The word “purpose” is heard a lot in business circles these days. Companies want to be seen as "purpose-driven," and to exist for reasons other than making a profit. The result is often a published set of values and mission statements for employees and customers to buy into, and it’s here that we frequently see sustainability take center stage.
There’s a reason for this: the successful business of tomorrow will be adept at harnessing the benefits of sustainability and be capable of demonstrating their commitment to addressing a number of pressing human needs.
That’s why any pledge to go green in a business strategy must be more than simple lip service. Instead, it requires organizations to accurately understand and act on the environmental impact of their operations to stimulate a better tomorrow.
And it’s here that data performs a particularly critical role.
End-to-End Value
The value of data in any sustainability narrative is that it helps provide answers to a number of fundamental questions, including:
- How can businesses become more resource-efficient?
- What options exist for introducing cleaner energy into the operation?
- How can waste be minimized in any production process?
- Is the supply chain sourcing from the most ethically sustainable suppliers?
Gaining the insight needed to answer these questions requires a lot of data: The kind of big data that incorporates everything from smart meters to sensors, that’s tracked in real-time, and is analyzed from a variety of apps and machine learning/AI platforms.
The challenge here of course is that such data is dispersed across many locations, business units, and formats. What’s more, understanding your full end-to-end environmental impact is going to require all of this data to be complete, consistent, and accessible.
Delivering this form of consolidated visibility can be difficult, but it’s the vital foundation for inspiring better.
Smart Sustainability
Turning sections of your data and analytical resources over to green-related concerns can have an immediate and long-term impact – particularly in two key areas:
Understanding the full impact of your operations: this is the complete, end-to-end story that even includes factors that are possibly outside of your direct control, such as raw material sourcing, employee travel, product disposal, and product packaging, etc.
Optimizing resource usage: where companies look to maximize their inventory, reduce waste, and improve efficiency. In addition, there are:
- Proactive measures and maintenance that can be used to prolong equipment lifecycles
- Demand forecasts to better predict future requirements and avoid over-production
- Routing algorithms to drive down fuel consumption and carbon emissions in the supply chain
- Automated monitoring methods to reduce wasted heat and energy consumption in data centers
The benefits being delivered extend beyond enhancing your green credentials to deliver significant and measurable savings.
Data clearly has a major role to play in delivering the benefits of sustainability. These are significant benefits too that in turn help generate measurable business value, and therefore justify an increased focus on data management processes.
Quality and availability will always be the key metrics to pursue here. But below these qualities comes the demand for technology capabilities such as automation, orchestration, and master data management/master data governance - features that help ensure data is continually brought together into a trusted whole.
These are just some of the capabilities provided by Syniti Knowledge Platform. An end-to-end data quality solution designed to help businesses actively pursue dynamic uses of data, confident in its accuracy and cleanliness.