Help Your Company, Help Yourself

Do your business leaders see product stewardship as an important but necessary burden? If so, it’s time to move beyond regulatory compliance and demonstrate your value to the company’s bottom line. At the same time, you can increase your own value to the company.

“It’s not just making sure your products are compliant to regulations so that you can ship to this or that region,” says Maryann Sanders, senior regulatory compliance specialist at Haley & Aldrich Inc. “It's also important to identify the market drivers that will advance the product.” For example, Sanders worked with a manufacturer of corrugated containers used in the produce industry. Traditionally, product stewards would ensure the product met regulatory requirements and that would be the end of it.

In this instance however, the corrugated industry requested support related to the attributes of containers used for the storage and transport of fresh produce. So Sanders helped evaluate the cleanliness of both types of containers to support a marketing effort that included potential food safety concerns and a lifecycle analysis. The efforts allowed her client to gain additional market share. This type of activity allows product stewards to directly add value to the bottom line. “You can actually make your product look better because it is better, helping to increase a product’s reach,” says Sanders.

Sanders will talk more the topic during Using Product Stewardship to Positively Impact the Bottom Line at Stewardship 2016.

Products stewards can help themselves in the process of helping their companies. “You really can make an overall difference in the company's bottom line, and you can open up new doors,” says Sanders. “I can see this being used by someone to transfer into a marketing position as they begin to more fully understand the product and the drivers behind customer choices.”