Supply chain management is a term indicating an efficient management of resources in manufacturing processes that require a number of different supplies from different sources and from suppliers of suppliers (secondary) in order to construct a final product. Supply chain management in this sense allows a full audit trail to be established and detailed knowledge of the source of materials and potentially the processes involved in the production of each material may be obtained.

The green supply chain management software involves three key stages:

1. It must be possible to analyse the proposed materials for a building to provide the building designer with high level advice and allow sustainable material selection (existing tools do this).

2. It must be possible to assess the credentials of the suppliers of the selected materials (new software needs to be created for this).

3. The process of assessing a supplier needs to be extended in some way to include the suppliers suppliers. A system which can do these three things would meet the definition of a green-supply chain management software.


>> The Green Supply Chain Management [GSCM] tool


The Biocell's [GSCM] tool has two main components a web based component and a computer based software component.

The web-based component facilitates suppliers to feed information into the GSCM system. It also enables the computer-based software to be down loaded.

The computer-based software is a user friendly front end tool through which users [specifiers] can search for suppliers and their environmental credentials.