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I recently attended Perspectives 2010, Epicor’s annual global user conference. This was my first experience at Perspectives, and while my colleagues briefed me well on what to expect during the event, I was quite amazed and impressed by our customers. The vast majority of discussions that I had with users were about value creation as opposed to mere functionality. There were those customers who were eager to share how they’ve used Epicor to improve their businesses, but there were even more who were willing to listen.

For example, one customer explained how he used Epicor Business Process Management (BPM) and Service Connect tools to integrate and reduce the number of steps in processing information from a third-party manufacturing application—essentially reducing the required number of barcode scans from five, or more, to just one. As a result, this has saved his company and co-workers from performing thousands of non-value added steps each year.

At one point a question came up (as it always does), “Yeah, but how much did that cost you to do?” There were several nodding heads wondering the same thing, and before a chorus of “that must have been expensive” the response came: “You know, I’d have to think about it—I don’t really know. I only know what it would have cost us if we hadn’t done it.”

McDonald’s founder, Ray Kroc, once said, “If you’re green you’re growing and if you’re ripe you’re rotting.” Today there are many dimensions to this quote—personal, organizational, environmental. I mention it in the organizational context because technology has become a great enabler of growth. Also, because I have walked some miles in our customers’ shoes, having once worked for a distribution company where I was twice involved with major software selections and implementations that were necessary to grow and sustain industry leadership. Suffice it to say, there is much to consider—too much.

Nevertheless, consideration of technology is now an imperative and a competency. According to an Aberdeen study, Spotlight on the Distribution Sector: Market Challenges and Responses in 2010, most distributors are focused on growing profit margins despite crushing market forces. To meet the challenge, these distributors are leveraging technology in strategic and innovative ways to manage costs and make more intelligent supply chain decisions. What’s more is that distributors are focused on value creation, not functionality just for functionality’s sake—who cares what it does if you don’t use it, or know how to use it, or if it doesn’t align with overall business strategy.

Not surprisingly, interest in Epicor among distributors has been fantastic, recently. There are at least two reasons for this. The first is because of Epicor’s technology stack, its ease of use, and extensive tool kit. Epicor offers a nimble solution in times that demand business agility. Secondly, distributors are widely embracing Lean principles and Epicor is chock full of solutions to identify and trim waste and ensure product quality. Grow or rot? While the decision is simple it’s certainly far from easy in practice. However, the vast majority of the customers I spoke with during our user conference had interesting plans for growth and a creative determination to execute that was truly inspiring.

Posted by Mike Tatara, Manager, Product Marketing, Epicor

With an ever-increasing focus, both socially and statutorily, to reduce greenhouse gases (GHG) and climate change, companies are being driven to gain understanding and control over their carbon footprints. Traditionally this has been done with a number of separate, usually manual, systems based upon spreadsheets – if at all. Now, ERP vendors such as Epicor are beginning to offer Enterprise Carbon and Energy Management (ECEM) systems that synchronize with your existing applications to make it easy for your company to become more socially and fiscally responsible.

ECEM systems gather data from several sources: Utility Bills, Fixed Assets (devices), Production, Timesheet and HR systems (to name a few). ECEM systems aggregate this data, providing standard carbon usage information for companies in your industry and area using the same devices. The normal cost of transportation for your assets is also factored in. Then, capturing actual data, ECEM systems provide a baseline of your actual usage, comparing it to standards. ECEM systems should not, however, only be data recording systems – they should also provide practical and useful techniques for reducing your carbon footprint against your baseline. A few examples include providing a list of the most efficient settings for your devices, suggesting changes to the timings of energy costly events or transactions, and tracking actual mileage by employee to focus on transportation efficiency. Once a baseline has been established and better practices adopted and documented, ECEM systems will give your organization real-time feedback that allow you to assess the effectiveness of your carbon reduction initiatives, allowing you to fine-tune them.

The benefits of this are many. First, your organization will be compliant with, or ready for, the many national and local carbon reduction schemes currently being introduced, examples of which are the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CDC) and requirements under the EPA Clean Air Act. Second, your organization will gain direct benefits to its bottom line through reduction of energy costs and waste. Finally, if you succeed in reducing and tracking your carbon usage, you can monetize this benefit through carbon trading markets.

ECEM systems are something highly worth considering for your business – they make sense socially, economically and operationally. Ask yourself, what has your organization been considering in this area?

