Procter & Gamble Keep young and beautiful

Based in Cincinnati, and with operations in 80 countries worldwide, Procter & Gamble is the largest consumer packaged goods company in the world. Widely known in Europe for household and healthcare brands like Fairy Liquid and Crest, the company is also a dominant player in the market for beauty products. Joseph Altham reports on Procter & Gamble’s sustainability initiatives and its relationship with the world of European fashion and design.

KEEP YOUNG AND BEAUTIFUL

Procter & Gamble is a truly global corporation. The company employs 127,000 people around the world and achieved sales in 2010 of $78.9 billion. In western Europe, a region that represents 21 per cent of overall turnover, the average supermarket is likely to contain dozens of Procter & Gamble products. The company makes its biggest impact on people’s lives through its 23 so-called ‘billion-dollar brands’, each of which generates more than $1 billion in annual sales. By offering a more convenient and effective solution, these brands make a difference to many areas of everyday life, from doing the laundry (Ariel) to changing the baby’s nappies (Pampers).

Eighty thousand suppliers serve Procter & Gamble, and all of them have a part to play in helping the company realise its objectives.

CSi

Similarly to Proctor and Gamble, CSi strives for long lasting and fruitful professional relationships, with both customers and suppliers. The long-term relationship with P&G which started in 1988 is a good example of this. Each time P&G launches a new project, CSi is heavily involved from a consultancy prospective. Major installations have been executed both in Europe and beyond over the years, including case and pallet transport, robot and layer palletising. In coming together, both companies have achieved significant successes, which in turn have created great mutual respect.

The recent project is another one in which to be proud of. In Amiens, France, a pallet transport system was installed with a maximum capacity of 770 pallets per hour. The complexity of the system consisted of merging three pallet flows into one. At the end of the flow, it is divided into one stream to the warehouse and one for shipment. Again, good cooperation from both companies resulted in a positive outcome.

Pompe Cucchi

The Italian company Pompe Cucchi has been active in the pumping, dosing and fluid transfer sectors for more than 40 years. We supply a wide range of customers in many industry sectors, including thermohydraulics, chemicals, food & drink, paper, tooling, marine, pharmaceuticals, agriculture and cosmetics – the list goes on.

The products manufactured at our plant are divided into two main areas: metering pumps and transfer pumps. Special materials are available as Hastelloy C, Titanium also magnetic coupled. In addition to this, we also distribute ITT Jabsco industrial pumps, GRACO pneumatic diaphragm pumps and Grun-Pumpen drum pumps. All our pumps can become metering pumps through the use of engine drives, inverters or servo controls of both the electric and pneumatic types.

Our cutting-edge products are designed in our technical office which is equipped with the latest CAD software. The manufacture of our mechanical parts is carried out on the latest generation, high-tech numerically controlled workstations. Furthermore, we have recently installed a new robotised machining centre with 25 pallets that can work for 24 hours a day without the need for an operator. Every pump we make is tested by means of a hydraulic circuit which is able to simulate various application conditions. A 3D software is available for pumps maintenance and technical educational also in virtual reality.

Pompe Cucchi is proud to be a long-term supplier of Procter & Gamble.

This is why Procter & Gamble organises a Supplier of the Year award to recognise the achievements of its very best suppliers. The company also presents Excellence Awards to external business partners whose performance it rates as consistently high.

Procter & Gamble is the global market leader in hair care, thanks to trusted brands of shampoo like Pantene and Head & Shoulders, and has a 20 per cent share of the retail hair care market. Altogether the beauty segment represents 24 per cent of overall sales. The acquisition of Gillette in 2005 was an important milestone for Procter & Gamble, and products in the grooming category, such as razors, epilators and shaving foam, make up a further 9 per cent of overall sales.

Conservation through innovation

In total, Procter & Gamble serves around 4.2 billion of the world’s consumers, so a tiny improvement to any one of these billiondollar brands can have a measurable effect on the lives of millions of people. Innovation also plays a vital role in realising Procter & Gamble’s ambitious objectives on sustainability. Procter & Gamble helps to preserve the environment by designing products that enable consumers to consume less energy. For example, Ariel washing powder and liquid can achieve excellent results on clothes at temperatures of only 30 degrees Celsius, thereby helping households to reduce their carbon footprint. Procter & Gamble is also on a drive to use packaging that is more environmentally friendly. In 2011, the com-

pany introduced new bottles for Pantene shampoo and conditioner. The main raw material for these bottles is a plastic derived from sugarcane. Sugarcane is a renewable resource and sugarcane-based plastic takes 70 per cent less fossil fuel to produce than traditional petroleum-based plastic. In Western Europe, Procter & Gamble has recently started to use the new bottles for its Pro-V Nature Fusion collection.

Fashion with passion

In skincare, Procter & Gamble is a powerful presence through its Olay range of anti-aging skincare products. With a 10 per cent share of the global market, Olay is the world’s number one facial skincare brand. In the 1990s, Procter & Gamble moved into fragrances, acquiring the Old Spice brand in 1990 and Max Factor the following year. Procter & Gamble now makes fragrances for prestigious fashion houses like Gucci and Dolce & Gabbana, whose Light Blue fragrance claims to capture “the timeless sensuality of the Mediterranean”. For those with a more northern European sense of style, Procter & Gamble also produces fragrances like Boss Bottled and Boss Intense for the German label Hugo Boss. Smoothly does it

Germany is of special importance to Procter & Gamble because of the company’s German subsidiary, Braun, which celebrated its 90th birthday in 2011. The Braun technical centre at Kronberg is also Procter & Gamble’s Global Centre of Excellence for Devices and cooperates on product development with Gillette. Braun’s small electrical appliances have long been famous for successfully combining superior engineering with elegant design. After the world-famous designer, Dieter Rams, joined Braun in 1955, Braun’s products began to acquire their distinctively minimalist appear-

ance. “The strength of pure”, Braun’s design philosophy, owes something to the modernist aesthetic of the Bauhaus movement, whose aim was to put beauty and simplicity within the reach of ordinary people.

Following integration with Procter & Gamble in 2005, Braun has continued to win prizes for design. In 2009, it won the Red Dot award for its bodycruZer B35 bodygroomer. Fitted with Gillette Fusion blades, the bodycruZer’s slim shape and ergonomic touch points make it easy to handle in the shower. With this product, and its successor, the cruZer body, Braun caters to the needs of the increasing number of men who shave their bodies as well as their faces. Braun’s “Hairy” survey, based on the views of 3500 women in seven different countries, found that the majority of single women see men without chest hair as more attractive. This may not be the most sophisticated argument in favour of German engineering, but it is a compelling one nonetheless. n