A modular toolbox approach for supporting internal enterprise sustainable development

Today enterprise wide information systems carry a lot of different data and information about economic, ecologic and social impacts of the enterprise activities. Even if environmental management information systems and developments like sustainability reporting are advancing, as well in technological as in functional aspects, the amount of companies using such systems is quite low. Especially for small and medium enterprises the existing solutions are often to extensive, complex and nor the less affordable by the SMEs. By creating a lightweight modular toolbox of functions connected to sustainable development of an enterprise, the existing gap could be closed, giving SMEs a solution to choose from the needed functions for their own environmental related necessity and giving them an easy system to extend with own functions. Given core functionality of such a system could contain decision support, reporting functionality and of course a wide extend of data integration and transformation capability.

Motivation

In the surroundings of keywords like Green IT, IT-for-Green or Green Cloud small and medium enterprises are often in the center of consideration for the development of next generation technologies for environmental related information systems.

Beside special solutions for single sectors, most of the existing corporate environmental information systems are targeted at bigger, very large enterprise size system landscapes. Besides having an overload of complex and extensive function, the existing systems are way too expensive for most small and medium sized enterprises, as even solutions like software systems for sustainable reporting easily cost several ten thousand euros. If a company is not able or willingly to take part in environmental policy audit systems or in maintaining complex environmental management information systems, it should still be able to measure the own environmental impact (simply by collecting the legal compliance driven information) and obtain a positive internal sustainable development.

By giving small and medium sized companies a modular toolbox for environmental related tasks, they should be able to execute, accomplish, document and report several key subjects of corporate environmental management. Instead of solving environmental related tasks only out of necessity (particular for legal compliance), such a toolbox will allow small and medium sized enterprises to evolve their environmental management into a holistic and sustainable approach.

Through using all the available environmental related data (material flow, emissions, immissions, hazardous materials, etc.) and targeting for a sustainable development rather than for only environmental protection, small and medium sized enterprises are not only able to reduce their polluting behavior, but also to gain additional benefit from optimized operations and improved production by reducing used resources, materials and energy costs (starting e.g. by simply documenting and analyzing the actual condition).

Expected Results

The modular toolbox will be holistic oriented, integrating input-, output- and process information and aiming for a sustainable development instead orienting only on ecologic or economic optimization.

Precondition for such a modular toolbox would be an analysis of generic function needed by the SMEs. As the analysis of the companies needs for environmental related functions will be a full and completely overview of the needed complexity for environmental related corporate information systems like environmental management information systems or sustainable reporting systems.

The basic modules for the toolbox will contain functionality for the areas of sustainable reporting, decision support system, visual analysis, geographical information visualization, single-sign-on functionality, data integration layers and a set of interfaces for integration and extracting information from and to the toolbox.

As the use of the modular toolbox can be integrated to the existing corporate information system landscape over these interfaces, all the available information could be used, creating a single system capable of creating and reporting an overall sustainability benchmark for each SMEs. By comparing the actual condition with the targeted condition, the conducted activities can be rated and adjusted for a more effective and accurate output. Methods like an integrated multi-criteria decision analysis could be used to assist in project planning phases; the key-values for a corporate environmental strategy could be assessed by and with the toolbox and a high grade of flexibility can allow each company to adapt and develop single specialized solution, with a lesser extent to expenses and effort than the integration of a complete singular system would allow.

Another result of the research work will be an evaluation phase for the exemplary use of the toolbox. By comparing the requested and finally used functionality, the demand analysis for environmental related information systems could be simplified by comparing and including this knowledge.