There’s an increasingly green tinge to the discipline of performance management. Growing environmental awareness and the drive to triple bottom line reporting mean an increasing number of organisations are interested in determining how to go about fulfilling the reporting requirements they have around environmental issues, and to look at their businesses from this new perspective. According to Warren Wilson, research director at global IT advisory and consultancy Ovum, this is a trend which will only intensify.

“True, much of the data required to effectively manage energy consumption and carbon output isn’t readily available - and may not be currently tracked if it is available,” says Wilson.

“But as carbon-reducing regulations proliferate, as utilities deploy more sophisticated metering and billing systems and as the building industry incorporates energy-related controls, as its customers will inevitably demand, this information will become much easier to collect.” He says as that happens, enterprise applications are the logical vehicles with which to gather and analyze it.

“In a sense, adding green capabilities to enterprise applications amounts to an expansion of the governance, risk and compliance management capabilities that their vendors have been building for the last few years.”

One vendor addressing this issue is Microsoft, which is in the process of putting together an “Environmental Sustainability Dashboard”.

The tool is intended to enable growing organisations to supplement the information that already resides in their ERP system so that they can start to understand their environmental footprint, says Anne Frith, Microsoft New Zealand’s marketing manager for the company’s Dynamics solutions.

Frith says while large organisations are hiring environmental sustainability experts to help them determine how to go about fulfilling their reporting requirements around environmental issues, many small-to-medium sized businesses, don’t have the luxury of being able to put these types of consultants on their payroll. The Environmental Sustainability Dashboard initiative’s aim is to make the process affordable for smaller organisations.

“Once organisations know where they are with their reporting requirements, they can start to ask the kinds of questions that will help them uncover the opportunities they have to gain the types of carbon foot-printing benefits that larger corporations have been enjoying,” says Frith.

Built on the principle that “if you can measure it, you can manage it,” the Environmental Sustainability Dashboard application will allow businesses who are Microsoft Dynamics AX customers to implement a dashboard that will display four of the Core Environmental Performance Indicators (CEPIs) identified by the Global Reporting Initiative (www.globalreporting.org).

Those indicators are:

• EN3: Direct Energy Consumption
• EN4: Indirect Energy Consumption
• EN16: Total Direct And Indirect Greenhouse Gas Emissions
• EN17: Other Relevant Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Direct energy consumption includes the energy sources that businesses buy and consume on-site, such as coal or natural gas. Indirect energy consumption is typically electricity whereby you consume energy that is generated somewhere else, in this case by a utility. EN16 essentially takes the results from EN3 and EN4 and converts them into carbon equivalents, while EN17 computes emissions from business travel. Together, EN16 and EN17 constitute what is commonly referred to as an entity’s “carbon footprint”.

“Understanding your organisation’s energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions is the first important step to becoming more environmentally aware,” says Frith.

“We are hoping that this information will help organisations recognise changes they can make to lessen their effect on the environment.

And as many companies have found, by making these types of improvements, they are also realising significant cost savings and thereby adding to their bottom line.”

More information on the Environmental Sustainability Dashboard initiative can be found at: www.microsoft.com/dynamics/environment.

Ovum’s Wilson sees this type of solution as a natural and growing market for IT software vendors.

“The bottom line is that, despite the early focus on IT-related power consumption and carbon output, it seems clear that there will be a much larger opportunity in addressing the vast majority of power consumption / carbon output that has nothing to do with IT. It is this larger market for which software vendors should be positioning themselves to compete,” he says.

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