Oracle Introduces Environmental Accounting and Reporting

As organizations globally are faced with a complex set of emissions reporting requirements, the need for an information solution became obvious. Driven by country-specific regulatory mandates as well as stakeholder requests for voluntary reporting, companies are under pressure to provide consistent, transparent and accurate collection, measurement, and reporting of energy usage and emissions data.Companies must undergo extensive and expensive data audits in order to maintain a ledger of up-to-date emissions factors and compare results on an annual basis. Existing “ad hoc” approaches utilizing manual or niche solutions have a high operational cost and weak data security and audit-ability. Rich Kroes, product strategy director for Oracle Environmental Accounting told Automation World that this solution is built into financial applications in order to leverage existing IT infrastructure, robustness, security and auditability. It augments financial data through such features as automatically recognizing suppliers, prompting users to add information, coordinating with invoice processes, and more so that duplicate data is avoided. The first aspect of the solution is this data collection. The second is analytics. Kroes noted the solution uses the Oracle Business Intelligence Platform with built-in dashboards. Executives, for example, can have an overview of emissions at any given time. “Chief sustainability officers find it a challenge to collect sufficient data in order to do their jobs,” continued Kroes. “This product gives them what they need.”Provided as an option for the Oracle E-Business Suite Financials and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Financial Management, the modules now enable organizations to track their greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental data against reduction targets, and to obtain accurate, repeatable and verifiable methodologies for greenhouse gas calculation in accordance with global standards and for both voluntary and legislated emissions reporting schemes. The Environmental Accounting and Reporting modules manage this function from within the existing ERP system, and utilize Oracle Business Intelligence to provide immediate insight into an organization’s environmental data to identify and manage CO2 and cost reduction opportunities - resulting in rapid ROI. By leveraging existing platforms to collect and report environmental data based on existing business processes, such as invoicing, organizations are able to increase environmental data collection efficiency and reliability and deliver a more accurate measurement of energy consumption. Environmental reports required for external reporting, such as the Carbon Disclosure Project, can be rapidly created in multiple delivery formats, including spreadsheets, email and PDF. “For the past several years, we have relied on Oracle's JD Edwards EnterpriseOne and Ndevr's fully integrated NGER product to manage greenhouse gas and energy consumption figures across our widespread operations in the mining, construction and services industries,” said Ian Wade, executive general manager Business Services, Thiess Pty Ltd.  “We look forward to the additional benefits that enhancements in Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Environmental Accounting and Reporting can bring us in helping Thiess cut costs, save processing time and support our sustainability initiatives.”