Sustainability Indicators for Purina Monitoring System - Case Study Example

SUSTAINABILITY INDICATORS FOR PURINA MONITORING SYSTEM Table of contents Introduction …………………………………………………………………………………………….. 3 The company …………………………………………………………………………………………… 5 Sustainability dimensions for Purina …………………………………………………………………. 6 Environmental sustainability area …………………………………………………………………….. 8 Indicators for monitoring Purina activities ……………………………………………………………. 8 Summary ………………………………………………………………………………………………… 9 Reference page…………………………………………………………………………………………. 10 Introduction With the rapid development of world industries and growth of population, there appeared a need in counting resources that are used on the planet. A wide variety of methods and ways are developed and used in order to manage the world resources consumption. A monitoring system, developed and implemented in the right way and in compliance with the needs of a certain country and certain company or organization, leads to the changes for good as for the system as for its users. Monitoring system influences on all, providing an ability to evaluate the work of certain field or division, activities in general and standards of the company. Effective monitoring system allows creation of measurements or special indicators, which aim is to help the organization or company to analyze where it is and what it wants to achieve. Sustainability indicators in turn allow companies and organizations see how they conduct their activities and the conditions under which they should meet the world standards. The following paper will examine what monitoring system is and what it is created for. Further, it will examine the importance of the indicators for the organization activities. The paper will also describe the monitoring system of Purina Company, as one of the world leading companies of production of food and will develop sustainability indicators for this company. In the 21st century, managing industries is a challenging task. With the increasing competition among global leaders, rapid technological change and the same fast change among the consumers’ perceptions an expectations, their want for the quality, reliable, healthy and safe environment, there appeared a need in improving companies’ performance, planning new strategies for the future and use all the advantages of modern manufacturing techniques and methods. Companies and organizations should apply for an approach of a systematic rethinking of their economics, instrumentation, engineering and technology and management in order to earn benefit and respond the latest needs of their consumers. However, simple planning is not enough, as the excellent performance. To answer all the requirements of the modern world, organizations need to develop an appropriate monitoring system, which will indicate what is done and what should be done additionally. For the businesses, an importance of monitoring system is in its ability to measure their sustainability from the planet, humans and benefit in order to make the business operations more successful. In companies and organizations, a monitoring system finds problems and helps to decrease risk of making improper decisions. When a problem occurs and the right solution is founded, further monitoring systems is aimed to measure progress in delivering a plan, implementation of project or program and operation of a certain company or organization. One can say that monitoring is the assessment that lasts continuously for the purpose of implementation of projects regarding to what was expected and planned according to the certain activities, outputs and results. Monitoring makes its impact on those who is involved in the project. Monitoring provides organizations, companies and their stakeholders with the necessary feedback about the implementation of a certain project and indicates problems and progress in the achievement of planned results. Monitoring helps timely regulation of the operation of projects within certain company. Moreover, monitoring helps to build an understanding among the stakeholders about the project and creates a special background for learning sharing understanding of terminology and actions; it develops a special framework designed within the organizational context, promotes standardization of the data collection in order to provide with the results. For the effective involvement of the monitoring system, one organization or company can establish the purpose and scope of the system so to find out why a certain organization needs monitoring system and how apprehensive it will be for the company. Further, the organization can identify the performance questions, information needs and indicators in order to figure out what it needs to know to be able to monitor and evaluate the project to be managed effectively. For the monitoring system implementation, it is important to plan how the required information will be gathered and organized, how the organization will make sense of the results of the gathered information and how it will use such data for the improvement process. Monitoring system requires planning of quality communication and reporting. Thus, the company should think how and whom it wants to communicate the results of its activities and what processes will need to communicate. For instance, if the goal is the sustained improvement of income, monitoring system will put a question about the kinds of improvements the company should do in order to increase its income opportunities. If the purpose is to increase, the generating activities for the project target groups the monitoring system will enable to identify what type of income generation the company have created. The different case studies of an effective monitoring system are discussed in light of compliance to the criteria of good monitoring. It involves the reviewing of objectives and plans, tracking progress