BASDA’s Green XML is an interesting initiative from the UK-based Business Application Software Developers Association that claims to represent some 200 software vendors. BASDA has been promoting its e-business XML schema for a decade or so to facilitate the exchange of B2B transactions such as purchase orders and invoices between accounting/ERP applications. They now propose to extend their XML schema to include ‘green’ data, which is not a bad idea.
BASDA’s Green XML adds new metadata tags to their existing e-business XML schema to describe various green/CSR/sustainability data like the carbon impact of a product component/material, certification assurance or the eco-labeling that a product qualifies for. The idea is that this data becomes an integral part of the XML payload that comprises an electronic invoice or purchase order so that the data is already ‘baked-in’ to the source transaction and does not have to be manually calculated and added ‘after-the-fact’.
Product lifecycle assessments (PLAs) and supply chain auditing (SCA) are two obvious areas where this idea could have an immediate positive benefit. When purchase order acknowledgements or invoices already include appropriate green data as part of the data package then this data can more easily flow-through to sustainability impact or footprint reports, with minimal manual intervention.
By extending the scope of just a couple of key transactional documents, sustainability data is embedded directly into the core business processes of both procuring products, materials and components and of selling them on. Imagine if every order you placed was acknowledged with an XML transaction that included carbon emission, waste and water impact data for what you ordered. You would soon not only be able to accurately report carbon, waste and water impacts from your supply chain but even forecast these impacts from your order pipeline so you could take mitigation action proactively rather than reactively. Similarly if every electronic invoice you received/sent contained similar data including eco-labeling and environmental certifications you or your customers would easily be able to create an eco-profile of the products and services you/they buy – directly from the XML invoice data.
Using this idea, a significant part of every product manufacturing or service delivery organization’s environmental footprint can be automatically calculated from source data supplied by upstream supply chain partners and automatically communicated to downstream supply chain partners. Assuming they transact electronically using XML that is.
For those of you who enjoy reading XML in bed – I find it helps me to sleep – here is BASDA’s suggestion for recording carbon content and the certification assurance of a transaction (e.g. an invoiced product or an ordered material), which is just one part of their GreenItem element that also could record embedded water, waste, carbon offsets etc.:
<GreenItemCarbonContent>
<Amount>10.0</Amount><!– mandatory decimal number–>
<Uom>T|Kg</Uom><!– mandatory default kg–>
<Measurement>actual|estimated</Measurement><!– optional–>
<Scope>lifecycle|supply</Scope><!– optional–>
<Protocol>greenhousegasprotocolVer1.0</Protocol><!– optional–>
<Certification>pas2050|iso14067</Certification><!– optional–>
<CertificationUrl>http://certification.site/url?productID=XXX</CertificationUrl><!–optional–>
<CertificationProtocol>BASDA Green XML</CertificationProtocol><!– optional–>
</GreenItemCarbonContent>
As XBRL is a specific dialect of generic XML it would nice to see some impetus to develop an XBRL schema for a Green-Invoice and Green-Order along the lines of the BASDA proposals. I’m sure there must be businesses that care enough about the sustainability of their supply chains to be willing to participate in developing and trialing taxonomies for this purpose. We will only begin to chip away at the burden of sustainability reporting by embedding appropriate data at transaction level that can flow-through – not by inventing more indicators to be calculated and assured by time-consuming, after-the fact processes.
A vast improvement could be made to the whole sustainability reporting arena if Governments simply mandated that all invoices for certain products or services include a defined set of sustainability data to help consumers of these products and services to better report their own footprints and to ‘forward’ on this data (plus any added-impact) to their own customers.
Tags: BASDA
