By Dan Berthiaume
Sustainability, or compliance with environmental regulations and contractual obligations, has evolved into a business necessity in recent years. Increased consumer awareness and legal enforcement means that companies now must not only internally monitor their environmental activities, but also prove they are acting in an environmentally responsible manner to satisfy demands of customers, clients and various regulatory bodies.
One such company is Capgemini UK, the UK division of Capgemini, a global provider of consulting, technology, outsourcing and professional services. A recent white paper from Capgemini, “Capgemini Improves Sustainability Performance with CA ecoSoftware,” details how Capgemini UK is using BPO to meet the sustainability expectations of customers, partners and regulators. Capgemini UK needs accurate sustainability data and flexible reporting. However, with 3 million data points, Capgemini UK found the process of collating sustainability data to be excessively time-consuming.
Capgemini UK Faces Insubstainable Demands
As well as pressure from customers and partners, Capgemini UK is also subject to the mandatory Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) Energy Efficiency Scheme. Under this government program, large public and private sector organizations in the UK will be taxed on their carbon emissions, and will be ranked by the government in an annual performance league table. Obviously, Capgemini UK needs to ensure it is not erroneously taxed on any carbon emissions it is not responsible for.
To demonstrate its commitment to improving sustainability performance, Capgemini UK set some intentionally challenging corporate environmental objectives, focusing on its key areas of impact, including reducing its carbon footprint by 20% by 2014, improving energy efficiency of its data centers by 20% by 2014, reducing travel-related carbon emissions by more than 30% by 2014, and sending zero waste to landfill by 2014.
However, measuring and reporting progress against these objectives became complex and time-consuming. With more than 3 million new data points being processed each year from 30 disparate sources and numerous internal and external reporting requirements, collating and managing the information presented a considerable challenge.
Specifically, Capgemini UK was tracking sustainability performance using a four-gigabyte spreadsheet, but wanted to find a way to make the process more rigorous and cost-effective while ensuring that the quality, accuracy and integrity of data was of a sufficient standard to support the ambitious sustainability goals the company had adopted.
Capgemini UK Becomes First Client of New Sustainability BPO Program
Capgemini recognized many of its customers were under similar pressures, and launched an Energy, Carbon and Sustainability Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) service to help customers improve their sustainability efforts, with Capgemini UK as the service’s first client.
Following an assessment of the sustainability management solutions on the market, Capgemini selected the cloud-based CA ecoSoftware solution to support its new BPO service. The solution can be deployed to customers in just three weeks to maximize time to value. The solution captures a variety of data from numerous sources, both within Capgemini and from their suppliers, including air travel data from travel agents, electricity and gas meter readings from various facilities, waste and recycling volumes from waste management providers.
As part of the service, Capgemini defined workflows for capturing, cleansing and uploading data into CA ecoSoftware according to Capgemini UK’s requirements, and is responsible for managing these processes. The information provided by the service is not only used by Capgemini’s sustainability office to evaluate its performance, but also by senior management teams to support decisions, and is often shared with customers and employees
Capgemini UK Improves Sustainability Management at Lower Cost
As a result of outsourcing sustainability management through its parent company, Capgemini UK is able to leverage practice processes that reduce the time and resources required to collect, collate, validate and present sustainability data. The company has also been able to reduce the costs associated with collecting and managing data and creating reports by approximately 30% so far.
In addition, outsourcing has enabled Capgemini UK to actively manage carbon emissions and waste through better informed business decisions, gather data to support compliance with the legislative requirements of the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme, and improve communication relating to sustainability programs with stakeholders,employees, customers and partners.
Ultimately, the BPO Sustainability Service optimizes Capgemini UK’s data gathering and analytics processes. This significantly reduces the costs associated with reporting, and frees up senior resources to focus on more strategic matters.
Having implemented the system across the UK organization within three months, the sustainability business process outsourcing service is now available to Capgemini’s external customers.
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