If the movie “Don’t Look Up” taught us anything, it’s that ignoring a grave threat to the planet does not change the outcome.

Not using your process management practices for creating more sustainable outcomes is like knowing there is a comet about to hit the earth and refusing to acknowledge it. If something can be done to avoid it, it should be done.

Every person, every business, has to play a role in improving corporate social and environmental outcomes. Since sustainability is at the heart of everything, and is disrupting the economy (like digitalization did before it), you may ask yourself: ‘Can I “look up?” And could ARIS be my shield, as well as the key for a better tomorrow?’

The answer is “YES.”

How is ARIS the key to sustainability?

To better understand my thought process, it is good to remember what business process management (BPM) means. Typically, BPM is the practice of analyzing, designing and improving processes for the sake of efficiency or cost.  

To go further, Gartner defines business process management as: "The discipline of managing processes (rather than tasks) as the means for improving business performance outcomes and operational agility. Processes span organizational boundaries, linking together people, information flows, systems and other assets to create and deliver value to customers and constituents."

Sustainable BPM focuses on how you can improve your environmental and social impact by improving your processes.

The importance of sustainable processes lies in discovering and changing them to create better outcomes:

• Energy saving
• Emission reduction
• Resource optimization
• Cost reduction
• Productivity and efficiency
• Higher economic performance, human resources development, social welfare and workplace safety.  

Whether you are looking at climate action (supply chain management, decarbonizing manufacturing, reducing packaging, improving resource usage), circularity (recirculating products and materials) or social responsibility (improving worker and societal wellbeing), it is all about understanding and rethinking your operations.

So how do processes support sustainability?

Sustainability only becomes real when it comes down to your own processes. In the processes, you’ll be able to find the improvement, typically in each of these areas:

People

By evaluating your processes, you can see the impact they have on society and then act consciously to improve social responsibility. A deeper understanding of the day-to-day working lives of employees can help you put better processes in place for employees’ well-being, such as diversity or work-life balance.

Planet

Climate action such as carbon management or net-zero initiatives is a fundamental area of environmental responsibility. Put your business processes under the microscope to gain full transparency of resource use and conservation, from energy to raw materials. Optimizing and tracking efficiency enables informed decision making about how to improve and meet sustainability targets.

Profit

Sustainable business value lies in your company’s operations. To remain operationally profitable, increasing efficiency and boosting long-term value are made possible when companies look at their processes and continuously improve them.

These three P’s are what is commonly called SHARED VALUE, and ARIS brings a fourth ‘P’—the processes—into the mix.

How can you use ARIS to be more responsible?

All these initiatives bring many challenges, but ARIS anchors sustainability in your organization’s operations by integrating it into business process management. It enables your organization to create more environmentally and socially sustainable operations and helps you fasten and prove those actions for compliance purposes, while creating one single source of truth for all stakeholders—inside and outside the company.

How? The new ARIS for sustainability accelerator package delivers templates and sustainability-related content that help you get an overview to jump-start your ESG initiatives:

• Role-based sustainability roadmap template
• Ready to-go maturity questionnaire template and radar charts to view results
• Templates for materiality assessment and heat maps to review and support strategy building
• Templates including ready-to-use subjects such as UN goals, UN guiding principles, mandatory and voluntary regulations linking to further information
• Sustainability dashboard templates
• Non-financial report template to jumpstart annual reporting input
• Out-of-the-box confirmation management to ensure process compliance—audit-proof.

It comes free of charge for all ARIS customers. Download ARIS for sustainability and get transparency, control and prove accountability of your sustainability initiatives.

Look up and start acting now, before it’s too late. Want to learn more? Join our webinar here: