Sustainable Development

Executive summary

Sustainable Development

Water and energy are both highly stressed sectors currently undergoing massive transformations. This transition phase is unsettled and presents many opportunities for customers to assist in guiding the discussion and development of the future regulatory environment, protect past investments, and to evaluate new investments to reduce their operating costs and comply with regulatory mandates like greenhouse gas emission reductions. Water: the procurement, treatment, distribution, and wastewater treatment are energy intensive, and proposed methods to address water quality and availability concerns as well as adapting to climate variations are even more energy intensive and costly. Improvements in water system energy efficiency and the development of alternatives like renewable energy can be quite cost effective options with rapid paybacks, and can not only improve operating budgets but can significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions with relatively minor costs. The digitization of water system data also offers unique opportunities in system optimization, customer service, and the development of new revenue channels. The water infrastructure repair global market is being driven by unprecedented need for water infrastructure repair, global and regional population growth, climate changes, and new and emerging technologies. Energy: the intersection of dropping renewable energy costs, plummeting energy storage costs, and the digitization of utility data, and the imposition of greenhouse gas reduction targets is forcing utilities to radically change their business model. The monolithic electric utilities that generated power and then shipped it to customers over their wires are being forced by the availability of customer generation, energy storage, electric vehicles, digital appliances, and enhanced customer information to change their business plan in order to survive. This transition will change what opportunities customers have for electric service, what customers pay for electricity services, how they pay for those services, what customer responsibilities are with regards to their operation, and will present opportunities and challenges as incentives, and penalties, as well as changes in responsibilities become more common in the new electric utility industry. New and emerging technologies and policies present challenges for many customers. Customer need guidance from an active and knowledgeable participant in the transition. Knowledge of the available technologies as well as the transition environment and the regulatory framework that is being modified is essential for positioning customers to take advantage of these changes and position themselves for the future.

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Service Methodology

Four questions need to be answered: 1) Where are we now? 2) Where do we want to be? 3) How do we get there? 4) How do we measure progress?

Action 1

Survey the history and current position. One of the most important components of planning is an initial evaluation of historical and current activities. From the evaluation, the organization should identify its strengths and weaknesses and determine its opportunities and threats. The evaluation of the past and current activities should include a thorough review of all aspects of its structure and operation including: scope; organization; personnel; fiscal resources; relationships and regulatory burden.

Action 2

Identify Future Directions and Needs. Identifying future directions and needs which must be considered and addressed in strategic plans. There must also be an identification of new and emerging technologies, which impact activities and the changing needs of services provided.

Action 3

Define Objectives and Actions and Assign Priorities. Develop a statement of objectives that includes a clearly defined purpose-measured process in an achievable time schedule. Qualitative as well as quantitative measurements are useful when developing objective statements.

Action 4

Develop Goals to Meet Objectives. Develop a statement for each goal that includes a clearly defined purpose-measured process in a specific time period. Multiple goals may be required to meet a particular objective timelines and responsibilities.

The emphasis for this consulting service is water and energy. While water and energy are inextricably linked, they are often evaluated independently of each other. Combining their evaluation into a more integrated approach to address the challenges and opportunities of the water-energy nexus can have significant benefits for organizations and companies.

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Service Options

Companies can elect whether they just require Appleton Greene for advice and support with the Bronze Client Service, for research and performance analysis with the Silver Client Service, for facilitating departmental workshops with the Gold Client Service, or for complete process planning, development, implementation, management and review, with the Platinum Client Service. Ultimately, there is a service to suit every situation and every budget and clients can elect to either upgrade or downgrade from one service to another as and when required, providing complete flexibility in order to ensure that the right level of support is available over a sustainable period of time, enabling the organization to compensate for any prescriptive or emergent changes relating to: Customer Service; E-business; Finance; Globalization; Human Resources; Information Technology; Legal; Management; Marketing; or Production.

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Service Mission

Organizations and companies are constantly challenged to manage complex and changing problems with limited resources. They must address new as well as ongoing responsibilities while containing and even reducing costs. A strategic plan is essential for success. Strategic planning requires broad-scale information gathering, an exploration of alternatives and an emphasis on the future implications of present decisions. It facilitates communication and participation and fosters orderly decision-making and successful implementation. A strategic plan is a practical action-oriented guide, based on an examination of internal and external factors, which directs goal-setting and resource allocation to achieve results over time. A strategic plan develops 1) a clear statement of the current status and mission and vision, 2) identifies a set of goals and objectives, 3) formulates key strategies that address those factors that are essential to the plan’s success, 4) assigns resources and responsibility for implementing components, and 5) develops evaluation metrics to determine progress in plan implementation. After the objective statements and established goals to achieve its objectives are established, the next step is to identify the implementation tasks for each goal. Establishing a plan to achieve each goal is essential to enable the determination of the required effort, the timing of that effort, the available resources, and the assignment of responsibilities.

