Integrating Sustainability in Corporate Strategy

We help to create long term value and resilience for medium and small enterprises. We do this by facilitating adoption of relevant good business practices and integrating them with the long term goals and aspirations of the enterprise. This makes the business foundation strong over a long term by reducing economic, environmental and social risks which sometimes are outside the direct control of the enterprise and could manifest either suddenly or over a long period of time. Our structured value creation approach helps to deliver a combination of relevant outcomes for the enterprise which may include financial benefits, other tangible benefits including innovations of products and services as well as non-tangible benefits.

 

What is sustainability in the context of a business?

It is a set of good business practices followed by an enterprise by intent that makes it economically strong, does not harm the environment and fosters social equity. Such enterprises create long term value for all stakeholders (for example - business owners, employees, customers and local communities) as a result of accruing benefits from positive outcomes by following good business practices. Some examples of such positive outcomes are:

  • Reduced waste and emissions
  • Reduced operating costs
  • Increased employee engagement
  • Increased productivity
  • Gained competitive advantage
  • Reduced business risk by increased ability to comply with existing and potential new regulations
  • Improved brand image
  • Increased attractiveness of the enterprise for
  • New talent
  • Investors
  • New customers

 What are sustainable business practices?

These are business practices which improve environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance especially in those areas of business operations which are most important for the enterprise because of their significant impact. Adopting these practices also improves operational efficiency, financial performance and resilience especially over the long term. For example

  • Using energy efficiently to deliver the products or services, thereby reducing the environmental footprint and also reducing cost of operations
  • Reducing consumption of fresh water in the value chain, through internal re-use, avoiding wastage and other approaches that builds resilience against water supply vagaries while also saving cost
  • Understanding long-term availability issues of raw materials and improving material efficiency in operations and/or developing new products or services that are not affected by material availability constraints
  • Work force engagement to enhance occupational safety, productivity and availability

How we help our clients?

We help with relevant solutions that have been developed and refined from our learnings and experiences from having helped over 700 business enterprises adopt sustainable business practices. The solutions have both proprietary (for example our in house developed Sustainability Maturity and Adoption Model) as well as internationally recognized frameworks, methodologies and toolkits and can be customized to meet the specific needs of the client. Our solution set includes

1.MASTERS (Materiality Analysis and Stakeholder Engagement for Resilience and Strategy)
This proprietary solution helps to identify the most important and relevant economic, environmental and social issues that matter for the business enterprise and its stakeholders. The issues and related information is analyzed and then insights are drawn which are used to guide the business strategy and also the communication for different stakeholders including customers.

2.SCORE (Sustainability Communication and Reporting)
This solution uses the GRI framework and standards to help the business enterprise communicate in a consistent and credible way to different stakeholders the impact of the most important and relevant economic, environmental and social issues that matter for the business enterprise.

3.ESG-PI (Environmental, Social and Governance Performance Improvement)
We help you map your current ESG performance against relevant benchmarks and help develop and implement a plan to close identified gaps as well as reach specific goals for example if you have set a goal to become a zero GHG emission enterprise by a specific year. 

4.Product Stewardship
We help enterprises reduce the environmental footprint of their products and services right through the value chain using eco-design approach as well as tools like Umberto Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) software.

5.Eco-innovation

This is a business approach which promotes sustainability throughout the entire life cycle of a product, while also boosting a company performance and competitiveness. It can help small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) access new and expanding markets, increase productivity, attract new investment into the business, increase profitability across the value chain, and help SMEs stay ahead of regulations and standards notably those related to the environment. We deliver this using a framework, methodology and toolkit developed by UNEP.