Using standards can help you save energy, save money and help to save the environment.

The UK business community has long used standards to improve the quality and performance of its products, reduce risk, and support reputations. Standards, which can be defined simply as ‘agreed ways of doing things, have provided firms with guidance to help them create repeatable procedures to minimize risks and operate more efficiently.

Particularly in sectors highly regulated at UK and EU level, standards have been key agents in consistently preventing pollution, meeting regulatory compliance, and supporting good stakeholder relations. Standards, including rules, guidelines, and definitions, have also become recognized indicators of quality and safety.

Sustainability has never been more important. But at the same time, people are more cynical than ever about ‘green’ marketing claims. They want to see proof of your utility company’s commitment to tackling environmental and social challenges.

Implementing standards can help you to demonstrate your credentials to customers, employees, and stakeholders, and showcase your commitment to sustainable development. 

They can help you deliver substantial environmental, economic, and social benefits, whatever your size, sector, or geographical location.

They also help you to identify and manage the impact of your business on the environment and community, understand relevant legislation, and most importantly use resources more efficiently by implementing powerful policies across your organization. This not only helps the environment, but it makes a real difference to your bottom line.

Widely adopted standards such as BS EN ISO 14001 and BS EN ISO 9001 (or BS EN ISO 29001:2020 for oil and gas businesses) have been important drivers of change in promoting environmental management and better quality management across the industry. But other standards related to sustainability, such as BS 8900-1 for sustainable development, have not yet achieved widespread implementation.

To read more on the topic of quality management in the energy industry, click here.

Understand the benefits of standards

Using standards can offer a set of powerful business and marketing tools for organizations of all sizes. You can use them to fine-tune your performance and manage the risks while operating in more efficient and sustainable ways.

Other benefits of implementing standards in the energy and utility sectors include:

• Improving performance - success is all about how you perform at every level of your organization. Standards, such as BS EN 9001 Quality management system promote a culture of continual improvement.

• Reducing business risk - businesses today simply can’t afford to take an improvised, reactive approach to risk. Using standards, such as BS EN ISO 22301 Business continuity management system, can help you to identify your risks and minimize them.

• Becoming more sustainable - by helping you to take a close look at how you’re using energy and resources, using our standards, like BS EN ISO 14001 Environmental management system, can save you money and improve your image while benefiting the environment.

• Encouraging innovation - in a global economy of rapidly emerging new technologies and markets, standards, such as BS ISO 44001 Collaborative business relationships management system, help set the rules and establish the frameworks to facilitate innovation through collaboration.

How can standards help utility organizations implement sustainable practices?

Particularly for organizations that deal with natural resources such as oil and gas, the pressure from consumers and the UK Government to switch to more sustainable practices have become hard to ignore.

Standards can help make this transition easier, in turn allowing businesses to benefit from retaining and gaining new customers and maintaining a good brand reputation.

Here are our recommendations on how corporates can use standards to put sustainability into operation:

• Leverage standards for integration and consistency, not isolated campaigns - large firms have multiple layers of complexity, from distributed and varied facility types to different strategic business units that need to engage with a single narrative on energy, environment, and sustainability. For example, the IT services firm Dimension Data, which operates four offices and a data centre in the UK, needs to involve various divisional leads to incorporate sustainability management into its operational excellence plan. The repeatable processes and procedures that follow from the implementation of standards provide the underlying structure for all the different business units to be able to implement and report on the KPIs derived from the single corporate vision on sustainability.

• Use management systems to move from compliance to optimization - firms operating in heavily regulated sectors, particularly basic resources, chemicals, construction, oil and gas, and utilities, have often used standards to put in place internal practices to reduce the risk and cost of operational mishaps. Building on this, these firms should look to use standards above local compliance requirements and target improving the environmental efficiency of their operations. With sustainability performance also creeping into requests for proposals (RFPs), clients increasingly will require firms to go beyond regulation-specific compliance towards strategic, globally consistent offerings that integrate new ideas such as the use of renewable energy.

Experience the benefits of standards by adding these key standards to your collection today.

Discover BSI Knowledge

Over 100,000 more internationally recognized standards are available for simple and flexible access with a BSI Knowledge subscription. In your trust-critical industry, our subscription service puts the control in your hands, with traceability to monitor and demonstrate your business's compliance to standards, and self-serve functionality that enables you to manage your subscriptions, standards, users, and content quickly and simply. Request to learn more.