As I noted in my recent post on Why You Need Visibility, if you put an energy meter inside a home and show people total usage in real time, a miraculous thing will happen: they will use about 10% less energy. And, more importantly, you can use this behaviour to drive savings, revenue, and innovation in your business. How? Consider these five uses courtesy of Andrew Winston and the Harvard Business Review which give you a green advantage. Usage Reductions If you provide operations with information on resource use, they will …
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December 30th, 2009 | Posted in Cost Reduction, Green, Spend Analysis
Supply Chain Brain recently ran a decent article on 10 Steps to Green Packaging in the CPG Industry that had a few insights that are worth a closer look. Replenish Purchase raw materials from suppliers who employ sustainable resource management policies. Re-explore Use recyclable material. Reduce Use ergonomic design and optimization to minimize the use, and size, of packaging material. Replace Replace hazardous and harmful substances with eco-friendly materials. …
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December 27th, 2009 | Posted in Green, Manufacturing, sustainability
Editor’s Note: Today’s post is from Dick Locke, Sourcing Innovation’s resident expert on International Sourcing and Procurement. (His previous guest posts are still archived.) The October 1 New York Times has an interesting article on a tariff increase on solar panels. While the panels came from China, that’s not the interesting part of the story. The interesting part is that CBP (The US Customs and Border Protection department — successor to the US Customs Service) announced the tariff increase eight months ago and nearly the entire solar panel industry missed it.To summarize, one US company asked CBP for …
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December 3rd, 2009 | Posted in Dick Locke, Energy, Global Trade, Green
If you haven’t, you might find that you’re shut out of European markets in 2010. You see, when January, only two short months away, comes around, another 15 substances must be reported under REACH. Furthermore, the EU is planning to add substances to the list every six months, possibly until the entire SIN List of 356 chemicals that have been identified as Substances of Very High Concern is on the table. If you can’t complete the necessary reporting, you can’t import into, manufacture in, or export from the EU. Right now, you just have 15 restricted substances …
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November 26th, 2009 | Posted in Compliance, Global Trade, Green
This summer, MessageLabs (now part of Symantec) released a white-paper on The Greening of SaaS which I found very disappointing because one key point that many vendors overlook when selling SaaS is how it can considerably green your operations if implemented and utilized properly. The paper indicates that with no hardware to purchase or software to run, the energy required to power that hardware and execute that software is eliminated or significantly reduced, depending on client-side consumption. While it is true that the client does not need to buy, maintain, and then dispose of (as much) energy consuming …
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October 25th, 2009 | Posted in Green, SaaS, Technology, sustainability
Share This on Linked In A recent article in Industry Week pointed out that a recent report blames petroleum industry for 25% of toxic pollutants. More specifically, the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) reported that 90% of toxic pollutants in North America came from fifteen industries, with over 25% coming from the U.S. [...]
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July 9th, 2009 | Posted in Green, sustainability
Share This on Linked In Industry Week recently ran a great article on why going green can mean less red for your bottom line. The article quoted some great statistics from a recent Economist Intelligence Unit study that found that companies undertaking green initiatives as part of a strategy to cut costs and [...]
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July 2nd, 2009 | Posted in Finance, Green
Last fall, Industry Week ran a good article on getting the green light that outlined some good ways to go green and save green at the end of the article that I haven’t covered yet, and in one case, even thought about before. Cutting right to the chase: [...]
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June 23rd, 2009 | Posted in Energy, Green
Share This on Linked In A recent article on building an actionable framework for Green Purchasing did a great job of outlining the the true total cost of ownership calculation for any purchase when sustainability is taken into account. Simply put: TCO = Purchase Cost + Overhead + Environmental Costs + Social Consequences [...]
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June 7th, 2009 | Posted in Finance, Green
Share This on Linked In Regular readers know I’m a big fan of green and an avid promoter of Enterprise Contract Management due to the many advantages it provides including reduced contract management costs, decreased maverick spend, reduced overpayments, IP management, etc., but in an even bigger picture, Enterprise Contract Management is a [...]
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May 24th, 2009 | Posted in Cost Reduction, Green
