Before we hurdle headlong into investing in green and sustainable initiatives and technology, it is important to understand the challenges that manufacturers — and their vendors — will face. It’s one thing to issue press releases and conduct feel-good task force meetings, but it’s another to actually be ready to meet the challenges of implementing a green/sustainability strategy, especially if enterprise data and applications are involved.
The main problem is that configuring a business so that we can understand our carbon footprints, mitigate our greenhouse gases, and lower our energy and water consumption is actually hard to do at a fundamental level. That’s because we have to start at the bottom of the technology food chain and change how we look at the intersection of technology and business at every level.
The first order of business is to understand the extraordinarily different data requirements that green/sustainable initiatives will force upon companies. The main difference has to do with both the quality and quantity of data that must be part of a green/sustainability platform. At issue is the fact that companies will be monitoring energy and resource inputs and outputs down to the individual device level in the plant and, in aggregate, across their supply chains. This data will come to the enterprise in a variety of formats and in a quantity that will be breathtaking. Being smart about resource usage means having a statistically significant sampling rate that will yield terabytes of data that has to be stored, combined with back-office ERP data, and turned into reports that can guide change across the enterprise.
Judging from our industry’s experience with marrying shop floor data to the enterprise, the additional data needed to support enterprise-wide green and sustainability initiatives will be a major resource and technology challenge.