DC Velocity - March 2014

ny management and employees as well as external stakeholders that environmental impact is being measured and improved.” The building incorporates a number of features that promote sustainability. For example, to conserve energy, it includes high-density insulation in the warehouse ceiling and high UV coatings on windows that minimize heat coming through the glass. Lighting is programmed to shut off in unoccupied areas. Several times since the site’s opening, Avnet has upgraded the systems that manage air conditioning to wring ever more efficiencies from them.

The company’s sustainability accomplishments also include recycling nearly a ton of cardboard every day, according to Beimfohr. “Just the sheer volume indicated to us how much of a difference we could make if we truly tried to find a way to recycle all the byproducts of our warehousing and integration process,” he says.

Today, Avnet recycles more than 99 percent of those byproducts—things like CDs, manuals, and packaging that come with the components of the systems it integrates. Further, it has established what it calls the Avnet Refurbishment Program for repairing and recycling systems. The company estimates that the program has kept some 126 tons of electronic waste out of landfills.

That’s important to Avnet, Beimfohr
says. “Our goal is always to get to 100 per-
cent waste free. We don’t want anything
going into a landfill,” he says. But achiev-
ing that has sometimes required a bit of
creativity. Beimfohr cites the example of
foam, which had proved a challenge to get
rid of. The answer turned out to be a type
of recycling. “We had an employee find
an organization that reuses the material in
classrooms,” he reports. “We don’t have
to pay to dispose of it, and it helped the
community.”
Beimfohr says all of Avnet’s U.S. opera-
tions have been active in pursuing sustain-
able practices. Like its Lean practices, many
of those initiatives had their start at the
GSC. “It’s a constant evolution,” he says.

“We try to leverage the triple bottom line as much as we can. We want an environmental impact, a financial impact, and a social impact. Those will be the ones we will focus on first.” ;

trucks manually outside of the aisles.

When Avnet built the GSC, it installed a RedPrairie (now JDA) warehouse management system (WMS) for the facility. It is now deploying that system in all of its warehouses around the world. The WMS drops pick orders to associates, who select products using radio-frequency (RF) scanners.

The combination of the WMS and the efficient layout has allowed implementation of a just-in-time (JIT) production system in the integration center, Beimfohr says. “That means we’re delivering material to the center within a couple of hours of when it’s intended to be consumed, where we used to queue up an entire day’s worth of work. As a result, our inbound staging areas are significantly smaller.”

GOING GREEN

In addition to its commitment to
Lean operating principles, Avnet
made sustainability a priority in
the center’s design and business
practices. Because its customers
haven’t asked for it, Avnet decid-
ed not to pursue certification
under the Leadership in Energy
& Environmental Design (LEED)
standards promulgated by the U.S.
Green Building Council, which can
be a costly undertaking. However,
it did keep those standards near at
hand as it went about the process
of designing a sustainable facility.
The building’s design and oper-
ation meet the LEED Silver stan-
dards, the third-highest category of
certification.

The production and warehouse operations do have the ISO 14001 certification. That standard estab-lishes criteria for an environmental management system. The ISO website says adopting the system “can provide assurance to compa-