In alignment with the United Nations Conference on Climate Change, the urgent need to reach an international agreement to battle CO2 emissions is unequivocal. Now, public and private sector organisations have the ability to better understand the environmental impact of their supply chain thanks to a new Cloud based tool SCEnAT+ (Supply Chain Environmental Analysis Tool). SCEnAT+ has been implemented in various organisations to help reduce their carbon emissions and pinpoint efficiency improvement opportunities within their supply chains. By running an analysis of a supply chain and presenting a carbon "heat-map", SCEnAT+ provides recommendations for reducing the carbon footprint of the supply chain. The pioneering tool enables companies to perform improved life cycle analysis, better life cycle costing, supply chain benchmarking and evaluation of a plethora of supply chain environmental impact on the ecosystem and wider economy, leading to increased revenues and decreased CO2 emission.
Professor Lenny Koh, Director of the University of Sheffield's Advanced Resource Efficiency Centre, said: "Microsoft's Futures programme is the ideal platform for us to base the SCEnAT+ on as it will enable its scalability, interoperability and reconfigurability. We look forward to working with Microsoft on further new developments in the future. Our goal is embedding sustainability conditions in all decision making across supply chains around the world."
The SCEnAT+ has the ability to provide great benefits to organisations in reducing the cost and environmental impact of their supply chains
Professor Lenny Koh
AREC Director
Mike Davies, Head of Higher Education Business from Microsoft UK, said: "We are pleased to announce this new partnership with the University of Sheffield and its Advanced Resource Efficiency Centre.
"The SCEnAT+ has the ability to provide great benefits to organisations in reducing the cost and environmental impact of their supply chains, and it also showcases the abilities of our Cloud services."
Dr Kenji Takeda, Solutions Architect and Technical Manager from Microsoft Research, added: "The future of research collaboration will be accelerated via Azure Research and Azure Marketplace which provide a rapid innovation environment supported by Cloud technology. SCEnAT+ technology is based on Azure infrastructure. We are looking forward to our next phase of collaboration with the University of Sheffield."