Category Archives: Sustainability

Apple Dominates The Portables Market Because

Apple dominates the supply chain. While Sony and RIM had to delay products, Apple trucked ahead with the iPad2 right on time, and even though the backlog was a little bigger than they expected, they’re still doing fine. But how can you argue with over 60 Billion in Cash? Especially when “Apple could survive on current cash alone until 2018” (TUAW.com).

And that’s another reason why your company needs to be a supply chain leader.

Sustainability is a Long Term Goal

I enjoyed a recent post over on the HBR Blogs on “Ford’s Impressive Sustainability Strategy” that noted that a real sustainability effort requires both a short term and a long term sustainability challenge.

As the article notes, if we are running out of resources at less than 7 Billion people, imagine the situation when we get to 9 Billion people in less than 40 years. Sustainability can no longer be a fad, it must be a way of doing business. And it’s not going to be obtained with short-term quick fixes. And even if you eliminate 90% of waste from the production process, that still leaves one tenth the waste to be eliminated and, most importantly, the process is probably still using too much energy and water, which are becoming increasingly scarce resources.

Plus, market saturation is not always sustainable. Sometimes the right level of market penetration is less, not more, and sometimes users should pay a premium for the privilege of the product, or a penalty for overusing a product or service.

And, most importantly, sustainability is more than strategy. As the post points out, it’s execution.

You Don’t Have To Be Big To Be Sustainable

It’s nice to see a big publication like Inc. address the issue of sustainability in supply chains. It’s even nicer when it says that smaller supply chains without the financial means to make an aggressive push towards sustainability can still take gradual steps to be more socially, economically, and environmentally responsible, as it did in a recent article that addressed How to Build Sustainability Into Your Supply Chain.

Going after the low-hanging frutit of transportation and sourcing efficiency is a big step. Transportation is among the most unsustainable processes in an average supply chain as there are no viable long-distance shipping options that don’t rely on fossil fuels. While plants can be powered by wind, hydro, and solar energy, trucks, planes, and trains still require fossil fuelds. Thus, minimizing shiping distance, and the need for shipping in the first place, takes a lot of waste out of the operation and makes it sustainable.

Another easy step, as the article points out, is to minimize waste. Many manufacturing by-products can be reused or recycled, and can often even be resold to companies that can reuse or recyle them, turning (the) cost (of waste disposal) into profit.

Yet another easy step, not pointed out in the article, is to install timers and motion sensors and automatically turn off lights, heat, cooling, etc. when it’s not needed. A considerable amount of your energy is wasted heating and cooling space that no one is using.

Even if you can’t transform your operation overnight, you can still green it considerably taking baby steps.

You Know Your Country is Falling Behind On Sustainability When …

The dirtiest country, energy wise, on the planet will almost equal you in Wind Energy Production per capita within five years. Sustainability is a big part of China’s new five year plan, and the goal is to increase wind energy production to 90 Gigawatts (GW) of power by 2016 from current production level of 40 GW. (Source: “The Next Five Years” SupplyChains.com) Currently, the US, the world leader in wind power production, produces a meare 35 GW of electricity from wind.

But more important is China’s commitment to reduce energy intensity per unit of GDP by 16%, cut carbon intensity per unit of GDP by 17%, and have non fossil fuels increase to 11.4% of primary energy mix by 2015. For a country that currently relies on dirty coal (whch is 70% of the energy mix), this is an aggressive goal. And even more aggressive are its 2020 goals of reducing carbon intensity per unit of GDP by 40% and increasing sustainable energy production to 15%. Considering that China tends to accomplish tasks it puts its minds to, this is an impressive start to a sustainability effort, which it has been in dire need of.

If You Want To Know How Green a Data Centre Is, Ask For a Verified PUE

In a recent article, Global Services asked if “cloud computing [is] really green”. Considering that most of your supply chain apps are moving to the cloud, and that sustainability is a must, it’s a question you should be able to answer. Unfortunately, the article was completely useless and gave you no useful information whatsoever.

All it said was that

  • a recent study from Microsoft noted that, due to increased efficiency and scalability, outsourcing companies can reduce their energy use and carbon footprint by up to 90%,
  • an uninterrupted power supply is required to keep data warehouses running and cool, and
  • energy efficiency is not green on its own, and is no longer enough.

With respect to these statements

  • we all know scale adds efficiency, and that data centres will be much more energy efficient if they use modern high-density low-power blades while you use ancient box servers,
  • classic data centres will create sauna temperatures if not kept cool, and
  • the energy source needs to be renewable.

In order to determine how green a data centre is, you need to know at least the following three metrics:

  • The Performance Per Watt (PPW) of the hardware.
    This tells you how efficient the hardware is. Typically measured in MFLOPS (Mega Floating point Operations Per Second) or LINPACK FLOPS per watt, an efficient modern IBM BladeCenter can get up to 536 MFLOPS/watt. Compare this to a desktop Beowulf cluster that maxes out at 58 MFLOPS with 4 dual core Athlon 64’s.
  • The average load of each operating machine.
    If a machine is only operating at 20% load, on average, you’re only getting 20% of the PPW. But if the average load of each operating machine is 80%, you’re getting at least 80% of the PPW. A modern data centre uses dynamic process allocation and virtualization and machines sleep until the load on the machines that are awake exceeds about 90% in a sustained manner, at which point another machine is woken up and added to the available pool. A traditional data centre does not use virtualization or have machines that support fast wake-up or shut-down or dynamic load balancing software and the machines are always on.
  • The Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE).
    PUE is a measure of how efficiently a data centre uses power and measures how much power is used by the computing equipment in contrast to the overhead required for lighting, cooling, etc. Defined as Total_Facility_Power / IT_Equipment_Power, an ideal data centre has a PUE of 1.0. While not achievable, a PUE of 1.1 is, even though the average data centre still has a PUE of 2.0 to 2.5. Today, a data centre is generally considered green if it has a PUE of < 1.5, but the best data centre in Europe, datadock, has a PUE of only 1.21 and the Thor Datacenter in Iceland has a PUE of only 1.07 and a zero carbon footprint. With carbon emission mandates coming into effect around the globe and significant mandates for power reduction by 2020, if the data centre isn’t closing on a PUE of 1.2, it’s not efficient. And unless at least one its primary energy sources is not renewable, it can not be considered green. (At the very least, the overhead should come from renewable sources.)

So don’t get confused by grandiose claims, scale, and jargon. Ask for these third-party verified metrics. Then you’ll know how green the data centre really is.