Tools track energy usage for businesses

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SEATTLE — With businesses scrambling to reduce their energy use — both to save costs and limit their carbon footprint — Microsoft and other software vendors are building tools that make tracking environmental data easier.

Last week, Microsoft released a free add-on to its enterprise resource planning software for midsize businesses.

The Environmental Sustainability Dashboard is designed for use by a facilities manager, environmental-compliance officer or anyone in the company with the responsibility of tracking energy use and greenhouse gas emissions.

It displays graphs of direct energy usage, such as coal, oil or natural gas burned on site, and indirect usage — energy purchased from a utility. The information can be used to track efficiency programs or evaluate improvements, such as shifting from oil heat to electric.

Sole Technology, a Lake Forest, Calif., sports apparel and footwear company, has a goal of becoming carbon-neutral by 2020.

George Bock, vice president of IT, said the company already uses Microsoft’s Dynamics ERP software, and the addition of the environmental dashboard is “a perfect blend for us.”

The dashboard allows the company to compile data it’s already collecting and keep track of specific efforts to reduce carbon emissions.

While the company’s carbon-neutral mandate is driven by its environmentally conscious chief executive and founder, Pierre Andre Senizergues, it is also seeing cost savings through the effort.

Dwight Klappich, a Gartner analyst who follows supply-chain applications, said there’s a major trend toward adding environmental measurement capabilities to business applications.

Some applications are very sophisticated while others are “putting a green spin on stuff they might have already been doing,” he said.

For companies to begin adopting these technologies, however, there generally has to be a clear economic benefit.

“I don’t see a lot of demand driven exclusively by being green,” Klappich said.