Positive initiatives drive Capgemini’s commitment to sustainability

It’s difficult for an organization to consider its evolution without factoring in its responsibilities to the environment and society.

Targets such as increased business insight, greater efficiency, more seamless processes, and better user experience ought to be joined by a commitment to become carbon neutral. Sustainability and efficiency are linked – the more efficient we are, the less resources or energy we spend. And the positive impact of truly sustainable engagements on employees and customers is the cherry on the cake.

In this article, some of our leaders share insights on how Capgemini is helping its clients drive sustainability into their business operations, and how they leverage our Frictionless Enterprise approach to deliver sustainable outcomes.

Tim Szymanski – Go-To-Market Manager

How can organizations balance sustainability and profitability? Capgemini helps our clients balance service, quality, and cost so that they get the outcomes that matter to them. We also help clients connect with and understand their customers more – meaning operations, products, and services can evolve profitably and responsibly.

When clients drive sustainability and optimize customer operations, there are immediate, long-term benefits. We help our clients increase productivity, improve quality, and reduce cost. This also positively impacts the environment, as greater operational efficiency leverages less energy, consumes fewer natural resources, and produces less waste.

We help our clients achieve their sustainability goals by reducing the environmental impact of their enterprise IT. We do this by creating an organization-wide culture around net-zero objectives. We also work with clients to identify emissions hotspots and identify ways to reduce their carbon footprint. This is important as a majority of organizations that are committed to a sustainable IT roadmap see improved environmental, social, and governance (ESG) scores, increased customer satisfaction, and tax savings as a direct result of sustainable IT practices.

Elle Sanchez – Digital Transformation Manager

Sustainability is now on client agendas more than ever when Capgemini transforms processes with our clients.

As an example, when we recently looked at the impact of paper throughout a client’s end-to-end processes such as order-to-cash – this review encompassed everything from printing receipts and billing, all the way to the invoice coming in and how the client has to print and file it correctly. We looked at how much this client could save on paper and how much it cost them to print each invoice, ultimately leading the client to net savings of £300,000.

Capgemini’s Frictionless Enterprise approach makes outcomes such as this a reality by breaking down silos between different departments to make processes more efficient and eco-friendly. Digital ways of working always end up driving sustainable outcomes even if the initial goal is something else, such as improving customer experience.

In our client’s scenario, intelligent automation not only helped to eliminate manual effort, but also caused a reduction in friction by reducing paper usage, which led to a reduction in our client’s carbon footprint. A sustainable approach is inherently frictionless and improves customer experience and increases brand loyalty.

Antoine Starek – HR Senior Transformation Director

Many of our clients’ sustainability targets relate to people. From reducing carbon footprints to recycling to fitness programs – most of these initiatives are either enabled by people or influenced by their actions. At Capgemini, we enable our clients to achieve these goals through more digital interactions and easier communications between their workforces and the HR policies that drive them.

The main outcomes for our clients who embrace sustainability are increased efficiency, happier employees, reduced carbon footprint, increased effectiveness, and significantly reduced costs. Digitally-enabled HR processes reduce the need to come to the office, send paperwork via post, and complete other carbon-generating activities.

We consistently keep sustainability in mind by ensuring employees are made aware of Capgemini’s new bike to work program, rideshare options, and our remote working and company fitness plans. We also help decarbonize HR processes and limit the amount of paper used across the organization. It feels good to do good!

Eloise Hebert – Executive Program Manager

The recent shift towards touchless operations and the implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) into customer operations has brought huge changes for our clients and Capgemini. Adopting a data-driven approach to our business is helping our clients streamline their data architecture by designing more sustainable and efficient processes. This is enabling frictionless operations and remote working models, while still having access to key information.

Key outcomes for our clients’ business processes include a much better carbon footprint and enhanced time-effectiveness through streamlining data access via cloud native solutions that break down silos and store everything in a single space. It’s also less energy-consuming as a result.

Through our combined aim of achieving sustainability and a customer-first agenda, we reduce our clients’ carbon footprint, while delivering a highly personalized experience and building meaningful relationships with their customers. It’s a win-win situation!

Agata Kasperek-Karwowska – Automation Architect

At Capgemini, we leverage sustainability goals to ensure the organizational outcomes we deliver have a positive environmental effect across function. Within the planning area we are helping our clients balance their demand and supply operations by enabling touchless planning capabilities to avoid overproduction. The trend at present results in lower inventory levels, leading to a reduction in unnecessary warehouse space.

The main outcomes of driving sustainability into our clients’ business processes include reduced CO₂ emissions for both advanced transport and data optimization, reduced waste by going paperless and an advance in end-to-end capabilities to track the origin of goods. These initiatives help the brand attract environmentally-minded customers.

It is believed that eco-friendly endeavors induce additional cost. Through the frictionless = touchless approach we aim for our clients’ organizations to become more sustainable and improve their performance.

Smitha Gopalaiah – Intelligent Automation Delivery Head

I drive robotic process automation (RPA) and AI-based solutions for our clients, driving benefits such as reduced risk, wage costs and workload, improved data quality, increased scope for data collection, improved business results and faster service. Reductions in power usage, tracking and improving the lifecycle of products and a saving of time and resources results in sustainability.

AI solutions mimic human decision-making, reducing the dependency on humans as. These solutions also provide easily scalable and sustainable outcomes, managing changing demands and requirements with ease. RPA also help reduce the need for paper, which helps to save trees and thereby manage CO₂ levels in the atmosphere.

The Frictionless Enterprise fuses clients, engagement leads, the business transformation team, delivery excellence partners, the analytics team, and innovation lab to drive best-in-class automation and business value for clients. It leverages technology including cloud-based solutions to reduce duplicating data. This creates a frictionless environment reducing workload and resources, helping to reduce our carbon footprint.

