ECO-INTELLIGENT TOOLS – A NECESSITY FOR SUSTAINABLE BUSINESSES

Abstract

Many of the challenges associated with sustainable development can be traced in the way modern society produces and consumes. Production, distribution and supply of goods and services require material and energy consumption, having an impact on natural resources both quantitatively and qualitatively, generating waste, pollution and disrupting ecosystems. Ecobusiness intelligence is the capacity of people, processes and applications / tools to organize business information, to facilitate consistent access to them and analyse them in order to improve management decisions, for better performance management of the organizations that are increasingly pressed to synchronize their processes and services with a sustainable development agenda, through the development, testing and implementation of decision support software. By adopting sustainable practices, eco – intelligent companies can gain added value, increase market share and boost shareholder value. Moreover, the growing demand for "green" products has created new markets and the visionary entrepreneurs already reap the rewards of approaching sustainability. Large and small companies are learning that sustainable business practices not only help the environment but also can improve profitability by pursuing higher efficiency, fewer harmful side-effects, and better relationships with the community and more. Gaining competitive advantage is a core concern of the companies and the existence of systems of identification, extraction and analysis of available data in a company, but also from the external environment, to provide real support for business decisions, is an essential ingredient of success. This paper highlights the necessity of eco-intelligent tools that help determining the organization's strategies, identifying the perceptions and capabilities of the competitors, analyzing the effectiveness of current operations, deploying long-term prospects for environmental action and establishing indicators and key variables for organizational health, security and natural growth of its assets. The proposed tool is a decision support system that will be implemented in an online environment, tested and integrated with the information systems of the organizations. The eco-intelligent business tool can be used to obtain competitive advantages by the organizations that seek to contribute to a better quality of life in the present without compromising the development and life quality of future generations.

Keywords

• business intelligence
• sustainable companies
• decision support systems