Sustainable by Design

Overview

• Sustainability has become the core strategic driver and competitive advantage for manufacturing organizations as traditional linear business models continue to get disrupted due to market and regulatory forces and the increasingly visible effects of climate change. Changing consumer sentiments and financial implications are making sustainability the default license to operate. New circular business models are data-driven and require a connected enterprise with purpose-driven ecosystems that can sense, perceive, and act.
• The Sustainable by Design offering suite from Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) helps manufacturers unlock significant economic, social, and environmental value that enables sustainable processes, products, and services design, connected value chain operations, and purpose-centric ecosystems, which drive new circular business models. These data and digital technology-led solutions foster sustainability innovation in an organization while effectively addressing associated risks.

Business context

• Sustainability entails a multi-horizon journey with an ecosystem-based approach.

The pace of shift across the sustainability horizons, as depicted in Figure 1, is increasing because of fast-depleting natural resources, evolving regulations, a competitive landscape change forced by early movers, and consumer and investor demands. We believe that the future manufacturing enterprise must be sustainable by design to thrive in this changing paradigm.

How can such an enterprise be designed?

Sustainability at the core of the future manufacturing enterprise: To address the demands of regulatory and market forces, manufacturers need to take measures towards:

• Value chain decarbonization, sustainable and ethical sourcing, and resource optimization 
  
• Product design according to circular principles such as ease of repair, remanufacture, recover, end-of-life treatment, and recycle
  
• Extended producer responsibility, product environment footprint, and climate-related risks disclosures
  
• A siloed organizational function of sustainability will not be able to drive these outcomes. Manufacturers need to revisit their operations, processes, and products to embed sustainability and circular economy principles. Effectively including these elements in the business models can positively impact a manufacturer’s brand and financial performance.
• Governance and transparency: Enterprises will need efficient reporting across multiple reporting standards and will need to include sustainability key performance indicators (KPIs) across organizational levels to address internal and external stakeholder needs effectively. This can improve access to capital, ensure higher valuations, and provide competitive edge by sustainable innovation. 
• To achieve this, organizations need to have a robust data fabric, sustainability performance metrics visibility, insights-driven business decisions, and proactive risk management.
• Sustainable ecosystems: Manufacturers need extended value chain and cross-industry partnerships to achieve sustainability goals such as value chain decarbonization and adoption of new circular business models.

Our solution

• TCS’ Sustainable by Design solution suite has been structured on our foundational framework of Neural Manufacturing™. It enables manufacturers to orchestrate connected, cognitive, and collaborative ecosystems. By building value chains with an intelligent edge, it ensures organizational agility and creates new business and operating models.
• The Sustainable by Design suite enables outcomes across key sustainability aspects, as depicted in Figure 2, satisfying the needs of various stakeholders.

To progress on all six levers above, organizations need to invest in data and a contemporary, scalable digital core. TCS enables this journey with a phased roadmap:

Phase 1: Envision a sustainable by design strategy and define target operating models for sustainable ecosystems

Phase 2: Design and build a digital core, including a neural information fabric. Enable the orchestration of connected ecosystems through data-driven platforms

Phase 3: Scale and operate the sustainability platforms. Enable automated cognitive business operations and risk management. 

Listed below are our solutions that enable sustainability:

• Sustainable by design strategy: This advisory service helps manufacturers across different sustainability maturity levels by offering target operating models and an actionable roadmap. Such digital technology interventions can help them achieve their sustainability goals and build circular business models.
  
• Sustainability analytics: An increasing amount of sustainability-related data on materials, products, services, and operations now traverses across enterprise boundaries. Manufacturers need to collect, process, and report data for various regulatory and reporting requirements. TCS’ sustainability analytics offers a robust data fabric with a single view of sustainability data and metrics. Apart from managing reporting across multiple frameworks efficiently, analytics lends cognitive capability to enterprises. The insights enable business decisions driven by sustainability considerations and ensure effective risk management. The ability to associate organizational sustainability goals to KPIs across different organizational levels fosters sustainability innovation.
  
• Sustainable operations and sourcing: For effective reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across scope 1, 2, and 3 categories, manufacturers need to act on: 
  
• Operational efficiency improvement
  
• Sustainable energy, raw materials, and components sourcing

TCS’ proven solutions provide extensive track-and-trace, supplier sustainability benchmarking, and operational efficiency improvement capabilities to accelerate the organizational goal towards extended value chain decarbonization. 

• Closed-loop ecosystem: To adopt circular business models, enterprises need extensive capabilities around product use-dispose-collect-recycle. A closed-loop ecosystem is a digital platform enabling material visibility and new data-led services for sustainability ecosystem partners. It has built-in features for enabling consumer participation in collection and incentivization mechanisms. 
  
• Marketplace for circularity: This offering provides firms an online marketplace to buy, sell, or offer new data-led services for waste, recycled, or remanufactured materials and products to promote the adoption of circular business models.