ERP vendors and environmental tracking

The old adage that you can’t improve what you can’t
measure holds true for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and other
environmental data. While data can be compiled in something as
simple as a spreadsheet, lately, a couple of ERP vendors have added
environmental tracking capabilities to their systems.

A recent
post mentioned Microsoft adding energy and emissions tracking
functionality to their Dynamics AX ERP package. Now IFS has added an
“Eco-footprint Management” tool to monitor and manage
the environmental impact of a company’s operations. According to
the
IFS release, the tool makes it possible to configure the ERP
package to capture environmental impact data just as easily as it
can be configured to capture cost data.

Of course, it makes sense to streamline the way we capture GHG and
other environmental data. The nice thing about functionality from
ERP vendors is that the data capture is connected to normal
business activities in areas like purchasing. ERP vendors also know
how to keep data centralized in a database, and how to add charts
and trend visualization. In my earlier post after the Microsoft
announcement, I warned that tracking environmental data in an ERP
system may generate some good summary trends, but to actually
fine-tune operations to save energy or cut GHG emissions,
it’s possible that process-level data from energy management
systems or building controls systems would need to be accessed and
analyzed. I think that still holds true, but overall, it’s a
good thing that ERP vendors are building environmental tracking
into their suites. It simplifies things.

If your company isn’t tracking GHG emissions or energy use
data, you’re starting to fall behind. Late last year, analyst firm
AMR Research, surveyed 313 large companies from discrete, process,
and continuous manufacturing sectors, and found that 38 percent of
survey respondents already collect and report GHG emission data to
the Carbon Disclosure Project
(CDP) or to other such organizations that track emissions data.
If you take a look at the CDP’s Web site, you can find out
plenty about this non-profit group, and the more than 1500
companies that reported data to it last year, including CDP’s
leadership index, a list that includes some well-known
manufacturing companies with top reporting scores.

Obviously, leading companies are moving forward with GHG emissions
and energy use tracking. It’s good to see ERP vendors making
it easier to collect environmental data, but even if your ERP
vendor doesn’t offer such tools, there is nothing to stop you
from collecting data in Microsoft Access, Excel, or some other
solution, such as the Access-based tool that Cisco Systems
developed, and that I’ve blogged about previously. The
important thing is to get started.