…and those that do, use manual spreadsheets!
Governments of the world have been working towards an improved level of sustainability for some time, with the Kyoto protocol of 1997 and its later amends in 2012.
What we’re particularly interested in right now is the fact that the UK Government plans to bring in legislation later this year which will see companies required by law to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions annually in their Directors’ Report. This is a position reflected by the EU, the USA and in the Asia Pacific region, so companies need to sit up and take note!
Yet a recent survey which IFS Defense conducted found that the overwhelming majority of companies (68%) do not currently have a formal system of monitoring current carbon emissions compliance, and just under half (45%) still have no plans to monitor in the future. More revealingly, two thirds of leading A&D companies who do monitor compliance, do so manually or using standard multi-purpose tools such as Excel spreadsheets, as opposed to an approach that is fully integrated into the processes that drive the emissions themselves.
And it is possible: integrated systems such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) enable effective management of data covering the entirety of the organisation. This data can be fed into our EcoFootprint module which specifically calculates and analyses the environmental impact of a company’s entire supply chain, allowing for in-depth analysis and increased transparency for the benefit of the business and the customer alike. It also minimizes the collection, calculation and reporting process.
Consider the New Legislation as a Business Opportunity
Companies need to focus on the opportunities: customers are already requesting more and more information relating to the carbon emissions throughout the procurement and logistical processes within firms, so being able to monitor this data and produce detailed information for customers would add value for those firms which are accurately and systematically monitoring their emissions.
If we look at the upcoming UK legislation, it introduces the opportunity to:
- Provide evidence of compliance and fulfillment of the company’s obligations under the legislation to reducing carbon emissions
- Provide credible evidence of a sustainable supply chain
- And provide evidence of a long-term sustainable effort to reduce the company’s logistics emissions footprint
Why Integrated ERP Systems will Serve Firms Better
The ‘process infrastructure’ that exists within ERP solutions including Asset Management, Fleet Management, heavy maintenance and logistics, provides data that can be fed into specifically designed modules such as our own IFS EcoFootprint which takes into account of all the processes in the supply chain to provide integrated consumption and efficiency metrics.
By acquiring accurate measurement of the environmental impact of your supply chain, firms can use this data to gain more information about the sustainability of their own resources. We need to start changing those 68% who don’t to 80% that do!
You can explore this question in more detail by downloading our new whitepaper around sustainability regulations here.