and results, providing reasons for non- achievements and verifies indicators. An indicator specifies a problem or condition and shows how well a system is working. If there is an issue, an indicator helps to assess the way, which will help to solve an issue. Indicators vary depending from the types of systems they monitor. That said certain characteristics of the effective indicators. Efficient indicators are relevant and easy for understanding. They should fit the purpose for measuring. One should also know what a certain indicator tells. They are reliable and based on the accessible data. One should trust what the indicator shows. Indicators measure complicated conditions. For example, if it is hard to measure the quality of education for the sustainable development in a country, people may have different consideration and opinions they can count on most. This is why it might be important to develop indicators measuring each of that concerns and ideas. When it comes to the indicators of a sustainability, they allow to focus one’s efforts on the specific sustainability areas and to measure the accomplishments and improvements. They help to determine and prioritize one’s sustainability activities. While, most organizations and companies are familiar with the goals setting, they can establish their practices to the sustainability indicators. Deciding what the organization or the company is planning, will help to develop certain rules and procedures for measuring and reporting and environmental management . In such cases, what an organization measures will be an indicator of its performance. This can also refer to the social sustainability, while environmental sustainability is seen and measured and one’s business influence on the people is harder to evaluate. Additionally to the requirements, it is clear to choose those indicators that are relevant to one’s company activities and targets. Finally, there is no reason to set an indicator, which cannot be measured. This means that indicators are created inly when there is a need in the decision making process. For the organization or company, it is important to identify their sustainability strategies and activities concerning specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely indicators. They will help to measure them further. Environmental sustainability indicators are already used by the organizations, which monitor its costs associated with the energy consumption, for example, or waste removal. Such features is common to most modern organizations. They try to run their business in compliance with the eco- friendly laws. . When they invest in the efficiency improvement projects, it is vital to monitor and measure whether the investment is worthwhile. In addition, it is important to measure each work areas, as most savings will be earned by the individual operations. The company will need to determine the right factors, measure them and then monitor the improvement activities in order to implement a difference. This can be simple if the organization has a not excessive process and wants to focus on one factor. However, other factors may require of environmental sustainability are more complex for measurement. They are the mass and energy balancing where losses occur within a process, thus, need calculation. Indicators for the environmental sustainability include rates of the resource consumption, which out in the carbon quality of air, soil and water. Other indicators of sustainability are the changes in local ecosystems, its flora and fauna. The direct or indirect emissions converted to carbon dioxide equivalents are also the indicators that point the level of air pollution. Apart from the sustainability environmental indicators, the important are also the social sustainability indicators. They identify the social sustainability factors. Organizations and companies often use surveys to measure their culture and image in the community. Such indicators are aimed to measure a rate of complaints and how they are addressed. In addition, they measure a number of corruption charges and industrial relations actions. Social indicators point out the number of safety incidents and environmental accidents that influence the community. Among other group of indicators, there are the record of human rights and child labor complaints, within the organization they are the employee turnover rates and costs. Certain surveys and tracking feedback provide an opportunity to see the customers’ satisfaction f a certain product or service. While one organization or company has already well established financial performance, this means that it uses the economic sustainability indicators. Some of them are defined by financial regulations. Others- by the accounting standard, which a certain business is following. The company When one talks about standard, there is no better example as the companies that produce food. What is worth mentioning, food for animals and pets requires the highest quality, otherwise, one’s dog or cat will not simply eat it. Ralston Purina, an American pet food company that merged with Nestle Friskies Pet Care Company a couple of years ago is now a pet food division of Swiss-based Nestle S.A. It is an excellent opportunity to show how one place gathered all possible to create the unique product, how its strategies help to run the most popular pet food brand in the world. Purina has been making high- quality and nutritious pet products with the passion about pets and the people who love them for more than eighty years. That is why the company is continuously working to use the earths resources in a more efficient way and improves its impact on the environment. The company believes that the subject- matter of sustainability is learning to live friendly with the nature. By finding new ways to do that, the company supplies high- quality and nutritious products improving