Discussion Board Responses - Business Class

I need a 200-word reply to each of the following discussion board post made by peers in my class:

The post need to be positive and not overly critical of my peers.

Forum #1

Triple Bottom Line

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A triple bottom line measures a company's degree of social responsibility, its financial value and its environmental impact. The economic value is the easiest to measure because it is the most tangible. The social responsibility includes labor and employees as well as local neighborhoods and communities. The last piece in the triple bottom line is practices to reduce its environmental impact.

The company I work for, Allegion, lives by the triple bottom line. They always try to push the financial aspect of running a business. They also take time to send their employees to work for Habitat For Humanity. They also value their employees and reward them with unlimited time off. They also make safety a priority in our plans, promoting health and safety of everyone. We have evaluations of our EHS compliance as well as continual improvement of EHS performance, including the reduction of use of natural resources, reducing pollution, and minimizing waste.

Forum #2

ArcelorMittal and Their "transforming tomorrow" Initiative

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  ArcelorMittal is the world's largest steel producing and mining corporation.  While many people correlate the steel industry with grubby rust belt cities and mining with impoverished Appalachian strip mining towns, this corporation fully embraced the Triple Bottom Line philosophy to develop strategy that relate economic, employee and environmental viability with a positive profit margin (Jacobs, 2017, pg 18).  While most people may consider mining antithetical to sustainable practices, the steel industry has quietly revolved around recycled materials for decades.  At least since the 90's, no steel has been produced solely from virgin ores; it is in fact, the single commodity with the highest percentage of reuse and recycling in its products - 88% in 2012. 

 ArcelorMittal takes this to the next level by incorporating the triple bottom line into their corporate strategies.  They state that individuals, companies, NGOs and nations all want to enjoy a good quality of life which requires finding ways to prosper without overusing natural resources, hurting others or changing the climate.  They identify the need to find new ways of thinking about everyday products and changes to enterprise, infrastructure and innovations.  This may seem like a piece of fluffy language drafted by their marketing firm, but ArcelorMittal executes this strategy through a new framework outlining ten sustainable development outcomes. Before identifying these, the company conducted several annual assessments of what matters to the health of their business and its stakeholders.  In 2013, they identified safety, health, greenhouse gases, transparency and accountability, air and water emissions, and employee engagement.  In 2014, they added water, resource efficiency, ethics, community relations and their aging workforce.  Their efforts have been recognized by the United Nations Global Compact, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, VBDO and Transparency International. They distilled these areas of concern into focused efforts they call their ten outcomes for their sustainable framework: people; products; infrastructure; resources; air, land and water; energy and carbon; supply chains; community; scientists and engineers; impact measurement and good governance (Corporate ArcelorMittal website). Some of the specific projects local divisions implemented include using steel slag for fertilizer, retrofitting old plants in developing areas such as Bosnia with high tech filtration to reduce air emissions, non-smoking facilities in other countries and scholarship and community development projects to improve local partnerships and prepare for their aging workforce.  These efforts shock you when considering the minimal political push in many areas the corporation executes them.

References Cited

 Jacobs, F. Robert, & Chase, Richard B. (2017). Operations and Supply Chain Management: The Core. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Education.

 ArcelorMittal transforming tomorrow, n.d. Retrieved April 02, 2017 from corporate.ArcelorMittal.com

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