Menu
Sustainable
Business
Transformation
After globalization and digitization, companies are facing a third wave of transformation within a few decades: the one towards sustainable business transformation. In the face of the urgent need for action, and the resulting dynamics or requirement and reporting obligations, sustainability has the potential to be a gamechanger for organizations of all sizes and from all sectors.
Ahead lie new regulatory obligations, legal requirements, and a massive change of processes, technologies, and mindset – but also countless opportunities for companies. Leaders who act strategically meet these challenges decisively and proactively, while seeing the potential for themselves and their organization. The winners are those who take advantage of the opportunities that arise, and with this, create the foundation of their future success.
For many companies, sustainable business transformation begins with compliance: from compliance with requirements, laws and standards, to reporting obligations and sustainability reports. Companies must compile basic figures, data, and facts, create an information basis for sustainability, and introduce suitable tools for data analysis.
Internal and external transparency and communication and effective change management are essential for the success and acceptance of a company’s sustainability strategy. The mindset of the people involved, but also the organization and processes, must be geared towards sustainability. Required skills, e.g., in complex data analysis (data science, artificial intelligence, machine learning), must be developed.
With the increasing maturity of organization and information management, the understanding of relationships and underlying factors grows. This results in ideas and approaches that, in addition to reporting, actively bring about changes to products and processes. In this way, the company gradually develops into a sustainable organization. Agile project management and creative innovation techniques (such as Design Thinking and Future Design) accelerate this development.
Legislation (e.g. CSRD, EU taxonomy)
Investor requirements (ESG)
Customer demand / preferences for sustainable product
Competitive pressure
International (even global) standards
Sector and market standards
Partner and network requirements
Expectations by employees, friends, and families
Public pressure (media, NGOs)
Technical progress (digital technologies)
Scarcity of resources and raw materials
Cost of non-sustainable management
Clear targets on all levels
Transparency
Change management
Data-driven organization
Sustainability mindset
Fact-based sustainability management
Digital fitness
Process and IT governance
Precise requirements engineering for key figures and mappings
Clean processes and interfaces in data management
Tools and skills for unstructured data
Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning
Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
Comprehensive sensor technology
Data Quality Management (DQM) & Data Governance
Successful (i.e., effective and efficient) sustainability management is based on facts – data and information. These facts help with the reporting of sustainability indicators in the past and present, but also enable patterns and interdependencies to be identified. This helps you to identify potential areas for optimization and improvements.
On this foundation, you can determine and prioritize measures, estimate investment needs, and create a roadmap of incremental optimizations and projects, which helps to steer the organization towards sustainability.
Development of sustainable products and services
Adaptation of existing products and services
Optimization of resource efficiency in production processes
Measures to promote gender equality
Improvements in occupational health and safety
Resource efficiency in internal business processes
Closing information gaps (e.g., the interface to suppliers)
To collect high-quality data and information, companies need not only expert knowledge of business, production, and operational processes, but also professional data and information management. Data from relevant company sources must be collected, processed in a targeted manner, and integrated in a way that provides an efficient foundation for decision-making.
The effective use of data and information requires appropriate analysis tools from “simple” reporting to innovative machine learning. However, organizations and people must be provided with the knowledge and skills to use these tools effectively and meaningfully.
Data and digital technologies are an essential foundation for sustainable management. But depending on the application, they can also have adverse effects on humans and the environment.
To reduce the risk of such damage, we need digital governance to regulate the handling and use of data and algorithms. When using artificial intelligence, we must pay attention to its trustworthiness and compliance with ethical rules.
The IT tools must also not increase the cost of sustainability, e.g., due to high consumption of electricity or other resources.
Strict protection of personal data
GDPR Compliance
Use of fair algorithms
Security and reliability of data and algorithms
Resource-efficient programming
Sustainable IT operations
Leightonstr. 3, 97074 Würzburg