its impact on the Earth. It shares the most positive steps they take to enhance its environmental performance. Purina’s fundamental purpose is to meet the expectations of the customers for quality food products and Nestle makes all possible to achieve this goal. By doing this successfully, it generates long term and sustainable economic outcomes and development. Through modern technology and innovative programs, by training its employees to international standards and paying taxes to fund infrastructure construction, Purina is contributing to a sustainable economic development around the world. It proclaims the same time improving the quality of foods for the others. The company’s passion for pets goes beyond selling pet nutrition, but it raises the awareness of what pets truly need. This is the company’s reason for investing in the excellent quality of food for pets. That is why the company demonstrates its commitment to pets. They know how powerful the connection between people and pets is, thus establish many unique ways that strengthen families and bring communities closer. The company has dedicated and passionate employees on its team and makes sure that Purina to be a great place to work. An interesting fact is that the company is so much dedicated to care of pets, that it even allows it employees to bring their cats and dogs to work every day. In addition, the company conducts an industry- leading research for enhancing good quality of pets’ lives. It deals with the understanding on how nutrition affects pets’ aging thus inventing and improving the quality of Purina’s food. Research center all around the world give an opportunity to make new discoveries. The company publishes its results in the academic journals and present their works at the major veterinary conferences. Moreover, the company funds work by veterinary universities around the world as well as organizations that have similar high standards of pets’ care. Purina’s sustainability strategies are fully presented in the company’s life cycle of its products. Thus, everything starting from sourcing ingredients and ending using of energy, water and raw materials is taken into account by the company’s policy of efficient and eco- friendly attitude. The company utilizes protective and recyclable packaging for optimizing the use of the amount of materials. It transports its products using highly efficient methods. The company believes that the steps they take today will make the company stronger in the future and will allow improving its performance in compliance with the environment. Nowadays these steps start with identifying of the opportunities and designing smarter and effective systems for protecting nature and preserving it. Purina’s associates are involved in this challenge with passion and pride, helping experts from many areas and making progress for all. Sustainability dimensions for Purina For its successful running, every business applies triple bottom line in its activities. They are the planet, the people and the profit. These concepts are the essence of sustainability because they measure the infuence of an organization’s activities on the world. The balance of the entire triple bottom means that business operates in the most effective manner. If one of the concept is weak, then the systems a whole is unsustainable. Purina Company tries to keep the balance between the three dimensions because it is the passport to its success. Growing the grain and meat, which the company uses in its products takes a huge amount of energy, water and nutrients, which generally affects the environment. In order to reduce such influence the company works closer with its suppliers and other sides to understand its supply chain and determine possible issues and possibilities that matter the most and improve company’s performance in time. The company knows that overfishing is a serious issue that is why it is working closely with its suppliers and outside seafood sustainability experts to understand its supply chain and find new ways for such issue resolving. Good planning is the main key in this issue and this is where the improvement opportunities exist. As part of a global effort, Purina discovering new sourced species of fish that they want to use for their future products. The organization have also developed apprehensive Responsible Sourcing Guidelines for vendors to make sure that the company obtains responsibly sourced seafood. The company tries to reduce its impact of mining. It also uses the power of nature to enhance the impact of producing litter for cat. Thus, the Maricopa, CA mine utilizes the sun to exhale some of the humidity in the loam and this reduces the electricity, which is needed for drying. When there is no need in the land of the mine, the company helps it to adjust the wildlife as best as it can. The company takes positive steps to provide protection for continuously improvement of the environmental impact. In order to help to conserve the safeguarding Water resource, the company puts a significant amount of attention on where it uses the most water, the manufacturing sites. In these factories, the organization decreases water usage by more than twenty- three percent from.The company is working on making more product using less energy with its constant improvement efforts that help it to reduce energy usage by seven percent per ton of pet food. Purina is enhancing its use of renewable energy in addition to its power mix, although it still makes up a very small percentage of the overall energy that the company needs. Purina continues to expand its generation of solar power. It currently has solar arrays at some manufacturing plants, newest facility. It also has a solar array at its learning center where it generates solar power each year. Such energy is a growing part of our energy mix. Besides, the company uses total electricity from renewable sources, mostly hydroelectric power from Niagara Falls.  