费力的可持续性

转自：http://www.managingautomation.com/maonline/magazine/read/view/Sustainability_Spadework_27755662

 

Before we hurdle headlong into investing in green and sustainableinitiatives and technology, it is important to understand thechallenges that manufacturers — and their vendors — willface. It’s one thing to issue press releases and conductfeel-good task force meetings, but it’s another to actually beready to meet the challenges of implementing a green/sustainabilitystrategy, especially if enterprise data and applications are involved.

 

The main problem is that configuring a business so that we canunderstand our carbon footprints, mitigate our greenhouse gases, andlower our energy and water consumption is actually hard to do at afundamental level. That’s because we have to start at the bottomof the technology food chain and change how we look at the intersectionof technology and business at every level.

 

The first order of business is to understand the extraordinarilydifferent data requirements that green/sustainable initiatives willforce upon companies. The main difference has to do with both thequality and quantity of data that must be part of agreen/sustainability platform. At issue is the fact that companies willbe monitoring energy and resource inputs and outputs down to theindividual device level in the plant and, in aggregate, across theirsupply chains. This data will come to the enterprise in a variety offormats and in a quantity that will be breathtaking. Being smart aboutresource usage means having a statistically significant sampling ratethat will yield terabytes of data that has to be stored, combined withback-office ERP data, and turned into reports that can guide changeacross the enterprise.

 

Judging from our industry’s experience with marrying shopfloor data to the enterprise, the additional data needed to supportenterprise-wide green and sustainability initiatives will be a majorresource and technology challenge.

 

And that’s just the beginning. Once we have built a dataframework, we have to start building the analytical framework that willmake use of those terabytes. Herein lies problem number two: thenewness of green/sustainability initiatives, combined with the nascent,confusing, and guaranteed-to-change nature of the many local and globalregulations that will be mandated in coming years, means that customerswill need a lot of guidance in just what they are supposed to report.This effort will require more than a simple set of cool-lookingdashboards. This multivariate analysis — better known inside thegreen/sustainability movement as multi-scalar analysis — will taxthe analytical capabilities of most companies and users as they moveinto this brave new world.

 

Next up is the business process problem. Now that we know whatthe carbon footprint of our products or services is, doing somethingabout it will take a new set of business processes that are also notwell-understood and certainly not implemented. Want to change aproduct’s design to lower its carbon footprint? Chances arethat’s not a process your ERP software can provide out of the boxtoday.

 

Finally, it’s about people. Most employees are long onconceptual buy-in, but short on know-how. We need to educate them aboutwhat it takes to make green/sustainability initiatives successful, andshow them how to become the nexus of all the data, reports, and newbusiness processes that will be needed.

 

So don’t be fooled into thinking it’s going to beeasy or painless. It’s a journey, not a destination, andyou’d better map your way carefully or pay the consequences.