Kanhiya Singh – Senior Solutions Consultant

The global pandemic has acted as a catalyst to drive our frictionless and sustainability goals. Despite the disruption caused by the pandemic, the increased adoption of remote working has pushed the digital transition. Many of our clients are now open to moving to digitalized, automated operations, which is helping us drive workforce reduction and curb company CO₂ emissions.

Capgemini’s digital products and services encourage sustainability through our digital offerings, and we have observed a 40–50% increase in digitization across the value chain leading to a 20–25% reduction in CO₂ emissions.

Although sustainability is not always the focal point for clients, the “Sustainable Planet” pillar of our Frictionless Enterprise approach acts as the foundation to sustainable business operations as one its inevitable outcomes.

Leveraging a digital twin helps us formulate core business solutions, leveraging an AI-augmented workforce and AI-driven operating models to drive frictionless processing. The more efficient we are, the less resources or energy we spend thereby achieving our organization’s sustainability goals.

Robert Piotrowski – Record-to-Analyze Global Process Owner

More efficient solutions and delivery strategies reduce finance and resource consumption which directly feeds our sustainability agenda. With our platform-based record-to-analyze (R2A) function – a part of our AI.Controllership solution – we enable continuous accounting, continuous close and real time reporting, eliminating extreme effort peaks and supporting well-informed decision-making, driving sustainable outcomes.

Our finance intelligence concept is embedded in all our processes. We provide information allowing procurement to pick up suppliers that are producing in a responsible way and provide analysis enabling us to reduce the storage costs. The R2A function drives overall ESG reporting and provides clarity to business leaders on our sustainability goals.

Efficiency savings up to 50–60% and growth in business revenue are some of the positive outcomes of the Frictionless Enterprise. Although sustainable operations bring tangible financial growth to clients, the motivation behind these initiatives should be to safeguard our planet, humanity, and the next generations. Organizations that keep this in mind will be more successful, as investors, consumers, and employees are engaging green companies more and more.

Sandip Sharma – Director, Digital Supply Chain Solutions

We help our clients reduce their carbon footprint through better planning and optimization of processes. Products need to be distributed to different stores across geographies. However, if the process is not optimized properly, the number of trips a truck makes increases more than it needs to be. Reducing the number of trips or shipments helps reduce CO₂ emissions.

If processes are siloed as opposed to connected and integrated, waste is created in different parts of the supply chain – within the warehouses, distribution centers, and the logistics network. This waste ties up working capital for clients. Reducing it creates a reduction in the overall cost clients incur. Another key performance indicator (KPI) that is positively impacted is the responsiveness to customer demand, which ultimately improves the agility of supply chain processes.

Capgemini’s Frictionless Enterprise concept aims to increase hyper-automation and implement an augmented workforce with the right technology. This improves efficiency and positively impacts sustainability. Making these processes frictionless and seamless has a big impact in terms of waste reduction and lowers the cost of operations.

Scott Manghillis – Business Transformation Manager

There’s a direct correlation between reducing Capgemini’s overall carbon footprint and that of our clients. Our contact center and customer operations solutions reduce friction for both caller and agent, helping our clients speed up the time to answer queries and resolve problems. Because of this, less infrastructure is needed and call centers become more efficient, leading to a significant reduction in the carbon footprint.

We make contact centers more efficient by leveraging digital transformation to reduce the required amount of infrastructure,  shift infrastructure from on-premise to the cloud, and decarbonize through shrinking the overall headcount and the amount of commercial floor space needed.

We provide guidance to our clients on implementing sustainable solutions and retiring their data centers, as well as helping them transform their contact centers to be more efficient. We do this by leveraging our Digital Global Enterprise Model (D-GEM) platform, which can lead to a significant reduction in overall contact center expenses.

Divya Turner – Order-to-Cash Global Process Owner

By driving digital and organizational transformation we secure sustainable outcomes for our clients. An underutilization of resources creates more automation, expanding an organization’s footprint. To combat this, our experts look at optimizing and scaling current processes.

With greater efficiency comes cost-effectiveness. Our clients can channel data more effectively by giving the right information to the right person as opposed to retrieving incorrect data. This makes it easier to provide insights improving overall customer satisfaction.

The Frictionless Enterprise concept is the driving force behind sustainable initiatives and offers monetary benefits by improving days sales outstanding (DSO) processes and working capital. There are a few things we can do that help achieve outcomes that benefit our clients. We can reduce or eliminate manual tasks and ensure people are focusing on strategic, higher-value activities. Thanks to AI and machine learning (ML), learning costs are reduced and time management of resources and knowledge improves.

The effective use of technology and management of resources leads to a streamlining of employee’s activities and workload, which in turn reduces an organization’s energy consumption and waste.

Małgorzata Praczyńska – HR Automation and Improvement Manager

HR is one of the most forgotten teams when it comes to automation and improvement. The HRInnHUB team that I lead – an internal function dedicated to continuous innovation in HR – is on a mission to improve HR processes. We bring automation to HR slowly, avoiding a revolutionary approach. Sustainability in small steps.

Our sustainable solutions deliver next-generation, frictionless outcomes that leverage a human-centric approach. Incorporating technology into HR processes means less manual work for employees leading to faster processing times, thereby eliminating energy waste. Focusing on something smaller and user-friendly like mini bots helps to drive frictionless outcomes.

The Frictionless Enterprise is based on making strategic changes within business frameworks. Rapid change would negatively impact employees – people generally don’t like revolutions. Our people-focused approach prioritizes the health of our employees leading to sustainability outcomes; less manual work is more energy efficient and means less stress for employees.

Parvathy Nair leads marketing and communications for Capgemini’s Business Services.

Read more in this section

Go to the next section >

Back to homepage >