Help for Small & Medium-Sized Businesses
The “Efficient Entrepreneur Calendar” looks like an ordinary hardcopy calendar with days and weeks and months. But to “smaller” businesses, it is much more. It guides you in implementing an EMS month-by-month, by introducing performance measures that are easy to assess and evaluate. Companies can measure where their inefficiences are (how much energy, water and raw materials they consume; how much pollution they produce), where costs can be reduced and employee and customer satisfaction improved. Companies can learn how to make simple process and product adjustments and how to communicate their achievements to their stakeholders.
The calendar is available in English, French and Spanish. It was developed by UNEP’s Division of Technology, Industry and Environment and the Eco-Efficiency and Sustainable Enterprise Group at the Wuppertal Institute in Germany [sorry this link is no longer available]
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In cooperation with the U.S. EPA, NSF-ISR has developed a set of practical EMS implementation guides and case studies. One report, geared toward small and medium-sized organizations, describes the experiences of 18 businesses and government agencies of various sizes and types. (Environmental Management Systems — An Implementation Guide for Small and Medium-Sized Organizations.)
On the other side of the coin, The Latin American Center for Competitiveness and Sustainable
Development has produced a guide to help Latin American commercial bankers incorporate EMS analysis into their internal operations, policies and loan programs. The Ecoefficiency Guide for the Latin American Financial Sector is an adaptation of the UNEP guidelines for environmental management in financial institutions.
What is the state of the art of environmental management systems? A Conference Board survey, Corporate Environmental Governance: Benchmarks Toward World-Class Systems, analyzes the EMS planning, development, and implementation processes of 45 leading corporations. They look at how EMS systems are being integrated into companies, where they add value, and what elements separate the leaders from the pack. The report is organized according to the characteristics of most organizations’ EMSs: leadership and organizational commitment, market and stakeholder focus, knowledge management, strategic planning, design processes, work processes, and performance measurement.
All the companies surveyed either have systems substantially or fully in place to bring strategic environmental considerations into their overall business strategy, or are developing such a strategy. 30 percent track the triple bottom line and 10 percent have the systems in place to begin doing so. Among EMS components, they found that design process components are least developed. But almost half the companies have a mechanism in place where adverse environmental concerns can override a case for an otherwise compelling business opportunity.
The Conference Board study found that while 90% of surveyed companies systematically manage knowledge of environment issues, the information is not yet fully leveraged or integrated. Here is how information is used:
Operations planning: 64%
Strategic planning: 56%
Community relations: 52%
Product design: 43%
Customer relations: 41%
Supplier relations: 30%
Competitive strategies: 29%
Marketing design: 21%
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