Hetero Drugs: Supplier ESG Participation from 11% to ~60%

At a Glance

Industry: Pharmaceutical manufacturing
Supplier base: 10,000+ suppliers across India, China and other regions
Client goal: assess 100% of suppliers on ESG performance by 2030
Services: supply chain sustainability programme, supplier ESG assessments on Oren Sustainability Hub, GHG accounting for suppliers
Headline results: supplier participation up from around 11% to almost 60%; priority supplier assessments completed in about 2 months instead of an estimated 6–9; 129 critical raw-material vendors covered in Phase 1

About the Client

Hetero Drugs is a global pharmaceutical manufacturer with a large, complex supplier network spanning India, China and other regions. As ESG expectations from regulators, customers and global partners rose, Hetero set a long-term objective to assess 100% of its 10,000+ suppliers on ESG performance by 2030.

With a very small internal ESG team, Hetero recognised early that manual supplier assessments would not scale. It partnered with Oren to design and run a practical, auditable and scalable supply chain sustainability programme.

The Challenge: Supplier ESG Data at Scale

Severe resource constraint: a two-member ESG team was expected to engage thousands of suppliers across countries, languages and time zones, each with different ESG maturity, documentation quality and internal ownership.
Procurement misalignment: at the start, ESG assessments were not part of core procurement processes, so they were seen as extra workload, a low commercial priority and a compliance task with unclear ownership.
Gaps in SME readiness: ESG requests often reached sales teams instead of EHS or compliance owners; many vendors struggled with basics such as emissions calculations and data units; and follow-ups frequently produced no response or unusable data.

Oren's Solution: A Phased, Execution-Led Operating Model

Oren ran the work as a managed execution programme, not a data collection exercise.

Phase 1: Internal Alignment Before Supplier Engagement

Procurement enablement: Oren worked with internal teams to reframe ESG from a compliance task into a risk and supply-continuity priority, linking ESG gaps to regulatory exposure, supply disruption and customer expectations. This created ownership within procurement and operations before suppliers were contacted.
Supplier prioritisation: assessing all 10,000+ suppliers at once would have stalled the programme. Oren prioritised suppliers by country and geopolitical risk, spend concentration, material criticality, and supply dependency and substitutability, narrowing Phase 1 to 129 critical raw-material vendors.

Phase 2: From Passive Outreach to Active Support

The first rollout showed that email-based ESG surveys do not work for complex, global pharmaceutical supply chains. Supplier training attendance stalled at 20–25%, and data submissions were inconsistent and of low quality. Oren switched from request-driven reporting to hands-on supplier enablement.

Dedicated vendor helpdesk: a centralised, pharma-specific helpdesk staffed by ESG professionals, with multilingual, time-zone-aligned support (including China) and one-to-one sessions for SME vendors struggling with ESG and emissions basics.
Free GHG calculator for SMEs: most SME suppliers could not afford consultants for carbon accounting, so Oren built a free GHG calculator into Oren Sustainability Hub. Suppliers could calculate their own Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions without third-party tools, which improved data completeness and accuracy and sped up onboarding.

How Oren Sustainability Hub Carried the Programme

Central programme management: every vendor's data, documents, follow-ups and status tracked in one system, replacing spreadsheets and email trails.
Correct stakeholder routing: sales teams could forward ESG assessments to the right internal owners, improving response quality and accountability.
AI-supported validation: AI OCR extracted data from uploaded ESG documents, and automated checks flagged unit errors, missing values and logical inconsistencies, turning months of manual review into days.
Structured outputs: vendor scorecards, peer benchmarking and practical improvement plans instead of raw data.

The Outcome

Impact Area	Before Oren	With Oren
Vendor Participation	Around 11% of suppliers responded, with frequent drop-offs after the first outreach.	Participation rose to almost 60%, with consistent follow-ups and structured support for critical suppliers.
Internal ESG Effort	A two-member team stretched across follow-ups, data checks and coordination.	Day-to-day execution, vendor support and data validation handled by Oren, freeing the internal team for oversight.
Time to Completion	Estimated 6–9 months because of low response rates, repeated corrections and manual reviews.	Priority supplier assessments completed in about 2 months through structured workflows and central tracking.
Data Quality	Inconsistent and difficult to verify.	Structured, validated and audit-ready.
Vendor Value	Seen as a compliance request.	Suppliers received clear, actionable improvement plans.

What Made the Difference

Pharmaceutical supply chain expertise from Oren.
High-touch engagement and enablement for SME vendors.
Automated, validated and audit-ready workflows on Oren Sustainability Hub.

Conclusion

Hetero Drugs' supply chain ESG programme shows that scale comes from the right execution model, not more internal headcount. With Oren as an extended execution arm and Oren Sustainability Hub as the operating backbone, a two-person team ran a complex, multi-country supplier programme in a fraction of the expected time, with better data and little disruption to internal teams. The result is a repeatable framework Hetero can extend towards its goal of assessing every supplier by 2030.