Posted by Matt Muldoon, Vice President, Product Marketing, Epicor

It is a commonly held belief that there exist very few CFOs who can write out a check for an annual software maintenance contract with a smile on their face. However, I’d venture to guess that CFOs never smile when writing out checks -- only when they’re cashing them.

Maintenance contracts tend to get a bad rap – especially so, it seems whenever we enter into a period of economic distress. This is when customers start letting their maintenance contracts lapse in the interest of trying to reap short term cost savings. Many rationalize that they can go without their maintenance contract if their system is “stable” and they don’t make many support calls. (This is the great irony for software vendors -- the perceived need for a maintenance contract is in many ways in inverse proportion to the quality and stability of the system!)

Maintenance is like an insurance contract … (I know, as if you’ve never heard that before) that you offer customers in order to ensure the continued operation of their systems. While you might be tempted to let your maintenance contract lapse with plans to sign up again when the next version is released, you should make sure you fully understand any penalty fees involved so you can determine whether this will really save you money. Also, if you have users who need a lot of “care and feeding” and/or your company is rapidly expanding its use of the software, the maintenance fees you’re paying may well be justified, as maintenance doesn’t just cover fixing what gets broken, and investment in new releases, it also provides access to resources that help you get the most out of your system.

Aside from this, you need to balance the potential short term gains with what I call the “opportunity loss.” By far, the biggest benefit of a maintenance contract is that you receive new software releases, updates and new features that address new and emerging business requirements and incorporate best practices from other customers just like you. In this way, business systems – especially ERP which serves as the critical business operations backbone -- are very dynamic.

Once you cancel your maintenance contract, you no longer have a dynamic system that is continually evolving to help you meet new business needs; and there’s a risk that your business needs might outgrow the existing functionality of your software. And, if your business prospects, scope, or strategy change sooner than you expect, you may well find yourself short on options.

At some point, upgrades become inevitable, and if a company hasn’t stayed current on maintenance (benefiting from software features and functionality along the way), it often must do a “rip and replace” approach, leapfrogging several versions. And as a result, sometimes the biggest pain they feel is in the “drinking from a fire hose” effect from users who find themselves overwhelmed trying to relearn what now -- due to the advent of so many new features, functionality and enabling technology – seems like a completely different system.

If ever there was a topic to stimulate healthy debate it's software maintenance. So let’s have it … I’m interested to hear your point of view.

Posted by Dan Whelan, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Support, Epicor

I enjoyed reading the recent post on this blog by my colleague Chad Meyer, Don’t Venture Into The Cloud Without Meyer’s List, which follows on from his other equally passionate post covering the debut of Epicor’s first complete ERP solution in the cloud, Epicor Express – The Little ERP Engine that Could. I can tell you now, knowing Chad as I do, he may be somewhat soft spoken but not when it comes to his views on cloud computing, which are fervent to say the least. He’s not alone; all of us at Epicor feel strongly about dispelling the myths and demystifying the cloud on behalf of our customers. The cloud was one of the key technologies I highlighted back in December 2009 in my post, New demands will shake IT up, as presenting a real opportunity for business.

The debate about the right way and wrong way in the cloud will continue, of course, and rightly so, but at the end of the day, IMO, cloud computing is simply about greater customer choice and flexibility. I don’t think I’m alone in this either – believing that SaaS is “just another deployment model,” I have heard as much from several leading analysts. But I’m also not naïve enough to think that everyone agrees with me. For instance, I had a rather spirited debate with a leading analyst only a few months ago about whether a “traditional (sic) ERP company,” which I guess Epicor is meant to be, could ever be a “cloud ERP company,” because in their view cloud companies “are different.” Well, maybe so, but I doubt for much longer and Meyer’s List is a great way to help make that change.

Unfortunately, some “SaaS only companies” just don’t get this. Perhaps it’s precisely because they are only cloud companies and so by their nature limit the choices available to customers. Epicor is neither a traditional on-premise only ERP company nor a SaaS only ERP company, Epicor is a software company.

Damn I said it! I admitted that Epicor publishes innovative ERP software, because of course SaaS only companies (if we are to believe them) are not software companies at all. So what is it that they offer on-demand, hardware? A natural marketing position of course, but they still publish software.

