Procter & Gamble

A. The main facts about the activities of the company.

P&G slogan is “Touching lives, improving life”.

Procter & Gamble is a multinational manufacturer of product ranges including personal care, household cleaning, laundry detergents, prescription drugs and disposable nappies. P&G touches and improves the lives of about 4.4 billion people around the world with more than 300 brands of products.

P&G has factories or branches in more than 80 countries and regions around the world, with 127,000 employees. In its 2007 financial year, the company annual sales reached up to nearly $78.9 billion. P&G is confident in its focused growth and productivity plans

B. The Ethical challenges this company is addressing.

As one of the largest daily commodity production enterprise around the world, people become to pay attention to its production energy consumption, environmental pollution, and the product’s packaging, with higher expectations. P&G is one who organizes the program that called “Change that Matter”. The program covers four parts in doing business ethically; including environmental sustainability, social responsibility, employees, and stakeholder. As the main ethic’s dilemma P&G faced, we think there are two main which is environmental pollution and energy consumption.

•Environmental Pollution is their first challenge.
Environment damaging stack effect goes along with the large production gross of P&G. In general, the raw material for the products contains a large number of environmental hormones. According to studies, the amount of their emissions of chemical species may be breathtaking. That may cause great pollution. However, since many years ago, P&G has been making continuous research for the green and low contamination of the products. In fact, they are successful in their washing products for not containing phosphorus. P&G has developed a series of phosphorus-free technology. Friendly environmental material is one their solution to address the problems that is environmental pollution. Apart from that, P&G devote to make the environmentally friendly process for their manufacture, supplying chain, as well as logistics. They apply smart eco-design in manufacturing, more sustainable design to reduce waste during transportation, and making scorecard system for their suppliers aiming to help reducing environment pollution in their supplying chain.

•Energy Consumption are the second challenges.
As scientist discovered, the energy saving and the emission reduction is mainly embodied in the production line, P & G has to take the resource problems into consideration in the production process. For instance, they have to save water and electricity, but that may influence their productivity. On the other hand, energy-saving technology costs are high. Actually, we are surprised and inspired to find that P&G have taken the positive actions to deal with this challenge. First, they keep the materials from disposal by devising creative alternative uses. Second, they have made a Sustainable development plan which includes 100% the use of sustainable energy production, and zero waste landfill. Third, they are taking actions to collecting rain water for supplying plant landscape water, and maximize the use of natural light and solar energy.

C. What makes you believe this company is really ethical and why you trust it?

We have felt that this company has ability in both of ethical dilemma solving and proactive in doing business and responding to the society.

In doing business, P&G plays the good roles in both of consumer product’s manufacturer and employer. On one hand, P&G has been known well as a biggest company in consumer product’s manufacturer and has been known as a good reputation on doing their business. They commit to the society, P&G also has the sustainability program to ensure they meet this commitment in a way that not only helps preserve the planet, but touches and improves the communities in which they live and work. P&G is one of the pioneers to take part in the Project of Hope in China early 1996. In the next 10 years, they had built more than 100 hope schools in poor areas. That helps many children from poor family come back to the school getting needed education. Otherwise, P&G cherishes and respect the talents of staffs, and pays more attention to help employees developing their career. P&G becomes the most attractive company that a lot of people want to be in a part of their company. Now P&G has the employee over the world around 138,000 people and has challenge to manage that people in the right way and make the appropriate compensation. As the P&G say “People are our most valuable asset”

In ethics dilemma solving, they faced with a lot of dilemma such as environmental pollution and energy consumption. They could make a decision and make the society not resist with their decision. Also, P&G demonstrate that they respond to society even though at that time many consumer protest and non-profit organization have some questionable on their ethics in doing business. P&G provided the program that is call “Change that Matter Program”. That could satisfy stakeholder and ensure that they could run the business properly. Finally, P&G Asia gains the top recognition in CSR at 2012.

D.The possible challenges facing the company in the future and how you think this company may improve.

As they loss some credibility from the quality of product in October 2007, customers suffered stained teeth and loss of their sense of taste as a result. We believe that quality problem of products is one of the challenges the company should face in the future even though they could solve it in the past. Firstly, we think that the most important measures are that strengthen the supervision of the quality of the production process and quality checking. Secondly, we suggest that P&G have to ensure that their employee follow their standard procedure and have appropriated skill to keep the product’s quality. Thirdly, company should take responsibility when it has quality problem, the progress of the investigation and the results should be announced to the public.

The other possible challenge is their human resource. As P&G have the new plan to reduce costs by $10 billion by the end of fiscal 2016. Now P&G has the employee over the world around 138,000 people, so P&G has challenge to manage that staff in the right way and make the appropriate compensation. Regarding to P&G say “Employees are our most valuable asset”, so we think P&G should take effective measure to manage their employees. The first suggestion is that to improve internal training system and enhance system, let they know they have clear career development goals. The second one is to focus on the interests and rights of employees, establishing an effective security system. The last one is to enrich the lives of employees and strengthen communication with staff.