John Keels Group's Environmental Responsibilities Sustainable Operations Management Case Study Management Assignment Help

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Executive Summary
Sustainable development is fatly growing increasingly trendy in strategy implementation, although its interpretation is regularly elusive. Some people reduce sustainable development to environmental concerns, while others use interchangeable terms to corporate responsibility. Thus many people like to live and their guardians, and now they want their children to have better arrangements. The same logic should apply to company or organization decision-makers who would like to have their organization as financially beneficial as it was during the past, but not more profitable. According to this logic, business sustainability can be defined as a firm's ability to meet its short-term financial needs without adversely affecting its (or others') capacity to meet its long-term financial requirements. As a result, time is fundamental to the concept of sustainable development. There is no moral necessity that specifies what a business should and shouldn't do to ensure its long-term viability.
Therefore, most world-leading organizations try to follow the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals for archive sustainability within their organizations. Unilever is one of the organizations that follow the sustainable development goals for their production process. Hence, they are mainly focusing on producing environmental friendly productions with reducing ecological degradations. "Unilever is practicing within their organization and along with external parties to eliminate deforestation from their supply chain process, for support and protect human rights and tackle climate change. By 2023, Unilever intends to have a supply chain that with deforestation-free. According to that, Unilever reduces world deforestation through its production process and supply chain management.
Sustainable development has become a more and more significant concept globally. Due to this reason, most companies and organizations are trying to enhance their business development by focusing on sustainability. Then, practice with sustainable goals will help all organizations become socially, economically and environmentally sustainable in their production process.
01. Sustainability Concepts to Business
Sustainability can be defined as a business strategy to long-term value creation that reflects how a given firm operates in the ecological, social, and economic aspects. The rationale underlying sustainability is that establishing such initiatives promotes firm stability. Therefore, sustainability is a phenomenon that helps to achieve organizational development in a better way. Most world-leading companies operate their production process with sustainable goals to achieve sustainable development.
Sustainable goals are always focused on equitable development for every country worldwide. Sustainability implies meeting present generation needs without adversely affecting the needs of next generations. In addition to the natural resources, people require social and economic resources. Sustainability entails more than just environmental considerations. Further, various definitions of sustainability include considerations for social equity and economic development. Many individuals and organizations share the value of sustainability, which they indicate through their policy initiatives, daily routines, and behavioral patterns. Further, individual people have played a key role in shaping their current environmental and social conditions. Therefore, modern people and future generations must develop alternatives and make adjustments to allocate to limited resources sustainably.
Businesses and organizations that have incorporated sustainability into their operations have only one option for success: ensure that everyone will be engaged to the sustainability goals. Stakeholder engagement, both internally and externally, has several advantages. Sustainable companies can attract new talent, customers, and investors because it positively impacts society. Companies that make a variation for their consumers, employees, and other groups in society inspire impact investors and enhance the participation of stakeholders.
Consumers are gradually looking for environmentally friendly products and services. Organizations that interact to the need to develop faster than their inappropriate competitors. Clients increasingly aware of responsible production and consumption patterns are drawn to sustainable product and service offerings. Organizations which are able to offer goods and services that are environmentally and socially responsible throughout their product lifecycle continues to attract customers who are becoming much more conscious of responsible consumption and production structures. For example, John Keels supermarket tried to reduce the polyethylene bags usage within the country, and therefore they were introduced the reusable bag pack for their customers.
By applying circular economy principles or making investments in equipment and new technologies that optimize the product manufacturing operations, a supply chain becomes more stable in all elements of society, reducing costs. Stranded assets, unnecessary loss, and material waste are all factors that raise costs. Therefore, sustainable development goals help to achieve an organizational circular economic process.
Organizations could also progress to sustainable practices in small steps, slowly increasing and expanding their actions. Numerous companies initiate by organizing their proceedings. They could then form alliances with suppliers, distributors, and other corporate entities. Companies, from community stakeholders to non-governmental organizations (NGOs), must subsequently start engaging with society.
To achieve minimal environmental impact, any single company requires suppliers to develop relatively sustainable products and regulatory bodies and customers willing to support their initiatives. A specific organization cannot achieve sustainable development; it requires an integrated effort. Sustainability generally requires new forms of collaboration as well as emerging economic thinking.
