Consumers and organizations alike are beginning to adopt sustainability as a strategic necessity to seize chances for development and competition.
According to a recent report by PricewaterhouseCoopers, climate change and environmental damage were included in strategic risk management by 43% of CEOs in the Philippines.
But what is the connection between innovation and sustainability? How does it help companies in being more sustainable?
In a recent Globe Innovtalks event held in collaboration with SAP SE (NYSE: SAP), Simone Pigason, Head of Digital, Resilient, and Sustainable Supply Chain for SAP Southeast Asia, and Ivan Curada, Cloud Engineer at Globe’s Information Systems Group (ISG), discussed how innovations can help Philippine businesses pursue sustainability in today’s world.
Innovation in Supply Chains
The majority of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions now come from business supply chains. According to a non-profit charity CDP report from 2020, supply chain emissions constitute at least 92 percent of a company’s total GHG emissions and are around 11.4 times higher than operations-related emissions.
The digitalization of supply chains, as per Simone Pigason, aids businesses in lowering their carbon emissions and enhancing sustainability. Additionally, it makes supply chains more productive, adaptable, and linked, making them more robust to potential challenges.
“The global health crisis has shown businesses the importance of having resilient supply chains. And as various disruptions still happen globally, resilient supply chains are a must to provide consumers consistently with the goods and services they need,” said Pigason.
Pigason also stated that two SAP sustainability enablers help businesses to track their sustainability efforts.
First, the Sustainability Control Tower automates the reporting of businesses’ environmental, social, and governance (ESG) effects and GHG emissions.
It monitors the amounts of emissions coming from diverse places while operating from a single dashboard. Businesses may identify which regions of the Philippines produce the greatest carbon emissions by using the Sustainability Control Tower.
Second, SAP created the Plastics Warrior, a gamification approach that encourages people to recycle more. In addition to notifying supermarket customers of their plastic use, it makes use of advanced analytics to discover a retailer’s plastic waste. Businesses can help Filipinos recycle more by utilizing Plastics Warrior.
Innovation in the Workplace
Moreover, Curada claims that Globe produces at least 4,000 memos per month that are, on average, five pages long. If these were printed on paper, each month’s usage would be about 20,000 sheets or 40 reams.
Recent studies by Benoit Cushman-Roisin and Bruna Tanaka Cremonini showed that a single tree, which requires years to grow, can produce 16.67 reams of paper.
Curada described how Globe used its own system, memo.ph, to digitalize its memos in order to reduce paper usage and allow faster approval procedures. The company’s consumption of paper was considerably reduced by this technique.
“This serverless application digitalizes our memo approval processes to allow us to save at least two trees every month. It also offers templates to make memo creation as easy as possible while using an open-source library, so you are not paying for any license to make this application possible,” added Curada.
Pigason completely agrees that using technology to innovate the workplace is a good thing.
She said that in order to be more sustainable, businesses need to be able to digitize their current procedures. These ideas and uses demonstrate how technology may be used to create a sustainable future in the modern world.