It has implemented the production of two types of energy from one source. Another aspect of the sustainability is that Purina works on avoiding losses of its pet food during the manufacturing process. Recent initiative that was aimed for food waste began at its dry factories in 2010 and has achieved the eleven percent reduction since that time. This program will be expanded for the company wet pet food factories in 2013. The packaging of Purina products is important for preventing food waste and guarantee its high-quality standards and informing its consumers about that fact. That is why the company works to optimize the weight and volume of its packaging, leading the development and use of materials from sustainably- controlled renewable resources, taking into account the performance requirements for packaging and product and supporting initiatives to recycle or recover energy. Additionally, Purina uses special technologies when packing trucks, using slip sheets where possible in place of wooden pallets. This decreases the weight of loads, allows more product weight per one car and make less the number of vehicles drive. The slip sheets can be also recycled. The company ensures the quality of its products through involving people who are devoted to what they do, sustaining all they do. The company believes that the best way to provide high quality is to hire the brightest, smartest specialists in the certain field. While many organizations have smaller teams that work on quality aspects, the company has more than thirty experts who work every day to ensure their methods are absolutely state- of- the- art. Besides, Purina gives work to the most passionate and hardworking people in all of its factories. It also invests a lot of time and efforts into training of such specialists so they were as educated, comprehensive and safe as it is possible. The company even goes beyond its employees, training third parties, retail partners, who handle Purina’s products with proper care. The company considers that quality practices should lead the technology where it is appropriate. Purina is enlarging the use of technology to further screen ingredients. It strives to know where its ingredients come from. All raw ingredients that the company uses, are tracked from the time of receipt at its plants, with their involvement in ready products and on to the customers. Purina is working to implement monitoring systems in order to establish a chain of patronage back to the ingredient origin. It is vital for the company to prove that they have enough resources that ensure the proper quality assurance. It is considered that smaller companies have higher quality food. However, smaller companies often have a smaller quality assurance staff. That is why they dont always make their products in their own factories and it is harder for them to track the quality of their ingredients and the processes. At Purina, ninety- nine percent of brand products sold in the United States are manufactured in its own factories, under the severe guidance of the large number of assurance personnel. The company uses proprietary machinery for testing product that ensure the excellent quality of the Purina brands and make it possible have more efficient processes. The dimension of people goes far beyond factory, to the customers. It is the company’s goal to provide peace of mind for all the owners of pets to feed them with Purina products. That requires pet owners’ trust and the company keeps it for the many years. Beyond that, the company also works to help pet owners to better understand how to feed a pet with product when it is fresh and also special needs taking into account every peculiarity of a pet. For the dimension of profit, Purina as a part of Nestle Company, plays one of the main role for the economy of the country it is located in. Thus, the brands of Purina are represented in many countries in the world, sustaining the economy of a certain region, giving work to thousand employees, paying taxes. What is more important, Purina launches different programs for the pet owners and is proud to play a great role in building understanding between people and their pets. For example, in 2011, the company employee volunteers launched a single- stream recycling program, where all recyclables were placed in a single bin, at its headquarters in St. Louis. This one idea doubled the role of materials people recycle. This initiative was not only about pet food, but touched the important sides of human lives. Environmental sustainability area In order to ensure the eco- friendly attitude of the company, it establishes the sustainability approaches. The company prioritizes and manages what matters the most regarding the environmental impact, based on facts. It looks across the company for the ways to enhance efficiency, reduce waste and conserve resources where necessary. It works up and down its supply chain to responsibly source its high quality ingredients. The company learns from other best practices, including its customers, environmental organizations, retailers and companies in other industries. The company understands that simple changing of the way it performs its activities in order to improve the environmental influence is not just the right thing to do. The greater part is to understand who Purina is. Caring for the pets and planet shapes on everyday company actions. Keeping and preserving land resources comes along with the desire of the company to be number one in producer of the best food for pets. That is why the company struggles for the best quality of its products. Thus, quality assurance establishes a series of standards and processes in order to put in place that product, which is the most trustful and of high quality. It is what the company does to bring a cat or dog food home in a safe