Rosalee Hermens

Our environmental approach is pervasive throughout all aspects of our business, from making sure our products are made with materials that are environmentally friendly, to phasing out our use of PCBs (Polychlorinated Biphenyls — manufactured chemicals) in our products, to eliminating the use of solvents in the glues that we use to put shoes together.

We're building a new, consolidated bill of materials (BOM) system to keep better track of the materials we use in our products. That will allow us to phase out the materials we believe are hazardous and optimize our ability to move to other, more environmentally friendly, materials.

The main driver behind phasing out hazardous materials is to provide better and safer products to our customers. As a company, we want to be environmentally responsible, but our customers are also demanding it.

In addition, the new BOM system will keep track of which products have Timberland's new "nutrition labels" attached to them and ensure that they are applied correctly. The nutrition labels are a way for us to reach our goal of telling our customers where every product is made and under what circumstances related to the environment and fair labour practices. The nutrition labels feature three sections: The "Environmental Impact" reports the average number of kilowatt-hours that are used to produce a pair of Timberland shoes and the percentage of renewable energy Timberland uses from sources such as the sun, wind and water; "Community Impact" details metrics such as the percentage of children in a factory's workforce and the total number of hours Timberland employees volunteered [in the community] in the previous year; "Manufactured" tells the consumer in what factory and what country the product was made.

IT writes the programs to produce the nutrition labels and get them affixed to the bill of materials. The information then goes to the factory, which produces the label and puts it onto the box. We worked with marketing to figure out what the labelling would look like. We also worked with our environmental staff to understand the content for a particular product. We're also looking at how we can use less paper. One of our ideas in the pilot stage right now is to have individual mailboxes on our printers in order to eliminate printer waste. When an employee prints something, rather than it printing right away, the system will send it to her personal mailbox. She'll print the document only when she physically goes to the printer. This will also enable us to reduce our use of toner and printer materials, which are incredibly toxic.

In addition, our IT team worked as project managers on a volunteer project Timberland was involved in: building the Salisbury Rail Trail and cleaning up the Seacoast Science Centre in the US. This helped them gain project management skills, a critical part of IT. They had to create a project plan and an organization, recruit a team and get that team organized to do the work. They had to get the team their tools, communicate what needed to be done, keep them motivated, ensure safety, recognize contributions and do project wind-down — all soft skills you need to manage an IT project well.

Associate Staff Writer Katherine Walsh can be reached at kwalsh@cio.com.