The development of specific and measurable metrics and strategies, used to accomplish the stated goals and objective results in detailed work (action) plans. These work plans lead to resource allocations, responsibility assignments, and schedules for implementation. An Action Plan is a detailed description of the strategies used to implement an objective. Action plans break strategies into manageable parts for coordinated implementation of goals and objectives. Task specification includes: staff assignments; material resource allocations and schedules for completion. Action plans specify detailed cost and expenditure information and are often referred to as “operational plans” or “implementation plans.”

Perhaps one constant today is the notion of change. Increasing demands for services, shrinking resource bases, increased regulatory burdens, and greater expectations for service all combine to form a dynamic environment. Successful planning uses regular reviews and updates to check progress and reassess the validity of the plan based on changes in the environment it is operating in. The plan can be updated to make the adjustments necessary to respond to changing circumstances and take advantage of emerging opportunities. It sets targets for performance, incorporates ways to check progress, and provides guidance for on-going operational and capital plans and budgets. Intermediate performance measure targets should be established for each objective that represents incremental improvement.

Measuring progress in the execution of strategic plans consists of regular reviews and evaluations. The reviews should address objectives, goals, tasks, and target dates. Evaluations should determine whether the execution of the plan is producing the necessary accomplishments in the expected time frame. These regular reviews and evaluations are necessary to determine if progress toward meeting the objectives is on schedule. If needed, appropriate, corrective actions should be identified and implemented. Performance Accountability is a means of judging policies and programs by measuring their progress towards achieving agreed-upon performance targets. Performance accountability systems are composed of three component-defining performance measures including: outcomes; measuring performance and reporting results.

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Service objectives

The following list represents the Key Service Objectives (KSO) for the Appleton Greene Sustainable Development service.

