Innovative Service Award 

**NEW AWARD CATEGORY** 

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The intent of this award is to recognize an innovative service that significantly influences and drives the adoption of sustainability through an organization, customer base or industry.  The Innovative Service Award applies to a company or service provider that can demonstrate having made a significant and measurable impact on Environmental, Social and/or Governance (ESG) metrics across a value chain. Some Examples could be developing a new sustainable technique or standard, a new structure or business model, or a new use of a material or waste stream.

 

The innovative service must have measurable impacts and include the quantification of business impact (% improvement, % reduction, etc.) for more than one customer and evidence must be provided in the application.

 

The Innovative Service award criteria is based one or more measurable outcomes including:

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  • Integrates sustainability into strategic business decision making and overall operations

  • Develops and designs sustainability criteria for products, systems, services, processes, or buildings 

  • Progresses innovative material use, transportation, resiliency, risk reduction, and/or social impact/equity

  • Advances workforce strategies demonstrating positive improvement in overall health, safety and wellness

  • Enables and advances ESG criteria and frameworks

  • Engages internal stakeholders with services, programs and tools that yield sustainability-driven innovation


Innovative services will vary yet creative and unique solutions are being developed to significantly advance sustainability across businesses, markets, and industries. We encourage any business with a service they consider to be innovative and drive sustainable solutions forward to apply for this award.

 

Applications should include identification and, if possible, quantification of the direct and indirect benefits outlined above.

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The 2021 Business Sustainability Awards are now open! The application will close on June 30th. You can see example winners below or click here to view 2019 winner details.

CNH Industrial (Large Recipient)

Sturtevant

 

The Case IH plant in Racine, Wisconsin produces agricultural tractors and components, such as transmissions and valves. They implemented a World Class Manufacturing program designed to: 


   • Involve all employees in continuous improvement and
   • Cut out wastes and losses 
    
The plant has established a routine review of KPIs for forecasting and monitoring. Thus, action is proactive and some of the wins that they have had include: 


   • Eliminating the need for a touch-up booth through process changes 
   • Replacing older windows with high-efficiency double pane windows 
   • Replacing roll-up doors with high speed doors 
   • Switching to returnable packaging in order to eliminate or “refuse” wood packaging and its associated waste wherever
   • Decreasing the geographic distance of suppliers to the plant.    

General Plastics (Large Recipient)

Milwaukee

 

General Plastics, is a plastic manufacturer in the Milwaukee area.  During plant expansions in 2015 & 2016, their goal was to reduce the number of touches and the distance products and tools had to travel to process a part from start to finish. They eliminated an offsite warehouse and saved time, effort and cost to move products back and forth for production and shipping. They also were able to reduce the number of flow paths parts could travel in the production process for six to three making a 50 percent improvement.   
  
In addition, since 2012 they have been able to increase inventory turns by 43 percent and our Work In Process (WIP) by 75 percent. To reduce inventory levels while growing the business we worked with our key customers to develop template part programs, kanban, and pull systems, as well as utilizing the ERP inventory allocation system. These improvements enabled them to reduce the total average manufacturing time for an order down to 24 hours.