Reducing Environmental Impact in Procurement by Integrating Material Parameters in Information Systems : The Example of Apple Sourcing

Legislation, customer pressure, and energy costs are increasing the interest of enterprises in environmental performance
indicators such as greenhouse gas emissions and energy usage. Currently, business users take decisions across the value chain, from product design to disposal, without the ability to compare the environmental impact of alternatives within their information systems, thus limiting the optimization potential. In this paper we consider procurement as an example business operation and show how capturing previously-unknown material parameters in the respective information system can significantly increase the achievable optimizations. We use apple procurement into the U.K. to illustrate the paper's idea, and conduct Monte Carlo analysis to quantify the realizable impact reductions as each additional life cycle parameter is tracked. The results show that taking into account the production country alone achieves a decrease in energy consumption of around 1250MJ per ton of apples, equivalent to 28% reduction from the base case.