Turner & Townsend: Driving Performance With Procurement

Operating in today’s complex procurement landscape demands agility, as businesses need to be able to jump through many hoops in order to find success, that is where Turner & Townsend can help.

With these globally heated supply chains, sustainability goals and digital innovations, present risks and opportunities. All of these must be navigated to outperform volatile markets and drive competitive advantage.

Turner & Townsend: Supporting Procurement

Headquartered in the UK, Turner & Townsend specialises in programme management, project management, cost management and consulting across the property, infrastructure and natural resources sectors.

It is focused on driving capability, capacity and ultimately performance through effective procurement and supply chain management.

Through its support, clients achieve measurable results throughout the procurement lifecycle and across their major projects and programmes. Clients are assured of the best value in the market, improving profitability, productivity and performance.

It also mitigates the commercial and legal risks for its clients by ensuring the right solutions are embedded within the strategy, setup and delivery.

Through this, costs are reduced and a sense of organisational resilience is realised through Turner & Townsend's progressive approach to procurement strategy, packaging and buying. Client progress in priorities such as sustainability and social value is accelerated.

The company also mentioned that it is the first programme manager to be recognised by the Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply (CIPS) for excellence in procurement processes, as it has a unique global hands-on capability to assure its clients.

How Turner & Townsend transforms

Through a range of methods, the company helps businesses to transform the supply chains of its clients:

• Aligning the supply chain to its clients’ needs: It constructs supply chains and builds commercial ecosystems that align with its clients’ vision, strategy, objectives and business outcomes to maximise value.
• Mitigating risk and building resilience: Resilience is built through its assured approach, from strategy to contract award and into supply chain management.
• Using local market insight with global data: Robust decisions are made based on its global team’s insight and intelligence and global and local market analysis.

In 2024, the company announced that overall turnover and net revenue for the twelve months to 30 April 2024 had risen to £1.5bn (US$1.9bn) and £1.3bn (US$1.6bn) – increases of 25 per cent and 22 per cent, respectively.

Vincent Clancy, Chairman and CEO at Turner & Townsend, says: “In the face of an ever more complex and connected world, success in our industry will be built on businesses’ ability to evolve and reinvent themselves to deliver impactful solutions for clients.

"These excellent figures demonstrate our ability to build strong client partnerships while investing in our people and our global capacity. Our scale and reach make us more resilient to market volatility and, crucially, ensure that we are best-placed to anticipate and adapt to clients’ priorities and needs, offering solutions to their challenges wherever they are in the world.

"We’ve created an unrivalled programme, project and cost management capability globally and our recent acquisitions, as well as the plan to combine CBRE’s project management with Turner & Townsend, only enhance the specialist skills and creative solutions our business can offer.

"Going forward, we will have more strength than ever before to make a positive impact for the future – investing in our proposition, technology platforms and talent that our clients around the world can trust and rely on."

How Turner & Townsend helped Heathrow take flight on its sustainability targets

A real-world example of Turner & Townsend procurement expertise was its work with Heathrow Airport in the UK.

Heathrow, with its bold  sustainability targets worked with Turner & Townsend to develop an innovative procurement tool that offered transparency in understanding supplier emissions and social value outcomes.

The Heathrow 2.0 balanced scorecard is playing a pivotal role in driving improved results and achieving the airport’s sustainability goals.

Heathrow is committed to achieving net zero by 2050, and it is making substantive changes to achieve that target before 2030.

With the new sustainability strategy, the airport needed to make critical sustainability progress across its supply chain to meet its net-zero commitments.

Heathrow’s supply chain produces some 250,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions every year and comprises more than 800 suppliers.

To find the source of these emissions and reduce them, a new method of procurement was needed, as well as an assessment of the airport’s supply chain.

The tool developed to help deliver on the ambitions of Heathrow’s new sustainability strategy shows suppliers the required outcomes and how to report against targets.

The Balanced Scorecard directly links supply-chain requirements and measurements to the client’s sustainability strategy.

To do this, Heathrow established five ‘pillars’ as the basis of the Scorecard’s measurements: behaviours, carbon, community, social value and solutions improvements.

Based on these, Turner & Townsend created metrics to quantify the sustainability outcomes of each pillar against the 2.0 Strategy.

The project has benefited from the long-standing relationship between the duo and has seen the service company and the airport engaged closely with its strategic suppliers to gather sustainability data to create the Scorecard baseline.

Success beyond decarbonisation

The Balanced Scorecard has already identified several successful measures suppliers are taking to improve their carbon footprint, such as switching to using renewably sourced energy and reaching 100% landfill avoidance.

The tool has also been instrumental in identifying areas such as reducing and reporting suppliers’ emissions from their own supply chain.

Crucially, the tool goes beyond decarbonisation, driving progress on wider social value, including local community impacts and employee diversity and inclusion.

It also highlights how Heathrow’s spending is benefiting national and local SMEs, embedding sustainability beyond its immediate supply chain.

Paul Doherty, Procurement Director, Heathrow Airport, adds: “The construct of the Balanced Scorecard, with the support of Turner & Townsend, has grown and developed to articulate more detailed sustainable procurement aims and guidance for our supply chain partners.

“Turner & Townsend continues to play a key role as we move towards converting those partner commitments into performance indicators so we can progress the Heathrow 2.0 strategy into delivery.”

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