I didn’t start this post to go after SaaS only companies however, as many of them have paved the way to the greater acceptance of business software in the cloud, but if they can’t evolve, just as if on-premise only companies can’t evolve to exploit the potential of the cloud, then they will be going the way of….well you know.

Epicor’s cloud computing strategy is simple, concise, encompassing and based on two basic tenets:

1. Complete choice and flexibility for ERP deployment

2. Rapid, secure access to low cost value-added applications

I will let our regular website expand on this but Epicor’s cloud computing strategy is virtually unique in so far as it offers complete choice and flexibility in deployment scenarios to customers. That is, customers can move reasonably seamlessly back and forth and mix and match between multi-tenant SaaS, single-tenant (hosted), appliance or on-premise deployment as required, all based on the same code line. This is in stark contrast to cloud only business model providers or other ERP vendors who have introduced net new products to cater for SaaS only deployments.

As noted, this single code line and related approach is being both applauded and questioned by the analyst community who seem split on what it actually takes to be an effective provider of end-to-end applications in the cloud.

However, all analysts seem to concur on the value of the cloud to business, with a recent Gartner Group report, Significant Benefits Realized with Supply Chain Management in the Cloud, suggesting that 95% of those surveyed were using or considering cloud computing solutions.

One thing is for sure, over time it will be what the customer wants that wins.

Posted by James Norwood, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Product Marketing, Epicor

In 2005, AMR Research released a study predicting the cost of compliance over the following five years would reach the jaw-dropping figure of $80 billion, and that the average company would spend (gulp) approximately $500,000 on compliance-related activities. Now that we find ourselves in 2010, I wonder what the actual and final tabulation is at the culmination of that five-year period?

True, this new era of more stringent regulatory compliance mandates has heaped on a new layer of operating costs. However, savvy companies have used this opportunity to improve their businesses, streamline processes and reduce risk exposure. As a result, many companies have gotten way more out of it than they’ve put into it. In fact, it’s reasonable to believe that companies weathered (and are weathering) the recent economic storm much better, thanks in part to greater operational visibility and efficiencies ushered in by compliance requirements. Ironic isn’t it? Even more ironic when you consider that compliance-related activities have been a catalyst for job creation, which especially in the manufacturing sector, is key to overall economic recovery. Perhaps compliance, which rode in on a dark horse with nostrils flaring, has actually been our salvation?

While we ponder that, I’ll add the caveat that our work isn’t done here. While many companies have had successes in implementing a compliance framework, which at its core is about automating processes to ensure the right process is followed each and every time (and logged, tracked, etc.), the focus has been on the “low hanging fruit” – processes that are fairly standardized, iterative and easy to template and automate.

The harder part is tackling areas and activities that are more ad hoc, where there’s a heavy human aspect, and where it’s harder to define a workflow. And yet, these tend to be productivity black holes – where information workers are saddled with multi-tasking -- think change management, customer complaints, and returns management, etc. Due to their hoc nature and the ad hoc approaches that are then taken within the organization to address them, these areas also expose your organization to risk. So formulating a process and employing the tools to translate this electronically -- this is where real and tremendous cost savings lie along with a heap of risk mitigation.

Looking for more best practices on compliance? View our recent webcast, Building a Better Framework for Compliance Management, for the Medical Device and Diagnostics industry with Judy Meritz Shareholder with Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz, and Epicor customer Brandon Murch, with Aligned Medical Solutions.

Posted by Christine Hansen, Manager, Product Marketing, Epicor

It think it’s fair to say that Epicor was amongst the very first ERP companies to begin delivering Web 2.0 concepts as actual beneficial capabilities within our products with the launch of our Epicor 9 Next-Generation ERP solution in December 2008. One of the earliest to coin the phrase and make sense of Web 2.0 was Tim O’Reilly who noted “Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as a platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.” All good stuff, but one of my favorite and particularly straight forward definitions of Web 2.0 is “applications that embrace the internet, rather than fight the internet,” which comes from Epicor’s own executive vice president of worldwide R&D, Paul Farrell.

In the 20 months since the release of Epicor 9 ERP, Epicor’s product marketing and technology research teams have continued to look hard at the potential for modern internet technologies that cannot just harness the power of collaborative participation, but can actually make ERP software easier and potentially more fun [sic] to use.

