Environmental Excellence is one of the key drivers of the Suncor Operational Excellence Strategy. In concert with establishing environmental goals, Suncor is implementing a new management process—the Environmental Excellence Plan (EEP)—to accelerate the company's environmental performance and support its environmental excellence strategies.

Suncor's EEP is, in simple terms, an environmental planning and resource management system. At its heart is a process for prioritizing and optimizing environmental initiatives identified by business units across Suncor. Analytical techniques are employed to identify those environmental initiatives that provide the largest benefits for the costs incurred, ensuring that progress towards environmental goals is accelerated.

The process also involves collaboration between a corporate environmental excellence team and the business units to improve visibility of environmental initiatives across the company. The process provides for improved resource allocation and the identification of opportunities for synergies and leveraging. The EEP will be developed on an annual basis as an integral part of the business planning cycle, reinforcing the principle of integrating environmental progress and business performance that underpins Suncor's sustainability strategy.

Brian Doucette, Corporate Director Sustainability and the corporate lead for the development of the EEP, believes that the new management tool will provide the structured processes for Suncor to achieve its environmental objectives. "The EEP will help to provide a much higher level of information and transparency about the options Suncor has for developing and executing environmental projects, which in turn will accelerate our progress," says Doucette.

Suncor has been designing and piloting the process in 2009 with the help of consultants from DuPont, whose progress in accelerating its own environmental performance has been widely recognized. DuPont has been successful in reducing its environmental footprint significantly over the last several years through the use of its own corporate environmental plan management system.