02. Dimensions of Sustainability
The integration of ecological economic, and social dimensions is crucial to attaining development. There is worldwide agreement that the above three dimensions must be integrated; however, there are several questions regarding how this integration will be accomplished. Therefore, these three dimensions played a significant role in the sustainable development process. It needs parallel progress in all of the various pillars of sustainability. These dimensions allow for a much more full analysis of how much the concept of sustainability would look like in nations at different phases of development.
134810522923500Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 1 Dimensions of SustainabilitySource -: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Dimensions-of-sustainability-Source-7_fig4_305331714
The environmental dimension is frequently the one that receives the most concentration regarding sustainable development within an organization. Organizations are taking steps to reduce their greenhouse emissions, waste produced, resource usage, and overall ecological influence. Companies realize that obtaining a positive effect on the environment can have a real monetary benefit. Typically, reducing the volume of material used within the packaging reduces the total cost of those materials. For example, as major part of their zero-waste initiative, Walmart focused on wrapping, attempting for much less wrapping across all of their logistics system and more packaging produced from recycled or reusable materials.
Organizations with undeniable and visible ecological pressures or impact, such as food production or mining, engage the environmental dimension by standardizing and reducing. Some of the challenges seem to be that the consequences of a company or organization are regularly not adequately implemented, implying that externalities are not capturing. Performance evaluation is using to accurately measure externalities such that growth toward reduction can also be monitoring and identified meaningfully. Total direct costs of wastewater, soil conservation, carbon dioxide, and waste, in general, are difficult to quantify hence businesses are not held accountable for the waste they produce. Therefore environmental dimension is always concern about the negative externalities, which always influence the sustainable development process.
Recently, the social aspects of sustainability have been recognized as a critical matter in sustainable development. As part of the conversation on sustainable communities and urban sustainability planning, political, educational, and organizational supporters have taken an interest in social sustainability. Classical themes of social sustainability, such as employment and poverty, have given way to more tender and much less quantitative ideas, such as happiness, human engagement, and emotional intelligence. Equality, diversity, the best of social life and institutional democratic accountability, as well as corporate sustainability and business models combined, are all new aspects of the industry's social aspect. From the perspective of incorporation, such newly added questions become increasingly complicated in analyzing social sustainability. In general, social sustainability assessment can be carried through the social impact of the evaluation (which is used to integrate all economic and environmental variables) and the expansion of ecological concerns.
To enhance social sustainability, most of the organization use advertising promotions which that include sustainable practices. For example, Unilever uses hygiene and healthcare regarding advertisement to concentrate on their products to enhance and develop health sector sustainability. Therefore, all of the manifestations of social sustainability and their distinctive and ethical concepts, ideas, themes, and evaluation strategies from a sociological perspective are concentrated in the social dimension.
"The economic dimension of sustainability is concerned with the organization's effects on the economic circumstances of its interested parties as well as on economic structures at the local, national, and international scales". Most businesses believe they have a significant presence in the economic pillar of sustainability. An organization must be profitable to be sustainable. It demonstrates that financial gain cannot take precedence over the other two dimensions. Indeed, enhancing profit at any total cost is not the economic pillar's goal at all. Compliance, proper governance, and risk management are examples of activities that align with the economic dimensions. Although these are already on the board for most developed countries businesses, they are not yet available globally or in developing regions.
03. Relevance’s of Different Drivers in Sustainability Practices
Focusing on the importance of the environmental factor, the social and economic components of sustainable development are, throughout the theory, similarly vital in an organization's long-term viability. In practice, the outcomes of each factor's stakeholder engagement analysis and impacts analysis performed by each organization define the relevance of each component. Every organization's sustainable development is unique, as is the adjustment of each element in the organization's sustainability.
Human sustainable development is concerned with the preservation and enhancement of society's human capital. In the business world, an organization will regard itself as a community member and will strive to improve financial qualities that support human capital. Human sustainability involves the implementation of knowledge and humanitarian initiatives to support the organization's functions and long-term viability and promote the well-being of the community and society.
Supply chain management (SCM) forecasts including such market economy globalization, short product life cycles, digital innovation, and multidimensional consumer expectations. It’s considering breakthroughs such as resource scarcity, relatively strict relevant legislation, and a more long-term focus had also resulted in the emergence of highly effective supply chain management.
Incorporating environmental and social sustainability matters into supply chain management is becoming more and more essential to the growth of organizations and their production lines.
