by a DSDP graduate in South Africa, the digital ecosystem simplifies interactions between diverse suppliers and businesses to drive growth and sustainability through development, commercial opportunities, and tools to thrive in the Information and digital age. To date, the tool has allowed us to host all DSDP programming virtually since November 2020.

Sesley Brown is the North America Supplier Inclusion & Diversity Manager, leading the award winning Global Diverse Supplier Development Program (DSDP) workstream.