Applications for Environmental Sustainability

There has been growing momentum in recent years around environmental sustainability. Green initiatives can be driven by a combination of things--corporate citizenship, environmental survival, economic opportunity in the form of potential cost reductions and new marketing opportunities. In addition, as the socio-economic impact of environmental issues rises, government policy making has increased and corporations are facing numerous new regulations.

Organizations that run lean and green can be more productive and profitable, and less polluting. By taking an environmental stance, your business will be able to cut costs, reduce risks, drive revenues, and improve your brand. This set of benefits is called the eco-advantage. You can achieve the eco-advantage in various ways:

• Improving the efficiency of your organization—the eco-efficiency—by cutting out waste, using resources productively, and minimizing your carbon footprint.
• Improving product and service designs so they're based on green processes, such as minimizing waste by-products and designing for recycling—or eco-innovation.
• Gaining knowledge into the value chain so that your business can promote its green brand and enhance and protect its overall brand—or eco-transparency.

More companies are looking to Oracle Applications to help them manage, execute, and measure their green initiatives. By combining lean and green practices, companies can potentially save millions of dollars a year by reducing production and energy costs. With the product capabilities and breadth of Oracle Applications, we can help our customers go green.

• Supply chains have a significant impact on the environment-from the inception of a product, to the sourcing and make-up of its components, to its transportation, to the management of its end of life
• Sustainability reporting, planning and management provide data and metrics that are critical to fact-based decision-making and sound environmental management
• Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) management helps organizations improve Green Compliance by formalizing the scope around green initiatives, establishing targets for improving environmental performance, and then measuring progress against these targets.
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) customer self-service, e-billing, and contact center solutions can reduce the waste caused by paper-based systems and minimize energy and fuel consumption
• Oracle On Demand, Oracle's outsourcing solution, uses advanced technologies that make efficient use of resources to drive down power consumption and space requirements on behalf of customers