Sustainability
Efficient and sustainable operations are central to green strategies; utilising these use cases can underpin the start and continuation of successful environmental and sustainable operations.
Making efficient use of available resources is a key contributor to sustainability. During the Logical Design & Assign activities, effective allocation of resources in line with technical and commercial standards can deliver environmental as well as financial benefits:
- Reduce the need to purchase (and hence make) more equipment by using available resources
- Accurately track the status of resources to ensure that unused ones are marked as available
- “Sweat the assets” by preferring solutions that use existing resources over those that require acquisition of new ones
- Prefer allocating more environmentally efficient resources over those less so
Making efficient use of available resources is a key contributor to sustainability. During the Logical Design & Assign activities, effective allocation of resources in line with technical and commercial standards can deliver environmental as well as financial benefits.
During Order Processing, when selecting third party vendors for component delivery, include in the vendor assessment activities a sustainability or green metric; for example, prefer local suppliers over more remote ones.
In the Stock use case, as well as the efficient selection of physical stock to deliver to the customer, consider also the stock location to minimise unnecessary ‘delivery miles’.
Always ensure that when necessary, CPE to be returned by the customer (either because they have ceased the service it was delivered was, or it has been replaced by other equipment) is returned to the warehouse and either refurbished and reduced, or recycled in line with WEEE regulations.
As part of the Capacity Management use case, ensure that old, inefficient resources are removed from the network as soon as they are no longer required to deliver service. Also ensure that environmental metrics are included in the selection for new resources, and that these are acquired and commissioned as late as possible without adversely affecting service offerings.
From a sustainability perspective, IT Resource Allocation should follow the same principles as Logical Design & Assign: prefer to reuse resources where possible; ship from the nearest location to the delivery address; ensure that returns are correctly made; and reuse, recycle or dispose of in an environmentally friendly manner.