Oracle Environmental Accounting & Reporting – A Case Study With Oracle as Our Customer

“Ndevr’s expertise and depth of knowledge in this field were invaluable, especially when it came to establishing the emissions sources from our diverse facilities located around the globe.” Amy Aves, Senior Director, Global Real Estate Operations: Oracle

ABOUT ORACLE

Oracle is an American multinational computer technology corporation headquartered in Redwood City, California, United States. The company specializes in developing and marketing computer hardware systems and enterprise software products.

Oracle has more than 390,000 customers—including 100 of the Fortune 100—and offers an optimized and fully integrated stack of business hardware and software systems, with deployments across a wide variety of industries in more than 145 countries around the globe.

Oracle’s facilities portfolio spans more than nine million square feet of owned real estate and 14 million square feet of leased space, spread across 608 buildings in 70 countries.

Oracle’s Real Estate & Facilities division manages this portfolio and continuously strives to implement technology and best practices that reduce energy usage, water consumption, and waste, minimizing environmental impacts such as carbon emissions and reducing costs.

THE CHALLENGES
As a performance-‐driven organization, Oracle has set the following reduction goals by 2016:

  • 10 percent less energy per employee over the base year of 2010 for Oracle owned buildings
  • 15 percent less water per employee over the base year of 2011 for Oracle owned buildings
  • 15 percent less waste diverted to landfill per employee over the base year of 2012 for Oracle owned buildings
  • With respect to data centers, Oracle also aims to improve its Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) by 6 percent versus 2010 by 2016.

In order to meet these goals, Oracle needed to track their progress and improve performance, just as Oracle customers do. However the complexity
of Oracle’s business, coupled with the company’s rapid acquisition-‐fueled growth, meant that the teams charged with measuring the company’s environmental performance could no longer rely on labor intensive manual processes based on Excel spreadsheets for gathering environmental usage data.

100 people across different divisions were employed in this data collection process, with a 20-‐ person week effort required for validating data, evaluating progress towards set goals, and completing the facilities’ related portion of the Oracle Corporate Citizenship Report* and the Carbon Disclosure Project**.

This lengthy process also generated challenges in terms of auditability
and accuracy of calculations.

“By implementing the Environmental Accounting and Reporting module across our business, we are now able to confidently and proactively work towards the environmental sustainability goals that we have set. The expertise of the Ndevr consultants in both the Oracle technology as well as the environmental management space was an essential component of the success of this project.”

Jon Chorley – Chief Sustainability Officer and Group Vice President
Supply Chain Management Product Strategy & Product Value Chain Development
Oracle

THE SOLUTION
In February 2011, Oracle acquired Ndevr’s GHG Accounting Software, a solution that had been designed and developed in native Oracle technologies. To read the news relating to Oracle’s Acquisition of GHG Accounting Software click here.

Upon acquisition, Oracle fully integrated and standardized all aspects of the product, including it in the respective Oracle E-‐Business Suite and JD Edwards product lines under the new product name of Environmental Accounting and Reporting (EA&R).

Environmental Accounting and Reporting enables organizations to track their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and other environmental data against reduction targets, and facilitates environmental reporting for both voluntary and legislated emissions reporting schemes.

The solution manages this function from within the existing ERP system and utilizes Oracle Business Intelligence to provide immediate insight into an organization’s environmental data to identify and manage CO2 and cost reduction opportunities, providing a rapid return on investment.

Environmental Accounting and Reporting is available from Oracle for both JD Edwards and Oracle EBusiness Suite customers. JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Environmental Accounting and Reporting is available for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne version 9.0 and higher.

Oracle Environmental Accounting and Reporting is available for Oracle E-‐Business Suite version 12.1 and higher. Both solutions are backed by a common business analytics layer developed in Oracle Business Intelligence
Suite Enterprise Edition Plus and Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition, which are the required technology components.

THE OUTCOME
Ndevr worked with the Oracle implementation team to deploy Environmental Accounting and Reporting internally at Oracle. The module is now being used by Oracle to capture and transform the data from its 608
buildings across 76 countries, covering over 23 million square feet of owned and leased real estate.

The implementation was a success, with a very smooth transition to the new methodology and system and Oracle went live on schedule.

“Ndevr’s expertise and depth of knowledge in this field were invaluable, especially when it came to establishing the emissions sources from our diverse facilities located around the globe. They also worked closely with our sustainability team, reviewing the business processes involved in capturing the environmental data for those sources. The Ndevr team was an essential component of this project, ensuring it came in on time and within budget” Amy Aves – Senior Director, Global Real Estate
Operations at Oracle

The process of gathering data, which was previously handled through Excel spreadsheets by 100 people in different locations across the globe, is now highly automated. This has significantly improved productivity as well as ensured data accuracy and auditability.

In addition, the scope of reports now available to the organization for internal use has increased dramatically, ensuring that Oracle can easily track environmental initiatives against performance targets.

By implementing Environmental Accounting and Reporting across their own business Oracle has succeeded in automating the processes involved in capturing the data needed to measure their performance against their aggressive environmental performance targets.

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Ndevr has an outstanding reputation within Oracle, and across our customers, for our Oracle development skills and expertise in the Environmental Accounting and Reporting field.

To learn more about the Oracle Environmental Accounting and Reporting module for JD Edwards click here.

*View Oracle Corporate Citizenship Reports:
**Carbon Disclosure Project