Life-cycle approach to sustainability for a consumer packaged goods company
As a global consumer goods company increased its focus on sustainability, it needed rapid and drastic improvements in sourcing, manufacturing, packaging and transportation. It also needed to assess potential innovation targets and measuring the financial impact. The client also sought to make sustainability goals a requirement to become a “preferred supplier” to major retailers.
Challenge
A.T. Kearney was engaged to help the company develop a life-cycle approach to sustainability and meet the standards of leading retailers to become a preferred supplier.
Approach
We developed a strategy for reducing the company’s end-to-end environmental impact. There were five steps:
- Planning and program management. Identified current sustainability activities and documented business needs—outlining the vision, objectives and resource requirements
- Baselining. Collected data from business units to identify areas that would have the greatest impact on sustainability
- Forecasting. Projected business-unit volume growth compared with internal strategic plans, researching and developing a model to show the evolution of primary sustainability drivers, both internal and external
- Target setting. Determined targets that would achieve the most significant sustainability goals, prioritizing initiatives by business unit
- Gap closure. Launched workshops to identify potential initiatives, evaluating and prioritizing each one by its environmental impact
Result
Using various forecasts and scenarios, we developed a base-case forecast for the company to attain end-to-end life-cycle sustainability (see figure). The forecast was used to develop individual targets for each business unit, ultimately helping the company reduce its overall environmental impact.
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