To promote and enhance sustainable thinking throughout the organization while maintaining our continuous improvement of our HES programs and stance on human rights, MEDRAD formally defined the relationship between sustainable development and our business by establishing a corporate thrust, which defines our strategy as follows:
Ensure sustainability and drive long‐term commercial success through developing, commercializing and distributing innovative products and services, conserving resources, reducing waste, enhancing ecological performance, effectively managing knowledge and fulfilling related social responsibilities.
In early 2010, MEDRAD identified a crossfunctional, sustainable development council to develop an approach for sustainable development deployment, learning and obtaining results. Looking to the corporate sustainable development strategic thrust for guidance in planning, the council defined a waterfall strategy to embed sustainable development practices in the organization. Specifically, the corporate thrust provides the guiding principles which will be supported by strategic initiatives. These initiatives are intended for action via specific projects executed by teams and individuals across MEDRAD. This process fosters awareness at all levels of the business, and enables employees to understand how their actions and specific sustainable development steps tie to the overall sustainable development corporate strategic thrust.
Through this deployment strategy, we intend for sustainable thinking to become so well ingrained that the specific initiative becomes a mere formality. We hope that sustainable thinking will simply be part of normal business planning and operating.
Aligning with the corporate strategic thrust and focusing on our customers, products and employees has resulted in five (5) strategic initiatives to start the improvement cycle and begin deployment of the program across the organization.
1. Sustainable Products: Develop a voluntary program in which product development teams can participate. The program will provide guidance to the teams on attributes that can improve the sustainable aspects of the products. The intent would be to expand markets, improve products’ performance, and improve the sustainability of MEDRAD’s customers.
2. Packaging: Provide focus on all packaging (primary, secondary, and tertiary) to reduce the resource requirements and waste produced. The intended results are reduced internal costs and mitigation of emerging regulation and tax impacts while responding to customer requests and concerns.
3. Sustainable Operations: Collect, track and report on key operational (CO2, waste stream, etc.), health, safety, and community involvement performance indicators. Goals will be set for each of the KPIs to promote and give visibility to improvements.
4. Supply Chain: Engage suppliers to improve performance and transparency of the overall supply chain. Improve long term integration, costs, quality and stability while reducing risk.
5. Knowledge Management: Distribute and protect internal knowledge.