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Towards a zero-waste manufacturing process
The VP of Research and Development of an international consumer goods manufacturer called for Stim in 2020. He realised that whilst water and CO2 emissions have been measured and taken into account in the company’s environmental roadmap, it is not the case for waste. It is reported that the company emitted 20 times more waste (in weight) than final products. This startling result led the team to the question: are they really consumer goods producer or rather waste producer?
This waste problem inherently lies in the manufacturing process, which was designed under the prism of productivity optimisation. The products are not totally finished, but only semi-finished in order to be tailored-made later. This production mode allowed a standardised and efficient process en masse everywhere in the world.
However, this standardised manufacturing process can no longer be tolerated if the company is asked to be compliant with increasingly stringent regulations. Beyond these obligations, the VP of Research and Development also took a personal interest in this waste problem. As an engineer, he is quite sensitive to well-designed and technically elegant solutions. Therefore, he considered such a wasteful producing process a design failure, and a challenge that he had to solve.
He called for Stim with two main intentions:
To raise awareness of COMEX and the whole company in the matter of waste - the company cannot achieve the ambitious environmental objectives without tackling waste, one of their most important environmental impacts.
To explore new concepts to reinvent the manufacturing process and allow a drastic reduction of waste, or get as close as possible to the Zero-Waste target.
Our solutions
1. Diagnosis: Waste is a key strategic topic
We began the project with the building of a clear ambition: is it enough to be compliant with the laws for the next 5 years? Or should they go further, aiming at a 10-15 year horizon? Is it enough to reduce 10-15% of waste, or should we strive for an (almost) Zero-Waste process? At the end of this phase, the Innovation team and the COMEX were aligned on ambitious objectives of 90% waste reduction - meaning to get as close as possible to the Zero-Waste target.
In the next phase, we started the documentation of all the initiatives and projects related to waste that had been developed before in the company. This work clearly showed that the company will not be able to reach that defined ambition of nearly Zero-Waste via these existing optimisation projects. Due to the phenomenon that StimShift called “the invisible wall of R&D”, it is necessary for the team to explore breakthrough alternatives to reach for a long-term and drastic reduction of waste.
Consequently, the team identified several technologies that could be very interesting to become an alternative to the current manufacturing process. 3 of them turned out to be very promising solutions, with the potential of reducing up to 90% of waste.
However, these technologies are not yet mature, and are still very expensive at the moment. It would take at least another 5 to 10 years of development in order to make them commercially viable. Moreover, the implementation of these new technologies would require huge investments a priori, due to the necessary transformations of all their factories and labs worldwide. This becomes a blocking point for these technologies to be studied and developed.
Stim, therefore, suggested principles of Virtual Startup and Landing Zone. This means that the team would find small independent business areas to develop these technologies, without having to modify the existing manufacturing processes and the core business. At the same time, while the market demand develops, these new businesses may scale up and become significant business units for the company. And once technologies become mature, some technical bricks could also be progressively reintegrated into the standardised manufacturing process of the company.
2. Explore new concepts with bundled values
To build and support the growth of these new business units, a strong value proposition should be built, relying on the "bundled-value" principle. As a matter of fact, it is still today very difficult to monetize the environmental value, and thus, companies are not incentivized to finance the development of more environment-friendly solutions. By bundling the environmental value with other value propositions, for example, more user-centric or cost-centric, we would create more compelling and viable solutions to incentivize further developments.
The COMEX was convinced by this approach, and therefore allowed extensive exploration of new concepts that might become a viable alternative to the current wasteful manufacturing process. Consequently, we successfully identified 5 new product concepts, compatible with the maturity level of technologies and the emergence of niche markets for more durable product lines. 3 of them were selected to be launched.
A micro-factory, managed by an independent business unit with a specific brand, will be created in order to demonstrate and foster the market demand for greener products, while financing the maturation of these technologies behind. This allows a small-scale test-and-learn process, without having to integrate breakthrough solutions right away into their current massive industrial machine.
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