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Sustainability for Business Processes: Data, Intelligence, and Action
Sustainability for Business Processes: Data, Intelligence, and Action

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Sustainable Development as defined by the United Nations’ Brudtland Commission “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." Sustainability has three dimensions which are interconnected and interdependent, namely. Environmental, Social and Economic, often referred to as ESG. To be able to achieve sustainable business, all the three should be considered.

Today, the success of a company is not exclusively predicated on its financial performance. It extends to non-financial performance, including the sustainability of the business. According to the UN Global Compact, “executives have a responsibility to make sustainability central to their organization’s culture, strategy, and leadership.”

However, sustainability efforts are often siloed and set apart from business processes. Processes determine how businesses are run, and any process inefficiencies will not only have top and bottom line impact, but often also create waste, emissions, manual rework, compliance issues and other negative impacts.

According to a recent Forrester report commissioned by Celonis, 9% of business leaders think inefficiencies lead to missed opportunities. 44% think they cause higher operational costs, 37% believe they increase employee turnover and 69% believe they result in higher carbon emissions. The negative impact of inefficiencies on the planet is not limited to carbon emissions either. Inefficiencies in the supply chain for example are a major cause of the trillion dollar global food waste crisis — with 1.6 billion tonnes of food lost or wasted every year. This represents one third of all the food produced in the world.

Instead of taking one-time actions to cut emissions, waste and costs, or boost social impact, you can achieve lasting gains by embedding sustainability into both your business goals and your existing processes.

The basis for operationalizing sustainability is to leverage the data in your systems to create intelligence and action. The Celonis Execution Management System (EMS) can make sustainable processes a reality.

Here’s how:

1. Real-time Data: We integrate data across your transactional and analytical systems such Planetly and Ecovadis at scale in real time to render a holistic view of business processes. To make this fast and easy, we have more than 100 pre-built connectors with the most frequently used systems. We offer a low-code, easy-to-use component to build your own data connectors for your home grown systems.

2. Process Intelligence: Knowing that your emissions are beyond the threshold you want is one thing. Knowing why emissions are high requires context, deep dives into processes and finding the hidden inefficiencies and their root causes. We apply process mining and machine learning to visualize what’s really happening in your processes and surface the digital truth. It’s an x-ray for your processes that reveals all the inefficiencies and their root causes. We apply advanced algorithms and machine learning, coupled with our deep industry and process domain expertise, to give you recommendations on what to fix and how.

3. Targeted Action: Based on prioritized recommendations, we trigger actions within the same platform to fix inefficiencies and orchestrate your systems. That may mean automating real-time actions across systems, as well as alerting and deploying the right people to remove inefficiencies. For instance, automatically changing suppliers to improve the sustainability of the entire value chain.

The data-based approach and the ability to permanently impact processes allows Execution Management to make sustainability a part of day-to-day operations. Example use cases of EMS for sustainability are:

  • Millions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions saved from the world via intelligent shipment planning and route management to optimize carbon footprint by improving on-time delivery. This is a classic example of efficiency leading directly to sustainability improvement.

  • More than 5x sales growth achieved by proactively preventing misuse of resources like time, money, and human capital and ensuring supplier compliance for sustainably sourced products. This pattern of finding huge sustainability gains in procurement processes is repeated in many industries.

    After all, as we like to say at Celonis, the earth is our future — we should look after it.

    About the Author:

Author Pic

Dr. Monika Gupta is a Lead Technology Consultant at Celonis. Before joining Celonis, she was     Research Scientist in AI for Business Process Optimization team at IBM Research, India. She has also   served as a guest faculty at IIT Jodhpur. She has done PhD at the intersection of Process Mining and   Software Engineering from IIIT Delhi, India. She has many US granted patents in her name and has   published research papers at various top International conferences and journals. Also she was a   recipient of the prestigious Prime Minister's Fellowship. In addition to being a Process Mining   enthusiast, she loves to deliver technical talks, mentor students, and do art-craft work.


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Celonis is the global leader in execution management. The Celonis Execution Management System provides companies a modern way to run their business processes entirely on data and intelligence. We pioneered the process mining category 10 years ago when we first developed the ability to automatically X-ray processes and find inefficiencies.

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