Greening your supply chain
Production optimisation
Green enterprises can use production scheduling to minimise waste and level production. By optimising product assets, they can reduce energy consumption associated with ramping up or shutting down between production runs.
In general, demand-driven supply chains tend also to be green supply chains. Forecasting tools, web-based collaboration, and sales and operations reporting all help to predict and plan for customer demand with greater accuracy. And by being better prepared to meet demand, costly last minute scrambling can be avoided.
Each of the capabilities outlined above can help deliver leaner, greener supply chains. However, companies can make even greater strides toward sustainability by combining these practices.
Asset management for the future
Critical factors that a business can control in an environmentally responsible way include waste management, infrastructure management (buildings, facilities, and their energy efficiency), emissions management, and asset management.
Unfortunately, asset management is often forgotten as a key contributor to energy use. Assets are purchased and expected to perform satisfactorily until their estimated end-of-life. However, assets represent a significant portion of a business’s operating expense, impacting environmental as well as financial performance. Since careful management of assets will affect a company’s overall environmental efficiency, it is an important consideration.
Green-centric asset management
Efficient assets minimise energy use and improve productivity. A business can be both environmentally responsible and economically competitive.
Implementing and sustaining a quality corporate social responsibility (CSR)-oriented asset management program requires the ability to gather, store, and process large quantities of information related to energy consumption, asset condition, asset productivity, and the like. Executing such a program manually would be an impossible task because of the volume of data to be gathered and processed.
Forward-looking companies are investing in software applications that greatly simplify and streamline the information aspects of environmentally responsible asset management.
What does the future hold?
Is the urgency to curb greenhouse gas emissions a fad or at a critical turning point in our history? As businesses and governments begin taking action to reduce greenhouse gases, what type of approach makes the best financial sense for your business?
Only your company can decide. As your business continues to respond to consumers and regulatory agencies who demand a more environmentally conscious approach, it makes good business sense to include asset management and supply chain design as part of your CSR and green strategy. The long term winners will be those companies who begin working on their CSR strategy and implementation now while other companies are only cost cutting and in survive mode only. Do it now and your company will be a leader as the economy starts to grow again.
Any green strategy must rely on the wise collection of pertinent data and the processing of that data to determine program success and the direction of efforts required to expand success and remedy weakness. A comprehensive, green-oriented approach to supply chain management will enable you to achieve compliance, efficiency, consumer appeal and in some cases, competitive advantage.
—Richard Simpson is Senior Business Consultant for Infor (www.infor.com.au), the world’s third largest business software company.
People who read this, also liked:
Going green: Do your ICT credentials make the grade