We believe we owe a duty of care towards our employees, our customers, our suppliers and the wider community. Our commitment to operating responsibly has and will continue to differentiate us from our competitors. It has helped us to build our strong brand and, ultimately, it will help us to drive sales and to operate more efficiently.
At the end of 2008, we undertook a significant review of our CR governance structure in line with our ongoing aim of embedding CR throughout the Hikma Group and driving the CR programme from the Board and senior management to operational functions. This year was the first full year of operations for the board-level CR Steering Committee and CR Working Committee.
The seniority and breadth of experience that the members bring to these committees ensures that CR remains focused and aligned to the business. Facilitated by the Corporate Communications and CR team, the group is responsible for agreeing strategy, endorsing activities, reviewing activity reports and assessing progress. This approach provides coherence and economies of scale as well as a framework to share best practice across our markets.
On the ground, CR Champions work to implement our strategy across the Group. At the end of 2009, we had a team of 10 CR Champions, each dedicated to one of our manufacturing facilities across the Group. During the course of 2010, we will build on this initiative, adding two new Champions to the existing team.
These Champions work to deliver initiatives, engage with and report to country managers and encourage and motivate employees to make CR part of their day-to-day operations. All our Champions are full time employees with a range of experience and expertise, which ensures that CR remains focused on business benefit and is embedded in employees’ working lives.
Our Champions deliver monthly reports to the CR department and their unit/country managers. These managers then report back to the Group on progress, encouraging diligence and continuity. We are now establishing KPIs for senior management to deepen their support for CR in their respective markets.
We have continued to use the Global Reporting Initiative’s G3 guidelines as a benchmark tool. Building on our work in previous years, we have focused in particular on community investment, environmental impacts, employees and labour practices.
Many of our subsidiaries began reporting against GRI metrics for the first time in 2009, including Egypt, Germany, Italy, Jordan’s APM facility and Saudi Arabia. We have also started to use dedicated reporting software, underlining our commitment to the GRI approach and enhancing comparative reporting in the future.