Posts tagged ‘Environmental Management’
How a New Design Revolution will Change Supply Chain Management
Howard Brown
Stories about Henry Ford’s genius with manufacturing abound, though it’s rarely clear which ones are actually true. One of my favorites is his insisting that parts manufacturers deliver their products to his plants in wooden crates of his design, which he then dismantled and used as floorboards in his cars.
Supply chain management has grown in sophistication and importance since Ford’s time. The quality movement, just-in-time manufacturing, corporate responsibility initiatives, enterprise-wide information systems, environmental impact analyses like life-cycle assessments, and growth in transparency and public access to information have all brought about major changes in supply change management. Now a new design revolution is about to create an even bigger change in supply chain thinking. The change will come both from new materials and products and from new manufacturing technologies.
Radical new materials and products (such as the ones we feature in the dMASS Insights newsletter) will themselves disrupt traditional supply chain relationships. For example, there are composite materials that exhibit behaviors with the potential to replace mechanical appliances, tools, and other machinery – even entire factories. There are materials that can be used to generate electricity by movement, temperature differences and solar energy conversion. Others have the ability to interfere with the growth of harmful bacteria, actively transfer heat or emit light with minimal energy subsidy. The cumulative effect of new materials and products will be shorter and simpler supply chains.
New manufacturing technologies will be at least as disruptive as the products themselves. Nano-scale manufacturing technologies such as Additive Layer Manufacturing (including 3D printing) and bio-manufacturing (the growing of products) stem from recent advances in the scientific understanding of how nature organizes itself at the most fundamental levels of matter and energy. Similarly, biomanufacturing stems from new discoveries in the fields of genetics and micro-organisms. The common thread among each of these technologies is a growing knowledge of nature’s tendency to self-organize, and an ability to leverage this knowledge.
Three-dimensional (3D)printing, in particular, has the potential to drastically cut resource demands, costs and dependence on resource-intensive supply chains, as well as pollution and waste. Advanced computer-aided design (CAD) systems bring design down to the level of individual molecules. The entire downstream supply chain for a 3D-printed product can be a set of printer cartridges containing different chemical elements. When laid down in precise proportions, the atoms arrange themselves into material structures with the desired characteristics. Printing can often be done in small shops, portable facilities, or even in the home. There is little or no need for high-temperature smelting in parts manufacturing, high-speed grinding or stamping that produces manufacturing scrap, or glues, adhesives, staples, rivets and other parts to hold separate pieces together.
Henry Ford’s tactic saved resources a century ago by creatively taking advantage of existing supply chain resources and harvesting value from waste. Nano- and bio-technologies will radically transform supply chain management in a new way. Business success will increasingly require understanding these technologies and taking advantage of the changes they will bring about.
What are your thoughts? Have you begun to experience supply chain changes due to commodity prices or supply problems, or due to the availability of new materials, products, or technologies?
Howard Brown is a noted entrepreneur and the founder of dMASS.net, an organization focused on helping businesses improve resource performance. For more than 20 years, he was CEO of the consultancy RPM Systems, Inc. (Resource Planning and Management), where he worked with companies such as International Paper, Mobil, BP, Duracell, Avery- Dennison, Whirlpool, SaraLee, and Wrigley, earning a worldwide reputation for developing practical strategies that merge environmental and business goals. To learn more about dMass, visit: http://www.dmass.net/wordpress/
What do you call your EMS?
Megan Lum
It’s cliché, I know, to say that change is constant. But it’s so true and I try to remind myself to remain open and flexible. At Pacific Gas & Electric, we continue to make significant changes to our business to better serve our customers. One of the changes we are currently trying to implement in our environmental organization is a re-imagining of our environmental management system (EMS) – leveraging the strengths of some elements, while boosting the effectiveness of others. We’re using a cross-functional team to work on this, including having frequent meetings with various stakeholders.
During one of those stakeholder meetings, we had a brainstorming session on “What do we do to ensure a successful, sustainable EMS?” The conversation was quite animated, and one comment struck me: “If you want this to be sustainable, don’t call it an EMS when you roll it out to people.”
This brought a lot of head nodding. If EMS was introduced as a grand new program, it may come across as yet another corporate initiative, which could be an impediment to making it a truly sustainable program.
I’ve seen success on both sides of that coin. I’ve implemented EMS programs where all the elements of an ISO 14001 program were present, but it wasn’t officially called an EMS. Everything was introduced as part of the environmental program, and employees incorporated environmental practices into work processes and job descriptions as part of the slowly changing culture. Everything was there, but it just didn’t have a specific name.
