Turning to sustainable business practices offers companies a great deal of potential, and there are many areas that serve as low-hanging fruit. According to a recent KM World report, these include transitioning to energy-efficient electronic records management systems and enlisting operational procedures that support compliance with environmental regulations. Furthermore, organizations can use videoconferencing to reduce travel and turn to specific knowledge management solutions that enable sustainability.
While these gains are all considerable, getting diverse technologies to mesh for effective process-level improvements can be challenging without adequate support. This is clearly visible in the efforts of EDP Renewables North America, a wind energy organization that recently began a major project to enable more sustainable knowledge management processes and use those improvements to support broad environmental-efficiency goals, the report said.
Stephan Blasilli, corporate development manager at EDP Renewables North America, told the news source the system needed to enable better collaboration among geographically diverse field workers by giving them quantifiable facts to solve day-to-day problems.
To overcome the process and technological challenges that come with engaging in sustainable knowledge management practices, EDP Renewables North America turned to Appian, the news source explained. Initially, the organization was considering a standard business process management software system to improve knowledge management and enable sustainability. However, Blasilli told the news source the company needed a more flexible system than traditional BPM options and, therefore, chose an Appian case management solution.
"One of our key issues was to prioritize work at the different sites. Everyone was aware of the top issues, but we wanted a robust decision support system that was based on very specific criteria and could track all our issues," Blasilli told KM World.
BPM and case management solutions can support organizations trying to employ more sustainable practices because they give companies a way to refine their data gathering and distribution processes so workers can access the information they need quickly, efficiently and without having to go through a variety of technological or communication channels. This is possible because the technology integrates data systems and ensures employees have access to the knowledge they need to support ongoing processes at optimal efficiency. As a result, workers can get the job done without having to deal with unnecessary processes that are easily automated by the software.
