SAS expands sustainability management: It’s easier being green

New analytic software improves organizational efficiency in meeting carbon-reduction goals; new strategic partnership with AMEE for global data

The Premier Business Leadership Series, Las Vegas  (28 Oct. 2009)  –  To help resource-stretched organizations adhere to regulations, improve efficiency and cut costs, SAS, the leader in business analytics, is expanding SAS^® for Sustainability Management. The software helps measure, manage and report on key environmental, social and economic indicators and identify strategies that reduce risk and increase shareholder value. SAS will ship two new offerings in Q4 2009 that address sustainability reporting and energy and emissions management. Through a new partnership with AMEE, SAS customers of the new energy and emissions management product will have access to the most up-to-date emissions factors from a single source. This will reduce complexity, risk and time associated with delivering accurate and reliable information to decision makers.

The first new offering is SAS Sustainability Reporting. This single source of information about an organization’s sustainability performance uses generally accepted sustainability reporting metrics, including the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). The Web-based solution includes pre-defined analytics for accurate forecasting and correlation between metrics, with both automated data capture and manual Web data entry. Better sustainability reporting leads to more effective planning, better adherence to regulations, and more effective results. You can’t fix or improve what you can’t measure, and this new SAS software helps improve measurement.

The second is SAS Energy and Emissions Management. This software includes activity-based capacity and resource planning models to help organizations choose between alternatives, based on predicted resource requirements. It incorporates emissions factors from AMEE, a global service provider that aggregates every model, method, standard and emission factor related to carbon dioxide (CO₂), greenhouse gas (GHG), energy and environmental assessment. This allows SAS’ customers to reduce complexity, risk and time associated with energy and emission modeling. The solution can go beyond basic inventories by modeling the activities, processes and economic impact of operations. Accurate analysis of emissions can lead to better programs for managing and reducing them.

Partnership with AMEE speeds calculation and analysis
Teaming with AMEE, SAS allows customers to alleviate error-prone and tedious manual aggregation of third-party data for emissions calculations. This helps promote compliance with authoritative international standards.

“Our partnership combines SAS' world-class business analytics tools and applications with AMEE's dynamic global data set to create a fully integrated carbon modeling and decision support solution,” said Gavin Starks, founder and CEO of AMEE. “This alignment of core competencies provides enterprise customers with a robust and flexible solution that enables them to embed carbon intelligence into everyday decision making.”

AMEE tracks any activity or consumption data, including fuel, water, waste and other factors and converts them into carbon/GHG figures. Its Web services combine measurement, calculation, modeling, profiling and transactional services. This reduces time and cost while increasing accuracy.

“Leveraging AMEE’s emissions and energy information, SAS provides one-touch access to the latest emissions factors available,” said Jonathan Hornby, SAS’ Global Marketing Director for Performance Management. “SAS’ award-winning data integration automatically maps that data to the new SAS Energy and Emissions Management.”

Analysts and customers speak out
Organizations are concerned about sustainability for many reasons, with regulation being only one of them.  Concerns about corporate reputation, carbon footprint, supply risk and energy costs continue to increase. That’s why organizations need to manage energy and emissions today.

"Companies that shelve green strategies until the economy improves will miss a huge opportunity to become stronger and more profitable," said Andrew Winston, founder of Winston Eco-Strategies and author of Green Recovery .

“SAS has enjoyed a globally growing and dynamic influence in the business solutions, business analytics and performance management enterprise application space,” according to Stephen Stokes’ report from AMR Research’s Sustainability Peer Forum in July 2009. “SAS introduced a slick yet still evolving Sustainable Performance Management software application suite.”

“We selected SAS for Sustainability Management to monitor our CO₂ emissions because it’s flexible,” said Henry Terlouw, Climate Change Policy Advisor at the Municipality of The Hague. “It can calculate CO₂ equivalents for our 120 municipal buildings, 550 vehicles, public lighting and, eventually, our pump stations. Multiple users have access to reports so we can quickly make changes to meet our goals.”

Other new customers using SAS for Sustainability Management:

• E.ON Italia uses SAS for Sustainability Management to support internal cross-commodity pricing and integrated portfolio management processes.
• Northern Melbourne Institute of TAFE helps make its graduates work-ready by teaching them real-world sustainability reporting and auditing skills using SAS for Sustainability Management.
• The Norwegian Association of Local and Regional Authorities and its subsidiary see analytics as crucial for predicting, understanding and managing. They use SAS to provide overall management and to introduce sustainability management tools for local governments. This promotes initiating improvements early and effectively, incorporating long-term consequences into day-to-day decisions.
• POSCO Research Institute (POSRI) has successfully completed its pilot project using SAS for Sustainability Management to optimize GHG emission reduction potential, GHG abatement potential, and the marginal cost of GHG reduction for steel manufacturing.
• Regione Umbria in Italy purchased SAS for Sustainability Management to support a GRI management system for regional government.
  

SAS for Sustainability Management, based on the SAS Business Analytics Framework, uses the GRI Framework to report on triple bottom-line indicators – environmental, social and economic – using SAS software’s predictive abilities to validate strategies, identify causal relationships, forecast improvement scenarios and drive innovation.

The SAS Business Analytics Framework encompasses award-winning data integration, analytics and reporting technologies that organizations can put to work by themselves or as part of SAS’ expanding range of business solutions including the new SAS for Sustainability Management bundles. All capabilities across the framework enable continuous performance improvement, helping organizations achieve financial and operational excellence.

Today’s announcement came at The Premier Business Leadership Series event in Las Vegas, a business conference presented by SAS that brings together more than 600 attendees from the public and private sectors to share ideas on critical business issues.

About AMEE
AMEE enables businesses, consumers and government to build environmental intelligence into everything they do. Applications and solutions are “Powered by AMEE” to ensure compliance with authoritative international standards. AMEE is used internationally by a wide variety of businesses, government and NGOs.  www.amee.com

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