Greening by industry

Not all industries are created equal. What technologies and strategies, you might wonder, are best suited to meet the specific green goals of your particular organization?

Sure, any company, be it a big-box store or a multinational bank, can likely benefit from server consolidation and virtualization in the datacenter. An organization with plenty of desktop PCs — be it a call center or a university — might benefit from PC power management tools or thin clients.

Different industries — even if they have common green aspirations such as cutting carbon emissions or using fewer natural resources — will find that different technological approaches will better aid them in reaching their sustainability goals than would others. For example, a green-minded manufacturing company would gain more from, say, a transportation management solution to reduce fuel consumption; a financial company might be more fixated on finding ways to reduce travel for traditional in-person meetings.

Following that line of thought, IDC recently released a free e-book titled “Leveraging IT in Building Green Businesses.” In it, the researchers identify technologies that are respectively suited for the following four industries: financial services, energy, retail, and manufacturing.

This week, let’s examine some of the promising green technologies within two of the industries: manufacturing and retail. Doing so will exemplify how technologies exist to help companies in specific industries achieve their green goals.

Manufacturing a greener business

According to the book, “As they progress in their sustainability maturity, manufacturers adopt a total life-cycle view of sustainability, trying to balance conflicting business drivers and weigh design alternatives that would provide the highest level of sustainability at an affordable cost.”

For example, a capitalist manufacturer with no CSR (corporate social responsibility) creates products as inexpensively as possible and sells as many as it can for as high a profit as it can muster. But a sustainability-minded company seeks to build durable products that can be easily disassembled and recycled with as few hazardous materials as possible. It also prefers to transport products in an environmentally responsible manner (which generally means using as little fuel as possible).

So what sorts of technologies might help in these endeavors? Well, as a manufacturer, you want to deal with suppliers that can offer you the components that suit your green-product needs; that is, materials with little to no hazardous materials. Thus, IDC suggests investment in procurement and supplier relationship management solutions, aimed at collecting “in-depth details on recycling-friendly materials, processes, or packaging” as well as for tracking “supplier environmental scorecards and new RFPs.”

[ For more on how sustainability plays into the supply chain, please read “Green demands trickle down the supply chain.” ]

Logistics are also important to consider if one of your goals is to reduce the amount of fuel needed to transport products from point A to point B. Given the costs of gasoline these days, that’s not a trivial consideration — plus all that driving and flying contributes to your company’s carbon footprint. Thus, transportation management solutions are worth exploring, according to IDC, for, by example, evaluating “the trade-offs between fuel consumption and arrival time, fleet optimization, [and] profitable proximity.”

[ For information on a product from ILOG that helps measure the carbon footprint of your supply chain, please read “Carbon-measuring software evolves.” ]

Putting more green into financials

The world of financial services provides an interesting contrast in terms of sustainability goals, and the technologies you might embrace to achieve them. After all, unlike with retail or manufacturing, you’re not transporting goods to and fro; it’s more often an exchange of information in various forms (digital, printed, or verbal).

There is, however, often a lot of travel involved in financial service, a point noted by IDC. Clients often expect the chance to speak with an advisor face to face — or perhaps managers from different branches spread out across the country or world need to meet periodically. Whatever the case, there’s a lot of traveling going on, which can be costly — and all those CO2 emissions from planes, trains, and automobiles aren’t good for Mother Earth.

To that end, IDC suggests financial companies investigate video and teleconferencing tools, which the company says can “reduce travel by personnel, improve customer service across widely distributed branch of agency networks.”

[ For more on telepresence, please read “Telepresence breaks down communication barriers.” ]

With all the documents that must be exchanged and signed in triplicate in the financial industry, IDC also recommends finding ways to reduce paper consumption . IDC says that Internet-based delivery channels — applications such as online banking, as well as electronic invoicing and bill payment — can “save paper, mailing, and customer travel.”

Moreover, enterprise content management and workflow solutions could be helpful in “enabling knowledge workers to be more efficient with paperless access to process-related content, including reference material, legal documentation, etc.”

[ For more on reducing paper in the workplace, please read “Follow the paperless trail.” ]

I’ve covered just two of the four industries here that IDC touches on, and there’s no doubt many other industries — health care, education, and entertainment, for example — that can benefit from investigating IT solutions to assist with their own specific sustainability goals. Planning your green strategy is paramount; that is, assessing where you stand and then plotting an intelligent plan of attack. There’s no single green IT bullet; rather, there’s an entire arsenal at your disposal.

[ For more on planning a green strategy, please read “Strategic steps down the green IT path.” ]

IDC’s free e-book “Leveraging IT in Building Green Businesses” is available for free here. You’ll need to provide basic info, including name, title, and e-mail address. Pretty painless, and worth the time.