Governance in Sustainable Procurement, Part 3 of 3: Sustainability and Procurement Series  |  Interview with Mat Langley, by AcademyGlobal Managing Director and University of New South Wales Faculty, Paul Vorbach

An Interview with Mat Langley Part 3

Interviewed by Paul Vorbach

Paul Vorbach: Mat, welcome to our discussion on governance.

Mat Langley: Thank you. Governance is a great one; I am looking forward to the discussion. It is interesting for me that governance was not something I really started with, in the sense that I didn’t have the senior leadership buy-in. When I was at CBRE, and if you talk to representatives from other leading companies like Unilever, Mars, and Schneider Electric, you see they had heavy CEO support to drive their sustainability agendas.

I didn’t have that at CBRE. I had some support from the Chief Procurement Officer, but as I developed the operations, technology, and risk roadmaps, I quietly built a number of ESG aspects into them. After a couple of years, CBRE caught up, made a net-zero commitment, and then I was able to leverage the groundwork I had been laying.

Interestingly, at one stage my boss, the CPO said to me, “Stop working on ESG; no one cares.” I didn’t really listen. He was based in Dallas at the time, and he has since written the foreword for my book, so obviously I changed his mind. I had some pushback internally from senior leaders who didn’t see clients asking for this, but I said, “Just wait. It will take a couple of years for us to build this program, and by then, they will start asking for it.” So, I quietly built it into the program anyway.

When architecting a three-year sustainable procurement program, you need to think through the whole operating model and tweak all its different aspects. A lot of companies start with a policy, which is typically where you need senior leadership buy-in. However, most organisations already have a supplier code of conduct. That was where I started at CBRE: I looked to add an ESG clause that they didn’t have previously. That at least starts the necessary conversation when you engage with a new supplier, signaling to them, “Okay, this is starting to be important.”

Next come your category strategies. You need to work with category managers to engage them; naturally, some will be enthusiastic and some will be less supportive. Define those who are engaged, work with them, and provide them with the tools and support they need.

You don’t want your category managers to have to become experts in decarbonising supply chains, so you must equip them with the right tools. This means providing data that helps them engage with suppliers, decarbonisation databases, renewable energy solutions they can push through their supply chain, and carbon accounting software so they can track improvements. Those resources really need to be built out and provided to category managers to make the process significantly easier.

Then you have sourcing and RFx. There is some interesting thinking emerging around internal carbon prices that you can leverage in RFPs. For instance, as Haleon and Chris Lowe have done and helped champion through the Sustainable Procurement Pledge, you can require suppliers to provide a Product Carbon Footprint (PCF), which calculates the carbon emissions for the product you are buying.

Then you use it similar to an internal carbon price, say, allocating 100 euros per ton of carbon alongside the financial cost. You multiply the PCF carbon emissions by that internal price and add it to the base commercial price, which works out the overall holistic cost for the product you are buying. This allows you to integrate sustainability directly into commercial evaluations. A lot of companies, including myself initially, allocated something like 20% of the tender weight to sustainability, but kept 50% to 60% allocated to standard financial costs. That approach really didn’t move the needle; it did a little bit, but only around the edges. Another approach I looked at is requiring that any supplier invited to the RFP must qualify as a sustainable supplier, defined by a measure like an EcoVadis badge.

Sourcing is a crucial milestone to hit hard, because that is when decisions are made that lock a supplier in for the next three to five years, making it the ideal time to get them on the right track. Contracts are important, and while you can add specific clauses, which on their own don’t always move the needle, supplier management is what really drives change. You can loop back and say, “Look, you put it in your contract that this was important, and that you would provide carbon reporting or commitments to net-zero that align with our requirements.” This is where ongoing supplier management comes through.

Being a huge Peter Drucker fan, I believe “what gets measured gets managed,” so reporting and assurance are key. You need to address every aspect of the procurement operating model to see those improvements compound and realise true strategic synergy.

The other aspect of governance is just how quickly this scope expands. Interestingly, the Scope 3 peer group was initially created so sustainability people could talk to procurement people, because traditionally they didn’t speak the same language. That group has grown to over 3,000 people and is a collaborative mix of procurement and sustainability professionals.

