Manufacturing Executive - January/February 2009 - (Page 9) S U P P LY C H A I N NETWORKS SHADES OF GREEN Look for the carbon footprint behind that bag of potato chips, Supply chain expert Douglas Kent is getting a little sick of the green talk spewing from manufacturers these days. Not that he’s antigreen. It’s just that Kent, director and founder of supply chain consultancy eKNOWtion in London, believes that many companies are taking a free ride on the “trendy green” bandwagon for PR purposes, while taking relatively little action. “You’ve heard ‘lean, green and seen,’ but unfortunately I think the ‘seen’ part gets more attention than the ‘green’ part,” Kent said on a panel at the annual European gathering of the Supply Chain Council in Budapest. His concerns struck a chord. “The days of green wash are diminishing,” said Michael Bernon, senior lecturer for the Cranfield School of Management in Bedford, England. He noted that public awareness is making it increasingly difficult for companies to make unsubstantiated claims. Bernon encouraged manufacturers to consider their source of goods when implementing green strategies, and to examine various nooks of the supply chain. For instance, potato chip maker Walkers Crisps in the United Kingdom found it was spending unnecessary energy drying out potatoes because some of its potato TRAINING Can Cisco Sew Up the Turkish Textile Industry? The Turkish textile industry has been losing orders to China and other low-cost countries, in part, because Turkey’s many small and medium-sized producers lack the capacity to take on big production runs from clothing and fashion companies, according to Paul Mountford, president of emerging markets at Cisco Systems. To counter this trend, Cisco wants to equip Turkish producers with highspeed wired networks and collaborative software that allows them to hand off part of a large request for, say, shirts, to compatriots. “They are not connected as an industry and they see other [Turkish] textile companies as competitors,” Mountford said. “If they receive the order and keep part of it, then Turkey would retain the business.” The network and Cisco WebEx conferencing software would also let producers share information on best practices, nanotechnology, and other aspects of trade.Textile producers would buy access to wired and wireless networks through Cisco partner Turk Telekom. A limited number of shops are sampling the service for free in a pilot. These include Mavi Jeans, ERAK Tekstil, and Talu Textile. Turk Telekom will implement tiered service tariffs in early 2009. Cisco has set up a similar network with Chilean wine producers. Whether the vendor can weave a success story in Turkey remains to be seen. suppliers, which it pays by the weight, were intentionally humidifying their spuds, he said. He also praised Walkers for labeling its packages of crisps with the number of grams of carbon produced during manufacturing, although he noted that it’s difficult for any of us to put a number like “75 grams” into context. Joe Francis, the Supply Chain Council’s executive director, called for measurement standards of emissions to enable common government action. That, in turn, would help companies to deploy consistently green supply chain practices. “Until there’s a very consistent political definition of requirements, you’re not going to see a lot of adoption of this,” Francis said. “It’s going to be extremely difficult, other than incidental change, to make this really stick in the long term.” Cranfield’s Bernon also encouraged manufacturers to consider a product’s entire life cycle — from design through use and disposal. Noting that 75% of underpants’ energy footprint comes from washing the garments, he jokingly suggested wearing them for several days before cleaning them. “If we want to be sustainable, we might have to be more grubby,” he quipped. No wonder Kent was looking a tad green. EDUCATING THE NEXT-GEN PROCESS PROS Practical process industry expertise is getting tough to find. The more complex process technologies get, the harder it is for European companies to secure the top-notch human skills they need to develop, deliver, and manage the best results. Relief may be on the way. Honeywell has opened a multisite Automation College to help boost the technical skills of process industry professionals across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The company will even match much of the training cost for customers in the region. “Global financial upheaval is adding to the pressure as companies try to squeeze more and more out of existing installations,” said Michel Jennes, Honeywell’s EMEA Automation College Manager in Belgium. “There are also certain domains where the level of specialisation is now really high, like advanced process modeling and simulation. It’s becoming almost impossible to find the right expertise.” Over the next year, the college aims to provide process plant operators, implementation engineers, maintenance techni- Photo (right): Izabela Habur through its training centres in Amsterdam, Manchester, Prague, Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, Kuopio in Finland, and a newly designed central training hub in Brussels. Classes are in English, French, German, Finnish, Russian, or Afrikaans. Customers can also arrange on-site courses. As Europe’s workforce matures and fewer young profescians, system administrators, and sionals replace them, the acute management with 15,000 days skills shortage is now “one of of customer courses on creating the process industry’s foremost and maintaining a safe, reliable, challenges,” said Norm Gilsdorf, and efficient plant. Open systems, vice president and general process modeling, wireless manager of Honeywell Process technologies, and cyber-security Solutions in Europe. The only feature high on the curriculum. way forward is to “nurture the Honeywell will run the courses talent we have,” he says. Manufacturing JAN/FEB-09 Executive 9
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