Companies Need to Update Technology to Track Environmental Performance
Companies need to make wholesale changes to their business technology if they want to keep up with rapidly evolving mandates for environmental tracking, according to new research conducted for IFS in the USA, Scandinavia and Benelux.
The study, based on surveys of industrial executives in each region, discovered that more than three quarters of companies consider it important to track their environmental profile—that includes 83 percent in the USA, 82 percent Scandinavia and 79 percent in Benelux.
However, nearly three quarters of European respondents (74 percent in Scandinavia, 75 percent in Benelux) said they lacked sufficient software technology to track their environmental footprint. The US fared slightly better. Less than half (47 percent) of the American businesses polled said they lacked the enterprise software in place for environmental tracking; an additional 42 percent reported limited capabilities for tracking environmental impacts.
When asked about the most important reasons for green IT initiatives, survey respondents from Scandinavia cited the marketing value of green initiatives (35 percent) over legislation compliance (22 percent) and cost cutting (19 percent). By contrast, the Benelux and US executives surveyed believed that environmental compliance was a more important benefit (36 percent in the USA, 34 percent in Benelux) than marketing and cost reduction benefits.
Interestingly, over half of all the US and European organizations polled say they want embedded environmental tracking to be included in their existing ERP solutions.
These survey results underscore, once again, the growing importance of environmental stewardship as a core business practice that’s now critical to compliance, competitive advantage, risk management and profits. For quite some time now, companies and their stakeholders have been clamoring for better metrics and more transparency with regard to sustainability reporting. Clearly, updated technology will help businesses better meet rapidly evolving reporting requirements.
A nine-page executive summary of the IFS report is available here.
