Former executives from SAP and Oracle have set up a Software as a Service (Saas) that will help large organizations track their environmental impacts and energy use. The Silicon Valley-based company Hara is backed by the investment firm Kleiner Perkins, and has already signed such organizations as the Coca-Cola Company and the City of Palo Alto. The company has been working in stealth mode to set up their service and have just announced the service to the world yesterday with much publicity.
The Environmental and Energy Management system is focused on reducing a company’s use of natural resources and improving organizational efficiency while driving down costs. The solution is broken into four different modules that fit nicely in an enterprise computing environment with SAP and other ERP solutions.
- Discover – Aggregate environmental record information from relevant data sources in order to provide a comprehensive view of resource consumption, greenhouse gas emissions and environmental impact
- Plan – Define strategies, optimize planning decisions, forecast reductions, identify objectives and metrics, and calculate timing and benefits for each initiative
- Act – Manage the execution of environmental and energy programs, track results per initiative, and provide an audit trail for any current or future regulatory requirements
- Innovate – Implement the Hara methodology and leverage best practices for continuous improvements and business transformation
With growing focus on environmental impacts, Hara argues that the benefits of offshoring labor to low hourly wage countries is gone and that managing energy use and greenhouse gas emissions will be the area of greatest cost savings.
Read the case study from Palo Alto to get a sense how this solution is being applied.
