State-of-the-Art and Requirements for Collecting and Managing Sustainability Data Along Today's Supply Chains [original]

The 6th International Conference on Life Cycle Management in Gothenburg 2013

STATE-OF-THE-ART AND REQUIREMENTS FOR COLLECTING

AND MANAGING SUSTAINABILITY DATA ALONG TODAY’S

SUPPLY CHAINS

1*Grambow, Gregor, 1Mundbrod, Nicolas, 1Steller, Vivian, 1Reichert, Manfred

2Schiffleitner, Andreas, 3Bley Thomas, 3Feick, Christian

1Ulm University, Germany, 2KERP, Austria, 3iPoint-Systems, Germany

*James-Franck-Ring, 89081 Ulm, Germany, gregor.grambow@uni-ulm.de

Keywords: Supply Chain; Data Exchange; dynamic, process-aware data collection

ABSTRACT

Today, companies of all sizes need to gather, manage and deliver a wide

range of sustainability information due to public demand, regulations and

laws. However, in order to calculate reliable measurements, they face the

tremendous challenge to gather heterogeneous sustainability information

along their dynamic and complex supply chains. As there is no systematic

support yet, the EU project SustainHub aims to develop an information

system supporting complex sustainability data collection processes along

supply chains. Therefore, the project’s consortium has established a solid

base of requirements and state of the art which are presented in this paper in

a consolidated way to enrich the discussion about life cycle management.

INTRODUCTION

Nowadays, there is growing pressure on companies in the automotive and electronics

industries to produce and deliver more sustainable products, coming from the customer side

as well as emerging laws enforced by national and European parliaments. As a result,

companies now face the challenge to gather and distribute sustainability information along

their entire supply chains. Thereby, companies are often encouraged to deliver certain

computed indicators based on existing regulations or laws that also consider their suppliers.

The main issue in this case is the great heterogeneity of supply chain data: some data might be

delivered in an unsupported format, some might not match predefined quality requirements,

and some might be delivered incompletely or even not at all. So, data collection obviously

combines a multitude of manual and automated tasks (e.g., data verification, validation, or

authorization) and needs to be synchronized. Furthermore, in some cases, external service

providers might also be included in the data collection process, e.g., providing lab tests or

assessments regarding important regulations.

As sustainability data collection along supply chains is such a complex endeavor, companies

crave for professional support provided by integrated information systems. However,

currently available market solutions are fragmented and limited in many respects. They do not

satisfy the requirements companies currently have for collecting sustainability data from their

various suppliers.

The 6th International Conference on Life Cycle Management in Gothenburg 2013

The ongoing research project SustainHub

aims to provide a sophisticated platform that

supports this scenario. This paper, in particular, deals with the dynamic process of data

collection and management of sustainability data in the supply chain. It reviews the state of

the art in this sector and elicits important basic requirements for implementing a system

supporting automated dynamic data collection from heterogeneous sources.

BACKGROUND

This section briefly gives background information on sustainability indicators and regulations

requiring them. Published by different research fields and industries, there is a myriad of

possible definitions that can be considered as sustainability indicators. Furthermore, these

indicators relate to different phases of the life cycle (e.g., development vs. production) and to

different entities, like a produced product, a process or even a whole company. Areas of

indicators may include managerial issues, like compliance with regulations, social issues like

corruption and bribery, or environmental issues, like the reduction and prevention of GHG

(GreenHouse Gas) emissions. There are various initiatives, regulation, and laws covering

portions of these sustainability indicators formally or informally requiring companies to

comply and report the indicators to customers or legislations. Examples include the ISO

14000 standard environmental factors in production, GRI

covering sustainability factors or

regulations like REACh (REACh, 2006) and RoHS (RoHS, 2002).

METHODS

To properly elicit requirements for the coming SustainHub platform, the project consortium

has taken the following approach: To gather real end-user requirements, two quantitative

surveys were conducted with representatives from the electronics and the automotive

industry. Furthermore, multiple companies of these sectors are part of the SustainHub

consortium for continuous feedback and evaluation.

REQUIREMENTS

In this section, four concrete basic requirements of a platform supporting sustainability data

exchange in a supply chain are elicited. These requirements are illustrated in Figure 1 and

explained in the following. Figure 1 abstractly exposes the process of requesting a

sustainability indicator from one or multiple suppliers.

Requirement 1: Request Variability. In the area of supply chain communication, a

multitude of different factors can influence a request for a sustainability indicator. These

include, for example, quality requirements of the requester to the indicator data (e.g., age of

the data or precision of measurement) and approval processes on the answerer side (e.g., only

a specific person can approve the data or the four-eyes-principle). Other data influencing a

request includes specific configurations only applying for request made by the requester,

properties of the situation (e.g., a newly emerged regulation), or properties of data the

answerer has already provided as part of another request. If the meta data of that data matches

SustainHub (Project No.283130) is a collaborative project within the 7th Framework

Programme of the European Commission (Topic ENV.2011.3.1.9-1, Eco-innovation).