On the other hand, sometimes rolling out an EMS as a specific program can be a benefit – particularly if a company is working toward it as a stated goal. Having a goal of getting an EMS ISO 14001-certified can bring employees together, encourage teamwork, and drive culture change faster than a more subtle approach.
We’re still in the re-imagining process, so it will be interesting to see which path we choose.
What do you call your EMS?
Megan Lum, P.E. is the Manager for Shared Facilities and Environmental Operations, at Pacific Gas & Electric Co. In this capacity she is privileged to lead a team of about 30 professionals, who provide environmental compliance support for the company’s gas and electric distribution, fleet, materials management and real estate operations. She is a member of NAEM’s Board of Regents and will be participating in NAEM’s EHS Management Forum as a speaker in the Management of Change session.
Past Presidents’ Series: Who should drive a company’s sustainability journey?
Dick Pastor
One of the great joys of working in the sustainability field is the real freedom for organizations to be creative and innovate while they are on the sustainability journey. The scope of one’s sustainability program is dictated by the culture, mission and vision of that organization. And that is the way it should be.
Individual organizations understand their culture, which helps them focus on the activities that will best achieve their sustainability goals. In the end, an organization needs to identify what will make them sustainable and then follow their creative instincts to get there.
It is altogether wrong for outside entities to impose constraints and artificial requirements on these organizations. After all, the sustainability journey is a voluntary journey and one that is made for the future well-being of the planet, the people and the organization itself. Outside requirements that dictate how to be sustainable do not promote the creative ideas or the innovative processes that leading companies need to develop. Since it is in an organization’s self-interest to move as far along the sustainability path as possible, this should be a decision that is made by the organization itself.
Let sustainability remain a voluntary program, directed and guided by the individual organization. If they succeed, they will be around for a while. If they don’t succeed, do we really think that they will survive? Let’s keep artificial requirements out of the sustainability arena. What do you think?
Dick Pastor is Vice President at Shaw Environment and Infrastructure. He has more than 42 years of experience in the environmental field, including 18 years of government service with the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Resources and 15 years with the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Before joining Shaw he was Director, Environmental Services for Wal-Mart Stores Inc., where he developed the environmental management and services program for the company, going from a staff of 1 to a staff of 27 professionals. He also played a significant role in the early development of the company’s sustainability program.
A Pragmatic Approach to Green Product Development
Balaji Jayaseelan
Why do companies talk about and pursue ‘green’ products when there is often very little resonance among consumers? Is it because it is the right thing to do? Does it offer a competitive advantage to their brands? Or is it a strategy to achieve cost savings through energy and waste reduction?
It depends upon who you talk to.
There are some companies that get it right with the consumers and become successful, while others are constantly looking at ways to get it right. For the latter companies, here is my advice for a possible approach towards greener product development.
At Newell Rubbermaid, our first step is to understand that there is no such thing as a ‘green product’. Every product has potential trade-offs and we need to understand what ‘green’ attributes can be a good incremental value or a game changer. Some of the methods in understanding consumer relevance are through market research, either by primary or secondary insights and/or benchmarking with your peers and competitors.
Questions we need to answer to influence green product development in early stage gate processes are:
- To what extent are your consumers interested in ‘green’ products?
- To what extent are your consumers demanding ‘green’ for your product categories in particular?
- To what extent are consumer ‘needs’ related to environmental issues being met in the marketplace?
- To what extent are market trends forming that might drive greater desire for green solutions among consumers, retailers, and governments?
- Are there certifications/Eco labels available in the market that resonate with the core consumer of this product? To what extent is certification required to make a credible claim for this product category or market segment?
It is important that we understand these answers before we influence green product development. In the case of existing products, we should map out the green benefits using product mapping exercise like Value Analysis and Value Engineering. For those of you in pursuit of the green products,
- What kind of roadblocks have you found in innovating green products?
- Are we constantly looking out metrics to measure the green attributes to our revenue growth in our brands?
- What kinds of Green platforms do the consumer really care?
- What are the other effective methods to map out green attributes in our products?
Balaji Jayaseelan is Program Manager of the Global Environment and Sustainability group at Newell Rubbermaid. He is in charge of providing strategic advice to business units on a wide range of sustainability issues including energy/climate change, waste management, product claims, green product innovations and Life cycle management. He is a Chemical Engineer and holds a Masters in Environmental management concentrating on Sustainability. His professional interests and research focus on designing different models on socio-economics towards sustainable development and innovating green products. You can reach him at saravana.balaji@newellco.com.
