As per EDF, a not-for-profit organization that has helped several companies held by the private equity company KKR, following are the four key success factors for the green initiatives:
- People: Returns from green initiatives requires having the right people involved. This starts with senior management support and includes a dedicated leader, effective project team and organizational buy-in.
- Commitment: Organizations must adapt this approach to meet their needs, commit to integrating and improving the process over time, and share best practices across the portfolio.
- Data: Measurement is the key.
- Resources: Few companies have the optimal staff, time and resources to identify the most strategic business and environmental opportunities. Professional help with right toolkits, methodologies and workbook is important for success.
Their project Green Returns with KKR provides resources and tools to evaluate operations and identify opportunities to improve business and environmental performance in areas of : Greenhouse gas emissions, Water , Waste, Forest products, Priority chemicals. They should know well as since the program launched in 2008, the companies under the initiative have saved over $160 million in operating costs and eliminated 345,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions, 1.2 million tons of waste and 8,500 tons of paper use.
According to the organization, following are critical action items to lead environmental programs to success:
Resource Alignment and commitment has to be secured to ensure that the project lead and multidisciplinary team have been recruited. Before starting of it is imperative to critically examine the RoI approach and resources. Define objectives and timeline to kick start the project.
Before starting off you must diagnose the potential value. Hence next comes discovering opportunities, which is best done by reviewing current environmental practices & metrics, assessing environmental and business impacts across the company’s value chain and prioritizing key environmental performance areas in alignmment to company objectives.
While executing on the sustainability imperatives, to ensure that you are on the right track it is imperative that you establish the right metrics & Baselines. Establish core and management metrics and then collect historical data on company performance on these parameters. Develop baselines for core and management metrics. Standardize data collection processes to ensure fidelity of data.
This should lead to developement of your goals & action plans to capture value. It is important to identify and scan the range of possible initiatives for improving performance against metrics before select highest impact activities and develop an action plan with goals, timeline and incentives. As any other high-impact change program it is extremely critical to communicate the action plan to the organization.
Once the value is captured it must be sustained. To sustain it must be measured and acted leading to repeatable processes. Track and report performance against baseline and goals. Share results and
best practices. Reassess key environmental performance areas and amend action plans as needed.
Case study:
In 2009, SunGard achieved these results through the following practices:
- Leveraged Energy Management Systems to track energy use and identify areas of improvement
- Addressed managed services growth by optimizing existing space
- Generated economies of scale through enhanced infrastructure utilization
In 2010, SunGard will continue to focus on energy efficiency at its facilities and is considering additional improvements, such as:
- Scaling up pilot-level efforts at data centers
- Installing sub-meters to better track energy use
- Rolling out lighting retrofits
SunGard is actively measuring and managing energy use as part of its larger sustainability efforts.
This article is created from publicly available information. EDF is an organization which is truly pushing the envelop on sustainability orientation, particularly working with several private equity players. This was published in the Olive Blog and retwitted by EDF.
Quote this article on your site
To create link towards this article on your website,
copy and paste the text below in your page.
Preview :
Saturday, 07 August 2010
