By: Charlotte Grandy, Sustainability Project Manger – KDC
August 2015
KDC, the Knowlton Development Corporation, is a North American contract manufacturer and custom formulator within the consumer goods industry. KDC is the leading external antiperspirant and deodorant manufacturer, as well as bath, body and shower products. With five facilities across North America, KDC offers its manufacturing service and product innovation to many of the world’s best known brands.
In 2015, many stra
tegic changes have occurred including the announcement of the dissolution of the KDC Toronto facilities. This dissolution means that the current sustainability program, traditionally seated at the Toronto facility, will be transferred to the other locations. With this transition, KDC needed to have an easy-to-understand sustainability initiative implementation standard, which not only promoted uniformity across the facilities but also could be easily applied by a diverse group of key personnel.
The Tavares Consulting Group’s Sustainability Toolkit allows sustainability programs to be run in an organized and structured process on multiple scales. As Sonya D’Cunha, KDC’s Director of Sustainability, explains, “the toolkit is enabling our company to apply the philosophy behind sustainability principles to what we do every day. Having a framework to shape and define our projects and actions within our sustainability goals makes the difference in being able to successfully put a plan into action to achieve our targets over time.”
The Sustainability Toolkit’s simple business language and readability means that it was able to reach a wide audience within KDC. As Sonya D’Cunha has stated, “one of the challenges of implementing a sustainability project in a manufacturing facility is that the buy-in and action required often crosses multiple departments. Since the toolkit helps to frame the elements of the project in context of the different moving parts and stages, the front-end planning will identify each of the key participants with their associated actionable items so that a coordinated approach can be taken for the span of the initiative. This will foster a coordinated inter-awareness about how to work together to achieve a common goal.”
With its structured organization of sustainability programs and its diversity, the Sustainability Toolkit is a unique fit for KDC’s transforming sustainability program. “The fact that the toolkit tangibly structures action items within a cycle of goal-setting and decision-making makes it a practical tool to apply directly to our project management systems. The checks and balances intrinsic to the toolkit’s Plan -> Do -> Check -> Act model give us the assurance that we can modify our plan in real time and make meaningful decisions throughout the project lifetime.”
