CSR consulting

Our client wanted an overview of future low-carbon and decarbonized renewable energies that would meet military operational requirements, in order to better orient its future studies.

To do this, we conducted a 3-step investigation: first, we defined the army’s playgrounds and segmented the related uses, then our team identified and segmented the relevant low-carbon and decarbonized energy types, before characterizing and selecting the most relevant technologies for our client.

Finally, 40 energy bricks were analyzed to create an overview report of the army’s future renewable energies, thanks to which our client was able to build its strategy.

We supported a cosmetics player who wanted to reduce its environmental impact by transforming one of its products currently sold in pharmacies in a bottle to a bulk product in a container. As a first step, we verified that a bulk formula could make sense for their markets and customers.

We then sought to understand how it would affect pharmacists. For example, who would be responsible for asepsis? How would the storage be managed? What would be the impact on the point of sale? Lastly, we defined a new business model more adapted to this new offer and mapped out the new stakeholders to consider.

What was the result for our client? A clear vision of the changes brought about in the market by its new offer, as well as a roadmap to best accommodate the changes.

ESG questions are becoming a crucial issue, notably for our client, who needed to adapt to new demands from banks, rating agencies, stakeholders and the grand public, in terms of environmental, social, and ethical approaches.
Our client had put in place local action plans, but they were not fully coordinated, and the communication around these plans was isolated.
The client wished to identify amongst the actions put in place which were the most impactful, and challenge them with an external point of view in order to build their strategic vision and their communication around the management of their ESG issues in the general sense. We supported this organization by:

• Mapping out the actions put in place by conducting interviews with the people in charge of these actions
• Identifying and selecting key criteria for stakeholders by benchmarking the strategies claimed by key players in the sector
• Building their sustainability strategy together with them, by putting in place a materiality matrix and prioritizing the key challenges
• Working on the strategy and plans of action associated based on the existing plans

Our assessment allowed the client to define a CSR strategy in line with the expectations of the market and their ecosystem, as well as clear areas of communication.

Alcimed supported a leader in the phytosanitary and seed field who had recently defined its CSR commitments and selected the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on which it wanted to focus. Our client wanted a critical review of its strategy by players in its ecosystem before moving on to the implementation stage. We examined the commitments and SDGs chosen with KOLs and CSR leaders in the agricultural value chain, focusing on 3 questions:

1. Was our client perceived as credible and competent to work on the selected UN SDGs?
2. Were the commitments sufficiently ambitious and clearly defined, and were the associated KPIs adapted?
3. What were the gaps our client needed to fill?

Following this assessment, we were able to help our client to finalize their selection of UN SDGs and enter the implementation phase with a solid foundation.

We supported a pharmaceutical player who was seeking to strengthen its application for public contracts by reinforcing its differentiation arguments based not only on its products and services but also on its CSR policy.

To do this, we identified the expectations of the authorities in the respective countries in terms of corporate social responsibility and deciphered the weight of CSR criteria when choosing awardees. By coupling this vision of demand with an analysis of the CSR policies of our client’s competitors, we developed a pitch and a toolbox for each of the countries within the scope of the call and proposed some avenues to improve our client’s CSR performance!

We supported one of our clients, an industrial leader in the food and beverage sector, in achieving a state of the art on packaging solutions and innovations related to weight reduction, meeting the objectives of conservation, storage of products, and reduction of the environmental footprint.

We first identified the key trends in the field of packaging weight reduction (solutions around materials, production processes and design methods). We then identified 30 solutions and characterized the 10 most relevant innovations in relation to our client’s context, by creating an interactive database and a specific identity card for each solution retained.

Our analysis enabled our client to identify several potential solutions to achieve their packaging goals.

We supported a leading pharmaceutical player in a project aiming to study the impact of eco-designing their medications on their ecosystem (doctors, hospitals, pharmacists, patient associations, payers, regulators, etc).

Through an in-depth external investigation, our team measured the impact of ecological design levers on the entire life cycle of our client’s products, and provided a set of recommendations on priority actions to be integrated in the short, medium, and long term, with the aim of transforming our client’s development strategy into a green design approach.

We helped one of our clients, a leading agrifood manufacturer, to develop a decision-making tool for R&D, so that all CSR dimensions could be integrated from the very first stages of the concept, including product design, materials, purchases, the ethics of its positioning, etc.

We first worked on the pillars of corporate social responsibility in order to define each criterion and the KPIs to be considered when making product development decisions. We then defined how and by whom this tool would be used in order to open up decision-making. This tool is now used in each of their R&D programs and guides their innovation decisions.

Alcimed helped a leader in the pharmaceutical industry strengthen its CSR strategy by developing a methodology and a tool to assess the environmental impact of its R&D projects in order to reduce its carbon footprint.

To achieve this, our team began by defining the needs of the customer and its teams, based on internal documents concerning its CSR strategy. Following this, we developed an assessment tool for R&D project managers, built around a “step-by-step” approach to evaluate the environmental impact of each stage of the process and the overall impact of the project. In addition, our team produced a user’s guide for the tool, to support future users in their approach and in their questioning.

These tools have enabled our customer to document the environmental impact of its various R&D projects, and to commit its teams to an eco-design approach in line with the company’s CSR strategy. From now on, they will enable development approaches to be harmonized between teams in different geographical regions, whatever the complexity of the projects!