The UK division of UNIT4, (which owns the Agresso and CODA brands) has launched Sustain4, an environmental performance management solution teaming up with Trucost to help organisations quickly understand their environmental impacts.
The solution uses Trucost’s database to benchmark an organisation’s environmental impacts based on financial and other information (industry sector, turnover, geography, operations, employees) that should be readily available in the business. Anwen Robinson, Managing Director of UNIT4 Business Software told FSN “this by-passes months or years of research normally required for such analysis.”
According to Robinson, “The move follows the introduction of the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme and the growing importance of green issues, especially to the public sector” UNIT4 has the exclusive rights to provide Trucost data in the UK local Government, Higher and Further Education sectors.
Using Sustain4 organisations can benchmark themselves against other organisations in their sector as well as capture, analyse and track their ongoing performance across their entire supply chain.
Unit4’s Robinson told FSN, “The comprehensive database enables customers using Sustain4 to generate an initial ‘Skyline’ report immediately and gives users an instantly clear and reliable quantitative understanding of their organisation’s impact. The information is delivered as a cloud solution and provides customers with an on-demand environmental dashboard that delivers the high level information necessary for executive level management and reporting.”
In April 2010, the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme came into force in the UK. For the first time large non-energy intensive organisations, which account for about 10% of UK CO2 emissions, will be legally bound to closely monitor and report their emissions from energy use in preparation for carbon trading.
Robinson hopes that using Sustain4 organisations will quickly appreciate the impact of their supply chain on their carbon performance. The Trucost database may already hold information about suppliers and it is hoped that by encouraging other organisations to use the application the benchmark information will become richer and more accurate. UNIT4 have built a dedicated micro-site dedicated to the environmental issues.
The announcement of Sustain4 follows hard on the heels of last week’s news that FinancialForce.com, another UNIT4 company has announced a partnership with CloudApps, a carbon management specialist, to help companies measure, manage carbon as an asset.
