The Oxford-Achilles Working Group
on Corporate Social Responsibility

Developing knowledge about CSR

The Oxford Achilles Collaboration

In March 2009, a group of approximately 40 Achilles' clients from various sectors joined a group of academics and NGOs to evaluate key issues in supply chain corporate responsibility programs.

Discussions in Geneva.

Geneva 2009: evaluating the key issues in supply chain corporate responsibility programs.

This meeting of 'practioners' and 'thought leaders' allowed for a productive and open conversation about the challenges and opportunities for managing sustainability in complex supply chains. The event was held in a serene country setting and was organised jointly by Achilles, the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School and Twenty-Fifty. At the meeting, CEO of Achilles, Colin Maund and Dr. Dana Brown from the Saïd Business School, signed a two year extension of the 'Oxford-Achilles Working Group on CSR'.

Laurence Cranmer

Laurence Cranmer is a member of the Oxford-Achilles Working Group on Corporate Social Responsibility at the Saïd Business School. His research interests include analysing the scope of corporate responsibility and the how ideas of responsibility may inform a firm's reasons for acting. He currently coordinates the Oxford-Achilles academic and practitioner seminar programme at the Saïd Business School, and has co-authored an Oxford-Achilles case study report on CSR Consulting in the UK. Laurence is also an Advisory Board Member, London Centre for Corporate Governance and Ethics, Birkbeck College, University of London.

Laurence is Director of Woodgreen Consulting Limited. He has over 20 years experience as a consultant and lecturer primarily in Central Government. He has worked with clients including Buying Solutions (Office of Government Commerce, HM Treasury), Ministry of Defence, Metropolitan Police Service and Pan-Caribbean Partnership Against HIV/AIDS in Guyana. He has been an Associate with Atos Consulting and part of the Public Services Group, Atos KPMG Consulting. He has been a Senior Lecturer at the Civil Service College (now National School of Government) where he directed a range of programmes including Strategic Leadership and Organisational Change.

Laurence has lectured part-time in the social sciences at the Open University and Oxford Brookes University. He has a BA(Hons) Philosophy, Politics and Economics, University of Oxford.

Colin Maund

Colin Maund, BSc (Econ), MCIPS graduated from the London School of Economics(LSE), joined Achilles in 1993 and is now Chief Executive Officer. The Group employs over 450 people in 20 countries. Achilles is the leading provider of supplier management information for major sectors of the economy such as oil and gas, transport, utilities, pharmaceuticals and construction.

Prior to joining Achilles, Colin specialized in procurement where he worked for a variety of organizations including HM Treasury and the CBI. He is currently a member of the European Commission's Advisory Committee for the Opening Up of Public Procurement and is heavily involved in the interface between professional procurement and the demands of Corporate Responsibility.

Colin works in collaboration with the Saïd Business School on the joint initiative - Oxford-Achilles Working Group which aims to stimulate intelligent debate and promote academic and empirical research on the important area of CSR, which will help remove some of the misconceptions associated with this important and growing area.

Colin was involved in developing the partnership between Achilles and Landcare Research, a Crown Research Institute based in New Zealand, to create a carbon footprinting programme for supply chains. This programme has being designed as a tool for suppliers to measure, manage and report their carbon footprints with a focus on engagement of suppliers and improvement of emissions.

Colin fully supports the work of the Outward Bound Trust whose mission it is to unlock the potential in young people through discovery and adventure in the wild. Achilles has been a Patron member since 2003 and has sponsored the annual Outward Bound Charity Challenge for the last four years.

Frances Darton

Frances Darton BSc, MSc. is an Account Manager in Corporate Responsibility at Achilles with a role that is centred on sustainability focussing on corporate responsibility and climate change. She works on developing Achilles' corporate responsibility practices, across global business units, in line with the UN Global Compact principles. Frances also leads key projects to introduce CR systems into Achilles current services as well as new sectors by supporting regional directors in the promotion of new schemes.

Current work includes supporting a global roll out of Achilles carbonReduction, a programme for suppliers to measure, manage and report carbon emissions, as well as taking Achilles' UK operations through CEMARS (Carbon Emissions Measurement and Reduction Scheme) certification.

Frances has a degree in Geography and a Masters in International Relations, both from Royal Holloway, University of London. Frances sits on the organising committee for the Oxford-Achilles working group on CSR. She also represents Achilles at the UN Global Compact UK network meetings.

About the Saïd Business School

Established in 1996, the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School is one of Europe's youngest and most entrepreneurial business schools, with a reputation for innovative business education. The School combines the highest standards of academic rigour with a practical understanding of business and wealth creation. Our faculty are engaged in boundary-extending research on key management issues, in dialogue with the wider intellectual community and with practitioners.

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About Achilles

Achilles works to identify, qualify, evaluate and monitor suppliers on behalf of major organisations worldwide. We build and support buyer-supplier communities in many industry sectors, creating unique and powerful global networks. Our services for sustainable procurement help create opportunities for business and reduce risk in the supply chain.

