The potential of a network-centric solution for sustainability in business processes

Abstract

Due to an increasing pressure from international regulation, customers and other stakeholders, companies are increasingly experiencing the need to incorporate sustainability considerations in their core business processes and daily operations. For this purpose they require software solutions that simplify the collection, analysis, and incorporation of sustainability indicators at the right processes across their operations. However, prevailing systems are enterprise-centric in the sense that they are owned and used by one focal company collecting the data from different sources and using it for its internal decision making. This paper will describe three example use cases in which sustainability plays a key role and will provide an overview of major problems with the current state of the art. In the second part of the paper, a new approach for sharing sustainability indicators is introduced that enables many providers and consumers of environmental data to connect to and leverage a common platform. Finally, the paper analyzes the potential risks and benefits of introducing such a network platform, using the three business use cases to illustrate the opportunities resulting from it.