The concept of sustainability in businesses and the supply chain is becoming a current topic and an important field of interest. Implementing sustainable development practices in an organizations' and their supply chains' environmental and social performance. It provides an incentive for organizations to acquire new core competencies that can help them gain a competitive advantage by incorporating sustainable practices inside and outside the organization's various sections.
Sustainable development has already emerged as a significant global concern. Despite the recent market expansion, the political and economic implications for businesses in emerging economies vary from those in industrialized economies. Throughout the move, there's also a distinct set of sustainability initiatives for organizations in developing countries differentiated from all those faced by an organization in the industrialized nations. Modernization has created incentives for developing-country organizations to utilize sustainability practices from their clients and competitors.
An organization will now see itself as a community member and encourage business value systems that support human capital throughout the business context. Social sustainability emphasizes the significance of people who are directly or indirectly involved in the production of goods or the provision of services, and expanding shareholders. Businesses and the strategies used to procure raw materials can influence communities across the world, either positively or negatively. Social sustainability usually involves using human resources and human capacity to support a company's operations and sustainable development even while trying to promote social well-being and community improvement.
The goal of environmental sustainability is to advance human well-being by safeguarding natural capital. Environmentally sustainable initiatives and programmers ensure that the population's needs are met without adversely affecting the needs of the future.
04. Barriers & Challenges for Sustainability
Sustainability encompasses an industry's supply chain process, requiring accountability from the beginning to the end, through the supply chain partners, to retailers. If some organization is trying to produce something sustainably, it's becoming a significant advantage for supplying large corporations. It may reshape many logistics services developed over time purely based on profitable industrial production. Like moreover, this type of situation is dependent on how powerfully organizations incorporate sustainability and therefore, it is a natural transition in a path or perhaps just phrase. Sri Lanka tends to promote the manufacturing industry as one of the main drivers for economic development, with little regard for environmental and social issues. It has adversely affected various problems, prompting the adaptation of some efficiency approaches in the local manufacturing industry.
center20955000Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 2 Interdependency of barriers for Sustainable Manufacturing Operations Implementation Source-: https://d-nb.info/1076588085/34
Lack of adequate internal structures; low levels of social drive; lack of technology and management potential; lack of multi-stakeholder method; lack of interested parties academic achievement causes to reduce economic sustainability. Understanding of the sustainable procurement concept; a lack of direct sustainable procurement education; the states have little interest in ensuring sustainable procurement advancement. Insufficient political would indeed; Corruption exists between procurement consultants; small-scale suppliers/contractors lack capacity; Initial associated costs are higher.
Maintaining financial strength is the goal of economic stability. While social sustainability aims to increase equality and fairness, a green economy seeks to raise living standards. It refers to the effective use of resources to maintain organization profitability over time in the corporate environment. However, economic sustainability in an organization cannot be quickly achieved due to the barriers within the economic environment.
A significant difference was discovered, which appears to be that most companies making some improvements in achieving the sustainable development goals have grown into large enterprises capable of financially supporting sustainable research and the costs related to implementing sustainability practices. Even though several organizations, along with small and medium enterprises, face lack a comprehensive system for a long-term manufacturing process. Organizations cannot adopt new strategic plans or change existing ones unless they positively impact their market dominance and revenue growth. Therefore, economic dimension influence is one of the main barriers to sustainability in an organization.
Existing marketing and supply chain strategies are intended to increase unsustainably high consumption of goods and services, increasing the consumption of natural resources. Therefore, organizations should implement strategies to encourage customers to adopt more sustainable behavior’s and raise consumer awareness of environmental protection. However, most developing countries organizations cannot achieve the social sustainability dimension due to their product management and supply chain process. Such as most of their productions include child labor, unfair salary distributions, unsafe work environment, overloaded working capacity, etc. Due to this kind of social unfairness, they cannot quickly achieve sustainability within their organizations.
In addition to the adverse effect of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, there is an increasing need for organizations to recognize and implement sustainable activities in different fields. Global warming, environmental damage, and greenhouse gas emissions are all ongoing and prospective difficulties. As a result, immediate actions and plans should be implemented to increase the incorporation of sustainable practices and an outcome, a viable strategy for corporations and organizations. On a global scale, there are various significant barriers to developing sustainability. Trying to identify these barriers helps us to enhance alternatives and, as a result, improve the organizational sustainability practices. Incorporating sustainable development introduces multiple challenges, such as economic, sociocultural, and regulatory constraints and structural and institutional barriers.
