Recently I took part in a 2 week long case challenge hosted by a management consultancy company in Stockholm. Working in groups, participants were divided based on universities with me (and Reuben from this class!) being placed together with two other engineering students from Uppsala University. With six groups of students in total, and three companies participating, each company had two groups working separately on their case.
The task that was presented to us was (in true management consultancy fashion) to propose initiatives that would enable a fully circular value chain within the studied company. During the case, we had regular discussions with employees in leadership positions at the studied company, in addition to a group mentor, with whom we could inquire about our focus areas, existing/planned efforts within sustainability and other related questions about their work etc. This was essential to our work, and having an expe
In actually tackling this problem, we began with holistically studying the company’s value chain and their current work in order to truly understand what they do and what processes are employed. Following this, we drew up their current value chain (taking extra care as to mapping out material/energy flow in & out) and studied this alongside illustrations of fully circular value chains to identify what areas needed changing. Subsequently we looked at these focus areas and discussed possible initiatives and p