A "Greener" Approach for Microsoft Dynamics AX Users Need Not Be Complicated

A few years ago, my days were spent in the African desert teaching ecology and conservation to students, teachers and government officials. I lived in a modest house powered by a combination of solar and wind energy, collected fog moisture to support daily water use and maintain a vegetable garden with refuse water. It was an experience solely focused on my place in the world and how everyday decisions impact how we interact with the environment - for better or worse.

Coming back to the United States and transitioning to the business world was quite a shock, not just culturally but also in terms of issues of environmental sustainability and conservation.

When Microsoft Business Solutions announced on PartnerSource the addition of an ‘Environmental Sustainability Dashboard' to Dynamics AX several months ago, I began thinking about different ways in which businesses could reduce the environmental impact of certain business processes and transactional documents.

Visibility Is the First Step

Before I dive into some simple ways to reduce consumption of natural resources and increase awareness, let's review some of the basic functionality offered by the Environmental Sustainability Dashboard. Through the use of the Environmental Sustainability Dashboard, organizations on Microsoft Dynamics AX can actively track energy consumption and the amount of greenhouse gas emissions being released into the atmosphere.

With the dashboard, users can enter additional fields of data when paying bills, for example, to capture information such as the kilowatt hours used for electricity in a month, the number of gallons of gasoline used by delivery trucks in a month, or the amount of paper used by the company for document processing. Using the additional data fields, baseline levels can be established for determining ‘green' initiative reduction ...