Our Business Partners
At CEMEX, we seek to provide innovative, quality products that benefit society and make construction safer, more productive, and more sustainable. Our vision is to play a leading role in the sustainable construction industry. We recognize, however, that we cannot achieve this vision alone. We understand how our sustainability efforts depend on the support and participation of our business partners throughout our value chain, primarily our suppliers and customers, which include distributors and individuals building their own homes. We collaborate with them in order to create a more sustainable construction industry and build a smart world together.
Governance and management
Suppliers
Our ability to competitively source our inputs and offer our products and solutions for a more sustainable approach to construction is a key aspect of our strategy. Toward this end, we communicate with our suppliers and contractors to share our goals and challenges, engaging them in finding sourcing alternatives with lower impacts on people and the environment. We seek to partner with firms that have strong safety records, high labor standards, and strong environmental performance. In particular, we collaborate with our suppliers to reduce the impacts associated with raw material extraction and the production and transportation of building materials.
We work together with suppliers to ensure that they are selected fairly and transparently, that procurement decisions are made honestly and communicated clearly, and that our negotiations foster long-term, mutually beneficial relationships. At a minimum, we require that our suppliers comply with local regulations, and we seek to ensure that they work to our exacting standards. Together, we are constantly looking for opportunities and new ways to improve and innovate.
At the corporate level, we oversee procurement strategy and work to standardize our procurement practices by establishing processes, systems, and tools as well as monitoring compliance, promoting best practices, and reporting performance. In addition, procurement teams in each of our business units follow a common strategic sourcing methodology, which increasingly integrates sustainability aspects.
As part of our effort to better understand and improve on our supply chain practices, as well as contribute to best practices, we actively participate in the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) Advisory Group on Supply Chain Sustainability.
Customers
We seek to ensure customers' satisfaction and the best service experience across all business lines, no matter where our customers are located. Because customer needs vary across our global markets, the management of our customer relationships is decentralized. Our operations conduct regular customer satisfaction surveys at the local level to understand customers' needs.
We work hard to ensure that our products are safe to use, and we give customers the information they need to use them properly. All of our production processes are certified locally, and many of our cement plants are certified to ISO 9000, the internationally recognized quality management standard.
The materials that we offer are not end products in themselves but serve to construct buildings and infrastructure projects. Therefore, as part of our vision to build a smart world, we work to promote the use of our cement and concrete products as part of a more sustainable approach to construction. We collaborate with our customers, architects, and others to reduce the impacts associated with the design and construction of more sustainable buildings and structures, as well as the use, maintenance, and end- of-life treatment of the buildings and infrastructure made from our products.
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