Implementing Technology in Business to Achieve a Sustainable Environment

Welcome back Katie Brenneman for the 19th time to 21st Century Tech Blog. Looking at how businesses use technology is an interesting topic. I recently visited a business where tech purchases and the advice of “experts” had led to wires and ethernet cables being strung throughout the place. Holes in the ceiling and walls had been created to connect devices. Redundant systems could be seen throughout, most of them not in use. It was an eye-opener. After I came home I read Katie’s posting with a new insight.

As always enjoy the read and please consider commenting or asking questions about anything posted here.

Evolving technology simplifies daily operations. Communication gets easier. Inventory tracking and management becomes less time-consuming and training no longer seems to go into a blackhole void. Adopting technology should make day-to-day operations easier. The bonus comes when it significantly reduces a company’s carbon footprint.

Adopting smart technology improves efficiency and sustainability. Companies, today, have to understand that making a profit isn’t the only measuring stick of performance in a world dealing with climate change.

The Benefits of Adopting Smart Technology

Smart technology deployment can reduce carbon emissions. It can improve waste management, create greener supply chains, and increase energy efficiency. The two case studies that follow show how smart technology adoption is achieving profitability and environmental sustainability. 

UPS ORION

Transportation accounts for a huge percentage of greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, inefficient transportation produces unnecessary added costs. United Parcel Service (UPS) has made environmental sustainability in operations a measurable goal. The company implemented the UPS’s On-Road Integrated Optimization and Navigation System to address transportation inefficiencies. Initially, the system analyzed every planned delivery route. The goal was to minimize the number of turns, directing drivers to pick-up and drop-off points that weren’t visible from the road to reduce fuel consumption and vehicle maintenance costs. The system provided real-time route updates based on changing conditions and commitments and saved the company 160 million kilometres (100 million miles) in vehicle travel and almost 38 million litres (10 million gallons) in fuel annually.

Recently UPS added a feature called Dynamic Optimization which uses advanced algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning (ML) to analyze traffic patterns, weather conditions, package volumes, and driver availability. The goal was to find even more efficient routes. Adding AI gives UPS the ability to make route decision-making adjustments on the fly, address unexpected changes in route conditions, and minimize the environmental impact of delivery operations, a good example of improving workflow optimization to save costs and cut carbon emissions.  

Tata Power Solar

In India, Tata Power is making solar energy production smart. In a report entitled Unlocking a Sustainable Future produced by Schneider Electric, it states, “Tata Power has convinced thousands of early adopters to generate renewable energy and benefit from cost savings while protecting the environment.” Tata’s network operating system monitors its customers’ solar arrays remotely, tracking their performance in real time and using predictive analytics to anticipate maintenance issues. The result is Tata managing over 421 MegaWatt/hours (MwH) of clean, renewable energy across 90 cities in India. The company is now providing solar-powered microgrids to underserved communities, reducing total carbon emissions by 1 million metric tons per year while generating electricity for 25 million users.

The Tata model is all about leveraging renewable energy technology. Other companies can do the same in the current environment with governments providing incentives to build renewable capacity, offering energy tax deductions and credits.

Tata is providing a solar-energy-as-a-service operation and maintenance business model. Companies can build solar arrays and charging stations to power up fleets of electric vehicles (see the picture at the top of this posting) while having a company like Tata monitor performance. That’s a smart technology Tata Power has adopted yielding green benefits.  

Is Green Business and Low-Carbon Implementation Cost Effective?

We are awash today in innovative technological applications that can help the world get greener. Whether operating an assembly line or running a farm, smart technology can vastly improve a business and the environment. Green and low-carbon business practices can be cost-effective.

Why is this important? Climate change caused by humans is the reason. Businesses cannot ignore it any longer. Governments are no longer ignoring it and are enacting environmental legislation and policies that include punitive tax measures against big polluters while providing tax breaks and other incentives to those deploying greener practices.

How can a company measure its effectiveness in implementing a low-carbon strategy? One way is to track energy usage and assess sustainability practices in its operations. Adopting Impact Measurement and Management (IMM) software can help yield data about the environmental impact of an entire business, from trash and device disposal to energy usage and carbon outputs. IMM can ascertain how well investments in sustainability are performing. The following illustrates how using IMM has helped.

Lime Rock New Energy

Lime Rock New Energy partners with entrepreneurs whose businesses specialize in key sustainability verticals such as grid modernization and energy efficiency for the built environment. Before Lime Rock started using IMM software, it tracked data by email outreach and Microsoft tools. It couldn’t gather reliable data on the impact of sustainability investments consistently.

Now, however, Lime Rock uses IMM to view and update all data from multiple partnerships through a single dashboard. It gathers data and shares it with important stakeholders. The company sees how new technology implementation helps its bottom line. If a partner company’s share price increases because it has launched new microgrid technology successfully, Lime Rock invests more into that company.

What IMM software is doing is gauging the success of sustainability investments. Any green technology initiative can be measured against sustainability and efficiency goals. By creating a strategy to achieve goals and a consistent set of metrics to track them, a company can manage the performance of its technology investments, monitoring the data and using feedback from employees and customers. This is an iterative process that can measure all new technology acquisitions.

Cloud Services and Sustainability 

Another sustainability practice involves businesses migrating operations to the cloud. What does that mean? The cloud refers to computing services delivered over the Internet. These include software, hardware, data storage and technical support services. Cloud computing goes by many different names: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

Using the cloud eliminates the need for large physical investments in hardware, software and bricks and mortar (buildings). All that’s needed is high-speed connectivity. Employees can work remotely.

The arrival of AI in the cloud is pushing “the frontier of cloud supercomputing technology.” Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI is creating a cloud infrastructure where OpenAI uses it to train ChatGPT, DALL-2, and Github Copilot. Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service allows developers to build proprietary AI applications for its cloud infrastructure. Businesses can optimize processes, and improve efficiency and sustainability with cloud-based AI that learns as it gathers data. This is exactly what UPS is doing with ORION.

Is The Cloud Green?

A business using cloud-based AI reduces its local carbon footprint. Cloud providers and their large data centres, however, are large carbon emitters. According to MIT’s Steven Gonzalez Monserrate, “The Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. A single data center can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes.”

When network devices are included, the current cloud footprint produces 2% of global carbon emissions. So, if sustainability and a reduced carbon footprint are a company’s goals, in moving to the cloud, it needs to find a provider that is pledged to go carbon neutral. Monserrate notes that giants like Google and Amazon are investing in renewable energy projects to get to carbon neutrality and zero emissions.

A final word. Making environmental consciousness a significant part of a company’s brand shows consumers that you’re willing to do your part to save the planet, and it shows employees that you care about them and future generations. Environmental consciousness is a good thing.