way, sustaining environment while producing, packing and delivering it. Beyond that, it keeps the consistency of the pet foods, so that every piece of it will have the flavor one’s pet has come to love. Many quality assurance practices are industrywide, but Purina goes above and beyond these requirements, because it constantly works to elevate its ability to track and monitor every single ingredient in its product. Indicators for monitoring Purina activities Most organization and companies in the U.S. use a wide variety of sustainability indicators. They all depend on the type of the business the company runs. It also depends upon the perspectives of different stakeholder groups and involved parties and thus the preferred indicators may be quite different. They may be national-level reporting and tracking of progress to local, place-based or program-based investigation. To be at its best and in order to perform its activities in compliance with all laws and rules of the society and requirements as to the producing of the food for pet, there should be created the indicators, which will measure the execution of certain planning, achievement of goals and strategies that are set by the company. For the environmental sustainability area, such indicators should point to the ways to reach the best results by keeping and preserving the environment. They may be represented through measuring the impact of a certain organization on the air. Its indicators will be the CO2 emissions from transportations and by source; number of days air pollution can exceed; days per year that air quality standards are met. The company may establish and launch numerous campaigns for education of the community and its members in order tech them about the ways how the manufacturing for example, can influence the environment. These are the awareness indicators: a number of environmental education programs for community and the indicators that show the employees passing environmental education test. If the company uses fish resources it may work out the fish indicators, such as fish species with the restricted consumption, overfished fisheries compared to fisheries not overfished and other species of fish produced explored by the company. Every organization, whether it is a pet shop, a school or a manufacturing company should be aware of such global indicators as CO2 emission per capita, relative to fair earth share, the greenhouse gas emissions measured, thus to lead to behave eco- friendly regarding the environment. Similar indicators point to the state of use of land and its patterns. These indicators show total area in the significant land-use categories and land area in parks and wildlife refuges. For Purina it is important to measure what it cares about and the indicators arise from these values. It also cares about what it measures and this creates its values as well. First of all, the company values the quality of its products, thus makes all possible to be the leader in this area. However, to be first also means to behave as best as it is possible regarding laws, regulations and to live in harmony with the environment, because its major customers- pets- depend directly on the state of their surroundings. The company develops its sustainability indicators of air in order to avoid emissions in air. The company conducts policy for its employees in its divisions and stakeholders of the awareness about the environment and keeping it for the future. Numerous campaigns in gathering batteries, use of recycling sources demonstrate company’s desire to be eco- friendly and its ability to teach its staff to behave a proper way. Since the company produces food for pet, whose favorite dish is fish; it tries to discover new species in order to preserve the fauna of the certain territories. Water is a critical resource and is vital for the quality of food Purina produces. That is why a sustainability indicator for water resources would be the use of water concerning the economic benefit or the water use per unit. Material consumption requires a big need in such resources as water, energy, land and others. That is why an indicator for material flow in Purina would be in reduction of such material use. All indicators developed for the company should be analyzed and alternative options should be included into integration of the social environmental and economic consequences. Indicators will allow evaluating of the long- term consequences of use of the natural resources, which are vital to both Purina major consumers and their owners. Summary The goal of all the Purina activities is the right approach toward its main consumers- pets. Under the right management, strategy and well- planned monitoring system the company may achieve its popularity with more force as it has in the present days and stay the commercially viable organization. For this reason, keeping its all processes in compliance with the social and economic as well as with the environmental demands is the main priority for the company. Conducting policy of preserving the environment while producing its goods, Purina makes its all stakeholders aware about the factors that influence the surrounding and develops indicators that allow managing and monitoring these impacts. On the assumption that every step of the production and every involved party make common cause, there will be an opportunity to bring good quality of good food to every single family simultaneously with the keeping of the environment for the future generation. 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Washington, D.C.: World Bank Purina, The official web site, n.d., Available from https://www.purina.com/meet-purina/sustainability#/pet-food-life-cycle Sustainability indicators, n.d. Australian Government, Department of Industry, Available from http://sustainabilityskills.net.au/what-is-sustainability/sustainability-indicators/ Read More