Greater environmental awareness has come a long way over the past few years, with more government initiatives being introduced and corporations or consumers taking action to protect Mother Earth as responsible corporate citizens. For many organisations in the ME this "environmental responsibility" can merely be a "lip service".
There is evidence that directly links implementing green practices at the workplace with measurable rewards for the business involved. The benefits include increased customer confidence, improved employee morale and health, a stronger public image for the company, ease in hiring quality human resources and attrition rates that are lower than industry average as well financial savings.
Green workplaces also have operational benefits like energy and water savings, reduced waste and the subsequent lower costs for waste management, improved indoor environmental quality, greater comfort for employees translating into higher productivity, reduced employee health costs and overall lower operational and maintenance costs.
In addition to the above, environmental regulations world-wide are becoming more stringent. As a result, organisations are under increasing pressure to document their environmental initiatives and be seen to be taking serious steps to uphold these government regulations in the markets they are operating in.
Organisations therefore require a system that supports environmental work and where complicated calculations are needed for multi-level product structures and multi-site environments.
Against this backdrop, eco-footprint management tools are available to businesses providing an enterprise standard methodology to help control costs, as well as meet an urgent need to prepare for compliance with environmental legislations. These tools are a fully integrated ecological footprint calculator designed to help businesses cut costs and carbon and meet impending environmental regulations with ease.
Footprinting is internationally recognised as an indicator of environmental sustainability. It can be used to measure and manage the use of resources throughout the economy.
Businesses using this eco-footprint management tool will be able to track the impact of a wide range of activities ranging from raw material sourcing to product design to logistics and emissions, ultimately helping them to analyze their operations, learn environmental patterns and plan for urgent legislative requirements when the need arises.
These kind of management tools help organisations in calculating a "standard footprint" in a similar approach as standard costing or as a basis for budgeting and actual reporting. This tool will break down the report by footprint type, like air or water for direct environmental impact.
Users will be able to configure applications to capture environmental impact information from different areas of the business just as easily as they configure their financial systems to capture cost. For example, they will be able to assign different carbon footprints to various methods of transport helping them to see the environmental as well as financial cost of transporting materials by road versus air and compare the carbon footprint of local versus offshore sourcing.
The result is that organisations will receive unprecedented insight and understanding into which parts and processes of the business impact on the environment, a pre-requisite for planning, reporting and improvement in their business operations. Businesses will also benefit from having a clear methodology for measuring the ecological impact of their operations. In addition, it will enable businesses to prepare for and comply with urgent as well as future legislation. Another clear advantage of the eco-footprint management tool is that it re-uses data that resides in the ERP solution. Customers don't input fresh data, which is extremely time-intensive.
Organisations must be committed to complying with environmental regulations; conducting operations in an environmentally sound manner, applying the principles of reduce, reuse, and recycle. The eco-footprint management tool is an ideal enabler to help in realising a safer future for Mother Earth.
- Ian Fleming is Managing Director, Middle East, Africa and South Asia, at IFS, which develops, supplies and implements applications and ERP suites built on SOA technology.
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