How an integrated management system can multiply your environmental management
“Sustainability” stopped being a buzzword long ago. As awareness of our responsibility to look after this planet has grown, it has — rightly — become a central part of how consumers and businesses think. And yet there is still far too much ground to make up on sustainability, not least because genuinely sustainable operations do, unfortunately, still take some effort. There are ways to keep that extra effort down, though — and with them, reasons why a focus on sustainability can turn into a real competitive advantage. How is all that supposed to work? Let's take a closer look.
The challenge: sustainable in one place ≠ sustainable everywhere
“Sustainability” is an extremely broad term with a meaning in just about every part of a business. For a manufacturer, running its own production sites as sustainably as possible is accordingly only a very small slice of the cake if the raw materials used and the logistics of the products are entirely divorced from any environmental awareness. What emerges is a wide net of requirements, all calling for different measures and approaches. To support our sustainability efforts, then, we are looking for a system that ideally maps every process in our company while also offering a way to audit those processes, so that we can keep improving our process landscape as well as possible over the long term.
The answer: sustainable process improvement with a sustainable IMS
One option: introducing an integrated management system, or IMS for short. Why? Well …
Map every process? Check.
Record audits and monitor how they are carried out? Check.
Improve processes based on the results of those audits? Check.
In that sense an IMS already provides a solid foundation for supporting your own sustainability efforts. Not enough? There is a finishing touch too: an IMS filled by crowd mining, which draws on the company's actual as-is processes — and therefore on its people — instead of following the target processes laid down by a manager. That makes it possible to engage far better with the processes as they really run. On top of that, such systems are considerably more agile, because the process owner can be involved in improving their own processes.
aiio's payoff: doing business for the long term with a clear conscience
IMS in place? Excellent. Now simply keep at it CONTINUOUSLY and watch the fruits of your work: markedly more sustainable operations, innovation in sustainability, and — thanks to your own foresight and persistence — not only long-term competitive advantages but, above all, work you can do with a clear conscience. Because your company is now actively helping shape the more sustainable industry of tomorrow. Hats off.