Featuring Justine Russo Manager, Market Research and Business Intelligence at PITT OHIO
This week’s Insider features Justine Russo of PITT OHIO, a sustainable business practicing company dedicated to providing their customers with the best value in its Supply Chain, Ground, Less-Than-Truckload (LTL) and Truckload services. Headquartered in Pittsburgh, PA, PITT OHIO services the entire Mid-Atlantic and Mid-West regions and the remainder of the United States, Canada and Mexico with North American Service. A Sustainable Pittsburgh Board member, Justine is active in our Business Sustainability Pros cohort and provides support to PITT OHIO CEO Chuck Hammel in his leadership among CEOs for Sustainability. Among a growing list of accolades, PITT OHIO was recently selected as the 2017 Carrier of the Year for the first time by GEODIS, a top-rated, global supply chain operator.
In this brief interview, Justine follows up the recently published Kendall Simon Sustainable Business Case Study on PITT OHIO with succinct thoughts for sustainability leaders. We asked Justine to share her advice for businesses and organizations that are beginning to engage in sustainable business strategies. Thank you Justine for this helpful guidance!
“Start with the strategy and the why behind your sustainability goals. PITT OHIO’s mission statement is Customer Driven, People Driven, Quality Driven, so sustainability lined up well with that.
Plan on getting buy in. In some cases, like with PITT OHIO, it will be a top-down directive, but we still had to get all of the business units on board. In other companies, it might be a grass roots effort, and the priority will be to get the executive team to support and even fund the project.
Don’t try to solve everything or even the biggest things. Start small, learn fast and, if you don’t see the results you expect, then change directions. And if you do see the results, then replicate or expand the initiative. For example, I remember our Vehicle Maintenance team testing CNG tractors with Operations. They were able to keep the experiment small and provide feedback to the vehicle manufacturer. It took several iterations to get to a vehicle that worked in our operation. Once we were ready, we started with six vehicles and continued to add more where they made sense.
Make sure your results are quantifiable. We were surprised at the impact we saw when we published the first dashboards. We could see tangible success in the numbers and that made the team even more excited to specifically see the carbon emissions going down.”