UK-based retail giant Marks & Spencer (M&S) may have already passed numerous milestones in its Plan A sustainability program but the ever-growing scale of the initiative means it still has “90% of the work to do,” according to the company’s head of sustainable business, Mike Barry.

Speaking at a Green Economy event organized by the Dublin Chamber of Commerce and leading global ICT provider Fujitsu, Barry outlined how M&S’s ambitious sustainability agenda was not just having a major impact on its overall carbon emissions, it was also delivering significant financial gains — with technology increasingly playing a key role by enabling deep insight into critical aspects of business operations.

Plan A was directly responsible for £50 million ($82m) of M&S’s profits in 2010, and according to Barry this is only the tip of the iceberg — something that will become more apparent in forthcoming financial results.

Technology is a key enabler here, providing intelligence into operational areas such as manufacturing and supply chain so that positive action can be taken to cut waste. “Technology shows you things you might not have seen,” he said. “Suddenly I can see that one of our factories has 10 cotton weavers when we only need two — something I wouldn't have known otherwise.”

He said a lot of the gain so far has been achieved by reducing packaging, decreasing costs in the supply chain and through partnerships with charities. The upshot: the company has cut its carbon footprint by about 25% since Plan A was launched in 2007, although he accepted that the next 10% will be considerably harder-won.

“We decided to reduce our carbon footprint first and then move to the offset model,” he said. “We made as many short-term changes as possible to get our own house in order before we made that move because we know future reductions won’t come easily.”

Plan A was initially established as a 100-point, five-year plan but this has since been extended to cover a set of 180 environmental commitments with a target date for completion of 2015.

Barry encouraged business people at the event to spend time thinking about the development and execution of their own organization’s sustainability plan and to understand the business case for having one. He said it was vital that companies understand their customers’ and competitors’ position on these issues, but also that they are aware of the risks a changing market will have in the future.

“Initially we sat down with a sheet of paper and wrote down the 16 areas we could work on,” he said. “From there we worked out which ones we wanted to lead on and which ones we were happy to be simply doing well in. We worked out our position rather than let it happen around us.”