In procurement, we know we have to speak different languages when we talk to different parts of the business. When the sustainability team focuses on project management and asks, “How do we reduce carbon emissions?” procurement needs to respond with, “That’s great, but we need a baseline first.”

To make that baseline accurate, we need primary emissions data directly from the suppliers. The more primary data we gather, the more accurate the baseline becomes, allowing us to better support the sustainability team with their reporting. This proves that it isn’t just a data collection exercise; it’s a deep supplier engagement journey. We need to provide the tools to the suppliers to enable this, because just having high-level discussions with them isn’t going to move the needle. You also need to collaborate closely with your internal business colleagues. Sometimes there is an additional cost, not always, actually not even often, but there might be a re-engineering cost or shifting requirements that you need to navigate, which can really change your internal thinking.

At its core, sustainability is about doing more with less. You need to talk to stakeholders about building a different ecosystem and redefining requirements, rather than simply buying the same things the same way from the same legacy suppliers.

Finance is another crucial group you need to bring in; you must be able to track and demonstrate actual cost savings to show the financial viability of these aspects. With legal, the conversation shifts to risk and resilience. We have so many modern examples of geopolitical disruptions creating real risks, not just to an organisation’s license to operate, but to its basic ability to secure critical products and services. Consequently, you should be looking closely at buying locally rather than sourcing further afield, which might offer a lower initial sticker price but leaves you with a much more vulnerable supply chain.

Before you even approach suppliers, you need to align internally on several fronts: Why do we need a policy change? How do we enforce it? What standards can we collectively agree on? You need to align on the procedures, tools, guidance, and KPIs provided to each stakeholder group. If you can establish a cross-functional governance structure that meets regularly, comprising these different business areas, it will be far more effective than procurement or sustainability trying to operate in silos. That unified approach is where you generate momentum and drive systemic change.

At CBRE, I focused on embedding circularity and sustainability directly into our daily processes, procedures, technology roadmaps, and policies, while maintaining a constant dialogue with the sustainability team. Interestingly, early on, I didn’t actually need much from them because execution sat squarely within procurement. We were the ones who needed to design the mechanisms, gather supplier data, and execute the engagement. Sustainability provided excellent moral and high-level strategic alignment, but procurement drove the operational reality, helping to loop in other business owners across finance, legal, and the supply base.

There is an immense amount that can be achieved in this space without incurring additional costs, simply by integrating these goals into your existing roadmap. Everyone wants better data because it feeds better spend analytics, which in turn drives smarter sourcing and more accurate benefit tracking.

How you position this depends heavily on your global region. In the US right now, “resilience” is the primary buzzword rather than “sustainability,” because the term ESG has essentially been weaponised politically. In Europe, sustainability remains the core focus. In Asia, organisations tend to look evenly across all three traditional ESG pillars. In Australia, it’s a fascinating hybrid of European and Asian perspectives, paired with a growing US-style focus on supply chain resilience.

Recent history illustrates why this matters. It used to be that major climate or geological events, like the floods in Thailand or the tsunami in Japan, would disrupt supply chains roughly once a decade. Now, these disruptions happen far more frequently.

When building your business case, you must identify the right hook for your specific stakeholder groups and corporate focus. If you are dealing with banking or government sectors, the primary objective is tightly managed risk. Sustainable companies inherently possess more robust processes, better procedures, and lower risk profiles because their rigorous reporting forces them to understand their operations deeply. Better-run companies are more sustainable, but they are also naturally more resilient.

To optimise this, you might want to ingest deeper data into your data lake to map your supply chain down to tier two or tier three suppliers. Mapping those deeper tiers is crucial because that is often where the bulk of emissions sit. This is especially true for service-based companies; the emissions rarely sit with your direct tier-one providers, but rather further down the value chain.

There is also a massive amount of hidden efficiency and waste to uncover. When I worked at Citibank, we saved two million dollars in a single year just by optimising the electricity usage across a couple of buildings and a data center. High carbon footprints generally correlate with high energy consumption, meaning carbon tracking is an exceptional proxy for uncovering waste reduction, operational efficiencies, and direct cost savings across your value chain.

