The Data Heads

Last Friday evening I drove up two hours to Valpo University. The Business Department at Valpo has an annual lecture series, and this year’s topic was Sustainable Business. I have no real connections with Valpo, but when I got a notice about the lecture from an associate, I followed the link to a video clip about the keynote speaker, Ray C. Anderson. If you’ve followed my posts with the tag “Environmental Sustainability” you won’t be surprised that I made the trip.)

Anderson gave a compelling talk. He is an industrialist - actually an industrial engineer by training. His company, Interface Global, is a $1B carpet and floor coverings company. Fifteen years ago Interface began climbing what he calls “Mount Sustainability”, with the goal of meeting the United Nations definition of sustainability by 2020:

”Sustainable Development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.

I really appreciated the fact that Anderson is rooted in the industrial world and is actually doing something. At the risk of oversimplifying it sometimes seems like there are two camps in the environmental debate: the environmentalists who have all the theories and spend their time throwing stones and distrusting the industrialists, and the industrialists who focus on “the message” and are mostly not doing much besides “greenwashing.”

Anderson had the passion of an environmentalist and the discipline of Six Sigma Black Belt.

His talk oscillated between the macro and the micro. On the macro level he addressed issues of species extinction, depletion of resources, and the burden of industrial waste. On the micro level he dove into details of specific projects (very Six Sigma-like) where his company has reduced energy use and waste, switched to renewable power sources, and taken responsibility for recycling their products at the end of the product life cycle.

Another thing that impressed me was the fact that there were probably about 100 undergrad business students who gave up their Friday night to come to an evening of lectures. How cool is that?

I bought Anderson’s latest book, Confessions of a Radical Industrialist. When he signed it we talked briefly about all the gap between his company and the manufacturers who didn’t seem to see beyond the end of the quarter, much less a five year plan, much less to the next generation. His parting comment? “One mind at a time. One mind at a time.”

I don’t think I’ve ever plugged a book before in this blog. I urge you to buy Anderson’s book, and watch some of the videos floating out there on the internet. Pass it around your office and to your CEO.

And he got me thinking about what’s next on Hertzler Systems’ sustainable business journey.

One mind at a time.

Use the ShareThis button below to mark this page, leave a comment, tweet me, schedule a conversation, or call 800-958-2709.

I’m tickled that The Elkhart Truth picked up our story about our tree planting project today. With Arbor Day coming up this Friday they devoted part of a page to local efforts to support trees, and our story was the lead.

When I announced the tree project in this space, I mentioned that I would come back later and share another baby step we’re taking to reduce our carbon footprint. Compared to all those trees, this one seemed small - almost trivial. But then I ran the numbers and it turns out that this one small step cut our electrical consumption by 16%. All of a sudden it didn’t seem so trivial after all.

Back in early February I started writing down the reading on our electrical meter every morning when I got to work. I subtracted the prior day’s reading to get the amount (in Kilowatt Hours) that we used the prior day.  If I missed a day (or the weekend), I just took the difference and divided it by the number of days to get the average rate for the period.

After about a month I pasted the data into GainSeeker Suite SPC Software and came up with this chart:

I also calculated the average daily cost and sent out this memo to my staff:

Here is the challenge: Lets pay attention to your own personal habits and see what we can do to chip away at our electrical consumption. Here are a couple of things you can do:

• Turn off monitors and desktop pcs on evenings and weekends.
• Minimize use of space heaters.
• Unplug any chargers or DC devices that aren’t actually charging anything. (An AC/DC charger consumes power if it is plugged in and not charging anything.)

You may have other ideas. Please try them out.

There are certain computers (like our servers) that need to be up all the time. But lets see what we can do if we try these minimal steps.

I’ll take the difference between now and sometime towards the end of April and buy lunch with the money we don’t give to the utility company. If it is a dollar a day it will be pizza. If it is more, well it will be nicer.

Then we continued monitoring the meter every day. Here are the before and after results on one chart. The Anchor Point (the vertical red line in the center) marks the day the email went out, and the shift in our process.

According to GainSeeker stats, the average daily consumption dropped from 1.9KWH to 1.6KWH. This is a 16% reduction - achieved by something as simple as turning off equipment that isn’t being used!

We had a nice party!

Why is this important? Here are some statistics about my home state, Indiana, of which I am less than proud:

• Indiana produces about 95% of its electricity in coal-burning generating plants.
• Indiana ranks 5th in the nation as the largest producer of carbon dioxide air emissions from electric power plants in the United States (122,094,588 metric tons).
• Indiana ranks 3rd in the nation in terms of the number of metric tons of sulfur dioxide air emissions (responsible for fine particle pollution and acid rain).
• Indiana ranks 4th in terms of the number of metric tons of toxic nitrogen oxides emitted into the atmosphere (responsible for acid rain and smog).
• Indiana ranks 1st in the nation for the amount of carbon dioxide emissions per person from all Indiana energy sectors.

All of this reminds me of the quote that was attributed to Pogo, the famous possum: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

So what are you waiting on? Turn off or pull the plug on stuff you’re not using. Its a great place to start.

And while I’m thinking of it, maybe Electrical Consumption needs to be on our list of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).

What are you doing to reduce your carbon footprint? You can leave a comment, tweet me, schedule a conversation, or call 800-958-2709.

This post is a departure from my usual ramblings about how real-time access to accurate, actionable data can help drive business transformation, save money and increase profits. Actually it is still about data and how we’re responding to data, but has a slightly different twist.

There has been a lot of buzz in the mainstream media in the last year or two about ecological sustainability and “going green”. The science of global warming is real and we need to pay attention to the data. We can’t conduct business - indeed our lives - as if it doesn’t matter.

This post is about a tiny but concrete step our business has taken to respond to that data by planting 600 tree seedlings on our property.

Our business produces a lot of carbon. We run a lot of computers, and we’re often on the road to be with our customers. Since we produce so much CO2, it made sense to us to look for ways to offset that production. It isn’t a panacea, but there is a lot of evidence that trees can sequester CO2 and help reduce carbon emissions.

Meanwhile our office building is in an industrial park. It sits on the front half of a two acre lot. The back half of the lot is land-locked; you can’t get to it except through our parking lot. This aerial view shows the building and parking lot in the bottom half of the picture, with the vacant space in the top half of the photo.

Over the years that we’ve occupied this space we didn’t bother to mow the back half of the property and it became overgrown with weeds. By last summer it was an eyesore.

Our home town is known as “The Maple City. ” Trees are so important here that our city government employs a full time forester. Last summer I invited him out to our property and we talked about how trees could help.

He recommended that we purchase seedlings from the state government and plant a combination of evergreens and hardwoods. We did some rough calculations and came up with a count of between 600 and 800 trees.

A friend helped me track down a local tree planting service. They took care of all the details for me, even ordering and picking up the trees from the state nursery. Yesterday they planted 600 trees. We planted alternating rows of white pine and a mix of three hardwoods: red oak, tulip poplar, and wild cherry. The pine will grow up first and force the hardwoods to grow straight and tall.

Here are pictures of the planters at work:

The end result is - well actually - the start. It will take years for these to become a full grown. But here is what the property looks like today. (Same view as second photo, above, followed by a close up.)

Sometime soon I’ll write a post about another step we’re taking to be a more responsible and sustainable business, and this story will include some real-time data.