Jim Sinur

While many of us are very familiar with the productivity benefits of BPM, most of us have not thought about applying BPM to sustainability. Sustainability means meeting the needs of the present without compromising future the generation’s ability to meet their needs. We need to leverage BPM to optimize the use of scarce resources. We need BPM to help regions, countries and organizations to extend their sustainability over a long period of time.

We are constantly reminded that we have more competition for scarcer resources with constantly rising prices of commodities such as oil, water, copper, trees, plants etc over the long term. Despite our present economic challenges, the world is just at the beginning of our efforts to conserve and optimize resources thus reducing all of our collective carbon footprints.

There are certainly untold opportunities to save paper by leveraging electronic content “Just reducing worldwide paper usage by 10% would save over 100,000,000 trees, 100,000,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and a staggering $3.5 billion in paper costs” says expert James DeRosa.

BPM can also be used to minimize the movement of goods and process participants to reduce our consumption of petroleum products. However, we are pretty early in our efforts to include optimal movement in our optimization formulas. BPM can be used put processes in workers homes, so that they need not travel to work to complete their job. This is more than the traditional E mail and office productivity software jumping to support organizational processes from any location. While scarce resources contribute in the cost side of the equation, there is a need to consider the impact on long term sustainability in our calculations before it is too late.

Better processes can also schedule and leverage existing assets that are expensive to replicate. While this has been done with manufacturing processes for a while now, there are many opportunities to save materials needed to create redundant facilities/capabilities. For instance, we see too much redundancy in the healthcare industry, so why not schedule expensive resources in a smarter fashion. Instead of each hospital having new and exotic equipment, why not share? We also do not look at optimizing our workforces as much as we should.

We are faced with a great and honorable challenge of extending the sustainability of many natural and human resources, fortunately, we are also provided with a tremendous opportunity to “green” our critical processes through better BPM. Where else do you see BPM helping sustainability?