Allanah Kidd (Ravensdown)
Credit: Provided
Christchurch-based fertilizer and agrichemical coop Ravensdown is using Deloitte and ServiceNow to tackle the serious challenge of improving sustainability.
Introducing coop sustainability manager Allanah Kidd at ServiceNow’s Knowledge conference in May, Deloitte’s lead partner for climate and sustainability, Allan Mills, asked for a show of hands from the audience.
“Who has worked with a sustainability manager before?” he asked.
“There are a couple. For a lot of people who work in the ServiceNow space, I’m sure they don’t realize there are sustainability managers.”
That stands as a further example of how the company’s platform continues to win adoption in areas well removed from its traditional IT service management role.
Mills told the audience he was working to focus on the environmental and social impacts of the business and supporting Ravensdown’s cause of “smart farming for a better New Zealand”.
“Through this we provide products, expertise and technology to enable farmers to reduce their environmental impacts while optimizing value from the land,” explains Mills.
Ravensdown reports annually using an integrated reporting framework, but is looking for a way to better integrate the UN sustainable development goals into business.
For that reason, Ravensdown and Deloitte worked together to co-design a tool based on ServiceNow that worked well for the business and demonstrated a measurable contribution made towards achieving goals.
“The great thing about the ServiceNow tool is that it’s very easy to customize and the great thing about goals is that there’s no business they can’t apply to,” Kidd said.
The purpose of the tool is to educate and raise awareness about the goals of sustainable development and to demonstrate and measure significant contributions for business planning and reporting.
Each goal is supported by a number of indicators that need to be captured and measured.
“It’s also important that goals and targets transcend all areas of the business and not be one-off,” Kidd said. “If your business is goal-driven, you’ll have KPIs and targets rather than aligning with goals.”
For Ravensdown, that means areas such as environmental management, staff development, industrial processes, procurement, product development and more.
“The main focus though is positive impact rather than responsible business as usual,” Kidd said.
Harald Heimensen, the partner responsible for innovation on the ServiceNow platform at Deloitte and the NZ ServiceNow alliance, said to build confidence in Ravensdown and ensure the team was creating something fit for purpose, it was important to work closely with subject matter experts.
“We can build tools on the ServiceNow platform, we have a lot of technology people, but the opportunity for us to work with a maintenance leader, someone in the industry … that really gave us the opportunity, Heimensen said.
“It was really co-design and I’m very thankful to Ravensdown that they made their sustainability team, not just Allanah but the whole team, available for us to work for three months on a ServiceNow application that is fit for purpose, designed and built with sustainability leaders, not just technology people.”
Heimensen says the tool needs to go beyond metrics as well, to create a culture around sustainability. While there is a reporting dashboard and data delivered from integrations with other systems, the most important thing is that culture.
“We have this portal available for the whole organization so people can submit their suggestions and their ideas and it can be big but it can also be small,” he said.
Although Deloitte has invested heavily in building its sustainability practice and the consultants are very good at developing concepts, it needs to be made real and whatever is built really needs to work in the industry.
“There’s no limit to what we can do on the platform and so our people expect us to do it,” Heimensen said. “They look forward to it.”
The tool developed at Ravensdown not only integrates reporting, it also takes the next step to allow people to work with that data.
“So they can see what they need to do and see when they need to do it. They can also look and see what the organization is doing and how it contributes and maybe have a good idea.”
These great ideas can be sent directly to the leadership team for approval and action.
Tag sustainabilityagricultureServiceNowRavensdown
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