Road to Sustainability: Optimization, Mitigation, and Compliance

Have you seen people ride their sports bikes without helmets? It's absurd and ironic that a person wouldn't strive to mitigate the risk to their skull in case of a crash. Wearing helmets while riding is taken as an absolute necessity. The idea is sustainability – of the life and senses of the rider.?

Well, why not apply the same approach to climate change? We are actively experiencing the detrimental effects of climate change around us. The increased and shifting frequencies of forest fires, cyclones, droughts, and floods that plague our time on this planet are a direct result of climate change.?

A recent report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) shows that July 2023 had the highest average global surface temperature ever since 1850. The January – July period of 2023 witnessed the third warmest surface (global) temperatures in 174 years.?

This is no longer startling; it's simply indicative. The world has been acting on reducing the impact of climate change and better manage our shared resources. Only through continual and consolidated efforts can we sustain our environments for longer.?

Sustainability: Doing more with fewer resources while reducing waste?

Before jumping into better resource management, let's look at some of these resources. Consumables that are created with effort and expensed at a cost (social, environmental, or economic) can be seen as resources. This includes raw materials, power (petroleum, electric, hydro, etc.), capital, time, and people (effort plus stress). This is the basis of economics.?

People – their skills and efforts – are shared resources that need to be given the opportunity to evolve so that they can sustain the needs of the world in an efficient and streamlined manner. This is all about sustainability.?

We often define sustainability as something extrinsic that demands completion. Sustainability is simply about best utilizing your resources to get the most out of them while keeping their consumption and impact to a minimum. It's a way of doing things in life and business.?

Enterprises should look at sustainability in everything they do – in all processes, operations, production, marketing, customer support, etc.?

Asset inspections and maintenance have a direct impact on sustainability. If your assets aren't in their optimal state, they would consume more power and materials with a higher chance of wastage. This means that the overall plant output would be low while the costs would be high.?

Timely and predictive maintenance processes can help keep these assets in their prime state while minimizing overall downtime. This means that each minute of applied resources (power, material, or people's efforts) is efficiently and optimally directed.?

This can be achieved by intelligent products like Crave InfoTech's?cMaintenance ?and?cCalibration . Built over the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), these apps help automate, assign, perform, and validate all maintenance activities with full compliance, real-time visibility, and at-fingertips analytics.?

Our?cEWM ?helps streamline warehouse operations wherein the time, space, and efforts within the warehouse are optimized for efficient functioning, faster inventory counting, and better item tracking. All this adds to the sustenance of resources within the enterprise.?

Going back to the initial point – sustainability is a way of doing things. The leaders in the company can ensure that they respect their resources and better direct them. This includes performance management and office administration. Cut down on stress (waste), sustain employee skills with regular training and fair compensation, go green with your surroundings, etc.?

Sustainability: Risk mitigation and impact reduction?

After the talk on sustaining resources, the next logical step is compliance and tracking – whether these resources are being utilized properly. But we will jump one step to risk mitigation. There are elements of risk mitigation that form the need for compliance and hence would make some sense in this order.?

We read above about the sustainability of resources. Let's look at the 'what if' when the resources aren't handled properly. Improper asset maintenance and calibration can result in breakdowns and downtime. This disrupts production and the supply chain.?

In critical scenarios, the breakdown of assets may even lead to environmental pollution within the oil and gas, mining, and chemical industries. Sustainability, then, also encompasses safety and disaster avoidance. This is done by assessing and mitigating risk.?

Engineers, scientists, company leaders, etc., can analyze the various impact reports and take the necessary actions.?

Crave InfoTech won SAP's Hack2Build competition in early 2023 with our innovative sustainability solution -?Intelligent Ecological Balance Reporting and Analysis Dashboard. ?It leverages Optical Character Recognition (OCR), SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP Build, and SAP Datashpere for a consolidated and one-stop sustainability reporting solution. The solution employs the World Economic Forum's International Business Council (IBC) Framework's 21 core metrics to consolidate consolidates impact reports and data from various sources into clear analytics, key performance indicators (KPIs), and trends presented as actionable insights in front of the right people at the right time.?

This can help in tracking the overall operational and supply chain impact in real-time. This would help in avoiding hazardous scenarios by mitigating the risk with timely interventions?

Sustainability also includes workplace safety – following various Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) guidelines. These protocols and their checklist can be digitized and made necessary for the completion of the Workflow (task). This goes a long way in employee safety, risk mitigation, and compliance. Crave InfoTech products can do this as well.?

Sustainability: Compliance and goals tracking?

Compliance – it's the measure of controls and validations that ensure that key processes don't deviate from the preset standards. Deviation, here, would result in quality compromise and, perhaps, be harmful to the final consumer.?

Hence, compliance is a key necessity for industries that have a direct impact on the health of the people and environment. This includes industries like life science, oil and gas, chemicals, power, mining, etc. Non-compliance in the processes can have a large impact on society and the world.?

You can say this is an extension of risk mitigation, but compliance is more holistic than mere risk mitigation. Compliance is the central control logic for sustainability. Without compliance, sustainability is just talk and no action.?

All of?Crave's products ?and solutions mentioned above in this article help with regulatory adherence and compliance. These are ready-to-deploy solutions for any company under any regulatory body and in any language. Compliance is built into the solution so that the company can be compliant from day one.?

If you want to understand sustainability goals, you can read more about it?here . The essence is that companies should set their sustainability goals following the global standards and metrics suggested by agencies like the United Nations and the World Economic Forum.?

Collaborative sustainability would compound our efforts and help us counter (or at least give us a fighting chance against) climate change and global imbalances.?

Companies should:?

• set clear and attainable sustainability goals;?
• break them down into trackable and accountable steps;?
• educate all stakeholders about the goals and steps (regularly);?
• link the steps to company-wide processes and Workflows;?
• assign responsibility and define KPIs;?
• consolidate reports and track real-time developments;?
• mitigate risk and implement progressive improvements;?
• and document processes and achievements for standardization and ready replication.?

As indicated at the top, in the middle, and now at the end of this article – Sustainability is a way of doing things. Like any 'way,' it needs to be first accepted and then walked upon. Let's acknowledge and accept sustainability as the norm and work collaboratively towards, hopefully, a better future.?