Innovation is another great avenue, though it requires precise execution. I ran a supply chain hackathon a couple of years ago that was a complete failure. I brought together CBRE clients, internal teams, suppliers, and manufacturers to look at how to decarbonise HVAC and build airflow systems. The scope was far too broad; the conversation repeatedly stalled out with participants claiming “the government needs to act,” and no one walked away with actionable steps.

So the lesson here is, innovation initiatives and hackathons must be hyper-focused on a narrow, provable problem statement across the value chain.

A model that worked beautifully at CBRE involved structuring targeted conversations across three tiers of the supply chain simultaneously. We realised that client requirements were directly driving emissions down through CBRE’s layer and right into the supplier’s operations. By getting the client to alter a single specification, such as shifting from chemical cleaning to using ionised water on-site, we unlocked a 20% to 30% cost reduction alongside a massive 50% emissions reduction across the chain.

Unless you are having those multi-tiered conversations, you miss those opportunities entirely. Succeeding here builds deep trust with customers, boards, investors, and regulators. It moves the needle beyond greenwashing into genuine, tangible impact. It elevates your corporate reputation, which gets staff empowered, excited, and personally invested in taking ownership of these initiatives. Customers increasingly recognise that sustainable, low-risk companies are simply better businesses to partner with, making this a more powerful sales differentiator today than ever before.

Paul Vorbach: I’ve got a couple of questions, Mat, if I can run a few thoughts past you. The University of Queensland Advanced Diploma in Procurement and Contracting is accredited by the Australasian Procurement and Construction Council and offers pathways into the Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply, the organisation you generously speak at and judge presentations for. This diploma focuses heavily on governance and influencing leadership.

As you were speaking, I was thinking about the CPO’s opportunity to secure a seat at the executive table. It seems this doesn’t happen as frequently as many would like, partly due to traditional reporting hierarchies or a board cadence where procurement is omitted unless a major, high-risk project is underway.

Given that we are approaching June 30, which is the standard end of the financial year and peak reporting period in Australia, what advice do you have for innovative, energetic CPOs looking to craft messages that influence the executive team? How can they leverage gains in sustainability and circularity to create positive impressions for the annual report, the preface, and the CEO’s opening statements?

Mat Langley: It’s an excellent question. As mandatory reporting requirements expand and Australia aligns further with formalised sustainability reporting standards, organisations addressing Scope 3 emissions are going to discover that roughly 80% of their total carbon footprint resides within Scope 3, whether that’s downstream product use or upstream supply chain operations. CPOs and senior procurement leaders need to recognise that this responsibility is landing directly in their court, and they must prepare immediately.

Historically, procurement has functioned as a cost center, meaning leaders routinely struggled to secure budgets for two critical areas: team headcount and modern technology. However, the rise of AI agents is shifting procurement’s role toward becoming an orchestrator of intelligence. We are moving away from manual operational tasks, making strategic design, requirement setting, and ecosystem management far more critical.

You are at a unique juncture where regulatory compliance and decarbonisation mandates are converging with an urgent need to modernise, upskill, and invest in procurement technology. This creates an opportunity, just as I found at CBRE, to transform sustainability into a commercial differentiator. For example, creating a net-zero supply offering directly supports the sales team in driving revenue growth.

If your organisation is hyper-focused on revenue, anchor your procurement business case there; if they are focused on mitigation, lead with risk. Broaden the conversation and state clearly: “To execute this program effectively, we need to bring in subject matter experts, modernise our technology stack, and implement intelligent agents.” Then, tie that investment directly to revenue generation, risk reduction, compliance reporting, and investor reputation. If Scope 3 requirements haven’t hit your organisation in Australia yet, they are coming very soon, and you need to be ready.

