Unipart holds an annual Environment Week focused on raising awareness of environmental issues. This year we challenged employees to get actively involved and set up OCC (Our Contribution Counts) Circles to tackle environmental issues – with prizes for those circles that made the best contribution to the business.
The OCC Circles programme is part of Unipart’s proprietary approach towards continuous improvement and employee engagement. All employees are trained in a six stage problem solving approach and are then encouraged to find and solve problems at their level of the business.
Applying the OCC Circles programme to environmental issues provided a great opportunity to link our continuous improvement culture with our drive to reduce usage of resources like energy and water.
We were particularly looking for circles that made a speedy impact and that could be transferred across all areas of the business. The OCC Circles programme is particularly useful in achieving this as it is supported by an online problem solving website that enables all employees to calculate savings and, at the press of a button, share their ideas and innovation across the Group.
We encouraged everyone to take part and there were posters at each site to help people think about ideas for circles. Circles were completed within Environment Week and prizes awarded to the three which made the greatest impact in terms of innovation, benefits and transferability to other areas.
There was an excellent response to the OCC Challenge and many of the ideas are now being implemented across the company.