While “green” may connote money, it has come to connote environmental issues all the more. The two subjects are not mutually exclusive.
As Joshua Greenbaum wrote in his blog “Enterprise Matters” (http://ematters.wordpress.com/)
“SAP’s customers, according to SAP, produce 1/6 of the world’s carbon emissions … That means that anything SAP can do to support sustainability, efficiency, and other green concepts could have a profound effect on its customers, and therefore a significant quantity of the world’s emissions. And, as one of the main goals of SAP’s sustainability initiative is to build software solutions that can lower these emissions, and support more efficient and responsible use of other scarce resources like water, enterprise software companies like SAP can indeed become leaders in these efforts.”
In the late 1970’s I worked on a Control Data mainframe for the City of St. Paul, Minnesota. The mainframe was a few miles away and we had our printouts delivered twice a day. One of my key responsibilities was running demographics data for urban planning with a powerful (at the time) software called Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). Once or twice a week, I would receive a request for a new extract and after entering the parameters I would receive a twenty to thirty page report.
I was only a novice when it came to the full SPSS package and one morning I made the mistake of checking one extra box that provided a third dimension to the report. Early that afternoon the delivery man wheeled in a five foot high printout. This 10,000 page report was obviously unusable for anything other than a bonfire but it was summertime and I was not inclined. The next day I instituted paper recycling for St. Paul’s Citywide Data Processing.
Today, such an effort would fall under the heading of “Sustainability”. In SAP terminology, sustainability addresses environmental, health, and safety issues. At the risk of getting lost amid a flurry of potential avenues in search of sustainability, I advise that you focus upon core potential within the SAP installed base, namely energy and resource conservation, health and safety, and common sense. Investing in sustainability in these areas is the right thing to do and it should be a given a high priority, not only in altruistic terms but also because it will improve the health of your enterprise.
For the moment, sustainability in the context of SAP is a maturing movement. In March of 2009, SAP announced plans to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions down to its year-2000 levels by the year 2020. In support of this initiative as well as client-based initiatives, they named Peter Graf, a longtime SAP honcho, as its first sustainability officer. To date, there is not a lot of detail in regard to “how to” but common sense leads us right back to the starting point of Key Performance Indicators.
Ratio of Recycled Waste to Discarded Waste would have worked for me at the City of St. Paul.
An SAP prospect recently told me that transportation management at his firm consisted of a ball point pen and a notepad. Given that his firm spent $5M a year on transport, it is obvious that basic transport management would save them money (I estimated at least $1.5M). In sustainability terms, it would also have reduced carbon emissions. As KPI’s go, we could comfortably settle on Miles per Ton or simply the Cost of Truck Fuel. The firm has other problems since it is in the chicken industry. My prospect could quote the hatch rate, a somewhat crucial KPI for this industry, but he also claimed that safety issues were a great concern, though he did not quote any KPIs in that regard.
My advice is to embed sustainability issues into business process redesign, most especially where the KPIs, like those just mentioned, fairly shout to be addressed. This is not a PR subject unless you have actually done something. If you settle into the standard compliance and reporting elixir offered up by the former Big 4, you may improve compliance and reporting marks without improving the environment at all. However, if you have vastly reduced waste through recycling, reduced carbon emissions through more efficient transport management or manufacturing, or increased plant safety levels, you will have PR gold as well as my admiration.
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