Self-Assessment Questions
Answer the following nine questions about your product sustainability program to learn about opportunities to enhance your efforts – answer options range from no progress to performing among the leaders using best practices that help deliver business value. If you need more information to answer a question, click the question mark button on the right side.
Leadership Support: Top executive alignment on program goals and strategy is critical for long-term success, ensuring appropriate resources and organizational commitment and integration.
Linkage to Core Business: Program goals are essential. Connecting high-level targets to the business in a way that is easily understood by everyone in the organization boosts their success. Best practices include linking goals directly to business priorities such as a portion of revenues or the innovation pipeline/new products or establishing a percentage of the total portfolio that must come from more sustainable products.
Focused Efforts: Companies work best when they establish priorities to channel their limited resources. Organizations evaluate product life cycle impacts and then address top issues across health, social, and environmental topics. A clear focus on high-impact hotspots facilitates progress and ensures that strategies are meaningful.
Supplier Engagement: Working with suppliers to understand their impacts and efforts to address them is an important step in advancing product sustainability. Leaders also find opportunities to collaborate and build supplier capacity.
Customer Tools: Customers are increasingly asking suppliers about their sustainability initiatives and sometimes requiring certain approaches (e.g., sustainable palm oil sourcing, sustainable seafood sourcing). Companies can use this business relationship strategically to support company efforts.
Chemicals of Concern: There are growing marketplace demands for more sustainable chemical and material management. Leading companies take a proactive approach by removing chemicals of concern and substituting with safer alternatives through collaboration across the company in addition to meeting regulatory requirements.
Product Development Process: There are opportunities throughout the product development process to evaluate and improve the sustainability profile of a product, its package, or manufacturing. Leading companies build this expectation into the process through management or stage-gate reviews from concept to commercialization.
Empowering Product Development: Equipping product development teams with the information they need to improve products, packages, and processes is an extremely effective, proven strategy. Many companies provide custom tools, scorecards, and guides during the design phase.
Progress Tracking: Tracking and displaying program progress with simple dashboards and limited detail can help the organization quickly understand needs and align on priorities.
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