RPA makes the “E” in your ESG Plan sticks!!
How Robotic Process Automation can help you better achieve and report on the Environmental aspect of your ESG reporting.
Your business, like every business, is deeply intertwined with environmental, social, and governance (ESG) concerns. In our discussion today, we’re concerned with the [E] in ESG, the [environmental] aspect.
The E in ESG includes the energy your company takes in and the waste it discharges, the resources it needs, and the consequences for living beings as a result. Not least, E encompasses carbon emissions and climate change. Every company uses energy and resources; every company affects, and is affected by, the environment. [McKinsey]
With the current energy crisis [at the time of this writing — Summer’22] across Europe and in different parts of the world, ESG is highly topical in every sector of the economy worldwide, and it is becoming a high priority on the C-suite agenda.
However, it is being discussed in a slightly different approach to the previous years. Previously, it was more of a checkbox companies check with offsetting their carbon footprint somewhere in the world, probably thousands of miles away! Today, it is a priority to reduce emissions and optimize energy consumption [locally]. It became a matter of the current business survival rather than the survival of the generations to come.
The elephant in the room here:
How do we approach this issue?
For many organizations, the UN sustainable development [UNSD] goals act as the North Star which guides them towards the areas they can start looking into and build their action plan against.
We will be discussing how automation, specifically Robotic Process Automation [RPA] can help you in not just measuring, but also reducing the environmental impact of your organization.
Attended vs Unattended Automation
Robotic Process Automation [RPA] come in two major flavors, namely: attended & unattended. It is easiest to understand the attended as your enterprise version of Siri, Google Assistant, or Alexa. A digital assistant that helps you our in your day-to-day tasks at work. While the unattended embodies our predominant belief around digital bots, the 24/7 software that does the heavy lifting in the background and delivers upon the tasks assigned to it.
Depth First vs Breadth First?
Unattended automation tends to take the [depth first] approach, in the sense that it focuses on the high transactional processes and goes deep into automating them end-to-end. Thus it has a big impact in a small amount of areas, but not necessarily touching a large number of employees. And this is what forms the [head of the population].
However, attended automation takes the [breadth first] approach. It targets marginal gains across a large section of employees contributing to similar impact in size, but due to the aggregation of the marginal gains rather than due to the importance or significance of the specific process being automated. And this forms the [long tail of the population].
But how is this relevant to our discussion of ESG?
Once you decide you want to use RPA to support your environmental initiative, you would want to specify [how] it can help you do so. And by examining the nature of your business you can specify if you want to go depth first, or breadth first. That decision will depict the dominant mode of automation you will employ to supercharge your journey. And yes, I used the word dominant here since it will not be all about a sole mode of automation, you can and will most probably have both modes utilized, but one would contribute to the bigger piece of the pie due to the impact it can leverage through high transactional processes or high workforce load.
Levers to Pull
I will list and explain the most abundant themes in which RPA can help you with:
- Measuring the organization’s carbon footprint
- Automating work: Doing [MORE] with [less]
- Optimizing the IT infrastructure energy consumption
Measuring the organization’s carbon footprint
Throughout ESG impact reports issued by companies worldwide, a common section is around carbon emissions, while companies may differ if they are reducing or offsetting those emissions, they will still need to measure and report over their current footprint.
Some do the measurement over a representative dataset and extrapolate to the remainder of the population, others seek transparency in reporting the numbers as is and aggregating it from various sources across the organization’s geographical presence. Those sources cover utilities usage, water, gas, electricity, travel, etc.. This can be a laborious task, especially for B2C businesses that mainly depend on the ubiquity of presence for continued and/or superior service, and may have hundreds of branches or service points.
With such a sizable task, clearly automation’s ability to go score, aggregate, and transform different sources & formats of information is an outstanding advantage. It reliefs employees from having to pull in that information together manually on monthly basis, not just to report them, but also to track the effect of the implemented program in place.
This, as well, means that you can pull and update the data on a more frequent basis, say weekly basis.
It simply transforms the speed and ease of gaining visibility on your ESG rating, and gaining visibility is the first step to then being able to change things.
Automating work: Doing [MORE] with [less]
Automation is not just about the dollar value of the return on investment, and it is not just used for reporting, a critical facet of automation is concerned with reducing the operational cost of organizations, and using less resources and thus producing less emissions per serving a single customer.
Carrying out all the servicing and the processing of a customer in an automated fashion will bring your cost to serve through the floor and then you can actually serve more customers with the same set of employees and infrastructure in-place.
Then there are kind-of indirect impacts to automating work. one of which is going paperless. A by-product of automation is transforming the process into a paperless journeys, and this clearly drives an ESG impact that is factored into preserving the environment and reducing the carbon footprint.
Optimizing the IT infrastructure energy consumption
Most of current-day business seek high-availability, which is being available to customers at all times, and having redundancies to cover up for any failure in the network. However, high-availability does not mean that your service needs to be up all the time, it just means that it needs to be up when your customer is expecting it to be up.
The trivial example would be if an organization is serving its customer through the working hours, it may not make sense to keep all the servers and IT infrastructure up all night. It would be optimal to automatically turn off the network an hour or two post the working hours and then switch it back on the next day, again an hour or two before the working hours. This way the organization would have cut its carbon emissions and energy utilization for these components by half!
If we a more elaborate example in which a business is operating in multiple geographical regions, and it needs to be online 24/7. Through analyzing the load over the service it is noticed that the main load is through a 8–10 hour window, while sparsely distributed throughout the rest of the 24 hours. The company can choose to plan a schedule in which the serves for a certain region are on during the peak hours, and turned off during the off-peak periods, where traffic is routed to the nearest operational zones or regions with a cost of bearable service latency.
I know such solutions are easier said than done, but automation can massively aid in managing the infrastructure and providing the needed flexibility to create such an operational schedule to optimize consumption.
Extra Tip & Framework
Your first step doesn’t have to be gigantic, but you need to start somewhere to get the wheel rolling. Take the following as an example:
If we look at our inboxes, how many emails we have from Microsoft updates, Viva, Zoom notifications, meeting acceptance/rejections, etc.. You may think that this is insignificant, but when you add it up across your employees, it aggregates into a decent sum. These emails need to be stored and backed up, not because they are important, but just because we chose to keep them in our inbox. A simple robot that suggests the emails that can be deleted based on IT recommendations and/or other employees common practice can be an easy, frictionless way to start.
No matter how small or big the initiative looks like, it is due to consider the following three simple steps to assess if it is worth taking it forward:
- What is the current impact of the factor in question today? Especially in comparison to your overall organization carbon footprint usually measured in equivalent of Metric Tons of CO2 [MTCO2e]
- What is the scale you can implement this initiative at? Is it process-based or employee-based?
- What is the potential impact of the implementation of this initiative? Will the implementation/awareness/governance produce more carbon footprint than the takes off the environment? (Emissions ROI — If such a thing exists)
The above is by no means an exhaustive list of the areas you can put RPA to use in your ESG plan. Stay tuned and [consider following] for further details and future discussion on how RPA can help you along the way.
Until then, happy automating!
Salam
