Achieving Johnson & Johnson Consumer Health’s Healthy Lives Mission requires its supply chains to be healthy, as well. Here, Worldwide VP of Supply Chain Meri Stevens shares insights gained from collaborating with suppliers to achieve agility in complex supply chains.
Last fall, Johnson &
Johnson Consumer Health launched its $800 million
Healthy Lives
Mission
— a sustainability and wellness strategy built on the recognition that human
health is interdependent with the health of communities and the planet.
We spoke with Meri Stevens, Worldwide VP of Supply Chain at Johnson &
Johnson Consumer Health, for
updates on progress on the Mission and advice for maintaining agility in complex
supply chains.
Sustainability initiatives designed to reduce environmental impact throughout the supply chain often also result in cost efficiencies. In what ways have you seen the focus on sustainability unlock value in the supply chain and support business growth?
Meri Stevens: Support for sustainability makes good business sense — not
only in the eyes of our consumers but because it enables us to amplify great
business outcomes.
As part of the world’s largest healthcare company, Johnson & Johnson Consumer
Health is uniquely positioned and has a responsibility to approach health (of people and
our planet) in an integrated way — with our employees providing the fuel. We are
accelerating our Healthy Lives
Mission to increases value
for our customers, consumers and employees by innovating our supply chain to
deliver meaningful brand upgrades and reduce costs while helping preserve the
health of our planet. Investment into our brands and operations reduces our
environmental impact, creating momentum to positively affect public health. The
best of these programs not only serve this purpose, but drive growth and release
trapped costs.
As an example, our commitment to reduce complexity and waste in our product
packaging
allows us to reduce costs and associated environmental impacts. We recently
worked with one of our retail partners to remove the unnecessary plastic blister
from a few of our Neutrogena products: Neutrogena’s Oil-Free Acne Wash,
Pink Grapefruit Facial Wash and Healthy Defence Daily Moisturizer with
Sunscreen. Collectively, the elimination of these excess blister packs
eliminated 96,200 pounds of plastic and 3.2 million square feet of corrugated
cardboard material. The smaller and simpler packages can now be more efficiently
stored and transported, reducing the number of shipments and maximizing the
value of each transport. Additionally, reviews of our logistics revealed
opportunities to remove hundreds of trucks from the road without sacrificing
supply and is estimated to have doubled our miles-per-gallon fuel savings.
How do you ensure a sustainability approach is embedded throughout your supply chain strategy?
MS: Ensuring that sustainability initiatives are central to our end-to-end
supply chain strategy requires a mix of both process and culture.
We know that consumers are increasingly seeking personal care products that are
good for them and their loved ones, good for communities and the planet. This is
what motivates our teams across the business to deliver more sustainable
products and solutions. To ensure that we are meeting our commitments and that
sustainability is embedded across our supply chain, we have policies and
governance structures for our teams and business partners. These processes
involve dedicated governance teams — including oversight of sustainability
initiatives, supplier programs that drive social and environmental improvements,
regular environmental health and safety and social audits at internal and
external sites, and comprehensive corporate disclosures on relevant
sustainability metrics and goals.
Accompanying these essential procedural elements is our ingrained culture of
sustainability.
How do you work with suppliers to monitor and improve the sustainability of their operations?
MS: Collaboration with our suppliers to accelerate environmental and social
improvements across the value chain, is not new — it is one of the tenets of our
partnerships. At Johnson & Johnson, we recently launched a new public-facing
goal that by 2025 we will expand the Johnson & Johnson Supplier Sustainability
Program to include all suppliers — allowing us to monitor, engage and
collaborate on our joint environmental, social and ethical obligations.
As part of this work, we engage our suppliers to cascade our Responsibility
Standards for Suppliers — which were developed to assist us with selecting
suppliers who operate in a manner consistent with our guiding principles and to
support our suppliers in understanding and upholding our expectations. We strive
to include elements of these Standards in purchasing contracts and may take
steps to assess a supplier’s conformance to them*.*
We conduct regular social and environmental audits at our supplier sites to
ensure compliance and work with them to remedy instances of non-conformance.
