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 2023, 16 interns participated across four challenge areas.

Following the success of last year’s sector-level pilot, 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 2023 project brought together student interns from multiple IAEG member companies. The focus was developing an engagement model for IAEG to maximize collaboration with other industry associations and to create an on-ramp for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to learn what resources IAEG offers to contribute to their environmental, social, and governance maturity. The results were presented at the fall IAEG conference in London. We are on track to host an inaugural industry-wide virtual event for SMEs in 2024 that will ensure hands-on experience with resources and amplify their voices to shape the resources developed going forward.

One participant indicated, “Having the opportunity to impact the decisions of an industry-wide group was incredibly insightful and gave me the best understanding of how important each of the ESG principles are to aerospace companies.”

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.

This better equips IAEG member companies to address Scope 3 data, 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. In 2023, hundreds of suppliers attended supplier-focused webinars that highlighted how the sector was focused on enabling insights powered by the sustainability assessment program and empowering suppliers with information to prepare them for a meaningful inaugural assessment. The inaugural year of this sector program yielded nearly 1,000 supplier scorecards.

In 2023, Lockheed Martin continued an innovative program to provide cybersecurity support to an initial selection of small businesses based on specific criteria. At the inception in 2021, the Cybersecurity Small Business Pathfinder program included 50 openings for small businesses to receive third-party expertise for one year in the areas of phishing attempts, training and perimeter vulnerability scanning. In 2023, we maintained a cohort of 45 small businesses that were enrolled in phishing training and 36 that used perimeter vulnerability scanning. Moving forward, we are focused on collaboration and alignment of our efforts with the Department of Defense services of the future.