Paul Vorbach: Your comments regarding revenue and risk are incredibly pertinent—revenue drives commercial entities, and risk concerns every organisation. In the public sector context, this extends directly to the explicit reporting obligations that departments, agencies, and government-owned corporations face within their respective jurisdictions. They carry similar mandates to showcase positive progress in these areas within their annual reports. Who wouldn’t want to bring an increasingly positive story to the table to elevate the profile of these critical roles?

Mat Langley: Exactly. There are so many leading organisations you can look to for inspiration, case studies, and proven frameworks. There are plenty of examples of what works, and honestly, even more examples of what doesn’t. Utilising a large language model to analyse case studies or sourcing relevant literature is an excellent way to map out your program. It is nothing like it was a few years ago when I started the journey at CBRE and had to guess whether an initiative would succeed. Today, the pathways are validated; we know what works.

Paul Vorbach: It sounds like identifying multiple entry points is an incredibly effective strategy for influencing up. A CFO will be motivated by one metric, a COO by another, and a Chief Marketing Officer or Head of Sales will look for value propositions their teams can take out into the field to differentiate the brand.

In our previous discussions, we highlighted your two books: Sustainable Procurement in Action and Circular Procurement in Action, co-authored with Hélène Carpentier. Are there any overarching governance insights from either book that our students should specifically dive into?

Mat Langley: In Sustainable Procurement in Action, the structure intentionally mirrors the traditional ESG framework: the first section covers environment, the second addresses social pillars, and the third focuses entirely on governance. It is designed to be a highly practical, execution-focused guide that you can read, pull ideas from, and test inside your organisation to see what resonates. It features numerous real-world case studies and draws heavily from frameworks championed by the Sustainable Procurement Pledge and global peer-to-peer networks.

I highly recommend engaging with those peer communities. They focus deeply on practitioner-to-practitioner support without trying to sell you a product. It’s a network of professionals navigating the exact same challenges, who are incredibly open to sharing their successes and failures. You don’t have to operate as a lone wolf within your organisation; there is a wealth of collective knowledge available to support you.

Paul Vorbach: That is a wonderful note on which to conclude. This marks the completion of our three-part conversation series, Mat. I truly appreciate your time and your exceptional insights. I highly encourage our students, and anyone viewing these sessions to explore your two books. They are deeply relevant and bridge the gap between academic literature and practical, day-one application, which remains the ultimate challenge for many professionals. Thank you so much for joining us and for your outstanding contributions to the field.

About Mat Langley

Mat Langley is a procurement and sustainability leader who has embedded sustainability into more than 25 years of procurement practice. He has led global centres of excellence across sourcing, category management, analytics and supplier management at CBRE, the largest real estate company globally. At CBRE, Mat led Procurement Operations, Technology Transformation, Data, Risk and ESG, and built a first-of-its-kind net-zero supply chain program and product.

Mat is the 2024 European CIPS Sustainable Procurement Champion, and a regular speaker and judge at CIPS events. He is a former Sustainable Procurement Pledge Scope 3 co-chair and current emerging tech co-chair. He has advised Green Project Technology and Emitwise, a carbon accounting and supply chain decarbonisation start-up, as well as the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. Mat is the author of two books on these topics, Sustainable Procurement in Action: Integrating climate, nature & equity across the supply chain and Circular Procurement in Action: Closing the Loop on Fitouts, Furniture & Facilities, the latter written with his colleague Hélène Carpentier. He is currently employed at SunRice.

About Paul Vorbach 

Paul Vorbach MCom, LLM, MBA, FCG, F.ISRM, FAICD, FGIA is the Founding Managing Director of AcademyGlobal(AG). He has taught at post-graduate university level and for leading professional associations including the Institute of Public Works Engineering Australasia (IPWEA) and the Institute of Public Administration Australia (IPAA). He is Vice President of the Institute of Strategic Risk Management (ISRM) and Adjunct Academic at the Australian Graduate School of Management (AGSM) at the University of New South Wales.

AcademyGlobal partners with public sector, private sector, and not-for-profit organisations to build the capability that underpins sustainable delivery performance. AG is the Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply (CIPS) Centre of Excellence, and the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA), the first APCC-certified provider of the Procurement and Contracting qualifications through its partnership with the University of Queensland.