Fulfilling executives’ dream for collaboration between supply chain, engineering, marketing and other “silos”

By Kim Allen, PhD, and Pamela J. Gordon

In the mid-1990s TFI conducted a study for Electronic Buyers’ News about promising new teamwork between engineering and purchasing. Now in 2009 we’ve uncovered a whole new level of collaboration amongst not only these two traditional “silos” but also marketing, R&D, facilities, human resources, compliance, IT, logistics, and other functions. It could be the best answer yet to many an executive’s dream that through teamwork, employees’ decisions would lead to company-wide benefit, beyond that of a particular function.

Today’s organizations are responding to calls from many fronts for sustainability. Regulators are requiring carbon and resource accountability, investors want to know how companies are cutting energy costs, consumers and corporate customers are asking for green products, and employees question why their companies are not composting like they do at home. Suddenly, the abilities to track data across functional departments and share ideas company-wide moves from a dream to an imperative.

Fortunately, more companies are discovering the pleasant surprise that the very nature of environmental and sustainability programs brings about not only cost and resource savings, but also extensive cross-company collaboration. When employees are united in their support of the environment, they begin communicating with people in the company with whom otherwise they would have no contact.

TFI has observed the emergence of this collaboration in its environmental partnership programs. We’ve recently co-written a white paper called “Collective ‘Green’ Wisdom: Environmental Initiatives Evoke Unprecedented Multifunctional Collaboration,” which offers a detailed case study of this phenomenon, along with key success factors in forming a multifunctional “Green Team” and ways to avoid the most common pitfalls.

The client profiled in our white paper expects to save more than US$4 million and 4,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalent during fiscal years 2009 and 2010, which only came about because of multifunctional collaboration. In this time of simultaneous financial challenge and sustainability directives, such an advantage is even more valuable.

What inter-functional, inter-regional collaboration has been fostered by your company’s Green Team? (If your company does not yet have a Green Team, why not?)

Posted by Pamela J. Gordon, April 3rd, 2009