WARNING! This page contains secrets for advancing your business through sustainability.
Sustainability thinking – The basis of modern business
Sustainable development means finding ways for achieving comprehensive financial, ecological, and social sustainability.
- Financial sustainability means solvency and stable cash flow.
- Ecological sustainability means smart use of resources and minimizing your environmental impact.
- Social sustainability means promoting social values such as human rights and wellbeing in your operations.
For your business to become truly sustainable, both your company and its impact should comply with sustainable development principles. But how is it done in practice?
Resource wisdom – Nothing but savings
Sustainability thinking can result in major benefits. The easiest way towards resource wisdom is through embracing circular economy practices: your products should be designed so that they use as little materials, electricity, or other resources as possible to manufacture and use, thus resulting in minimal environmental impact. The less materials or electricity you require, the lower your manufacturing costs are, which in turn generates financial gain. This enables you to either lower your prices or increase your sales margins.
In practice, resource wisdom can be achieved through optimizing your production, designing components with material efficiency in mind, or implementing smart software solutions in your operations.
Services – More business
The challenge in creating a low-emission and low-cost product comes from the increasing manufacturing volume of new products. When new products are manufactured with minimal emissions through circular economy practices and the resulting financial gain is capitalized by lowering prices, you are likely to increase your sales and production volumes. This may also lead to an unwanted increase in total emissions.
Maintaining and growing your sales is an essential goal for all companies, but how can these goals be reached ecologically? One solution is to look into different service models that can generate business without any negative environmental impact.
Take a moment to think about what it would mean if your business strategy was to increase your products’ lifespan and decrease your sales volume, but still grow your business revenue by selling relevant services.
How does digitalization help generate sustainable business?
Digitalization provides endless sustainable business possibilities. It enables you to collect relevant data and utilize it for designing and providing different products and services. Digitalization reduces unprofitable labor, minimizes resource-wasting mistakes, and guides you in creating even more sustainable and efficient products and services. Basing your operations on real data gives your business and unfair advantage and a premium reputation.
Digitalization plays a key role especially in providing services. Preventive maintenance is a common example of this phenomenon. Precise and preventive service measures increase equipment service life, help anticipate production shutdowns, and give important pointers for product and service development.
But consider this: what if your product was designed from the start to enable endless service possibilities? Whether it is a single service, service package or continuous billing. Designing the solution to support your service business enables sustainable growth in a financial, ecological, and social sense.