FOCUS INITIATIVES  

The management of companies need to align their business goals with green goals and to have a documented path to be followed. The green initiative may not have cost savings in the short term, but it results in an overall review of all processes, systems and equipment, which helps realizing enormous cost benefits.

‘Green’ is the buzz-word today, across business and industry verticals. Green is about aligning the organizational processes, goals and assets to achieve the proper environmental alignment, avoiding harmful impact to land, air and water.

Organizations planning to take the ‘Green’ path face a challenge of what needs to be done, and where one begins. Going green requires review of the entire Supply Chain, beginning with a review of the existing systems and processes that are in place.

Also, of prime importance is the need for the top management of companies to decide to align their business goals with green goals and to have a documented path to be followed. But when the question of green arises vis-à-vis efficient, companies choose the latter, for obvious commercial reasons. The green initiative may not have cost savings in the short term, but it results in an overall review of all processes, systems and equipment, which helps realizing enormous cost benefits.

We have endeavoured to find out some of the steps taken by companies across industries, and the best practices in their green initiatives:

1. The Basics: The basic lean formula of reducing movement, be it in the warehouse or in transportation, trucks as well as workers; utilizing concepts like Direct Store Delivery, as used in the Retail industry, delivering to the point of sale rather than intermediate points of transportation and storage, can result in reduced CO2 emissions and a greener process.
    

2. Transportation: optimizing the transportation network to result in reducing fuel usage and the carbon footprint.
    

3. EV: an important step under serious consideration by companies is the use of CO2 free electric vehicles.
    

4. Process improvements: identifying processes resulting in wastage of raw materials, underutilized resources and excess energy usage owing to inefficient equipment.
    

5. Green packaging: Use of green packaging products which can be recycled is a great way of taking a step towards green.
    

6. Green suppliers: identifying suppliers who have minimized their environmental impact without letting it effect the quality of their product or significantly raising costs.
    

7. Reverse Logistics: Chalk out an efficient reverse logistics plan. Also, a refurbishment program for goods returned help in the green initiative.
    

8. Going paperless or reducing paper usage in the office by implementing and proper usage of information technology mechanisms.
    

9. Going multi-modal rather than uni-modal – for example using rail and road instead of rail or road.
    

10. General power-saving policies such as adjusting the setting for PC’s in the idle mode, implementing a videoconferencing solution to reduce travel, and server consolidation.
     

11. Lightening the product without compromising on quality, so that it uses less energy to ship.

Making use of modern techniques like virtual prototyping, which enables product simulation in a 3D environment, thus eliminating wasted material and energy used to test the product design, thus contributing to greenness.