Colgate-Palmolive's green tip: work your partners

At a recent SAP event in New York, I had the chance to interview
Ed Toben, SVP for Global IT for Colgate-Palmolive, the consumer
goods company. A long-time user of SAP’s ERP and other enterprise
software solutions, the company was there to talk about its
experience with SAP’s shift to component-based software that
minimizes upgrade pains, but I also got to ask Toben about what
sort of green & sustainability technologies the company is
leveraging.

Toben’s message: the right partners can help you go green.

For example, says Toben, Colgate-Palmolive partners with IBM to run
its data centers for ERP and other SAP software. Over the last few
years, IBM has help it centralize these data center operations to
one location using some of the latest technologies in green IT. Two
key technologies, says Toben, have been newer rack-based hardware
that packs more performance into less space, and perhaps most
importantly, virtualization technology that allows
Colgate-Palmolive to dynamically utilize that server capacity to
its fullest.

In layman’s terms, says Toben, rather than having each software
system hard-allocated to one or a set of server boxes,
virtualization allows the load from software systems to skip to
whichever server boxes have excess capacity. The net result, he
says, is that even with processing loads going up every year,
energy use can stay even, because fewer boxes can handle the load,
and fewer boxes mean less spent on cooling and running your data
center.

“Because of the work we’ve done with IBM to consolidate and use
virtualization, we’ve gotten tremendously more horsepower in much
less space,” Toben says. “We were almost running out of data center
space when we began consolidating, but now if you go [to our main
data center], about a third of the room is empty.”

Colgate-Palmolive also uses SAP’s software to support its
sustainability goals, says Toben. While it hasn’t deployed its
latest environmental compliance software, Colgate-Palmolive’s ERP
and supply chain software from SAP closely tracks materials used in
production such as water and packaging, allowing the company to
meet demand while minimizing waste. “In our view, good core ERP and
supply chain management software has always been good for
sustainability, even before the term Green was so popular,” says
Toben.

Colgate-Palmolive is currently testing SAP’s latest generation of
product-lifecycle management (PLM) software as part of the customer
ramp up program for SAP Business Suite 7. Toben says the first set
of component enhancement it’s testing is around “product ideation.”
The goal, he says, is to give scientists in the R&D
organization easy access to supply chain information such as
packaging specifications. The component-based software, says Toben,
will make it easier to deploy the needed supply chain data without
having to do a major upgrade of the full supply chain suite. The
promise, says Toben, is that the newer software will allow
Colgate-Palmolive to get at needed functionality in quicker,
smaller steps, rather than having to devote IT resources to massive
upgrades just to arrive at a smaller subset of desired
functionality.

Although Toben didn’t put it this way, the massive IT resources
traditionally devoted to ERP upgrades could be considered waste or
“muda” in lean thinking. The challenge for end-user companies is to
find a way to transition to newer, easier-to-live-with enterprise
software, so that more IT funds can be left over for green IT
technologies like virtualization. Toben’s overall tip was simpler:
it leans on its partners to find ways marry savings with green.
That’s a proposition I’m seeing more technology providers to
manufacturers focusing on, and that’s a good thing.