The company was created in 1990 in Norway and today, has offices all over the world. Our headquarters are in Abingdon, in the United Kingdom.

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Dana Brown

Dana Brown's research interests focus on the way that national employment and social policies affect business strategies, particularly in developing and former communist countries. Her doctoral dissertation examines the reasons why post-Communist governments in Central Eastern Europe implemented an array of employment and social policies in spite of assumptions that only one strategy - liberalisation and retrenchment of state social policies - would inspire needed investment and growth. Further work in this area will look at the way that these differences in social policies have affected business strategies across countries. In related work, Brown is researching how buyers and leading brands in the clothing and apparel industry can respond to pressure to achieve higher labour standards among their suppliers. Her research focuses on the problems with 'voluntary' and 'go it alone' initiatives in this area and argues that businesses can achieve more by investing in countries where governments capably support labour standard improvements.

Brown received her PhD in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in June 2005. She received an MPhil in Russian and East European Studies at St Antony's College, Oxford University, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar. She has lived for extended periods in Russia and Poland, and has travelled in many of the formerly Communist countries. In the time between her MPhil and PhD, she worked as a manager at Amazon.com and later as a director of the Trenton Academic Center at Rutgers University, which facilitates joint government-academic research initiatives.

Paul McNeillis

Dr. Paul McNeillis BSc, PhD, MBA, MCIM is Director of Corporate Responsibility at Achilles Group ltd. where he is responsible for the development and growth of global programs for the implementation of sustainable procurement and corporate responsibility in the supply chain.

In 2007 he led the launch of the E-TASC program (Electronics Industry's Tool for Accountable Supply Chains) for improving corporate responsibility performance in the electronics sector supply chain in collaboration with industry bodies GeSI and the EICC. In 2008 he led the launch of the global program for carbon reduction in collaboration with leading companies in the Utilities sector. Paul has sponsored Achilles' membership of the Global Reporting Initiative and is responsible for leading the joint venture in corporate responsibility with Oxford-Saïd Business School.

Prior to this Paul was Head of Professional Services, at BSI the UK's national standards body and global quality group. He founded the service in 2001 as a vehicle for collaborative communities to develop fast-track industry standards. The unit went on to launch several world firsts in new standards spanning fields such as risk management, sustainability, and biodiversity.

Paul has professional and industrial experience as an engineer and scientist and is a patented inventor. He holds an MBA and PhD from Imperial College, and is currently completing a second business doctorate entitled "Collaborative Learning and the Co-design of Corporate Social Responsibility". He is a frequent speaker and author on multi-stakeholder engagement, collaborative learning and standards in corporate social responsibility.

Steve New

Steve New's research focuses on buyer-seller interactions, supply chain management and operations management. His interests lie in developing a more rigorous appreciation of how individuals and organisations construct and interpret their environment and the systems in which they operate. New's work falls into two main categories:

Interpreting Supply Chains

How do organisations establish, sustain and exploit their commercial relationships with buyers and suppliers? New's work has looked at this from a number of angles, including looking at the meaning and interpretation of supply chain partnerships, exploring the way in which ethical and environmental issues are reflected in the chain, and on the impact of the internet and rise of B2B commerce.

On the last of these points, New has worked with Achilles Information Ltd, and some outputs from his research can be found in Understanding the E-Marketspace, and Understanding B2B E-Commerce: Explaining the Histories of B2B Initiatives. Other areas of interest include business process outsourcing and supplier assessment and development. With Roy Westbrook, he edited Supply Chains: Concepts, Critiques and Futures, published by Oxford University Press in 2004.

Making Sense of Organisational Quality

New's recent work includes analyses of how organisations achieve consistent quality performance. His study of Avis Europe examines how multimedia training can help maintain service quality in highly-dispersed international operations. With Paul Brunet, he has also recently published an empirical analysis of the application of kaizen techniques in Japanese industry. New has been active in analysing benchmark data collected from UK manufacturing companies, and a report Quality Cost and Delivery - A Sector Study is available here. New is particularly interested in the connection between quality management approaches and safety, especially in healthcare.

New's other interests include quantitative methods in planning and operations analysis, systems thinking and the management of high-technology ventures. With his colleagues Roy Westbrook and Kate Blackmon, he is exploring ways of introducing more critical research approaches within Operations Management.

New began his career as an engineer, working for Rolls Royce plc while completing a degree in Physics at Southampton University. In 1988, after working in management consultancy for Collinson Grant, he went to Manchester Business School where he completed his doctorate in 1993 on the use of visual interactive modelling for decision support in manufacturing. He taught at the Manchester School of Management, UMIST before joining Saïd Business School in 1996. For many years he has overseen the management component of Oxford's Engineering (Materials), Economics and Management degrees, and he was overall director of Saïd Business School's undergraduate programmes from 2002 to 2004. He is active in a number of projects to develop pedagogy. He works as a consultant for a range of organisations and is a regular speaker at industry conferences. He is a Fellow of Hertford College.