Today, Epicor has a detailed and strategic roadmap for delivering on an Enterprise 2.0 strategy. So how do we get from Web 2.0 to Enterprise 2.0? One of the Enterprise 2.0 definitions I like and feel effectively describes our strategy here is from Ross Dawson: “Enterprise 2.0 is the application of Web 2.0 and other emerging technologies to enhance organizational performance within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.”

In basic terms as far as Epicor sees it, getting to Enterprise 2.0 is based on the following:

• SOA, which delivers the ultimate framework for managing business logic and business rules.
• Web 2.0, which delivers the ultimate framework for beneficial interaction between people and software.
• Next-Generation ERP, which delivers the ultimate business benefit through the combination of SOA and Web 2.0 to create the pay-back on Enterprise 2.0: business agility and innovation.

Epicor ICE Business Architecture

At the heart of our strategy for Enterprise 2.0 is the Epicor ICE Business Architecture, a next generation platform that incorporates consumer Web concepts to create an innovative business Web solution. Epicor ICE introduced Epicor True SOA™ and the Epicor Everywhere™ Framework, along with an investment in Web 2.0 usability, to offer forward looking companies a business architecture for tomorrow.

In fact, Epicor ICE does more than that. It effectively merges SOA and Web 2.0 to create a single next-generation platform to support the demands of modern businesses. This doesn’t mean that we are embedding Facebook or providing our customers with the opportunity to have a Second Life within Epicor ERP, but what it does mean is that we are exploiting both the social and technical aspects of Web 2.0 technologies for business benefit. If you simply consider the last time your bought a book on-line or purchased a song on iTunes or went out to try Twitter for the first time, you just knew how to do it, you didn’t need to be taught how to use Amazon.com for instance. With Epicor ERP, we are reflecting many of the self-evident technologies that we all use today, collectively called Web 2.0, within our business applications as well.

Some of these concepts that are manifested today or planned for inclusion within Epicor ERP include: Enterprise Search, Presence and RSS, Composite Applications (Mashups), Wikis/Folksonomies, Rich Internet Applications (RIA), Data Tagging, Activity Streams, Collaboration and Engagement Platforms, and Contextual Metadata.

What does this mean for users, for our customers? It means an enterprise facility that promotes greater collaboration between users, internal teams and with supply-chain partners. It means unprecedented ease of you and access to information. And it means lifting ERP up to join with and exploit the rest of the tools and technologies we simply take for granted. In order to do this, we need a modern technology platform, and that is Epicor ICE.

Enterprise 2.0: A Business Necessity

All of these things are possible due to the fundamental design approach to Epicor ERP, which supports business process modeling through its service-oriented design approach, of which Gartner stated “The architecture of Epicor 9 makes it the closest solution to a model-driven packaged application available today,” in their Magic Quadrant for Midmarket and Tier 2-Oriented ERP. This advanced architecture, which fuses SOA and Web 2.0 is exactly what’s needed to help bring the benefits of these technologies to the business, because as far as Epicor is concerned Enterprise 2.0 is not just the latest buzzword it’s a necessary, complementary and inevitable future for ERP.

Posted by James L. Norwood, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Product Marketing, Epicor

I’m always amazed at how the topic of lean manufacturing continues to be ultra-relevant and topical to just about every manufacturer I talk to. I think it’s because wherever you are in the “lean journey,” you can always do more. The other reason is that lean is constantly evolving via new technologies, new techniques and new angles.

One of those new angles on lean is in looking at energy consumption throughout manufacturing operations. Lean practitioners seek to eliminate the nine wastes: over production, inventory, waiting, transportation, motion, over processing, quality defects, reprioritization, and people’s skills. However, today manufacturers must also be cognizant about how they use or misuse energy to produce a product or carry out a service. This is known as the tenth waste: energy.

Energy consumption is a great area for manufacturers to focus on during a downturn, when lower electric bills can help to provide a much-needed cash infusion to operating budgets. Lean manufacturing can help identify overall requirements and align need to capacity, thus ensuring production lines are optimized, energy use is maximized and raw product fully utilized.

But in today’s era of time-dependent electricity pricing and availability, savvy manufacturers are taking this one step further, factoring in the constraint of energy in the scheduling process – changing the time of day certain equipment is used, or timing power-up sequencing for off-peak hours. Manufacturers are also improving controls and upgrading older equipment for more efficient energy use, installing solar panels or other alternative energy systems to power manufacturing machinery; and building an entirely new, more sustainable plants that are located close to raw material sources, helping to reduce transportation costs and aid in traceability.

