Using Corporate Social Responsibility strategy with a climate focus for Enterprise Systems

 Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as a term has existed for only a couple of decades but in practice CSR has existed for more than 100 years. Through the 90's, CSR became common among businesses while evolving from a philanthropic to a pragmatic dimension. Recent research suggests a transformation of CSR, which combines CSR with the core business of the company in order to increase and maintain societal legitimacy.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are organization tools of a company's resources. The most basic parts concern finance and payments. Today, these ERPs are widely customized and integrated with respect to human resources such as time-accounting, map of competencies, and other events related to employee-care.

We propose a new concept on ERP called environmental ERP, which combines the climate aspect of CSR with the ERP-system. The purpose of this is to integrate climate friendly events into the business processes, particularly for large-scale companies.

The value of such a module or integration has many dimensions. It creates a green CSR-profile within the core business of the ERP-producer, who has a potential marketing focus. An environmental ERP-module will additionally create financial and social value to the company that utilizes ERP which will retain for example optimization of logistics and a decrease of CO₂ emission.  Finally, a legal regulation in 2009 requires the 1000 largest companies in Denmark to inform about their CSR-activities, which could be managed through this ERP-module.