Global Reporting Initiative: https://www.globalreporting.org

The 6th International Conference on Life Cycle Management in Gothenburg 2013

the request, no new data collection is needed. A platform supporting such communication

needs to be aware of such meta data and to be able to utilize it for the request. Furthermore, as

the large number of parameters implies many different request variants, that system has to be

able to efficiently manage and apply these variants.

AnswererRequester Service Provider Data Storage ApplicationHuman

Requirement 2: Data

Access

Requirement 1:

Request Variability

Query Variant 2

Query Variant 1

Meta Data

Requester Data

Query 1

Request 1

Request Variant 1 Request Variant 2

Meta Data

Answerer Data

Meta Data

Available Data

Meta Data

Request Data

Meta Data

Situational Data

Requirement 4:

Runtime Variability

Deviation 1 Deviation 2

Deviation 3

Meta Data Request

Requirement 3: Quality

and Monitoring

Figure 1. Data collection requirements

Requirement 2: Data Access. As mentioned before, the process of sustainability data

collection involves a large number of different manual and automatic tasks. Some requests or

parts of them might be answered by humans, some by automated systems. Some might be

forwarded by a supplier to his suppliers. For some requests, external service providers might

be involved. This implies that many different systems or data formats can be involved and

that data could be provided with different calculations or units. A platform supporting such

communication must be capable of managing such data as well as the access to it.

Requirement 3: Quality and Monitoring. Due to the heterogeneity in today’s supply chains,

the quality of data provided by suppliers might differ greatly. This can be of special

importance if one request involves multiple answerers. This situation implies another

problem: When expecting data from multiple answerers it is difficult for a requester to be

aware of the status of his request as they might answer in different ways and with varying

delay. A platform supporting such communication must be capable of coping with varying

quality levels and be able to monitor request in a way that the requester always has access to

up-to-date information regarding the request status.

Requirement 4: Runtime Variability. Sustainability data requests in a supply chain can take

a considerable amount of time. This implies the fact that properties important for the request

might change (e.g., a new regulation might emerge). Furthermore, various exceptional

situations are possible: one or more suppliers might answer with data that does not match the

requesters’ quality requirements, might answer delayed, or might even not answer at all.

Therefore, a platform supporting such communication must be able to cope with such

situations and still complete the requests.

The 6th International Conference on Life Cycle Management in Gothenburg 2013

STATE OF THE ART

Due to limited space, this section presents a small selection of state-of-the-art solutions and

scientific papers on this topic. When it comes to sustainability data communication in supply

chains, Environ BOMcheck

, HP IMDS

(International Material Data System), and HP CDX

(Compliance Data eXchange) can be considered as market leaders. All of these are platforms

that are centrally operated by one company allowing customers to exchange material data.

BOMcheck is mainly used in the electronics industry and allows for storing full material

declarations. CDX supports the creation of a material management process by enabling the

exchange of material data sheets along the supply chain. IMDS offers material data exchange

via web interface. It solely focuses on the automotive sector where it has become the de facto

industry standard. All of these systems do not meet the requirements for exchanging

sustainability indicators along supply chains as they only enable the transfer of directly

related product data and none about the companies, or people, or more complex computed

values. On the scientific side, there are studies dealing with supply chain communication and

information system support for it (Dong et al., 2009; Tseng et al., 2011). Further, there are

studies dealing with sustainability reporting and the impact of information systems on it

(Melville, 2010). However, these contributions focus on reviewing solutions or theoretical

approaches and do not deal with the creation of new supportive information systems.

CONCLUSIONS

In this paper we have briefly shown requirements for platforms that aim at supporting the

exchange of sustainability data in a supply chain. Furthermore, we have reviewed the state-of-

the-art elaborating that prevalent solutions do not meet these requirements. The latter can be

used to create novel systems that automate and thus support sustainable supply chain

communication. This is what will be done in the further course of the SustainHub project

where we aim at implementing the data collection and exchange process explicitly applying

dynamic process-aware information system technology (Dadam and Reichert, 2009).

REFERENCES

Dadam, P., Reichert, M. (2009) The ADEPT project: a decade of research and development for robust and

flexible process support. Computer Science-Research and Development, 23(2), pp. 81-97.

Dong, S., Xu, S.X., Zhu, K.X. (2009) Research Note—Information Technology in Supply Chains: The Value of

IT-Enabled Resources Under Competition. Information Systems Research, 20(1), pp. 18-32.

Melville, N.P. (2010) Information systems innovation for environmental sustainability. MIS Quarterly, 34(1),

pp. 1-21.

Tseng, M.L., Wu, K.J., Nguyen, T.T. (2011) Information technology in supply chain management: a case study.

Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 25, pp. 257-272.

REACh: Regulation (EC) No 1907/2006: Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals

RoHS: Directive 2002/95/EC: Restriction of (the use of certain) Hazardous Substances

https://www.bomcheck.net

http://www.mdsystem.com

http://www.cdxsystem.com