Checklist for selecting the right consulting partner – Part 2
In the first part of this blog, we presented the first two points of the checklist for selecting the right partner for BPM consulting. The next three factors complete the checklist that you can use to successfully implement sustainability in your company as well.
3. Flexible business process management (BPM) tool. Making sustainability data transparent throughout the company is the major challenge for many organizations in their sustainability project. This is because the necessary data is usually stored as separate islands of information in the respective departments and must be compiled via different contact persons. This is tedious, time-consuming and error prone. What’s more, deciding which information is relevant for the CO2 footprint of a service or product, for example, requires a certain amount of expertise. Not only the selected route with the corresponding fuel consumption plays a role when shipping a package. The energy requirements of the IT servers, which are necessary for the driver to optimally plan his route and for the recipient to track his package, must also be taken into account. In the same way, the activities of the administration behind the parcel carrier cause CO2 emissions that have to be allocated proportionately to the service – an impossibility via Excel spreadsheet.
If you already have a BPM solution in place – for example, as part of your quality management – you can use it to implement your sustainability topics in your process landscape as well and build up a central database for your sustainability management step by step. If you are faced with the choice of a suitable BPM software, you should definitely pay attention to its customizing options. Can you adapt the tool to your specific requirements without programming effort – and, for example, add required data fields yourself? This will be a prerequisite to being able to use the solution to model and further develop your sustainability strategy.
4. Pre-captured sustainability goals. It is ideal if the contents of the guidelines and regulations according to which you want to set up your environmental or sustainability management are already available in the BPM software and corresponding processes are preconfigured. iGrafx has both the contents of the relevant standards such as EMAS and ISO 14001, as well as the German Sustainability Code (DNK) ready for import into the BPM software. If, for example, you decide to set up your sustainability management according to the GNK, then you can compile the GNK content relevant to you at the click of a mouse, based on the focus topics that you have determined as part of your sustainability project, and link it to your processes. This saves you from manual input, which is not only time-consuming and labor-intensive, but also often associated with errors. At the same time, this gives you the certainty that you can count on expert support for DNK-specific questions concerning your software.
5. Change Management. A sustainability project is not completed with the definition of the corresponding corporate goals and the implementation of a supporting software solution. In order to involve employees across all levels in the long term, you should rely on a consulting partner who will guide you through the change process at eye level and with relevant best practices. Is the consulting company in question prepared to help you anchor your sustainability goals in the company, and expand them in the sense of a continuous improvement process? Reference customers can often provide clues about the scope and approaches of consulting projects.
What questions and issues around sustainable business processes are you dealing with in your everyday business life? Tell us in the comments section – or contact us to speak to our experts.
About the author:
Stephan Gindert
Manager at Cofinpro AG
www.cofinpro.de