Connect Your Sustainability Goals to Your Business Performance

Connect Your Sustainability Goals to Your Business Performance
Connect Your Sustainability Goals to Your Business Performance

Sustainability is more and more getting a main placement in framing organization method. But achievements demands more than fantastic intentions. Sustainable transformation may perhaps call for wide changes to an organization’s enterprise styles, operations, fiscal practices, and lover ecosystems—an undertaking whose complexity reaches further than the information an organization may keep in-dwelling.

There is no one-measurement-fits-all strategy to sustainable transformation. A retailer and a cement enterprise really do not have the exact requirements or procedures. Even within just an corporation, every single operation—risk and compliance, procurement and provide chain, output and functions, internet marketing and sales—has its possess objectives to meet up with.

Significant transformation necessitates organizations to coordinate and implement steps throughout all company capabilities and in the course of their value chain. They want to present the evidence points through concrete overall performance metrics. And they want to mobilize their workforce and their company partners, implementing company social duty guidelines that exhibit suitable returns on investment (ROI).

But with sustainability challenges getting ever more advanced, requiring at any time extra professional awareness and the collaboration of several players, a go-it-on your own technique may well not produce best benefits. A strong partnership with a knowledgeable advisor can carry priceless environmental, operational, and fiscal experience to assistance create and execute a tactic that pays actual dividends for the corporation, its stakeholders, and the earth.

Here’s how some main corporations tap into this kind of experience to deal with complex alter.

Environment a Sustainability Roadmap

Saur, centered in France, is a main service service provider in the global water sector with an ambition to make certain that industries, people today, governments, non-governmental businesses, and civil society appreciate the value of h2o and use this valuable resource accordingly.

Setting up a conservation-minded core ambition does not in itself spark sustainable transformation. Saur partnered with management and technological know-how consultancy BearingPoint for sector and value-chain know-how to assistance it strengthen its sustainability method and roadmap.

BearingPoint assisted Saur develop a “sustainable advancement roadmap” to set and fulfill such tangible environmental and money targets as preserving once-a-year drinking water use equivalent to that of a town of 100,000 building two strategic partnerships and executing one buyout to assistance water and strength changeover and signing electrical power buy agreements of 40 GWh in hydroelectricity and 100 GWh in solar electricity to reach 100% environmentally friendly electric power.

By applying these ambitious but tangible KPIs, Saur in 2021 lifted €950 million (US$1 billion) in environmental, social, and governance bonds, the initial h2o corporation to achieve that benchmark.

Field and Ecosystem Transformations

Succeeding in sustainability calls for companies to direct transformation throughout enterprise capabilities and during the price chain and to clearly show its evidence points through significant general performance metrics.

Among all industries, the cement sector is the second-major industrial carbon emitter and 3rd-most significant industrial strength buyer. ADEME, the French Agency for Ecological Transition, and the CDP, a main non-earnings business that will help companies and metropolitan areas disclose their environmental influence, have collaborated considering that 2015 on ACT, a methodology to assess companies’ local weather tactic and readiness to adapt to a low-carbon economic climate.

ADEME and the CDP partnered with BearingPoint’s sustainability consultancy, I Care by BearingPoint, on a 2020 report implementing this framework to the carbon-intensive cement sector. This highway-tests physical exercise highlighted that even though cement firms are fully commited to ambitious carbon targets and lessening greenhouse fuel emissions, these goals have not translated into sensible financial commitment designs, disruptive study and progress, or finish-to-stop administration of their carbon footprint from the buy of clinker to the output, distribution, and use of cements.

The report’s conclusions, though tough, served the ADEME and the CDP give sector leaders clear steering, measurement methodologies, and arranging equipment to switch a substantial-level transition approach into pragmatic steps that could assist them clearly show ROI as they recognize their small-carbon ambitions.

Sustainable Provide Chains

Experienced businesses, with sustainability at the core of their company model, also show the want to join even extra sound environmental guidelines with their money strategy. At any time given that it entered the buyer auto marketplace more than a 10 years ago, Polestar has branded alone as a producer of eco-mindful, minimal-carbon-emissions electrical autos. To reinforce its determination to carbon reduction, the business not too long ago built-in sustainability administration in the course of its world procurement process.

Incorporating BearingPoint’s environmental and supply-chain abilities, Polestar has developed a in depth roadmap to integrate more than 100 thorough initiatives with very clear steps and recommendations for environmental very best methods that help it discover stipulations, set timelines, and designate groups to assistance its initiatives. Polestar uses this roadmap to assess the overall performance of its suppliers and to thrust for additional eco-welcoming methods during its offer chains.

Money and Environmental Know-how

Ahead-thinking businesses watch sustainability targets as wise business enterprise exercise that can support potential-evidence growth, help save dollars, enhance trader confidence, and spur innovation and competitiveness. And over and above the benefit it can bring to a company’s shareholders, local community, and the world, a sustainability method can also draw in and retain expertise, partners, and prospects.

Regardless of whether approaching sustainable transformation through the lens of generation processes, supply-chain functions, sales and marketing, details and IT systems, or any other company, significant adjust just can’t take put in a vacuum. Complete conclude-to-conclusion improve throughout organizations, processes, and partnerships calls for mindful collaboration to obtain the appropriate expertise to commence the transformation and assistance it improve.


Find out more about how partnering with BearingPoint can enable your firm join your sustainability targets to your organization effectiveness.


BearingPoint, a management and technology consultancy, supplies marketplace and price chain skills to renovate firms. With its 2022 acquisition of I Care, BearingPoint supports companies in preparing and acquiring ambitious sustainability roadmaps from method to delivery.