Tips to becoming more sustainable & eco-friendly with ERP solutions

Sustainability and eco-friendly options are increasingly finding themselves at the core of how businesses act and operate. With climate change posing a very real and imminent threat, it’s time to do your part to reduce emissions and help combat the future threats to our ways of operations and life.

With a growing push across many industries - businesses are being pushed to provide more environmentally sustainable ways of working. Consumers are looking for eco-friendly products and will favour businesses that work to lower their environmental impacts on our planet.  

For example, this is especially true for the furniture industry, which has long been associated with exotic materials and intensive manufacturing processes. Buyers actively look for eco-friendly products for their homes and working environments. The shift towards sustainability has grown in significance, in some ways because of government action including the target of achieving net zero by 2050. 

And according to Statista, over 3.5 million metric tons of plastics are also thrown away as waste in the UK each year. One way that you can make a difference is to implement the “Three R's” to sustainability: reduce, reuse and recycle, everything that you’re able to, including discarded plastic packaging. 

Before going into the Tips, let’s set the scene - learn how implementing ERP can be the big step you need towards sustainable manufacturing, and how this can yield returns for your bottom line in the long run                                                             

What is ERP? 

ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning software and effectively acts as a comprehensive business management tool through which you can track and trace all aspects of your operations. From where resources are being spent across your business, the rate at which they are being used, right through to automatically preparing plans for future batches or forecasting demand.  

You gain full control over your resources - both materials and people – understand where they are coming from and going to, with the ability to highlight any inefficiencies that may be present in your production processes. Although ERP is primarily used to plan manufacturing and distribution processes and resources, ERP is also capable of supporting your human resource management.                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

Become more sustainable, read the 6 Top Tips 
 

Tip 1 – The benefits of reducing, reusing and recycling 

Research from Nielsen suggests that your customers are very likely to care about how you are implementing strategies to impact your environmental footprint. You may find that your “reduce, reuse and recycling” efforts will save money on raw materials, help you avoid Plastic Packaging Tax charges, and make your business more appealing to your customers. 

Businesses are legally responsible for disposing of their own waste appropriately and by using the “Three R's”, you will naturally become more cost-effective, plus by generating less waste you’ll have reduced the need to dispose of masses of waste. 

By using an ERP system you can use the software to help you plan how to get the most out of your materials, resulting in both lower waste and greater levels of control across your business processes. Facilitating your commitment to a more sustainable way of working, the best ERP solutions include a planning and scheduling module, housing the tools you need to enable optimisation of your process flows, streamline orders and deliveries, as well as track or cut down on your overall packaging volumes and costs.                                                                                                                                                                                                       

Tip 2 – Considering plastic what can you do? 

ERP software solutions help businesses like yours to streamline operations for efficiency, but how can your business become more efficient in your plastic consumption? 

When it comes to the plastic packaging that you specifically use to ship your orders, have you considered any strategies to combine orders, in order to reduce the overall packaging used? Can you implement lean processes to ensure you are not over-ordering, are optimising the volumes used and have systems in place that ensure waste is kept to a minimum? 

Are you able to reuse any of the packaging? It’s worth asking your team members to find out if anyone could repurpose boxes or protective wrap or gifts or moving house. 

For any packaging you are unable to reuse, have you considered if there are alternative recycling options available, instead of sending it to a landfill? All these things are worth considering. You’ll not only make your workspaces more pleasant places to work, but you’ll also have the benefit of knowing that your business is reducing its carbon footprint, and ultimately its impact on the planet.                                                                                                                                                                                                              

Tip 3 – Assess efficiencies 

Large teams, with each person operating their own processes, can have a surprisingly significant impact on the environment. Employees commuting to and from the workplace or to customers and supplier sites can lead to higher individual carbon footprints, which in turn contribute to your overall environmental impact as a business. Manufacturing and distribution ERP systems give you a stronger overview of your workplace rotas and shift patterns, helping you to set hours in the most effective manner and around machine runtimes or cycles to ensure efficient end-to-end oversight or handover, as required.  

Additionally, machinery or production equipment that is stopped and started continuously can take longer to get up to speed, use more fuel or cause issues if operating temperatures or conditions are not met - resulting in negative impacts on the sustainability of your business.                                                                                                                                                                               

Tip 4 – How to make your manufacturing processes more eco-friendly? 

The manufacturing operations that your business engages in day-in, day-out are at the forefront of sustainable changes, from streamlining daily tasks to complying with new environmental legislations. There are many tools available to support your manufacturing industry to improve and maximise sustainability efforts, and the most powerful tool may be the environmental management system:                                                                                                                                                                                            

What is an EMS? 

