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 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.

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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