Operations Management: An Integrated Approach, 5th Edition

THE SUSTAINABILITY LINK

ERP systems are now a major part of life for most businesses and their supply chains. When first implemented, the role of ERP was to manage a company's data and processes from a single system. Today, ERP systems have become increasingly important in managing sustainability, as companies are under tremendous pressure to meet and document their sustainability initiatives. As regulatory and environmental pressures grow, companies are now turning to ERP systems for help in executing and tracking the success of their sustainability initiatives. Remember that ERP systems are about managing resources and measures of sustainability to show how well a company uses these resources toward an eye toward “greening.” As a result, ERP systems are increasingly becoming platforms for this type of analysis, providing accurate reports on items such as carbon footprints, carbon trades, and information to support product-level carbon labeling.

To meet this growing demand, ERP software vendors, such as SAP and Oracle, are enhancing their software offering in the areas of sustainability reporting, planning, and management, adding modules such as carbon management. Using ERP systems to link resources to sustainability metrics is so huge that even small software vendors are developing these systems. These solutions involve expanding current ERP capability to include gathering and analyzing enormous amounts of data, as sustainability initiatives run the full length of a company's ...