This isn’t a fad; this is a way of doing business that’s here to stay. The lean (and green) journey is the path that yields continuous improvement, enhanced competitiveness, and improved agility and responsiveness.

Posted by Christine Hansen, Manager, Product Marketing, Epicor

Pricing that is profitable yet competitive is the Holy Grail in the manufacturing industry. To attain it, manufacturers must accurately estimate the costs associated with making products – a difficult task when you must account for all the various factors that can influence costs such as materials, labor, location, and special machinery requirements – and even more so when dealing with product configurations. Cost estimating is both an art and a science, akin to reading the tea leaves to extract the true costs involved across all manufacturing process.

One manufacturer that has cracked the code on accurate job costing is Companion Systems, a leading provider of ATM signage and branding. Challenged with managing the company’s growing number of product variants and offering the right product to meet each customer’s needs with accurate and competitive pricing, the company developed an effective strategy regarding product configuration and cost management to produce accurate job costing and quotations that are “right on the money.”

If you’re looking for greater profitability, and improved efficiency and accuracy in cost estimating, be sure to attend the Getting it Right on the Money: Best Practices in Job Costing session at the IMTS Industry & Technology Conference on Friday, Sept. 17 at 10 a.m. in Room W193B.

Visit Epicor at IMTS 2010 in Booth E-3851

Posted by Frank Martell, Manager, Product Marketing, Epicor

Epicor recently sponsored a report on Cloud Services by David S. Linthicum. Linthicum is the author/coauthor of 13 books on computing and a frequent speaker at leading technology conferences on cloud computing, SOA, Web 2.0, and enterprise architecture. David knows more than a little about the cloud -- including one cloud vendor “gotcha” -- escalating fees.

This issue is a real concern for many companies considering a Software as a Service (SaaS) strategy and to be candid, unfortunately, it’s completely justified. We ourselves have heard the industry stories about vendors holding clients hostage with unjustified subscription fee increases that, over the long term, all but completely erode the original savings in software, hardware and support.

This underscores the need for what I like to call “Meyer’s List of Contractual Assurances.” Trust me: Read this little piece of software insider wisdom now and you’ll thank me later. OK, so without further ado, here it goes:

PRICING ASSURANCES
In the area of pricing assurances, make sure there is a price cap, so going into the relationship you’ll know what the fees will be if all is successful and you decide to renew the service. This ensures you (and the vendor) have an absolute understanding of the upper range of what you will pay.

DATA ASSURANCES
It’s also important to have data assurances. Yes, breaking up is hard to do, but if you’re cutting ties with your SaaS vendor and they have your grandmother’s ring (so to speak), you’re going to want it back -- without any emotional blackmail, and also without a $$$$ penalty, let’s say.

DATA CENTER ASSURANCES
Next data center assurances should be validated. This is an easy one, simply ask to see the SAS 70 II certification report to validate that the system is being hosted in a credible, top-tier data center and not some server in the vendor’s storage closet. A SAS 70 II is a detailed audit that shows the data center has been thoroughly checked and deemed to have satisfactory controls and safeguards in place for hosting.

SERVICE LEVEL ASSURANCES
Service level assurance is important, of course. From my perspective, it’s become table stakes. However, contractual assurances regarding the service’s downtime limits and support response times should be called out, nonetheless.

As the cloud continues to grow in popularity, customers will gain more options and more leverage as SaaS vendors grow in number and no longer wield the power to make aggressive and unilateral demands. But in the interim I leave you all with the list and invite you to get more tips on venturing into the cloud in Infoworld’s Special Report

Posted by Chad Meyer, Director, Product Marketing, Epicor

Signs of slow but steady recovery in manufacturing are being seen in both the US and Europe, stimulating continued debate about the strength of a global industry turnaround. In the US, sectors such as electrical equipment, appliances and components, and fabricated metals are continuing to grow, while consumer spending and discretionary purchasing remains down, impacting segments such as furniture, food and beverage, and even toy manufacturers. As a whole, it seems the closer a manufacturer’s goods are to the end consumer, the slower the recovery.

