” Our journey, our successes, our shortcomings What has the change from commodity to speciality meant for AAK’s environmental work? This change has brought many challenges to our organization, 32 our manufacturing and our supply chain. We have been focusing on productivity, whilst introducing additional processes, to handle complexity throughout, to provide tailored solutions to our customers. One could argue that this is not an environment for conservation. However, we believe and continuously demonstrate that this is not the case, for example through waste diversion, by improving and revamping our manufacturing operation, by improving safety and the welfare of our employees and contributing to and supporting the welfare of our neighbours. Our driving goal is to accomplish what seems impossible and remain profitable with a supply chain that is lean and agile, in a world of constrained resources. What are some of the specific actions that AAK has taken within sustainability? We are moving away from jargon that often weighs down sustainability improvements to clear concise Aims, Actions and Targets. We are clearly focused on the long term and this approach has reaped many benefits. Our long term goals hold AAK accountable to what we promise to our stakeholders. It prevents us from setting expectations too high, it removes short term hurdles and it allows time to design corrective actions that are also sustainable for the long term. We have introduced many new procedures, among them MOC (management of change). This is a powerful tool that we have employed in our safety procedures, where any change brought about to our current processes/practices needs to be fully approved and signed off. This one change in our processes has contributed to improve our safety performance by more than 50 percent. What are some of the benefits that your efforts have produced? Our global activities across all manufacturing sites, where we learn and share best practices between each other, have produced huge benefits. We have worked hard to improve our European Supply Chain, where our sites ran independent of each other, often duplicating activities. We still have a long way to go to achieve our ultimate goal, but improvements to our cost base, reduced waste, reduced transportation, better energy and water efficiency and improved capacity utilization are clear benefits to our sustainability focus. What are the biggest challenges ahead? When we think about threats to the environment, we tend to picture cars, planes and factories with large smokestacks, but I believe that one of the biggest dangers to the planet is our need for food. We are in a world that is demanding more. By 2050 the world’s population is likely to increase by 35 percent, approximately another two billion people, to nine billion. Our challenge is how to achieve this – not by using more, but by using less; by reducing our valuable resources employed to produce enough food to feed this population, by eliminating waste whilst freezing our agricultural footprint, by growing more on our farms, by using resources more efficiently and by improving yields. One may think this is impossible, but it is not. We just need to find the right way to achieve the goal, set our minds to doing it and collectively take accountability and deliver what we promise. This is where I see AAK in all of our endeavours in the next few years. We will not solve the food challenge, but we will play our part in every way possible, reducing our environmental impact, through continuously improving performance. David Smith President European Supply Chain Transport optimization in AAK Dalby During 2014, Food Service in AAK Dalby has together with some of its largest customers worked with transport optimization. Many customers’ ordering patterns are usually based on internal logistics and commercial factors, but often also on tradition. These habitual patterns were based on customer needs, but was perhaps in the end not the optimal solution. Instead the flexibility was limited to full pallets of almost all products, more products per pallet, and fewer delivery times. The focus during 2014 has been cost-effective transports with full trucks from factory to the warehouses. The environmental benefits have been obvious, but after evaluating the project it has also been acknowledged that the quality and delivery service has increased significantly.
AAK - Sustainability Report 2014/2015
To see the actual publication please follow the link above