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| | Introducing Hans-Georg Riegler-Rittner, Vice President, Total Quality Management. |
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1. Can you tell me about your role in the company? |
| I am Head of Total Quality Management. It is a very broad role, although in a strict sense it means I am responsible for ensuring that all products and business processes live up to the high standards of quality required and expected from our customers. |
2. What role does environmental responsibility play within Total Quality Management? |
Total quality management means ensuring all our products are produced to an agreed quality and standard - a quality and standard agreed and defined not just by law, but increasingly by customers and wider stakeholders who have an interest in our business. It is here where social and environmental standards have increasingly become a more important, necessary, and integral element within overall quality control. High level quality and environmental standards have to consider the whole life-cycle of products: from development and production via usage to re-use and recycling. Quality is no longer just function and value for money. It is about social and environmental value too. And this refers not just to our products, but to all our business processes and systems too.
Take environmental legislation. From WEEE to RoHS in the EU, the law is increasingly demanding of us high standards of environmental compliance. Just as important though, are the social and environmental demands of our customers and wider stakeholders. In many ways their demands and expectations on quality, design, and production process are much more demanding, particularly with reference to the social and environmental impacts of our products and the way in which they are produced. Quality control, and my ultimate responsibility therefore, is about ensuring these wider social and environmental expectations are reflected in our products, systems and business processes; beyond and ahead of any legislation – if ever possible and achievable. |
3. Can you point to an example of how you do this in practice? |
On a more basic level it means ensuring products meet increasingly stringent environmental legislation such as WEEE, RoHS and EuP. For example it is my responsibility to ensure we are meeting minimum legal levels of hazardous substances in our products and production processes, and maximum levels of energy-efficiency both in production and product usage.
At Fujitsu Siemens Computers however, it means more than just compliance. We seek to go beyond basic minimum compliance, and always have done. For example on our way to RoHS compliance we initiated our lead-free soldering processes in 2002 – 4 years before the directive took effect. And our first energy-saving, silent and recycling-friendly ‘Green PC’ was already introduced by 1993, during CeBIT. |
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4. You talk a lot about the company's 'Sense of Responsibility'. Can you describe what this means? |
'Sense of responsibility', put simply, describes our business ethos; the way we do business. Our brand promise to customers is 'We make sure', and we do this through our collective sense of responsibility. This goes for social and environmental responsibility too. It is a guarantee to customers and stakeholders alike that all our products have been produced in a socially and environmentally responsible way.
You'll often hear me call it 'IT - with a sense of responsibility'. And, I won't tire of challenging people to prove their understanding of ‘responsibility’ and our ‘make sure’ brand promise in their daily business life just as much as in their private. Anyhow, according to my understanding, the most important word in our brand promise is ‘We’. |
5. What inspires you most about your job? |
| The constant challenge to maintain outstanding social and environmental standards across all areas of our operations and to ensure we are constantly meeting requirements expected of us. From sourcing, logistics, production, through to packaging and delivery my role is about support and endorsement of continuous improvement and optimization. It’s also a lot about innovation and company-wide networking. There is never a dull moment. |
6. Given your role, what social and environmental progress do you feel the company is making? |
I am proud to say we are making very good progress, particularly in key quality and environmental protection areas. Our products continue to make great strides forward particularly around chemicals, energy efficiency, and recyclability. We continue to lead the market in the development, production and sale of Green PCs. As a result we're a very welcome partner and speaker in many international conferences, associations and working groups and, of course, in our global network with Fujitsu and Siemens.
We are also making good progress tackling our own social and environmental footprint. Here we continue to save water and energy at our main production facilities in Augsburg and in Sömmerda. Calculations suggest our environmental management initiatives will save some additional €500,000 Euros in energy costs, in turn reducing C02 emissions by some 3,300 tons. We are also making good progress in supply-chain management where we are currently developing a stand-alone Fujitsu Siemens Computers Supplier Code of Conduct. This will reinforce our existing approach based on the United Nations Global Compact principles.
One of the key things we have to do as a responsible IT supplier is to ensure we openly and honestly communicate about the environmental impact and energy use of our products. We will therefore continue to discuss future trends and possibilities with several of our key stakeholders.
All in all, I believe we have come a long way, although there is still more to work on. We will be building on this progress over the course of the next year. |
7. Last thoughts from Hans-Georg |
I wanted to leave you with a thought-provoking fact. If I didn't use opportunities like this to build environmental awareness then I wouldn't be doing my job properly!
Just consider that driving a car for roughly 200km produces the same amount of greenhouse gas (CO2) as using one of our most advanced ESPRIMO PCs in 'office mode' for a whole year.
Besides demonstrating the levels of efficiency our products are now reaching, this fact highlights the considerable CO2 savings we can make if we chose to use teleconferencing and other communications technology instead of choosing to drive by car to meetings.
Information and communications technology have a vital role to play in achieving a low carbon economy. And if you don't believe this, please feel free to contact me,… |
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