We’ve spoken once before about Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software and a business’s environmental ethics. With an ERP’s ability to track every jot and tiddle of a company’s material resources, modern industry has more power than ever to make environmentally responsible (and financially sensible) decisions. Using a green ERP for efficient use of resources means less money out of your pocket, and identifying resources scrap or other material available for recycling means more coming into your pocket. Entire fields of industry have been more greatly empowered to avoid waste than ever before, but human psychology remains, as ever, our biggest hurdle.

GREEN ERP: THINK ABOUT ENVIRONMENTAL EFFECTS

Part of the problem in creating a green ERP rests in how we operate in groups. For instance, a form of institutionalization takes over when we’re a part of a group. This particular bias makes the continuing existence of that group more important than anything else, including the basic goals of the group (such as making a good product or turning a profit). The group, whether it be a university or a company, wants to continue existing so much that it quickly dismisses criticisms or problems, despite what the facts may say.

Another human trait that green ERP’s struggle with as we make ethical decisions occurs when we meet with those who share our beliefs. Studies show that we almost always come away believing more strongly in those commonly held beliefs, a dangerous tendency no matter if it’s in business, religion, or politics (unless of course you believe your group’s beliefs are perfect, but that’s a bias of even greater magnitude).

ECO-FRIENDLY GREEN ERP

The dangers of not checking our decision-making when it comes to the environment has a clear and bizarre history. While firms have created such memorable locations as New York’s Love Canal or Kentucky’s Valley of the Drums, who among us believes that the things we put into the environment stay exactly where we dump them and exactly in that form? When environmentalist Rachel Carson was fighting to get DDT off the shelves, studies revealed that DDT had made it into American ecosystems where no human had been in decades. Our world is large but it is also interconnected, and a green ERP should strive to recognize that.

Of course, we might think that these particular cognitive weaknesses are only occurring in other firms, in other places, but that is a dangerous delusion. Using Enterprise Resource Planning to offset these human failings makes sense. We should push our green ERP vendors to provide even more tools to help use energy and material more wisely; to save our bottom line, to save our bedeviled decision-making, and to save the world in which we live.