Getting carbon off my brain: many apps involved in green manufacturing

The last couple of months, I’ve been paying more attention to the carbon accounting software market. While software for monitoring and managing a company’s carbon foot print is an important, emerging category of software, it’s by no means the end-all system for sustainability.

I stopped to think about the many software applications and more real-time systems involved in managing carbon footprint, as well as other key environmental factors, and came up with a pretty broad landscape of software categories, ranging from real-time process automation systems, all the way up to corporate performance management dashboards and longer-term supply chain design tools. It’s a bit hard to describe the breadth of this landscape in words alone, so I drew up the graphic below.

In my view, carbon accounting is just a top-level application for reporting and management around one sustainability factor: greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. While that’s important, to really manage multiple aspects of sustainability–such as solid waste, waste water, chemicals, etc.–you need to tie into the real-time process control layer as well as systems of record for product data, suppliers, and bills of material. Even with carbon management, for continuous improvement and a more real-time grasp over energy use, the tie to plant data seems essential. Then there are supply chain-level applications that can do a lot for green efforts, such as supply chain network design and optimization tools, or at a tactical level, transportation and route planning tools offered by supply chain execution vendors. While many Green-related software categories are included in the chart below, there are others I did not include, such as server virtualization software that is so important to  “Green IT” needs, or advanced process control tools that simulate the output of a manufacturing process to optimize for goals like lower emissions.

In short, I don’t think there is single class of software vendor that is able to say they have an all-encompassing solution set for green manufacturing. Even an enterprise software giant like SAP–who offers ERP, PLM, SCM,  manufacturing intelligence, and now offers EH&S and carbon accounting solutions–does not specialize in plant automation or building automation systems. For sure, the enterprise-level carbon accounting function is important, but it takes a wealth of real-time data, master data, and insight into supply chain trends to support the varied sustainability needs of manufacturing enterprises.