As the old saying goes, you can't manage what you don't measure. It's often even harder to measure what you can't see -- like greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This difficulty is compounded by the pressure that companies are under to be good stewards and managers of the resources they consume when manufacturing their products.
To assist in closing this GHG gap, software companies and energy providers have been bringing products to market, staking an early claim to this emerging enviro-trend. Energy procurement specialist Pace, for instance, has developed a GHG Inventory Management System for its existing and potential customer base. Called Ecolink, the tool is a dashboard for a data-based back end that integrates a carbon and energy management system into the same collection and reporting tool.
By leveraging energy commodity invoice volumes and then applying appropriate emissions analyses, the tool systematizes the process of calculating impact, but has another upside, says program manager Christian Whitaker. "Because our data collection process is ongoing and data is collected in near real-time, Ecolink serves not only as an annual reporting tool, but as a management system," he says.
In today's high-stakes green game, the payoffs for tools like this are obvious. Organizing all the data into a common GHG data platform serves as a fundamental disclosure tool for a company's customers, suppliers, public and reporting agencies, as well as providing manufacturers with the ability to analyze, capture, track and accurately report on energy- and emissions-related projects.
