20.02.2025
QKS Insight
Green Business Process Management (BPM) Leading to Sustainable Organisational Practices
Author:
Apoorva Dawalbhakta
Part 1: The Need for Business Sustainability in today’s times –
Sustainability in businesses involves specific strategies and actions which are aimed at strategically reducing the critical environmental and social impacts arising from the particular business activities, and which are analysed through the lens of the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics. It should be noted that, climate change and environmental degradation are consistently presenting very urgent and glaring risks, making the issue of sustainability and addressing the same – an urgent business imperative. In this regard, companies must adopt certain key sustainability practices leading to a Green Business Process Management (BPM) approach, which includes:
- Streamlined and sustained improvement in the manner of energy management, coupled with a focus on reducing the greenhouse gas emissions.
- Developing efficient and robust supply chains, to support a circular economy model.
- Greatly enhancing the existing infrastructure resilience, promoting end-to-end intelligent operations.
It must be understood that, sustainable strategies leading to sustainable organisational practices are absolutely crucial for different ethical and financial reasons. In the current times, employees and consumers increasingly prefer and expect to deal with environmentally conscious and responsible companies, and pro-active governments and empathetic investors, thus expecting an overall greater accountability. On these lines, the investments in ESG initiatives is rising progressively, and are projected to reach numbers of multiple billions by 2025.
The onus for enabling and building for sustainability ideally lies on the organisation, and as such, creating a sustainable business strategy involves -
- Clarity of Understanding and Vision Setting – All the involved stakeholders must agree on the future state of the business, potentially with detailed guidance (preferably external).
- Implementing a Robust Framework: Making use of an end-to-end environmental management system with clear demarcations of roles and accountability.
- Initiating Measurable and Achievable Projects: It’s important to start with initiatives that demonstrate tangible results, which would help build momentum.
While the need for driving business sustainability couldn’t be more overstated in today’s times, some of the key and practical challenges along the way in its initiation and implementation would include aspects like – inertia in regards to customer readiness, high upfront costs, organisation level and systemic inertia, and genuine lack of tools and relevant expertise. It’s imperative to addressing these challenges on priority, and which requires consistent and intense collaboration with the concerned innovation partners, along with a need to leveraging key digital technologies such as AI, ML, IoT, blockchain, and hybrid cloud, amongst others.
It should be remembered that, the approach towards sustainability is not just about compliance adherence, but also about gaining a clear competitive advantage, enhancing the operational efficiency, and ultimately strengthening customer satisfaction. As businesses harness organisational data, pumping advanced technologies with refined data-sets, sustainability in such cases will become a defining factor for long-term success and market survival, acting as a crucial tool to manage environmental risks and for optimizing the resource utilisation.
This is Part 1 of the Five Part Blog Series on the Topic of ‘Green Business Process Management (BPM) leading to Sustainable Organisational Practices’.
Author Name – Apoorva Dawalbhakta, Associate Director Research, at QKS Group