Driving sustainability through process optimization

Believe it or not, sustainability all comes down to processes. 
 
Sustainability is the new digital, according to the World Economic Forum and is disrupting the economy just as digital did. Sustainability is revolutionizing how people behave, how businesses function and even how your own business operates. Sustainability is at the heart of everything you do. 
 
To hear more about how ARIS helps to drive sustainability, register now for the Software AG webinar Your Processes Help Make the World a Better Place.

Revolutionizing how people behave 

Consumers and employees are paying more and more attention to sustainability with customer experience and expectations driving new requirements. According to the 2021 Forrester report Empowered Consumers Go Green, 68 percent of highly-empowered consumers plan to increase efforts to identify brands that reduce environmental impact. 
 
Organizations are thus expected to cope with customer requirements and to prove their initiatives, while avoiding the risk of green-washing allegations. 

Revolutionizing how businesses function 

Businesses are recognizing that sustainability and shared value – people and planet on top of profits – are key to creating long-term growth, securing brand reputation and opening up new opportunities. These are achievable while tackling global challenges such as biodiversity loss, climate change and waste pollution. 
 
A profound understanding of a company’s operations is needed to successfully redesign or rethink operations, whether you are acting on climate issues with carbon management or net-zero initiatives, on circularity in defining completely new business models or on working to better society’s well-being. 
 
Once again, you will need to prove and report on your actions to inform stakeholders or prove compliance toward the growing number of regulations, such as EU taxonomy or the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive. 

Revolutionizing how your enterprise operates 

To cope with all of these requirements and successfully lead these initiatives, you will need to undertake another transformation, focusing your business so it betters the environment and society. This is where shared value comes in, extending processes as the backbone of your corporate social responsibility strategy and environmental, social and governance (ESG) initiatives toward sustainable development goals. Processes are key to identify the most effective measures and evaluate their impact. 
 
Business process management (BPM) focuses on the understanding and improvement of an enterprise’s business processes, traditionally for the sake of costs, time or efficiency. While green BPM helps you look at your operations from a people and planet perspective. It is a significant enabler for more environmentally and socially sustainable organizations. Looking at processes is also critical for finding and enacting circularity solutions that help reduce environmental impact. 

The importance of sustainable processes lies in discovering and changing them to create better outcomes, such as reducing waste, achieving net-zero, saving energy, increasing social welfare or securing workplace safety.

How processes support sustainability 

Sustainability only becomes real when it comes down to your own processes. In your processes you can find improvements, typically in each of the following areas. 

People 

By evaluating your processes, you can see the impact they have on society and then act consciously to improve social responsibility. A deeper understanding of the day-to-day working lives of employees can help you put better processes in place for employees’ well-being, such as diversity or work-life balance. 

Planet 

Climate action, such as carbon management or net-zero initiatives, is a fundamental area of environmental responsibility. Put your business processes under the microscope to gain full transparency of resource use and conservation, from energy to raw materials. Optimizing and tracking efficiency enables informed decision-making about how to improve and meet sustainability targets. 

Profit 

Sustainable business value lies in your company’s operations. To remain operationally profitable, increasing efficiency and boosting long-term value are made possible when companies look at their processes and continuously improve them.

How ARIS can be used to transform toward a more responsible and sustainable enterprise 

The business process analysis and management platform ARIS has a history of transforming operations. By integrating sustainability into BPM, ARIS helps you drive sustainable excellence while anchoring sustainability into your organization’s processes and operations. 
 
It enables your organization to create more environmentally and socially sustainable operations and helps you accelerate and prove those actions for compliance purposes, while creating one single source of truth for all stakeholders, inside and outside the company. 
 
ARIS facilitates sustainability initiatives with a structured methodology and an overall understanding of ESG and solution accelerators to jumpstart your initiatives. 
 
The new ARIS for sustainability accelerator package delivers templates and sustainability-related content that offer a strong starting point for your ESG initiatives. 

Do you agree with the idea that sustainability is the new digital? Let us know in the comments below.