Fredrik, what is happening in the purchasing area and how has the pandemic affected your work?
It has been and is a rapid development, on the one hand, basically all of us at Ericsson in Sweden have been working from home since March 2020 and have continued to do so in 2021. Although we started our digitization early, the pandemic has accelerated and increased the tasks of digitization with us, as with many others. We have had to work with our leadership and culture in new ways, as well as checking in digitally with all employees regularly, so that everyone is included.
In purchasing, we focus on securing the technology for all customer deliveries and that the entire company has the external resources needed with everything from communication and IT to equipment for working from home.
-What lessons and experiences do you take with you from the past year and how do you think the function will change in the future?
As the company is working hard with the rollout of 5G around the world, we in purchasing have full focus on supporting our suppliers and they have also supported us well when the supply chains in logistics, components and energy supply were affected during the pandemic. We have therefore worked through our strategies so that we have alternative solutions for all key components and also managed to strengthen relationships at the executive level with our most important suppliers.
All the different regulations also place a lot of demands on the preparatory work with each new supplier, where we put a lot of effort into simplifying and using various digital tools as far as possible to shorten lead times but still have full compliance with the regulations. It is important for us and all employees not to waste time on time-consuming monotonous routines.
-How can the purchasing function contribute to the work for sustainability and the environment
What I appreciate very much about Ericsson is that we have been working with sustainability in purchasing for a long time. We were already doing it when I started as a purchasing manager in Network Rollout Services in 2009. We call it "responsible sourcing" and it covers our code of ethics towards business partners, how we handle conflict minerals, recycling and circularity. It all comes down to the UN's Sustainable Development Goals and it is engaging to get several companies involved in climate work, with a special focus on the 1.5 degree target and the business guide we jointly developed with various companies and institutions to halve carbon dioxide emissions by 2030. The opportunity to develop and gain new knowledge every day contributes greatly to the work feeling valuable.