Greenwashing is a thing of the past; people can see through any hollow environmental promises. Is your organization prepared.
Although many worldwide believe sustainability is important, only 60% of organizations have a clear strategy. While some may have plans to wing it along the way, this is no longer cutting it for eagle-eyed customers expecting more.
It’s not just customers who are looking for better sustainability practices either. Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) standards, long maligned for their inconsistent reporting methods, are becoming more and more standardized, with recent regulatory changes paving the way for more accurate and reliable reporting.
As investors increasingly emphasize sustainable business practices and businesses start to take stock of their inefficient practices, there needs to be a tool to organize all of these efforts properly. This is exactly what sustainability management software solutions are designed to do. Let’s look at sustainability management software and which tools are the best to implement for your business.
What is Sustainability Management Software?
Sustainability management software allows organizations to track and manage their performance data from their operations to help attain their ESG goals. Traditionally, they help to organize and actively monitor metrics from non-renewable energy assets like energy, efficiency, and GHG footprint.
Some sustainability management software also provides tools to monitor and optimize renewable energy sources and consider environmental and geographic factors and changes. Others can examine an organization’s waste management or analyze the supply chain for inefficiencies and suppliers who focus less on sustainable operations and production.
Now let’s dive into how sustainability management software can benefit your organization and help achieve ‘greener’ operations.
What are the Benefits of Sustainability Management for Energy?
Keeping your operations efficient, sustainable, and future-focused is an obvious goal for any success-seeking organization. Sustainability management solutions are an integral part of that process. Sustainability management provides organizations with a wide array of benefits, including:
- Helping to track and achieve ESG goals
- Optimizing energy use for renewable assets
- Reducing reliance on fuel-based energy sources
- Removing the need for many onsite visits and assets
- Forecasting asset usage and adjusting accordingly
- Alerting to any potential malfunction or KPI issue
Sustainability management software can also go into areas like waste, utility usage, inventory, and other areas of your operations. So what exactly should you look for in your sustainability management software, and how do you differentiate between so many options?
What to Look for in Sustainability Management
What each organization looks for in sustainability management software comes down to their specific needs and goals. However, there are some universal factors every solution should include. To start, any worthwhile solution will help monitor, collect, organize, and analyze performance data. This spans from remote sites and assets to supply chains, vehicle fleets, waste, and more.
In particular, any reliable sustainability management solution will provide tools to monitor and optimize renewable asset usage to ensure you are getting the most out of your solar, wind, and other renewable energy sources. This goes beyond monitoring and requires taking into account environmental and geographic factors.
Top 9 Sustainability Management Software Solutions
1. BoxPower
BoxPower is an all-in-one solution focused on rural solar energy projects. They excel in managing and optimizing clean energy within a microgrid setup to ensure assets run at peak levels. They also provide onsite maintenance services if and when the need arises for non-renewable energy assets.
Best for: Utility companies, those with critical infrastructure, and those in the agricultural and telecoms sector.
Price: Upon request
2. Galooli
Galooli provides a real-time sustainability management solution focused on remote monitoring, management, and optimization of remote sites and energy assets. Our innovative platform integrates agnostically with any existing installation or asset, providing live alerts and detecting potential maintenance and performance issues before they worsen.
In particular, we have a unique patent for our method of optimizing renewable energy assets taking a number of environmental factors into account.
With customizable, in-depth dashboards and automated reporting options, Galooli helps you leverage the power of real-time and historical data to discover areas for optimization. Our platform also helps provide actionable insights into your operations and how to make them more sustainably focused.
Best for: Creating a more sustainable operating profile, especially regarding renewable and traditional energy assets. This includes organizations operating utilities, a building with a microgrid, data centers, or any other facility that uses a variety of energy assets.
Price: Upon request
3. David Energy
David Energy provides both an energy management platform with usage adjustment automation and also provides affordable, clean energy as a supplier. They also help create an alternative customer revenue stream by selling surplus energy to other clients, further saving on costs.
Best for: Businesses from SMBs to enterprises
Price: Upon request
4. Mainpac
Mainpac is an Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) solution that helps businesses of all sizes manage their assets and operations. The EAM helps manage critical resources, operations, labor, asset monitoring, and maintenance strategy. This helps improve operational efficiency, reduce related costs, and provide a consistent return on investment.
Best for: Businesses from SMBs to enterprises
Price: Upon request
5. Power Factors
Power Factors Drive is a cloud sustainability management solution for organizations focused on managing the performance of renewable energy assets. This spans from monitoring asset performance, optimizing their output, reporting on technical issues and maintenance, and more.
Drive Pro, in particular, provides analytics for solar energy use, including detecting operational issues and potential energy loss.
Best for: All enterprises
Price: Upon request
6. Conservice ESG
Conservice ESG provides an umbrella platform to properly retrieve, organize and analyze data relating to energy assets, ESG reporting, and related projects throughout organizations. The platform is focused on giving an organized space for these efforts, tracking progress, and providing insights into areas for improvement. This includes analyzing consumption, dashboard creation for ESG endeavors, and other features.
Best for: Enterprises and large organizations
Price: Upon Request
7. Avnet
Avnet provides a web and mobile-based smart energy monitoring solution focused on sustainable energy asset management and usage management. The platform provides insights into potential areas for energy saving, improving energy efficiency, and reducing overall operational costs. Avnet also provides a wide array of sensors and tools required to effectively use their solution directly on their site.
Best for: Industrial operations and large organizations
Price: Upon request
8. Watchwire
Watchwire provides a collection of solutions providing a sustainability management suite to address large organizations’ related needs. They range from tracking energy and other utility consumption to monitoring and optimizing renewable assets and even ensuring ESG data is accurate and sustainability goals met.
Best for: Utilities and large operations
Price: Upon Request
9. Radian Generation Green IT
Radian Generation’s Green IT is a renewable energy business-focused solution for projects from design to building and operations. Green IT uses plug-and-play modules and its platform to provide a unified workspace to monitor operations and organize incoming data into useful insights.
Best for: Renewable energy providers and contractors
Price: Upon Request
Solving the ESG Puzzle
Energy costs rare rising and carbon emissions are rebounding from their near-dormant state during the pandemic. As a result, sustainable and more efficient practices are becoming more and more central to organizations’ operational strategies on a global scale.
As ESG goal success and investing become more and more intertwined, organizations must have a clear, structured plan in place to achieve a “greener”, cleaner organization profile. Sustainability management solutions, especially those excelling at monitoring and managing energy use and assets, are a critical piece of that puzzle.
Whether you run a network of telecom sites or have a building reliant on a microgrid, sustainability management will help manage and drive your organization’s ESG success.
