Problems of Practical CEMIS (Corporate Environment Information Management Systems) Usage

Abstract

Up to now environmental oriented activities has been sufficiently efficient neither in politics nor in administration to gain essential improvements of the global or national environmental situation. Consequently laws and regulations have been enacted, which influenced significantly the economical oriented actions of companies. Companies, which intend to meet these challenges, are forced to consider the complete value chain from procurement over production to distribution regarding the aspects of saving resources and the minimization of waste and emissions. Despite of the fact, that the responsibility for environment protection are fixed in mission statements of many companies CEMIS are seldom in use. In a noteworthy amount just systems to fulfil legal compliance are expanded in companies. Within the last decade we have performed or supervised more then 40 projects to implement CEMIS in SME. In these projects one has to detect, that management is not interested in an implementation of comprehensive holistic CEMIS. They are mainly interested in systems to fulfil legal regulations and the connected burden of proof. The following chapter shows, in which corporate application areas the use of CEMIS is demanded in business practise. It should be possible to derive categories of application areas from the empirical findings and to find out for which reasons the management of SME didn’t spend the desirable attention to CEMIS.