M&S rewards lean and green suppliers

Speaking at Food Manufacture Group’s free one-hour lean and green webinar, first broadcast on April 26 and still available to listen to), Louise Nicholls, M&S’s head of responsible sourcing, described progress with the retailer’s ethical and environmental programme.

In 2010, M&S got together with its suppliers to deliver a sustainability programme. It now grades them at three levels – bronze, silver and gold – according to their progress towards world class standards of manufacturing.

Nicholls reported that 91% of M&S suppliers’ sites now “engaged” in the process of waste elimination. Over 45% of its suppliers’ sites were validated to M&S’s silver level of sustainable manufacture and 8% to gold. M&S’s target was for all of its suppliers’ sites to be compliant at the silver level by 2020, she added.

Quarterly supplier meetings

M&S now holds quarterly supplier meetings, with between 60 and 70 attendees exchanging best practice. Awards are made for the best sites with visits arranged to the gold sites.

“We are operating in a really volatile, uncertain and complex business world and our suppliers need to be able to robustly manage change to deliver the expected benefits,” said Nicholls. “We need suppliers that learn proactively and collaboratively in advance of the pack.” She said that M&S suppliers were assessed against its target standards using a series of audits.

“We wanted to prove to suppliers that we recognise and reward those factories that meet those standards,” she added. “Over 60% of our food volume now comes from sites that have staff engagement of 65% or higher, which is good for the food industry.”

The lean and green webinar was sponsored by specialist continuous improvement (CI) consultancy Lauras International. Lauras partner Jeremy Praud, who also took part in the webinar, together with Greencore’s group technical director Helen Sisson and lean management specialist Simon Spanyol, described how audits could be used to assess companies’ CI progress. “Audits really do drive action,” said Praud.

The use of lean and green techniques, including overall equipment effectiveness measures, plus value stream mapping and total productive maintenance tools, were important in helping to deliver CI and add value to the businesses.

Culture of lean and green

However, all speakers stressed that it was also essential to inculcate a culture of lean and green within businesses – from the board to empowered shopfloor workers – if improvements were to be sustainable in the longer term.

“Ownership of improvement is what actually makes it stick,” remarked Spanyol.

Sisson described how lean and green implementation had become more structured over the years as the chilled own-label supplier strived to become more efficient and reduce food and packaging waste, energy, water, effluent, atmospheric pollution and staff turnover.

She described how Greencore used “hot spot mapping processes” to quantify and validate wastes, with clear metrics – including costs – placed against them. “That really brings the process to life,” she added.

She cited the use of pressure restrictors to reduce water use by 4.4M litres a year. In another example, sensors had been installed on conveyors to prevent them running when not needed.