Mike McCluskey and Gabe Wing

Social responsibility is at the core of Herman Miller, dating all the way back to its founding. The first formal environmental statement dates back to 1953. Design for the Environment (DFE) was formed in 2001 in order to create a more sustainable design process for our office furniture. DFE is the group charged with developing products that are as sustainable as possible.

You couldn’t do that without informing designers about the chemistry and the sustainable properties of the hundreds of materials they use. Our materials database, which we created using Microsoft Access, captures information on the materials we use, where the reliable sources for those materials are and communicates that to the design team. The IT function and IT support is vital to that process.

The database is also Web-enabled, which makes it easily accessible to our designers, all of whom are independent contractors. That’s the main driver behind Web accessibility, but customer demand is also important. About 90 percent of all questions we receive from customers are about the recycled content in our products, how recyclable the product is and where it is sourced. It’s important that our customer response teams have access to the data so they can report it to our customers. About three years ago, we put that database into our ERP system.

Herman Miller is well-positioned right now to comply with Reach and another E.U. regulation, Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) requirements. [Reach, which stands for Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals, is a European Union regulation that goes into effect in June 2007 that requires manufacturers to register information about the substances they use in a central database. RoHS limits the amount of toxic chemicals that a product may contain.] The purpose of DFE has been to control the chemicals in our products by identifying chemicals of concern and eliminating them. We’ve already started an extensive inventory of our products and have begun phasing out components we feel are problematic. So we’re one step ahead.