1. Sustainable development
   Sustainable development is development that meets procurement goals while maintaining the ability of natural systems to continue to provide the natural resources and environmental services upon which the economy and society depend. Sustainable development is the organizing principle for providing resources necessary for the needs of current and future generations. It meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Two sectors, water and energy, are critical candidates for any sustainability program. Both are in a current state of transition, and both can include a variety of options for customers – from choices in supply to changes in operations. Water: the procurement, treatment, distribution, and waste water treatment are energy intensive, and proposed methods to address water quality and availability concerns as well as adapting to climate variations are even more energy intensive and costly. Improvements in water system energy efficiency and the development of alternatives like renewable energy can be quite cost effective options with rapid paybacks, and can not only improve operating budgets but can significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions with relatively minor costs. The digitization of water system data also offers unique opportunities in system optimization, customer service, and the development of new revenue channels. The water infrastructure repair global market is being driven by unprecedented need for water infrastructure repair, global and regional population growth, climate changes, and new and emerging technologies. Energy: the intersection of dropping renewable energy costs, plummeting energy storage costs, and the digitization of utility data, and the imposition of greenhouse gas reduction targets is forcing utilities to radically change their business model.. The monolithic electric utilities that generated power and then shipped it to customers over their wires are being forced by the availability of customer generation, energy storage, electric vehicles, digital appliances, and enhanced customer information to change their business plan in order to survive. This transition will change what opportunities customers have for electric service, what customers pay for electricity services, how they pay for those services, what customer responsibilities are with regards to their operation, and will present opportunities and challenges as incentives, and penalties, as well as changes in responsibilities become more common in the new electric utility industry.
2. Business continuity
   Business continuity, that is to say, maintaining a successful business, depends upon addressing both the demand and supply (production) side. A business continuity plan consists of: 1) Performing a business impact analysis, 2) Identifying recovery strategies, 3) Developing overarching plan and individual unit plans, 4) training and exercising plans, 5) Analysing lessons learned, 6) Improving processes. The key to this process is the business impact assessment. Business continuity has two sub branches in its taxonomy; internal events and external events that could disrupt business operations. A business impact assessment identifies: what risk scenarios are relevant, mission critical functions, critical resources (including staff, equipment, facilities, materials, and systems), time frame for each mission-critical function to recover, and how to protect mission essential functions and critical resources and mitigate interruptions. Emphasis for this consulting service is water and energy. While water and energy are inextricably linked, they are often evaluated independently of each other. Combining their evaluation into a more integrated approach to address the challenges and opportunities of the water-energy nexus can have significant benefits for organizations and companies.
3. Resilience
   Resilience is the ability an organization has to quickly adapt to disruptions while maintaining continuous operations and safeguarding people, assets and overall brand equity. Business resilience goes a step beyond disaster recovery by offering post-disaster strategies to avoid costly downtime, shore up vulnerabilities and maintain business operations in the face of additional, unexpected breaches. Availability, recovery, security and compliance processes and techniques must be managed concurrently to create an infrastructure that can sustain true business resiliency. One of the key challenges is assessing risk versus cost. How vulnerable are you and how much will it cost to protect you? Business resiliency is the maturation and integration of the individual disciplines of crisis management, incident response, business continuity, disaster recovery and pandemic planning into one integrated set of processes and capabilities that work collectively. This approach allows businesses and organizations to have minimal disruption in the event of an incident that affects the entire organization. Business resiliency is the ability of a business to spring back from a disruption to its operations. Business continuity and disaster recovery have historically focused on a business’ ability to recover from a disruption. Recovery implies that there was downtime during which business operations were unavailable. Resiliency, on the other hand, implies that an event may have affected a business’ operations but the business was never completely unavailable. All organizations experience failures or other impacts to business operations at some point, so it is critical for all services to be both designed for uptime and prepared for failures. Resiliency is tightly aligned to business strategy. It takes a holistic approach to risk management, and it strives to minimize outage time by embedding resiliency and workarounds into everything the organization does–from business processes to corporate and data center site selection to enterprise architecture and application development.
4. Water & Energy
   Present day water and energy systems are interdependent. Water is used in all phases of energy production and electricity generation. Energy is required to extract, convey, and deliver water of appropriate quality for diverse human uses, and then again to treat wastewater prior to their return to the environment. While water and energy are inextricably linked, they are often evaluated independently of each other. Combining their analysis in a more integrated approach to address the challenges and opportunities of the water-energy nexus can have significant benefits for organizations and companies. For example, reducing water consumption almost always reduces energy use, but the energy benefit is rarely credited to the water reduction technology. Water: the procurement, treatment, distribution, and wastewater treatment are energy intensive, and proposed methods to address water quality and availability concerns as well as adapting to climate variations are even more energy intensive and costly. Improvements in water system energy efficiency and the development of alternatives like renewable energy can be quite cost effective options with rapid paybacks, and can not only improve operating budgets but can significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions with relatively minor costs. The digitization of water system data also offers unique opportunities in system optimization, customer service, and the development of new revenue channels. The water infrastructure repair global market is being driven by unprecedented need for water infrastructure repair, global and regional population growth, climate changes, and new and emerging technologies. Energy: the intersection of dropping renewable energy costs, plummeting energy storage costs, and the digitization of utility data, and the imposition of greenhouse gas reduction targets is forcing utilities to radically change their business model.. The monolithic electric utilities that generated power and then shipped it to customers over their wires are being forced by the availability of customer generation, energy storage, electric vehicles, digital appliances, and enhanced customer information to change their business plan in order to survive. This transition will change what opportunities customers have for electric service, what customers pay for electricity services, how they pay for those services, what customer responsibilities are with regards to their operation, and will present opportunities and challenges as incentives, and penalties, as well as changes in responsibilities become more common in the new electric utility industry.
5. Operations improvement
   Operations and process improvement enables organizations to increase effectiveness by understanding, optimizing and aligning activities and processes to maximize output and returns on improvement initiatives. By strategically integrating operational processes, people and technology, organizations can make more effective decisions, increase value and drive higher levels of efficiency organization-wide. It is critical for organizations to improve the performance of their personnel and operational processes to increase effectiveness. Operations improvement can require new resources, thinking, new methods and new techniques for monitoring and measuring so organizations can fully understand, optimize and align processes to achieve strategic objectives. All businesses and organizations need and use water and energy. Emphasis for this consulting service is water and energy. While water and energy are inextricably linked, they are often evaluated independently of each other. Combining their evaluation into a more integrated approach to address the challenges and opportunities of the water-energy nexus can have significant benefits for organizations and companies.
6. Climate compliance
   A relatively recent force that is impacting organizations and companies worldwide is response to climate change, both voluntary and mandated efforts. Water and energy are the two most fundamental ingredients of modern civilization and the use of water and the use of energy are intricately intertwined. Each of these commodities has a significant impact on the other. We consume massive quantities of water to generate energy, and we consume massive quantities of energy to deliver clean water. The extraction, treatment, distribution, and use of water followed by the collection and treatment of wastewater require a lot of energy; likewise, the production of energy requires a lot of water. The analysis of an organizations water and energy footprint simultaneously can provide significant strides in climate compliance. By evaluating the energy and resultant greenhouse gas emissions, reductions associated with water reductions can be a valuable compliance mechanism for any organization.
7. Adaptive strategies
   Organizations and companies face more volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity than ever before, requiring an expanded kind of approach to strategy. Three attributes are essential for survival in a changing environment: readiness, responsiveness, and resilience. Responsiveness (or agility) means the organization can respond quickly to changes in the environment and begin to act while plans are still being finalized; is flexible in process and structure; and can deal with short cycle times. Resilience (or robustness) is the ability an organization has to quickly adap