Many in the US have bemoaned the fact that the US has “given away” its manufacturing base -- outsourcing this work to lower-cost suppliers in Asia, Latin America and elsewhere; maybe so, but there are two sides to every story. The tough economic environment has driven many companies to turn to outsourcing not just to cut costs, but to survive. Over the past few years, US corporations facing increased competition, ever tougher regulatory environments, and significantly rising health care and benefit costs have had to make tough decisions. The choice to outsource for many wasn’t merely an option, it was an absolute necessity; many would not be here today if they hadn’t. But remaining competitive in manufacturing has been about more than merely shifting around operations.

In 2008, the cost to manufacture in the US was only 17.6% higher than the average in nine other industrial countries, including Canada, Mexico, and China, according to the Manufacturing Institute and the Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI -- down from 31.7% in 2006. While rising labor costs in developing countries was a part of the equation, a key factor in US manufacturers reducing the cost delta was the continued investment in productivity-enhancing technologies. It was clear that with ever increasing global competitiveness, US manufacturers had to reduce costs, or lose their markets forever.

A quick scan of new Epicor manufacturing customers inked over the last quarter shows strong growth in emerging international markets including China, the Middle East, Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe. What we note is that these are not just US or European companies outsourcing -- there is also a strong mix of local companies expanding to meet the needs of local markets, as well as US companies building plants to meet growing demand (locally) in these markets.

This trend seems to align with the industry think tanks reporting that businesses are ramping up operations offshore (albeit slowly) to meet growing global demand. At the same time, while this demand continues to build, manufacturers can’t sit by and expect a return to “normal business” and growth.

For the next few years, the “new normal” is going to be tight markets with relentless, global competition -- emerging markets are developing significant manufacturing competencies seemingly overnight (Vietnam, for instance).

To compete, business needs to be more responsive than ever to its customers and markets. Flexibility and adaptability will be key (along with the givens of best quality, price, and performance). We should not expect any changes in the near term (regardless of administration) that ease regulatory compliance, or that universal healthcare will suddenly make our employees more productive.

As before, we need to look at how technology not only can drive dramatic shifts in productivity and profitability (as well as long term sustainability), but how it can change our fundamental approach to how or where we do business. While some companies may see technology as simply a tool for increasing efficiency, the smart companies see more than that; they see it as way to evolve their business models to focus on what has always been the strength of the US (and European) industrial sectors -- innovation.

Posted by John Hiraoka, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Epicor

It is estimated that the top 3,000 companies in the world caused damage to the environment worth $2.25 trillion USD (£1.5tn) in 2008 – a jaw dropping statistic which researchers say is indicative of “crisis proportions” of pollution and the rapid loss of freshwater fisheries and fertile soils due to industry.

Given this growing awareness of business impact and the resulting damage to the natural environment, and with global summits such as Copenhagen and Kyoto driving governmental focus on the environment and business impact, more and more countries will impose tracking and limitation rules on Greenhouse gases and carbon emissions, and the standards and initiatives on GHG and Carbon Accounting will only become more pervasive and stringent.

As the initiatives take deeper hold, carbon (or green) accounting will actually put a greater burden on SMBs as they generally don't have tracking systems in place. And, the cost of carrying out the tracking will be greater as a percentage of revenue than for larger firms.

Last week Epicor announced a partnership with Village Green Global, Inc., a company that specializes in enterprise carbon accounting. The partnership offers Epicor customers new capabilities to identify, analyze, audit, track, manage, benchmark and report on carbon emissions, environmental impact and energy consumption. By providing a simple and integrated carbon tracking system, Epicor is giving its customers the mechanism to beefficientlycompliant and gain benefits from ultimate cost savings. (Statistics are already showing a minimum savings of 10% in energy usage once a company starts to take steps to reduce its carbon footprint.)

Using an internationally recognized system for carbon analysis and trading, Village Green supports reporting for carbon accounting around electricity use, water consumption, transportation, natural gas, waste and other factors to find ways to save energy and money and enable organizations to implement and maintain sustainable business practices.

For more information on green carbon news, resources, and opinions on the rapidly expanding universe of carbon management strategies and enterprise carbon accounting, check out Greenbiz.com’s Carbon Management Center. Also, check out our related whitepaper, 7 Technology Tactics to Promote Corporate Social Responsibility.

Has your company undertaken any carbon accounting initiatives?

Posted by Matt Muldoon, Vice President, Product Marketing, Epicor