Are Your Green Initiatives Aligned To Business?
In their attempts to preserve and grow the ecosystem in which businesses operate, over the last several years, the green supply chain is one initiative that has gained popularity in business parlance. Organizations having realized that their social responsibility extends not only to the society that they operate in, but also to the environment, have launched several initiatives to go green. However, the extent and intent of such initiatives has not been uniform across organizations.
For example, some organizations have limited their 'going green' initiative to reducing paper usage and encouraging online transactions. Yet some others have tried to limit travel thereby reducing carbon footprint wherever possible. All of these, while helpful to the Going Green mission, might not provide business benefits apart from marginal cost reduction. Such initiatives are usually driven by the personnel department and not really tied to business objectives of the organization.
However, there are organizations that have actually rethought their business processes and supply chains through the green lens and identified scopes for improvement, and what they will gain in business terms such as process efficiency, better delivered value to customer, sustainable reduction in costs etc.. In other words, these businesses have used green to improve their business processes to derive business benefits. An example of such benefits by going green is that of an FMCG company that used recyclable packaging, which in turn reduced the cost of packaging material while maintaining the quality.
Businesses need to examine their value streams- right from product design through to manufacturing and sales and check the possibilities for reducing waste. A few examples of these wastes can be in terms of material, rework, energy (electricity, oil, utilities etc.) costs, old machines that consume more power to run. They should find out if there are any means of reducing such wastes- that in turn can help them reduce the necessity to dispose material wastes, reduce the necessity to use less energy etc.. Machines with new technologies usually consume less power to run and switching to those machines can reduce the energy costs and at the same time provide better precision. In addition, vehicles can run on different forms of fuel that are less harmful to the environment. Using such vehicles for transportation can lead to reduced overall costs at the same time preserving the environment. Reexamining your production strategies to find out if your utilization levels can be reduced (it is not necessarily a bad thing if you are able to meet demand with less utilization!!) will also reduce the waste generated. Innovative supply strategies such as enabling channels for customers to dispose off used goods, sending email catalogues rather than paper based catalogues etc. make for happy customers at the same time promoting green.
So, going green can be a way to reexamine your business processes and identify wastes and thereby derive benefits for your business also, not just for the environment. Doing that will create the necessary incentives for sustaining your enterprise's green initiatives.
