Becoming future-ready isn’t a mere buzzword which is travelling the corporate circuits like a new act in town. In its implicit sense, it means that an organisation is taking defined and measured steps to ensure that its practices align with sustainable and environmental friendly approaches.

The benefits of having dedicated sustainability programs and people, in place can have three point impact for an organisation:

•  Financial costs and benefits, over short-term
•  Social impact
•  Financial impact through sustainable performance, over long-term

The debate and discussion over sustainability programs have disappeared a while back. Large corporations in manufacturing, automobiles, special innovation products to cement manufacturers and even in oil and gas sector are demonstrating and documenting their sustainability initiatives.

Rather than the straightforward math of financial bottom line, decisive arithmetic of organizational longevity comes into play and most organisations are coming to terms with this crucial aspect – embracing and implementing sustainable approaches.

Here are 4 approaches to make your organisation future-ready:

1) Improving your EHS program can become the starting point for organisations by not only adopting cleaner technologies in production and manufacturing but also employing more reliable and definitive reporting systems. Better reporting systems can maximize the operational efficiency and even reduce overall downtime by introducing precision digital platforms and automation. Software can be modeled to understand and emulate the exact requirements that an organisation desires to achieve which otherwise seemed like a distant dream through conventional pen and paper methods.

2) Identifying sustainability metrics and discerning between the lagging and leading indicators will also prove to be useful. Different metrics based on the domain but not limited to environment (air, waste, water, greenhouse gas) and workforce management are key to making both the operations and operators’ sustainable. Software based management of environmental metrics and workforce are simply better than only manual inspection due to its real-time information reporting and superior data management.

3) Reducing the waste generated throughout the organisation would be a great way to promulgate the change of sustainability. Many organisations based on their processes have dabbled with the idea of frugal and better design to achieve this. But in a very simple yet actionable way, organisations can start reducing on paper and other such items that are (sort of) taken for granted. Again automated tools and software across devices can save the day and environment by reducing paper use and subsequently the paper waste generated each day.

4) Working with people towards achievable goals such as international accreditation and certification that identify, recognize and award, for say environment friendly and sustainable operations. This can serve the twin purposes of building better brand or organisational image and also motivate the workforce to a large extent in form of the pride and prestige it brings along. Building resilient and future-ready organisations would depend on bringing the operations and workforce together under a more transparent and responsive system. Automation has the tools and technologies to lend such support and bind these aspects in a definitive way for a sustainable future.

Rising resource constraints, changing demographics and globalization are being cited as reasons, why organisations cannot afford to ignore sustainability. These aspects have become apparent, even for the public sector units and small, medium sized enterprises. Automation and digitalization is already driving the next wave of sustainability initiatives through precise and accurate reporting, detection and better inspection tools.