Case Studies Archives: 2012
November 2012
Western Union Summit: Addressing Education Needs and Creating New Business Opportunities
Education has the power to improve both individual and community well-being, helping regions become more competitive economically, reduce poverty, and support democratic activities. Yet even though the UN has identified universal primary education as one of the eight Millennium Development Goals, approximately 61 million school-age children are not enrolled. An additional 71 million are not enrolled in secondary school.
Western Union has 510,000 agent locations in 200 countries and territories, reaching tens of millions of customers worldwide. Many are un-/under-banked and live in the communities where education is a particular challenge. Western Union asked BSR to help design and facilitate a process that would allow the company to engage with external experts to identify solutions for educational needs that also could potentially grow its business.
October 2012
Levi Strauss & Company: Improving Worker Well-Being in the Workplace and Community
Too often, supply chain compliance programs fall short of ensuring that worksite-based improvements meaningfully improve workers’ lives. Top-down requirements to raise wages, reduce overtime, or reduce chemical exposure, for example, cannot sufficiently address the myriad challenges workers face to raise their standard of living, improve their health, or enhance their access to professional-development opportunities.
As a leader in supply chain innovation that is committed to improving workers’ well-being, Levi Strauss & Co. (LS&CO) saw an opportunity to address this challenge. In early 2011, the company committed to creating a new strategy for its existing supply chain labor program, and enlisted BSR to help determine how the company could improve workers’ lives beyond the factory walls.
October 2012
CTIA: Outlining How Wireless Technology Drives Sustainability
CTIA—The Wireless Association commissioned BSR to investigate the benefits of wireless technology for the environment and society and to provide insights on the risks and challenges of widespread adoption.
October 2012
Twin Metals Minnesota: Using Early Stakeholder Engagement to Improve Strategy
By helping Twin Metals Minnesota engage early with a broad set of stakeholders for its development of an underground copper mine, BSR worked with the company to integrate stakeholder ideas into a more robust sustainability strategy for the company as a whole.
October 2012
Bradesco: Helping a Brazilian Bank Engage Society on Common Concerns
In every major economy, the financial sector forms the nexus between stakeholders, investors, and business, making it a potentially valuable enabler of sustainable business. In Brazil, a few banks have started to engage with stakeholders on issues such as financial education, social and environmental risk, climate change, and energy efficiency, but they sometimes struggle with how to address those challenges through their operations.
For Bradesco—an institution with 105,102 employees, 65.4 million clients, 4,636 bank branches, R$789,550 million in total assets, and a presence in every municipality in the country—the challenge was even more pronounced.
The company turned to BSR to help find an answer.
October 2012
The Boeing Company: Assessing the Maturity of Environmental Systems
As the world's largest aerospace company, whose commercial jetliners and defense, space, and security systems are used in 150 countries, Boeing operates a diverse network of manufacturing facilities that produce and maintain aircraft and aviation systems. In today’s operating environment, the company faces growing pressure from customers and reporting standards to quickly aggregate common data from across its manufacturing sites and report on its overall environmental performance.
Additionally, Boeing’s five-year environmental targets focus on key impacts, including carbon-dioxide emissions, energy use, water use, and waste. The company was on track to meet or exceed its 1 percent absolute reduction goals, which were set to expire in 2012, and Boeing needed to develop a comprehensive set of new targets. Additionally, given the steady increase in requests for corporate sustainability information from surveys, analysts, and customers, the company wanted to ensure that new targets could satisfy future data needs.
Boeing enlisted BSR to help develop its next set of performance targets and assess the viability and usefulness of the company’s current data, and the systems underlying environmental management at the various manufacturing sites.
October 2012
Helping Companies Ensure Respect for Human Rights
Ever since BSR was founded, we have been working with business to address human rights impacts, from labor rights abuses in global supply chains to freedom of expression on the internet.
Though human rights is not a new challenge to business, one of the big obstacles has been a lack of consensus and clarity on the exact responsibilities of business and a dearth of resources to help companies meet those responsibilities.
After UN Special Representative John Ruggie’s Protect, Respect, Remedy Framework provided that consensus in 2008, BSR supported Ruggie’s UN mandate to help find answers to the next question: How companies can ensure that they do not infringe upon human rights?
October 2012
Bettercoal: Improving Performance in the Coal Supply Chain
In the next 25 to 50 years, despite efforts to shift to lower-carbon energy sources, increasing demand from large emerging economies means that coal will continue to be critical to meet energy needs. And, increasingly, future production is likely to be based in countries such as Mongolia, Mozambique, and parts of Indonesia that, to date, have had modest coal mining operations.
In spite of this, there is currently no agreed-upon global standard for coal mining; performance varies widely across the world; and there are significant ethical, social, and environmental risks and impacts associated with coal mining.
To fill this gap, several major energy utilities—DONG Energy, EDF, Enel, E.ON, GDF Suez, RWE, and Vattenfall—worked with BSR as the lead facilitator to form Bettercoal, the first global, multi-company initiative aimed at improving conditions at the mine level. Bettercoal will seek to fulfill its mission by conducting independent mine assessments, facilitating industry best practice sharing, and offering support to develop resources and capabilities at the mine level.
October 2012
CiYuan: Building Cross-Sector Partnerships to Enhance Social Investment in China
In China, economic growth is perpetuating a multitude of challenges, including a lack of human rights protection for migrant workers, environmental degradation, and income disparity—and government is not fully able to address these issues. There is an opportunity for civil society to fill these gaps, but without business’ help in strengthening the country’s nascent nonprofit sector, that progress has dramatically less potential.
BSR founded CiYuan to address the biggest barriers to the development of China’s nonprofit sector: limited strategic partnerships and opportunities for dialogue between nonprofits and business; a foundation sector with limited experience in partnering with and supporting grassroots organizations; a restrictive environment for nonprofit registration and fundraising; and weak governance and transparency, which generates a lack of public trust in nonprofits.
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