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It’s Time to Consider Green BPM
By Jim Sinur | October 23, 2007
While many of us are very familiar with the productivity benefits of BPM and the visibility that process intelligence can provide to optimize resources from a cost and time perspective, what we have not asked BPM to do yet is to optimize the use of scarce resources. We have not tasked BPM to help regions, countries and organizations to extend their sustainability over a long period of time.
We are constantly reminded that we have more competition for scarcer resources with constantly rising prices of commodities such as oil, water, copper, trees, plants etc. We are at the beginning of our efforts to conserve and optimize resources thus reducing all of our collective carbon footprints.
There are certainly untold opportunities to save paper by leveraging electronic content “Just reducing worldwide paper usage by 10% would save over 100,000,000 trees, 100,000,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and a staggering $3.5 billion in paper costs” says expert James DeRosa.
BPM can also be used to minimize the movement of goods and process participants to reduce our consumption of petroleum products. However, we are pretty early in our efforts to include optimal movement in our optimization formulas. While scarce resources contribute in the cost side of the equation, there is a need to consider the impact on long term sustainability in our calculations before it is too late.
Better processes can also schedule and leverage existing assets that are expensive to replicate. While this has been done with manufacturing lines for a while now, there are many opportunities to save the contributing materials needed to create redundant facilities. We see too much redundancy in the healthcare industry, so why not schedule these resources in a smarter fashion.
We are faced with a great and honorable challenge of extending the sustainability of many natural and human resources, fortunately, we are also provided with a tremendous opportunity to “green” our critical processes through better BPM.
Topics: BPM |
October 26th, 2007 at 9:00 pm
Jim’s comments strike me as timely and well taken. The manifestation of environmental concerns is increasingly evident in business and product strategies, and will ultimately need to be operationalized in processes. At this level the arguments for environmentally conscious business practices are often framed in those two classic corporate themes: greed and fear.
The greed argument is that green is good business. Executives at Ford argue that their recent Rouge River plant renovation saves them money in maintenance and water reclamation costs, and at Herman Miller they point out that products designed to be easily disassembled for recycling are also easier, and therefore cheaper, to assemble. A credible fear argument would be Ray Anderson’s admonishment that a day of reckoning is coming where corporations will be held accountable for their “plundering” practices and prevented from “externalizing” the true cost of what they sell.
I think Jim is right in anticipating the incorporation of environmental concerns into process designs. Perhaps McDonough & Braungart’s Cradle To Cradle should be on all our reading lists.
May 15th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
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