Reducing Your Carbon Footprint

Climate change creates a loud buzz across the globe. People are talking about how extreme the weather is, how polluted the environment has become or how devastating the results of carbon emissions are. While it is true that humans contribute a large impact to the worsening climate situations, people are also the most influential key towards making this world a better place. As much as the increase in carbon emissions results from what you do, the healthy change can also start in you.

Although it is a bit difficult to determine what you can do to help the society, do not be disheartened. The devastating forces may be massive for you to work through, but there are countless simple actions?you can take to reduce your carbon footprints day by day.

Home

While you are in the comfort of your home, you can start saving energy to reduce your carbon emission. You could’replace your standard light bulbs with compact fluorescent ones. A compact fluorescent bulb saves more than 2/3rds or up to 1,300 pounds of carbon dioxide in its lifetime. This bulb contains mercury, so make sure to choose a brand that has lower mercury than others.

Another thing, you can do to reduce your carbon footprint at home, is to mind your electronics. When you do not use your gadgets and appliances, make sure you unplug them. If you buy new ones, take time to look at the energy rating of the electronics to save you more energy in future use.

Alternative renewable energy is also a good thing to shift into. Try solar, hydro or wind power at home. Setting up your own residential solar panels and building your own turbines are excellent ways to choose green energy.

Food

The food industry is one of the largest contributors of carbon emissions. You may not have control over the food processing, but you can lower your carbon footprint by buying local products in the market. These local products are not transported from far off places, so the carbon dioxide released from them is lower compared to imported ones. Take a look at the packaging as well; less packaging means less waste.

If you have a big backyard, you could use your it to grow food. ?Eating food, either fruit or vegetable, which you grow at home is energy efficient. No more fuel combustion from transportation and other consequent food processing.

Travel

When you have your own car, accelerating it slowly and smoothly, as well as maintaining speed while driving will help lower your carbon emissions. If you drive a lot, it would be better to get a green car. As of now, you can consider using?public transportation and go for road travel rather than air travel when you take long distance trips. But when you need to take planes, better choose a non-stop flight instead of connecting ones.

Indeed, there are many ways you can combat global warming and climate change. The road to improved life quality through energy efficiency might be hard, but a transformed lifestyle can make a big difference. Start now ? lighten your carbon footprint and help save the world.

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Strategy and Portfolio Management

 

A well planned strategy is the necessary bridge between brilliant leadership and excellent execution. Without it, your entire organisation cannot hope to respond quickly and effectively to challenges and changes within the landscape on which it operates.

Strategic planning involves identifying objectives, understanding what resources are needed to attain them, and then allocating the resources to the appropriate units to ensure they are used optimally towards the achievement of desired objectives. Among the end results which can be reflected by your team members are:

  1. Deeper understanding of the competitive environment;
  2. Snappy execution of plans;
  3. Faster, more aligned actions; and
  4. More intelligent and apt responses against strategic moves of the competition.

We understand the need to institute strategic management in such a way that your organisation can easily adapt to unforeseen developments. As such, all our solutions are formulated to make your organisation not only well-guided but also as dynamic as possible.

Strategy Formulation

Before you can proceed to map out any strategy for your company, you’ll have to study your company’s current environment. This will help you determine what courses of action should be taken to be able to navigate through such environment on your way to the end goal.

If you’re not a full time strategist, such a task can either be very daunting or deceivingly easy… the former can prevent your team from getting started, while the latter can lead your team astray.

Ideally, strategy formulation should be carried out as quickly and as efficiently as possible so you can move on to implementation before the competition can react. Our methods can enable your leaders to hit the ground running each time they set out on a strategic plan.

How?

  • We can assist in accurately applying strategic tools like SWOT and Gap analysis, then help integrate the results into an effective strategic plan.
  • We’ll train your team how to carry out effective research techniques so that the information they gather will really be what we need. This is because the tools mentioned earlier can only work effectively if the inputs were picked intelligently. Of course, if you want the entire process expedited, we can also conduct the research ourselves.
  • We’ll establish best practices for top-down, bottom-up, and collaborative strategic management processes. We’ll even show you how to organise and hold meetings where team members are constantly engaged and in-sync, so action plans can be developed and relayed fast.
  • We’ll see to it that strategies for all functional departments (such as IT management, supply-chain, HR, marketing, and legal) are in line with your business strategies, which should in, turn be aligned with your overall corporate strategy.

Strategy Evaluation

Your strategies have to be periodically assessed if you want to determine whether they are attuned to variations affecting your organisation. These changes may include new technologies, emerging competitors, new opportunities, as well as unexpected developments in the economic environment and political climate.

While no time limit is imposed for the build-up of resources vital to the attainment of a specific objective, the window of opportunity can shut on you before you can start amassing such resources. Given this possibility, it is important for your strategies to undergo evaluation processes that will determine whether you should pursue them or not.

Using only the most reliable evaluation techniques, we’ll help you establish whether:

  • Your strategies will place your company in a position that will give it competitive advantage or will erode whatever advantage the competition already has;
  • Your strategies are consistent with the landscape on which your company currently traverses;
  • They are realistic enough in relation to the resources you have on hand;
  • The associated risks have all been identified and the appropriate control measures have already been put in place;
  • The time frames for their full realisation are both realistic and acceptable.

Portfolio Management

In today’s highly competitive market, many of the more successful enterprises are driven by project-based systems.

