As part of the Lockheed Martin Supply Chain Intern program, teams of university students are provided with real-world experience to develop solutions for prioritized supply chain sustainability challenges. Each challenge is sponsored by a functional team at Lockheed Martin and has discrete business outcomes. Students work together to research the challenge and ultimately deliver targeted results to supply chain leadership and a panel of stakeholders. In 2024, 10 interns participated across four challenge areas.

We continued this year with one of the challenges being sponsored by the International Aerospace Environmental Group (IAEG) to accelerate areas of focus for the industry and provide a unique learning experience. The 2024 project brought together student interns from multiple IAEG member companies. The interns collaborated to reimagine IAEG resources through the new Take Off Resource Hub. With a new scalable repository of 179+ public resources across all work groups, the team developed a visualization layer that would allow for a tailored view of resources based on various perspectives within the value chain. The result of the team’s efforts will be evident in IAEG’s website enhancements planned for 2025.

Ashley Rubinsky, Sr. Manager at Lockheed Martin and IAEG WG 11 Co-Lead stated “Providing early career professionals an impactful project every year unlocks innovative solutions and ensures they see potential career paths within the Aerospace & Defense industry. This year, the team exceeded expectations and left us inspired.”

In 2023, Lockheed Martin joined nine other leading aerospace and defense companies, including Airbus, ATR, Boeing, CAE, Howmet, Leonardo, RTX, Rolls-Royce and Thales in the utilization of IAEG Sustainability Assessments powered by EcoVadis. This aerospace sector initiative is a voluntary program that aims to accelerate sustainability performance in the industry and the extended supply chain. The vision for the initiative began with Work Group 11 - Aerospace Industry ESG Engagement, which recognized the benefits of embracing a common approach to sustainability assessments with a shared results pool for voluntary and unilateral consideration and use by IAEG members and suppliers.

Working as an industry, IAEG member companies are better equipped with insights into Scope 3 emissions, supply chain human rights due diligence compliance obligations and supply chain aspects in regulated sustainability disclosures. In addition, by embracing a common approach, suppliers benefit from completing only one sector-level assessment rather than multiple assessments. Industry engagement in the program has continued to grow and, in 2024, this sector program yielded nearly 5,000 supplier scorecards, up from 1,000 in the sector program’s inaugural year. Additionally, once a supplier completes an assessment, we are seeing a 65% improvement in adoption and engagement.