U.S. Government, Wal-Mart and You

Information Management (11/9, Farris) - Wal-Mart and the U.S. government have announced plans to start tracking the sustainability profile of their suppliers as well as their products and services. As two of the largest buyers in the world, the directives from these companies have the potential to impact many companies in the U.S. and around the globe.

The U.S. government buys more than $500 billion worth of products and services each year from roughly 230,000 different companies, according to USAspending.gov. It is the world’s largest buyer of goods and services. Wal-Mart, as the largest consumer products retailer in the world, buys roughly $300 billion each year in products that it sells in its retail stores from more than 100,000 different companies.

If your company sells products and services to one or both of them, expect that you will soon be required to provide more information about your environmental impact. Companies will need to consider implementing new business intelligence applications in order to provide the information needed to make decisions about sustainability, such as:

• Sustainability scorecards reporting and analytic solutions allow enterprise-wide monitoring of a broad set of key sustainability metrics.
• Energy intelligence reporting and analytic solutions allow detailed trending analysis of energy use and related greenhouse gas emissions by facilities and their subsystems. This could be applied to facilities in general and to specific types of facilities like data centers.
• Sustainable manufacturing intelligence reporting and analytic solutions allow tracking of detailed sustainability-related information (water used, energy used, chemicals used, waste produced and greenhouse gas emissions) about your manufacturing, processing or assembly activities.
• Sustainable sourcing intelligence reporting and analytic solutions allow tracking of detailed sustainability-related information about your vendors and the raw materials and parts they provide an organization or business.
• Sustainable logistics intelligence reporting and analytic solutions allow tracking of detailed sustainability-related information about the distribution of products and services, inbound to your operation and outbound to your customers.