Introduction to the Sustainable Supply Chain Framework

Plattform Industrie 4.0 approached the MIT Club of Germany to write a whitepaper on Sustainable Supply Chains and Data Spaces. This collaboration was intended to look at how sustainability data can be exchanged in global supply chains. The MIT Club assembled a global team within its value network, including its industry and academic partners to explore this space. It became clear pretty soon that Industry 4.0 initiatives like Catena-X cover the topic of sustainability data exchange pretty well, but that each organization involved in global supply chains need to get connected to the data spaces, which requires the development of new and/or extension of existing systems. With digital solutions becoming ever more complex through concepts like Digital Twins, the team started to focus on how to accelerate sustainability solution development, while improving the quality of those solutions.

The result: The Sustainable Supply Chain Framework.

It was presented for the first time at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, HICSS -56 conference and afterwards at the HANNOVER MESSE on the Industry 4.0 Stage.

The first phase was to see, if there is demand, speak market desireability, for such a framework. After 6 months this has been confirmed. Now is the time to evaluate the technical feasibility. Here we follow the path that Catena-X successfully took. They set up an open source project to specify and then another open source project to create code, that can then be applied within the industry and even drive international standards, like the Asset Administration Shell.

Here now a brief description of the 4 building blocks of the framework.

The Use Case Library is a collection of sustainability use case that are implemented using the framework at least in form of a POC.

The Sustainable Supply Chain Reference Architecture provides a structure for the design of a digital sustainability solution. Unique is its inclusion of business value and business model as solution architecture layers.

In order to support the solution architect in the design of an end-to-end solution, a genAI tool, called the Solution Architecture Co-Pilot, is part of the framework. Like GitHub Co-Pilot for programmers, the Solution Architecture Co-Pilot improves the productivity in the early phases of a project and as well improve the quality of the solution. Everyone in software development knows that the later you discover mistakes, e.g. during testing or even in production, the more expensive, and sometime also embarrasing it gets. With requirements and design covering 30-40 percent of the solution development effort, there is of course not only a significant reduction in cost possible, but also the project duration gets shorter compared to project that do solution architecture the traditional/manual way.

The Solution Building Block Repository is a directory of hard and/or software products that can be used to implement the functionality needed by the use cases in the Use Case Library.

CALL TO ACTION:

If you have a use case, you think should be included in the framework, please do reach out.

If you want to contribute to this open-source initiative, please reach out as well. The initial core team is already establish and it sits distributed in the Americas, Europe and AsiaPacific.

NEXT TIME:

We dig deeper into the Sustainable Supply Chain Reference Architecture.

LAST BUT NOT LEAST:

For those in the northern hemisphere, enjoy the summer time. For those in the southern hemisphere, hang in there - the next summer on the horizon.