Now, there’s always a tendency for project managers to become overenthusiastic and to come up with a number of projects that can’t be sustained by available resources. If your project-based company frequently runs out of resources, then either you just have too many projects running or too much is being allocated to a select few.

In both instances, the problem does not necessarily lie on the individual project managers themselves. Rather, what is needed is the ability to have full control over existing projects and investments.

Your leadership should be able to rank projects in terms of their impact to your organisation’s growth, positioning, and profitability. This will give you sufficient information when deciding which projects to pursue, prioritise, or shut down. These are the benefits you’ll gain from our services:

  • A vivid presentation of the big picture. Only when you can step back from all the detail and see the interplay of investments and resources will you be able to make wise decisions regarding how and where to position them.
  • The ability to distinguish between projects with the highest potentials and those that are outdated.
  • Access to expertise that will help you distribute your present IT infrastructure, human resources, financial resources, and facilities across running projects to obtain the biggest benefits for all stakeholders.

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A Definitive List of the Business Benefits of Cloud Computing ? Part 4

Lowers cost of analytics

Big data and business intelligence (BI) have become the bywords in the current global economy. As consumers today browse, buy, communicate, use their gadgets, and interact on social networks, they leave in their trail a whole lot of data that can serve as a goldmine of information organisations can glean from. With such information at the disposal of or easily obtainable by businesses, you can expect that big data solutions will be at the forefront of these organisations’ efforts to create value for the customer and gain advantage over competitors.

Research firm Gartner’s latest survey of CIOs which included 2,300 respondents from 44 countries revealed that the three top priority investments for 2012 to 2015 as rated by the CIOs surveyed are Analytics and Business Intelligence, Mobile Technologies, and Cloud Computing. In addition, Gartner predicts that about $232 million in IT spending until 2016 will be driven by big data. This is a clear indication that the intelligent use of data is going to be a defining factor in most organisations.

Yet while big data offers a lot of growth opportunities for enterprises, there remains a big question on the capability of businesses to leverage on the available data. Do they have the means to deploy the required storage, computing resources, and analytical software needed to capture value from the rapidly increasing torrent of data?

Without the appropriate analytics and BI tools, raw data will remain as it is – a potential source of valuable information but always unutilised. Only when they can take the time, complexity and expense out of processing huge datasets obtained from customers, employees, consumers in general, and sensor-embedded products can businesses hope to fully harness the power of information.

So where does the cloud fit into all these?

Access to analytics and BI solutions have all too often been limited to large corporations, and within these organisations, a few business analysts and key executives. But that could quickly become a thing of the past because the cloud can now provide exactly what big data analytics requires – the ability to draw on large amounts of data and massive computing power – at a fraction of the cost and complexity these resources once entailed.

At their end, cloud service providers already deal with the storage, hardware, software, networking and security requirements needed for BI, with the resources available on an on-demand, pay-as-you-go approach. In doing so, they make analytics and access to relevant information simplified, and therefore more ubiquitous in the long run.

As the amount of data continues to grow exponentially on a daily basis, sophisticated analytics will be a priority IT technology across all industries, with organisations scrambling to find impactful insights from big data. Cloud-based services ensure that both small and large companies can benefit from the significantly reduced costs of BI solutions as well as the quick delivery of information, allowing for precise and insightful analytics as close to real time as possible.

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When Carrefour Pushed the Right Buttons

Retail giant Carrefour based in Boulogne Billancourt, France is big business in anybody?s numbers. Europe?s #1 retailer opened its first store in 1958 near a crossroads (Carrefour means ?crossroad? in French) and has largely not looked back since then. The slogan for the hypermarket chain with more than 1,500 outlets and close to a half million employees is ?choice and quality for everyone?. Our story begins when Carrefour decided these things belong at home too.

The company implemented a worldwide universal responsibility program firmly anchored on a tripod of goals for environmental, economic and social progress. Its first step was to appoint a five-person project team tasked with liaising with program delegates in all thirty countries in which it operates, and who had responsibility for driving these goals.

The team?s job was to make sure that policies, standards, procedures and key performance areas were common visions throughout Carrefour. By contrast, the local managers? were tasked with aligning these specifics to local conditions in terms of environmental, political and social issues. The project team checked the fit quarterly via video conferences.

The Triple Bottom Line Goals were woven through with Carrefour?s Seven Core Values, namely Freedom, Responsibility, Sharing, Respect, Integrity, Solidarity and Progress. Constant contact was maintained with staff and other stakeholders through ?awareness training? seminars and other dialogues. As the program took hold and flourished, it became evident that the retail giant needed help with managing the constant stream of metrics flowing in.

After reviewing options, Carrefour appointed a software provider to monitor progress against its primary focuses on energy, water, waste, refrigeration, paper, disposable checkout bags, hygiene & quality, management gender parity, disabled people and logistics. This enabled it to track progress online against past performance, and produce meaningful reports.

The Environmental Manager in the Corporate Sustainability Department waxed lyrical when he said, ?We believe that our sustainability strategy and software solution have powerfully improved collaboration, innovation, and overall performance?. He went on to describe how it was helping drive cost down and profitability up, while simultaneously growing brand.

Non-conformance costs can be high and run counter to the imperative to make a profit – while simultaneously ensuring a better world for our children?s children. In Carrefour?s case, having a consultant to measure progress was the key that unblocked the administrative bottleneck. Irish company Ecovaro does this for companies around the world. Click here. Discover what we will do for you.

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