05. Measurements of Sustainability
The performance of Environmental, Social, and Economic principles is used to assess a system's sustainability. Because when a well-balanced approach to all three is ideal, it is not always entirely feasible. Organizations are starting to focus on measuring sustainable development as conservation has gained attention in the last few decades. Assessing a program against existing best practices is one method for determining the primary road for sustainable development. In general, incorporating sustainable growth as a system of measurement implies broadening the typical business reporting framework to include social and ecological performance in addition to its economic performance (the Triple Bottom Line). The above three fundamental principles should be evaluated, but they do not have a measurement system or even themselves.
Keels will start encouraging many organizations to have a significant stake or impact, whether as supply chain partners or indeed, to incorporate similar policy plans by raising awareness and integrating sustainability throughout the organization. Their broad policy statement will be supplemented internal and external with more specific and detailed guidelines, procedures, and standards controlling all aspects of sustainable supply chain management that will be implemented throughout the group. Further, Keels will encourage and empower their employees to take a strategic approach to achieving long-term success at work, at residence, and in the public. They will assess their efficiency against with a strict environmental guideline and report on a regular basis in accordance with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) framework, as well as review policies, methods, and targets related to sustainability based on the feedback received through regular and continuous customers and business partners.
The John Keels Group's environmental responsibilities remain a top primary consideration. Keeping the focus mainly on energy and ecosystems, they had already captured on the new responsibilities of implementing a robust mechanism for identifying the group-wide carbon footprint, efforts to reduce the environmental consequences of their goods & services, and controlling the financial value of serious penalties and total number of non-monetary sanctions for non-compliance.
According to that different organizations use various kind of measurement to measure their organizational sustainability. However basically sustainability depend on the three dimension of sustainable development, including social, economic and environmental performance. There is not much easy procedure to evaluate sustainable development and therefore it may depend on the organizational production process.
06. Different Sustainability Practices
Dialog Axiata, as a member of the United Nations United Nations global network, places a high value on United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and has associated its business strategy to develop sustainable development in Sri Lanka. To develop a strategies to reach these goals, the company would have to allocate considerable time and effort to researching the current economic position, market indicators, and global climate with regard to every SDGs in order to gain clarity on how this would optimize the value generated by actively supporting and working towards achieving the goals through information.
In 2019, a variety of energy-saving projects and methods were incorporated across the scope of Dialog's operational processes. A significant portion of the savings was accounted for by the solar-power production process at the Head Office and the expansion of such systems to a higher proportion of tower locations. Dialog also focused on a variety of operations and maintenance performance improvements, achieving additional savings through device converting and renovation of existing. A notable example was the company-wide establishment of energy-efficient inverter type split air-conditioning units. Dialog intends to minimize long-term ecological impact at the inception of the project by working directly with and imposing design efficiency and energy efficiency criteria on vendors. The organization's ultimate strategy is to gradually transition to an ecosystem of solar power and other sustainable sources. A Resource Management Dashboard was also generated, designed to allow for further accurate measurements of average electricity savings.
Dialog already continued to work hard to accomplish a newly improved waste disposal conceptual model, which also included exacting isolation and disposal guidance, as well as a focus on reprocessing – ensuring the exclusion of Organization plastic products and substantially optimizing consumption of resources. The initiative ‘Digitization toward that paperless environment' pushed the shift from printed copy documentation to digital documentation.
Therefore, Dialog continues to engage employees and raise awareness of the advantages of efficient resource management, as well as the relevance of limiting the extreme use of air conditioning units and other high-usage devices. It also included the proper training workshops for cleaning staff on the optimal use of electronic devices in order to be vigilant on saving energy alternatives and developments related to maintaining energy conservation approaches. Furthermore, the savings generated by such activities were tried to communicate on a far more continuous basis.
07. Sustainability Practices of Unilever
Uniliver is the one of leading multinational company in the world. Food, cosmetics, personal care, pharmaceutical, and infant items are among its products. Lever Brothers Ceylon Limited established Unilever Sri Lanka in 1938. Unilever Sri Lanka was renamed in 1972 as its present name. As a best leading multinational company in the world, Uniliver is going through the sustainable practices with their organization. Therefore, several numbers of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) follow for achieve their organizational goals as well as enhance their sustainability. Most relevantly, SDgs number 12, 13 and 15 are integrate with their operations management, such as it include responsible consumption & production, climate action, and life on land sustainable goals.
