Determination of environmental impact of products along the supply chain: an integration scenario

Abstract

The integration of EMIS and ERP-systems has been recognized as an important step towards a holistic and long-term oriented environmental management. A number of research projects attempted to model the environmental impact of products in ERP systems and to integrate environmental impacts into the operational decision-making and communication of companies with their customers. In this paper we elaborate further on a reference architecture that allows an increasing level of automation when calculating a company's environmental impact by concentrating on the own operations and assuming that the environmental impact data for input materials is provided by suppliers as a service.