FEATURE


CLOUDAPPS MAKES SUSTAINABILITY AS FUN AS FACEBOOK


M


any organisations are now recognising the importance of


sustainability in every area of their business, for both


environmental and financial reasons. According to figures published by the department for energy and climate change (DECC), the amount spent on non-household energy in the UK in 2009 was £83.2 billion. Despite the obvious potential for huge savings, issues such as energy usage, waste management and water consumption are rarely properly dealt with.


When organisations start to focus on becoming more sustainable, they face a number of challenges in measuring their environmental impact and it is often difficult to ensure that legislative and voluntary disclosure schemes are met. The biggest problem is that without a means to enforce sustainability and energy management initiatives, it is simply too easy for employees to shrug responsibility for their contribution and neglect to find time to incorporate the advice into their daily life. Although guidelines may be given and sustainability schemes well outlined, it has traditionally been hard to monitor how closely these are followed at the level of departments, and more or less impossible at the level of the individual employee.


The danger is that facilities managers who are expected to ensure sustainability may be held unduly responsible for minimising the costs associated with consumption and waste of natural resources, while in fact this requires everybody to play a part in reducing their own personal footprint. For example, the PC Energy report published by the Alliance


to Save Energy and 1E, estimates that £300 million is spent per year powering idle computers alone in the workplace. Huge savings would be possible if every individual just turned off their machine overnight.


The challenge of ensuring that everybody plays their part in the collective effort has, until very recently, been a daunting one. How can organisations guarantee that every employee is meeting their sustainability targets? What is required to make sure that everybody is involved and engaged, from the basement to the boardroom? The answer is what Simon Wheeldon, CEO of carbon management software provider CloudApps, calls “social sustainability”. With the new Winter ’11 edition from CloudApps, sustainability information can now be published throughout the entire organisation, aligning every employee behind corporate sustainability goals. Employees can share and discuss ideas for reducing the corporate footprint, be provided with reduction suggestions relevant to their job role, participate in sustainability initiatives and be informed of progress against their personal targets and goals. The technology monitors and scores each employee individually, keeping them, their departments and company executives informed of progress against targets.


The “sustainability desktop” provides all the functionality an organisation needs to keep employees connected and talking about sustainability management. The innovation of the software lies in achieving sustainability and energy efficiency through engendering employee engagement.


Another major benefit delivered in Winter ’11 is sustainability collaboration, harnessing the collective wisdom and creative input of the whole business, customers, suppliers and partners in generating sustainability initiatives. The ideas discussion forum provides the means for everybody involved to contribute ideas and suggestions for improving the sustainability performance


Simon Wheeldon


and generate cost savings across the organisation. The best ideas work their way to the top, ensuring that the organisation’s sustainability strategy continues to evolve and improve, resulting in ever increasing efficiency and greater savings over time. There is also Facebook-style collaboration, meaning that sustainability management can be a truly socially driven activity.


Building on the existing enterprise cloud computing platform, the user- friendly interface makes sustainability management and monitoring easy, the application also uses industry standard benchmarking techniques to automatically prioritise reduction initiatives in terms of cost and return, making management of the business-wide sustainability strategy as simple and straightforward as possible. Simon Wheeldon commented: “We are reaching far beyond the management of Carbon as a business asset, and are now able to help organisations to manage their entire sustainability strategy, engender ownership across the business and engage with every single employee to accelerate sustainability success. While many others are slowly waking up to the new realities of limited energy and the continuing austere times, we have recognised that tomorrow’s leading brands will use sustainability to dramatically reduce costs, distinguish themselves and gain competitive advantage.” www.cloudapps.com


50|


SUSTAINABLE FM | DECEMBER 2010/JANUARY 2011


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69