What supply chain innovations or adaptations are underway to meet the Healthy Lives Mission commitments?
MS: We collaborate end to end to develop sustainable products and paths to
delight our customers and consumers. We are focused on improving our products
and ensuring our production, warehousing and logistics meet our Healthy Lives
Mission
commitments.
We are launching products with more sustainable
formulations,
increased PCR (post-consumer recycled plastic) and improved recyclability; as
well as exciting refill and reuse solutions, that will help decrease single-use
plastic packaging. We are committed to 100 percent renewable electricity by 2025
and carbon neutrality for our operations by 2030. Our end-to-end team is also
focused on ensuring data and analytics in these areas as an important asset in
our sustainability journey.
What advice would you give for keeping agility in a complex supply chain?
MS: Perhaps the most essential factor for maintaining a successful agile
structure at Johnson & Johnson is empowering our teams, not just our leaders, to
make impactful business decisions. We believe that our end-to-end
cross-functional teams should have the resources, knowledge and drive to make
the best decisions for the business without bureaucratic red tape or
obstructionist approval processes. Armed with this capability, clear goals and
guardrails, our teams can adapt quickly to changing business conditions and
market trends.
How have supply chain employees risen to the challenge of providing continuous supply of healthcare products during the COVID-19 pandemic?
MS: Throughout this pandemic, I’ve been impressed by the ways in which our
people have demonstrated true resilience and leadership as they adapted to new
challenges. Our supply chain organization worked together, end to end, with our
commercial and R&D partners, our customers, suppliers and other organizations to
mobilize as one team and meet this responsibility head on.
Some specific examples of our teams rising to the challenge would be our
distribution centers rapidly implementing new and enhanced safety precautions
and expanding normal working hours around the clock to fulfil critical personal
protective equipment (PPE) support shipments. We shifted some of our
manufacturing lines to produce much-needed hand sanitizers and increased the
production of high-demand
products
to meet the needs of consumers all over the world. As commercial airline flights
were cancelled, we worked with Third Party Logistics (3PL) partners to quickly
pivot to intermodal solutions, including expanding the use of “driverless” rail
and sea freight. Lastly, our customer service teams expanded the use of chatbots
and digital technology to respond to inquiries from home to comply with
social-distancing guidelines.
What is the one lesson from the pandemic you are taking into 2021?
MS: The power of true business agility, digital and empowering our people.
Long before the pandemic, our supply chain teams were on a journey to improve
our digital workflows. When the crisis demanded faster decision-making, our
ongoing investments in digital technologies and ways of working accelerated
rapidly, and allowed us to meet the moment and continue to deliver for our
customers more efficiently and effectively. In the future, it will be no less
important for us to be able to quickly respond to changing business conditions;
our newfound agility is a powerful tool for addressing those changes and making
the necessary adjustments.
How do you inspire employees to keep a sustainability mindset?
MS: For the entirety of Johnson & Johnson’s 135-year history, our most
foundational goal has been to improve the trajectory of human health — a goal
that is still ubiquitous across all sectors and functions today.
Our commitment to environmental stewardship is rooted in our
Credo (our company values) and also in the
understanding that the health and wellbeing of people and the planet are
fundamentally linked.
That is why our Healthy Lives Mission is focused on improving both the health of
people and the planet. By ensuring that sustainability is inseparable from our
foundational mission of improving human health, we’re compelling sustainability
considerations for all business decisions and empowering our teams to pursue
sustainability agendas. We see every day how we can make a difference in the
world when we engage our minds and hearts. It starts with each one of us,
#ONETEAM.
Published Jun 21, 2021 8am EDT / 5am PDT / 1pm BST / 2pm CEST
Sponsored Content
/ This article is sponsored by
Johnson & Johnson Consumer Health.
This article, produced in cooperation with the Sustainable Brands editorial team, has been paid for by one of our sponsors.