An environmental management system, or EMS, is a framework that you can use to monitor and track your environmental performance. Those that adopt a framework of this type are likely to work in a more sustainable and lean way, as well as taking advantage of a number of benefits such as: 

• Helping you design environmental responsibilities for team members
• Identify areas where waste can be reduced, such as raw materials and waste disposal costs
• Lower wastage and increases profits
• Create a transparent framework for auditing
• Lower the risk of fines, due to non-compliance with environmental regulations
• Record and monitor environmental performance
• Certification to evidence your commitment to environmental sustainability

Additional environmental approaches to consider 

Although EMS provide an excellent foundation to build a more sustainable focus across your manufacturing business, there are a few other methods you could consider 

• Eco-design: both a principal and an approach that enables you to assess your environmental impact. It allows you to look at your processes and identify areas to eliminate wastage, such as using sustainable materials wherever possible
• Regular inspections: monitoring workplace processes to ensure waste is minimised can also help. Little changes can often make the biggest impacts, compounding over time, so consider the ‘how’ in your processes, for example, the how behind the way you cut certain components, or highlight whether there are more efficient ways to do activities
• Responsible sourcing: by nature the manufacturing industry uses a vast variety of materials, regardless of your sector this could go against sustainable practices. Making sure your materials are responsibly sourced can help you to grow customer trust, attract new buyers, from groups you might not have considered before, and ensures your business is doing all it can to be sustainable
• Remanufacturing and recycling: assess the scope to build in remanufacturing practices to your organisation and understand the impact this has on your wider carbon footprint, are the energy costs lower when compared to from scratch manufacture? It has been shown that recycling can be as high as 85 to 95% less energy-intensive than the manufacturing processes involved in the creation of new products. Moreover, any leftover scraps can be reused, which also improves sustainability efforts

Tip 5 – Familiarise yourself with the plastic packaging tax 

This new type of tax came into effect in April 2022, it impacts: 

• All UK customers who receive plastic packaging or goods 
• UK plastic packaging manufacturers and shipping organisations, as well as  

• Business customers of UK-made plastic packaging 

The tax does not apply to manufacturers and shipping organisations that use 10 tons of plastic or less per year

 Designed to help reduce the amount of plastic used in packaging, the tax encourages businesses across the production, manufacturing, food manufacturing and many other manufacturing segments to rethink how they use or rely on plastic packaging. 

The tax does not apply to any plastic packaging made out of 30% or more recycled plastic, or any packaging which is not mainly plastic, with the hope that it will motivate more businesses to consciously use more recycled materials in their operations. 

Tip 6 – Control the resources 

One of the most concerning factors at the heart of climate change is materials being overused. By using more than the planet can keep up with, specifically natural resources, we as the manufacturing industry are creating significant damage that the world may either, take decades to recover from, or may not even be able to recover at all. ERP solutions allow you to track your resources, plan for demand and factor in waste to make sure that you are not using more than you need to.  

For example, being able to keep track of what you have used means that you won't find yourself ordering far more resources than you need to meet your planned production goals. Considering the knock-on effects of cleaning or finishing processes, which are likely to use resources such as water and energy. Where excessive us isn't just ideal. ERP solutions, integrated into your business processes will give you visibility to track and monitor, in turn helping you to protect your bank balance by preventing overordering and taxations which are likely to become the norm when operating un-environmentally friendly practices.                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

Reduce the volume of unused materials 

ERP doesn't just track what you're using and when, it also suggests which materials you should order to create your products with smart recommendations. This allows you to order more intelligently, and without fear of wastage, examples of this might include cutting a small shape from a board of material only to dispose of the rest. ERP gives you the power to optimise your ordering and production methods, ensuring that you forward plan to either order, stock and use only what you need. This means that fewer materials need to be harvested from the world around us, helping you to generate fewer emissions as an indirect output of what you order, and how it’s delivered, processed or assembled and shipped. 

 It’s understandable that making changes to your workplace operations can seem like a challenge, particularly if you rely on a suite of heavily manual processes. This is where a fully integrated ERP system can help you to not only digitalise and modernise your operations but also to give you a moment to stop, assess and revamp your whole process in the most meaningful of ways. ERP value, amongst other things, sits within the ability to build in automations and workflow into your existing processes to make them quicker or more agile. Manufacturing or distributing products that allow customisation or offer hundreds of variations? No problem - a product configurator is exactly what you need, whilst the main system will help you track the cost of recycled materials, create an audit trail that helps you to document and deliver your environmental strategies, and optimise processes to maximise raw material utilisation and reduce waste. 

 If your business needs a solution that will give you the confidence to achieve future success, contact us today for more information.

Set the foundation for your plans by conducting your own in-house business review workshop - get your hands on our free business review template here:

Start your journey to digitalisation and go green along the way with a new business management system – helping you to improve workforce productivity and reduce your carbon footprint at the same time!