An Enterprise Resource Planning software system has been used for some time now to enhance team collaboration, business processes and the organization as a whole. Nevertheless, there are still innovative and new ways in which it could help to make the entire corporation more productive and efficient. One of the most recent developments is to use the software as a way to better guidelines of CSR or Corporate Social Responsibility.

As ERP adoption grows, so must the desire to ethically and responsibly runs a business, both for the good of people and of the company. By using the already comprehensive data collection, analysis powered by ERP apps to link them with CSR, companies could become more responsible socially in the eyes of the public and their clients.

The idea is for existing apps could be the perfect place for adding extensions to help manage CSR guidelines being drafted and finalized by the ISO or International Organization for Standardization under the fledgling ISO 26000 standards. A couple of years ago, ISO launched the development of International Standard that provides social responsibility guidelines for organizations to follow. The work aims to encourage voluntary commitment to social responsibility and lead to common guidance on definitions, concepts and methods of evaluation.

Since ERP systems already acts as central information depositories for numerous key roles and processes in business, it is the perfect place to add further tracking abilities for social programs. This would include things such as labor relations, human relations, environment and corruption which are all being addressed under an ISO 26000 standard. This makes perfect sense and is a natural extension of the program’s data tracking, reporting, management and oversight capacities. It helps provide a more concise manner of tracking and  flow of vital information in case disasters such as an oil rig explosion for instance happens. It could help companies enhance their CSR through making such incidents more transparent. As information is power and if data is automatically tracked, it could support ethical firms even during crisis scenarios. Furthermore, if corporate information and decisions are tracked and documented, there’s less opportunity for corruption, according to the ISO proposals.

By creating corporate social responsibility into the software, it will link new responsibilities to an existing app that already has and manages other major corporate data. When risks are determined and a risk mitigation plan is made, the risk management that directly exists in the system that is widely used throughout the firm allows execution of  the mitigation plan to be automated to a much larger degree. A separate risk mitigation tool might  leave executives guessing as to whether the plan they created is being followed and this may be ead to various unpleasant surprises.

This is truly smart thinking. The BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is just one incident wherein a link between ERP and CSR could be extremely beneficial to society. This is a first huge step and another example of how much people have come to rely on the software, notwithstanding its complexity and challenges. The program may not be easy, but it surely helps businesses and could ultimately help boost corporate responsibility anywhere.