Paste your essay in here… What are the key characteristics of a sustainable enterprise and how can organisations become more sustainable?
In this modern economic system, Capitalism, engaging a business to achieve a successful point could happen easier than entrepreneur would anticipate, with the afford and well prepare plan a new successful reputation dose not difficult to reach. But to maintain the accomplish, or in another word is to make business be sustainable, this would require much more afford. Thus, the key purpose of this essay aims to clarify the key characteristics of a sustainable enterprise. Firstly, this essay will examine at the basic concept of a sustainable enterprise and a sustainable business development to understand the meaning and scope of what will we going to talk about. Secondly, it will look into the key characteristics in relation to the economic, environmental, and social aspects, respectively. Finally, it will look at a case study of key characteristics, and sum up the key development of the example enterprise had work through. A case study which will be analyse within this essay represents how each aspect applies in practice. Moreover, some suggestion to sustainability will also be provided.
According to M. D’heur (2015), although sustainability is defined in several distinct ways since the scope of its definition is rather broad. For instance, it ranges from environmental protection to conservation of resources, a habitat preservation, biodiversity, recyclable or pollution-free products, including the sustainability operations in terms of stability, and fair working conditions. The first well-known definition was introduced by the Brundlandt Commission (1987, p.2):
Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. An economy where natural resources are used only to the extent that they can regenerate. (cited in M. D’heur, 2015)
After that, various explanation was created and the next acceptable idea was introduced in the terms of Corporate Societal Responsibility and sustainability are interchangeable by the European Union Commission in October 2011: “CSR is the responsibility of enterprises for their impacts on society”. However, there is an argument by some critics stating that CSR is already obsolete, it is more extensive to use sustainability, while some suggest that sustainability is a concept that can be contained under CSR. Furthermore, there is another idea that should be considered in this essay, which is Sustainable Value Creation – a concept about a company’s engagement to structure all conditions of its core business (i.e. products and supply chains) in terms of delivering economic, ecological, and societal value-add at the same time (M. D’heur, 2015). To understand more about sustainability improvement in enterprise, we could examine important characteristics of sustainable development in three aspects as follow: (1)economic (2)environment and (3)social.
The first attribute to be evaluated in this paper is the economic aspect. In the term of economic, this refers to the considerations which also are the primary concerns for corporations. Economic could be define as crucial in strategic management development constructs, market evaluations and LCAs, and these are fundamental to understand the established business conditions and directions and are critical in determinations. Sustainability Business Development retains that economic growth should ensure in step with the demands of community and the capabilities of the enterprise. The key characteristics of economic aspect could be evaluated as follow. In the short interval, economics generally advocates the strengthen of business’s leveraging resources. In additionally, market achievement is definitely an important part when analytical economics. It can be evaluated in two terms; short-term earning and long-term profit, or reference to progression productivity and the effectiveness of the results. Effective resolutions have an optimistic B/C ratio, calculating the resulting conditions worth the investment of time, effort, and money. Cost effectiveness and B/C analysis are crucial attentions for determining public plan and corporate decision-making. The following example will be provided to make this short-term aspect easier to understand. The economic movement of the automobile industry go across the society and commercial scales. Financing in new prototypes is fairly easy to justify based on the presented requirement structure and value levels. Fundamental changes that would combine new technologies such as fuel cells may difficulty to recognize and justify. New supplies and abilities have to be established that are initially excessive and have relatively high risks. These evaluations require a more thorough considerate of the dominant and future trends. On the other hand, the long interval for economic growth is important for keeping balance with the increasing global population and for improving circumstances for humanity. To operate on this, economical term, enterprise should develop their philosophy from supply and demand to a general view of economic equivalence.
The second element that this paper will evaluated is environment aspect. Environment is particularly wide and complex division. This paper will focus on conditions and developments which should be consider of and have mechanisms for approach. There are many criteria that company should examine through the processes of scan, monitor, forecast, and assess which are population growth, demographics, mobility, life styles, technological innovation, social expectations, and laws and regulations. These conditions could be investigated by the following process.
Figure 1 A simplified framework for analysis of the business environment
(D. L. Rainey, 2006)
The illustrator presents the procedure of how to analytic business environment in social, political, economic, environmental, market and technological, to achieve life cycle analysis or LCA. The action starts with ‘scanning’. This is the first phase which is the extensive approach. It is used to achieve an empathetic of the business condition by investigate every condition to find important concerns that could be involved to the activities of the organization and to detect early indications of changes that can have direct and indirect effects for the business. After detected factors, the process will continue to the next step which is ‘monitoring’. Concept of this stage is tracking particular conditions and tendencies that have been recognized as significant to the firm. Subsequently, in ‘Forecasting’ stage, it will use gained information to anticipate what is supposed to occur in the upcoming. This predication will be supposed to produce on realistic term as much as it could be. Moving to the last step, ‘Assessing’, on this step the result of scanning, monitoring, and forecasting will be used to deliver the corporation with a clear understanding of the key issues and concerns and the predictable suggestions and impacts of possible corporate actions to exploit or improve them. To have a clear picture of this process, here is an example of a manufacturer. The producer plans to generate a product that mainly uses connectors 100,000 units per year. This company can calculation the amount of lead discards produced per year. It merely requires to recognize the waste generated per unit and the reuse or recycling rate.
The last aspect to be analyzed in this paper is the social aspect. The frame of the social element is society in common. The essential objective of sustainable business development, from a social evaluation, is to achieve accomplishment in the current and invent a much better future through value creation. The overall objectives are to growth customer value and benefits, expand stakeholder interactions and positions, improve employee and contractor opportunities, outcomes, and rewards, and to increase shareholder wealth and value, all on a simultaneous base. In fact, the social and environment aspect have been in the same concernment in practice as Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). CSR can be identified in simple term as corporations have a fiduciary responsibility to equally meet the requirements and desires of clients and stakeholders and protect the wellbeing and security of humanity and the natural environment. To illustrate, outsourcing convinced activities may reduce directly to business responsibilities for the litters and ecological effects generated by the processes of the dealers or suppliers of suppliers. However, such methods (outsourcing) do not lessen the social responsibilities of the organization. The effects and consequences are still straight linked to the corporation’s judgements. The enterprise chose the address of the creation and the variety of suppliers, and it administers the flow of activities that led to the influences and consequences. Outsourcing does not moderate social responsibility.
In conclusion, a sustainable enterprise is one of a rather broadly topic. A concept of sustainable is how to retain something permanently as far as it could. So sustainable business is how to retain business model or business development on a successful track by keeping balance between corporation and other factors, both internal and external element. Considering there are various aspects that needed a corporate examine. This paper has given key characteristics from three aspects; economic, environment, and social which may be the most important features that should be evaluate. However, even though key characteristics are quite perceivable but the usage of each factor should be aware of other elements that could happen by unexpecting. A well prepare plan for business development and more examination in resemble area should be recognize as one of important alternative to be complete afterwards.