We know we elevate our impact and help the world move forward when we help our customers – and their customers – achieve important sustainability goals.
For us, shared success means seeing manufacturers improve their energy consumption and efficiency through our i-ALERT®2 machine monitor. It’s creating copper-free brake pads that proactively meet the requirements of environmentally sensitive communities. It’s helping electric vehicle manufacturers make their products more compatible with today’s modern lifestyles. And, it’s creating components that provide environmental benefits above those of our competitors.
Shared success is also a key driver of our environmental efforts because improvements to our footprint are important to our businesses, our communities and our global impact. To that end, our facilities are integrating sustainability into their operations while embracing our global lean transformation efforts to improve efficiency and reduce waste.
For example, reducing electrical consumption is a key theme across many of our sites. From Mexico to Japan, we had sites that reduced usage by as much as 50 percent year-over-year through targeted actions. In a drought-ridden area, one site focused on water conservation to reduce consumption by 30 percent over three years. We also focus heavily on reducing waste and improving efficiency as part of our ongoing Lean transformation.
All these efforts reflect the sustainability commitment of our employees around the globe, and we put an intense focus on their health and safety. In 2016, we continued our diligence by introducing simple tools that help employees easily report unsafe work conditions and maintain a healthy workplace. This builds on prior efforts to improve our site audit diligence, empower supervisors to recognize and correct unsafe acts and conditions, and implement targeted safety support programs.
While we are pleased with our progress, we recognize how important it is to keep focused on creating an even greater level of shared success, whether it’s with employees, customers or other stakeholders. We know that we are on a journey and that we can make a difference at every juncture along the way.