We all know that digital transformation is good for your bottom line: letting you move quickly, become more innovative and exploit ever-increasing amounts of data. But did you know it's also good for the environment?
Here are 4 ways digital transformation can help your company meet its sustainability goals and reduce its carbon footprint:
- Create a digital workplace that reduces the need to travel. Video meetings using Google Hangouts Meet, part of G Suite, make it easy to meet face-to-face with teammates, clients and customers, no matter where they are. You can run meetings with up to 30 participants and share screens so everyone’s looking at the same information. You can even start a Hangout right from your email, with just a few clicks, while there’s no need for special equipment and no worries about whether everyone has the right accounts or plug-ins.
- Deliver business transformation that lets you use resources more efficiently. With the wealth of tools in Google Cloud Platform, you can quickly create and deploy custom web and mobile apps that remove paper from your processes, along with the need to print and distribute reams of paper. But that’s just the start. You can also give your field workers tools that enable them to deliver the same high-quality service every time, even if they’ve never visited that customer before. So you can always allocate the nearest employee to each task. All of that cuts their mileage and fuel consumption, while helping you serve more customers with the same resources.
- Use business intelligence to reduce waste. Google’s Big Data and Data Analytics solutions help you to accurately predict sales, so you can optimise your procurement and production and correctly allocate stock to each of your distributors and stores. The result is less wastage and fewer overstocks, while you’re also minimising the miles stock travels before it's sold.
- Run your IT on carbon-neutral and ethical cloud platforms. Google Cloud data centres not only use 50% less energy than a typical data centre but Google Cloud buys enough renewable energy — either for its own consumption or to put back into the grid — to offset the energy consumption of the entire company. It’s now working towards minute-by-minute matching of demand with supply, so it will only ever use energy from renewable sources in its data centres. Google has also set itself a Zero Waste Goal to eliminate waste sent to landfill across its operations while working hard to be a “good neighbour” by, for example, ensuring its data centres don't affect the local drinking water supply.
All of this why companies — like handmade cosmetics firm Lush — that put corporate social responsibility and environmental issues at the heart of their operations are moving to Google. “Everything we do inside our technology arm we want to make sure is powered by 100% renewable energy and the alignment for that is great with Google,” says Lush.
If you’d like to find out more about how Google Cloud is both good for your business and the environment, read more about Lush’s digital transformation journey or come and talk to the experts in our Digital Transformation team.
