Carbon-measuring software evolves

How do you accurately and meaningfully measure the predicted carbon impact of a new project? After all, you don’t want to discover — too late — that its environmental impact has made you Public Enemy No. 1 for Greenpeace.

In an effort to aid companies as they struggle to balance profitability and environmental responsibility, vendors are rolling out increasingly sophisticated tools. Among those vendors is ILOG, which this week released a Carbon Footprint extension to its LogicNet Plus XE supply-chain application. This remarkable tool serves a valuable function: It’s designed to help companies evaluate the impact that various supply-chain network configurations and transportation strategies would have on their carbon footprint.

Suppose you’re a manufacturer with a couple of distribution centers and a manufacturing plant on the East Coast, yet business is booming to the point that there’s demand for your product across the country. ILOG’s supply-chain app would map out several scenarios to assess the cost of adding new facilities in various locations, then factoring in different means (planes, trains, or automobiles) of transporting goods and the impact that the various configurations would have on service (40 percent next-day delivery vs. 80 percent, for example).

Balancing costs against service reliability is tough in and of itself. But let’s say you’re a green-minded CXO who has pledged to put a cap on your company’s carbon emissions. Now you have to add environmental considerations to the already complex equation. Is it even possible, you might wonder, to make broad changes to your supply chain — including adding distribution centers and manufacturing plants — while maintaining (or even lowering) your carbon footprint?

That’s where ILOG’s Carbon Extension comes into play. According to the company, it can estimate the carbon impact of changes to the supply-chain network by computing the total carbon emissions associated with the new distribution facilities, plants, and modes of transportation used between various points. The carbon figures come from a pool of data from reputable sources, including the U.S. Department of Transportation and the World Resources Institute. Thus, the extension can provide a general estimate as to what the carbon emissions are of, say, a warehouse in New Mexico built in 1973 or the emissions from a train loaded with widgets traveling from Bismark, N.D., to Boise, Idaho. Alternatively, a user can enter his or her own data about a specific facility or mode of transportation if it’s more accurate.

Using LogicNet Plus XE with the Carbon Extension, the company cranked out various scenarios that involved adding between two and seven new distribution centers. Turns out that moving to four distribution centers would have resulted in the highest costs savings. Thus, a company that wasn’t thinking about green metrics might have gone with that option.

The company found, however, that by going up to six distribution centers, it would have slightly higher costs (1.6 percent), but it would reduce transportation distances by 20 percent and overall carbon emissions by 11 percent.

Those results might come as a surprise: How could adding six more energy-consuming distribution centers result in less carbon waste? The answer: With the six-center model, the company relies more on trains for transporting goods inbound than it does on trucks to ship products outbound. Trucks have a significantly higher environmental impact than trains, according to Simchi-Levi.

ILOG’s Carbon Footprint extension is an effective tool, and we’ll no doubt continue to see more vendors offering similar assistance — such as tools for predicting the carbon output of a newly remodeled datacenter — aimed at helping companies gauge the carbon footprint of their operations. The market is ripe as more decision-makers are forced to choose between saving that extra dollar or releasing that extra pound of CO2.