How Data can Support Green Goals – BI and Sustainability
Business intelligence and sustainability doesn’t mean rinsing out and recycling the plastic yoghurt pots in your office kitchen. Neither does it mean cycling to client meetings or using a green search engine while doing desk research.
They’re all good things, so keep them up.
Business intelligence and sustainability means taking the tools you use to turn your data into business knowledge and applying them to sustainable goals instead. So rather than using data to search for ways to save costs, you’re using it to reduce your energy use or waste.
You’re using the same tools to be greener. Simple.
Why is this change happening? Well, customers and the government are both demanding more sustainable practices. People want to buy products and use services that align with their greener values. And in the UK, the Net Zero 2050 target is firmly on the agenda – across the UK economy, businesses will have to make mandatory climate disclosures by 2025.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the ways your data can help you act more sustainably.
Supply chain gains
The supply chain is a data intensive part of any business. So much data is produced in the lifecycle of sourcing, making, storing, and shipping of products. You can use BI tools to take advantage of all of that data.
But the supply chain is also responsible for a large portion of any business’s carbon emissions. For example, if you’re a large cream cake making company, you’re using energy to make the cakes, cool your fridges and factories, and then ship them in refrigerated trucks. Alternatively, if you build electronic goods, a lot of carbon is used in sourcing the components from across the globe.
BI systems allow you to take the data in your supply chain and make decisions to meet sustainability goals. Getting a big picture of your network can be difficult, but good data analytics can give you that. Having sight of your supply network and its carbon footprint will help you reduce your environmental impact and move toward more sustainable practises.
A lot of the emissions in a supply chain will be external to your company too. Being able to collect and integrate that data with your own can be a challenge. If you’ve got good BI, you’ll be able to do it better. You can also set up KPIs relating to your external carbon emissions, which can guide you to change suppliers or logistics methods.
Improved efficiency
In some ways meeting sustainability goals are harder than others, but in other ways they’re quite simple. Alongside reducing emissions, it’s important to be more efficient and less wasteful.
You can do this is several ways. If your company deals directly with a lot of waste, you can set up systems to gather data on it and use the information to make greener decisions about how to manage that waste.
But if you’re using BI to find efficiencies everywhere you’re going to be more sustainable overall. Everything your company does requires time and resources. If you’re delivering parcels across the UK, any efficiency you implement will help make your operation more sustainable. If you’re manufacturing garden furniture, more efficient processes will make you more sustainable.
Whatever it is you’re doing, if you waste less and improve efficiency, you’re going to be more sustainable.
Better reporting
BI tools will let you take advantage of any environmental data you have, and it’ll help you develop sustainable practices and find efficiencies.
Climate related reporting will soon be the norm for many businesses, especially large public ones. Having the ability to quickly create reports that can be used for regulatory purposes will be incredibly useful – remember what it was like making reports before we had all these BI systems?
We can help you. If you need to you organise your environmental data, plan actionable routes to reach your sustainability goals, or get insight on how and where you can reduce emissions, get in touch.