The Uniliver company planning to elliminating greenhouse gas emmision from their product operation and tring to achive net zero emmision from Uniliver products up to point of sale 2039. As a result, they increase their involvement with common shareholders on the climatic change strategic plan by presenting Unilever's climate change comprehensive plan to shareholders for a semi consultation vote on their emissions-reduction goals and strategy. Uniliver products are also actively working to make sustainable choices easier for customers and reshaping brands to reduce carbon emissions from manufacturing and use. They are making significant investments throughout the board to make their climate change action strategy a reality.
Over the next ten years, Unilever brands will invest €1 billion in their Climate & Nature Fund, which will be used to finance, partner with, and drive innovation. Furthermore, the impact on the management and significant climate change action and eliminate carbon emissions from the manufacturing and the use of their products. Moreover, their Home Care division has committed an additional €1 billion over next ten years to prevent all carbon derived from fossil fuels from their general cleaning products. Although, the day-to-day impact of climate change, which is increasingly likely to have an impact – both in society and in their businesses – and further water scarcity and pollution of water resources. They are working to make their operational processes as water-efficient as possible. They are now working to ensure that their product formulations are recyclable, thereby protecting water quality and availability.
Figure 3 Unilever Sustainable Progress209550381000
"Unilever is practicing within their organization and along with external parties to eliminate deforestation from their supply chain process, for support and protect human rights and tackle climate change. By 2023, Unilever intends to have a supply chain that with deforestation-free. This implies that by the end of 2023, their raw materials will be verified as also being deforestation and conversion-free First and foremost, they focus on their supply chains for palm oil, paper and board, tea, soy, and cocoa. These supply chain processes account for over 65 percent of Unilever's total land impact – and are the crops the more commonly associated with deforestation and upgrading of existing ecological systems to cropland."
They need awareness and recognizing of the origins of their raw materials to bring an end to deforestation. This is especially the case for the crucial first mile - the distance between where product is procured and where it is first processed. To accomplish this, they are making investments in tracking and tracing and transparency projects that are assisted by technological solutions. They are also working to strengthen their supplier requirements, to encourage producers and small farmers to protect and revitalize their land, and to continue their important work in the community with the economy, nongovernmental organizations, and government agencies. According to that Unilever is rapidly concerning sustainable development concepts for achieve their production process. Therefore, Unilever always plan their supply chain process in focusing environmental, social and economic dimension prospects.
08. Implementing of Sustainability in Unilever
One of Unilever science-based targets is to reduce the Greenhouse gas impact of their products by half over their entire lifecycle by 2030. Since 2010, their greenhouse influence for every consumer use has been reduced by 10%, especially compared to a recalculated benchmark. They are making steady progress, particularly in Food & Freshness and Home Healthcare, in which they have reduced emissions by 30% and 37%, respectively, since 2010, potentially due to disposals, asset allocation adjustments, as well as, inside the scenario of Residential Services, a decrease in phosphates in their household cleaning products. Emissions in the Beauty and Hygiene Products Section have increased by 10%, mainly acquiring brand products with high greenhouse gas emissions related to consumer hot water usages, such as hair and shower products. Since launching the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan in 2010, they've learned a lot about which areas they can influence and which they can't, as well as which areas necessitate relatively broad intervention from those other actors, such as the transition of programmers and technologies to much more renewable power. Innovation and technology seem essential in dealing with climate change and generating the market opportunities that a low-carbon economic system can provide.
Unilever has met its goal of providing 100 % of the grid electricity used in its renewable generation operations by 2020. Further, they meet 51.9 percent of global energy requirements for their production processes from renewable sources, including on-site biomass, solar, wind, and hydroelectricity. They are achieving an intervening period target of 50 percent of Unilever power generation from renewable sources for 2020.
Unilever purchased the three direct coal-burning factories in 2020. One of the difficulties with many of the sites that are using indirect coal is that existing legislation prevents them from using renewable energy. Therefore, they plan to avoid using direct coal by the end of 2021 at the three factories they purchased in 2020. They are investigating the alternatives for eliminating indirect coal. When establishing its target for greenhouse gas emissions, Unilever has expanded its focus beyond its production plants to include international operations. Unilever's goal has adapted from becoming carbon positive to accomplishing zero carbon emissions from their operational processes by 2030.

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