Editor’s Note: The following column by Deni Albrecht, Leader of Sustainability, Kenco, is part of Modern’s Other Voices column. The series features ideas, opinions and insights from end users, analysts, systems integraters and OEMs. Click on the link to learn about submitting a column for consideration.
Sustainability has been much in the news in the last few years. What does it mean to be a sustainable organization? Or to manage sustainable materials handling and logistics processes? Albrecht discusses his role as a sustainability leader at Kenco.
Last year I was named Kenco’s first leader of sustainability. It is a position that requires an extensive experience in supply chain design and a passion for sustainable processes, a combination of skills that at one time were considered unrelated, if not incompatible.
Because most everyone agrees that our children—and their children—deserve a world that is at least as good as ours, supply chains and sustainability must go hand-in-hand. From my point of view, the degradation of any significant part of our world is unacceptable.
Keeping that in mind, I recognize that building a sustainability program may be one of the biggest challenges to a 3PL when there are already plenty of other priorities to manage. To establish a positive and healthy mindset within the organization, everyone needs to understand that sustainability is about more than being green. It’s about strengthening the triple bottom line: people, planet and profit. You really can’t sustain one without the others. So our sustainability mission includes social responsibility, environmental stewardship and financial prosperity for all of our stakeholders.
We are moving this ethic throughout the Kenco organization via a strong Lean Six Sigma (LSS) process. Our active cadre of LSS leaders has been mentoring various teams to nurture an internal conviction that our core business decisions must be borne of sustainable thinking.
Ironically, change is typically championed by a small number of people and also resisted by a small number of people. Our challenge is to convert more sustainability champions from the middle ground. Fortunately, there are positive influences beyond our corporate boundaries that are simultaneously creating a greater awareness in favor of sustainable practices. Everyone is now exposed to media coverage about the growing imperative of sustainability. That provides significant leverage in our internal learning process.
Kenco’s initiative focuses on developing key metrics, starting with the “lowest hanging fruit” which includes energy, landfill waste and carbon related values. Within our LSS process, we anticipate that the concept of sustainability will mature to become a real and integral part of Kenco’s best practices—across the enterprise.
This August we passed one of our first milestones: the establishment of sustainability behavior metrics at six sites that we manage for a customer. Its top management agreed with the planned approach under which we will provide measurements based on 16 parameters to assess sustainability at each of the six facilities. Data is pouring in now from the sites and soon we will have a baseline for each. Next we will set stretch goals and plan the tactics to achieve them. We will also employ competition among the sites to work in favor of overall success and encourage camaraderie.
Now that a sustainability culture has taken some roots, it will be important that we avoid being consumed by daily activities. It’s critical that we allot time to learn how other businesses approach their sustainability challenges. To that end I subscribe to a handful of news sources which provide a window to the world beyond Kenco. If we don’t look to the horizon we’ll loose momentum in our drive to continuously question paradigms that can stifle innovation. That is why we empower our LSS leaders to challenge their teams to find the next best practice in sustainability.
Following the time tested Kaizen format, we form teams of willing volunteers for sustainability Kaizen events, during which we explore new ways to look at our business processes. One example is an “Energy Treasure Hunt” using instruments measuring light lumens and kill-o-watt meters that show the annual energy cost of what’s plugged into them. Not as much fun, but still an eye-opener, is a “Waste Stream Analysis” during which we investigate the sources of what we send to landfills and seek alternative materials, or a recycler. At the end of the event a formal presentation is made to the area management, showing the cost savings discovered. Such reporting is usually given by one of the more charismatic team members who took part in the discovery and potential savings realization.
Though we’ve made great progress in the past 18 months, we have a long way to go. The positive results we’ve already achieved will keep Kenco moving toward more sustainable practices and will—I hope—encourage other supply chain partners to do likewise.
