With the dramatic rise of Green Supply Chain thinking, it is clear that many companies will confront the need or desire to track the "Green-ness" of their supplier base.

But how will that actually be achieved? To date, virtually every report any company has offered has been dependent on self-reporting by suppliers. Wal-Mart has recently announced plans for scorecarding Sustainability performance by its suppliers, but how this will actually be implemented is not completely clear.

Among the key questions: will the Green measures be direct, or indirect? Meaning, will scorecards try to directly measure carbon emissions, or will they use other measures, such as metrics around transportation modes and efficiency, that drive overall Green performance?

It may wind up being a combination, but we think the indirect measures will be easier to capture - and likely be more accurate.

A draft of what such a Green supplier scorecard might look like in the area of transportation is presented below. That graphic was taken from the just released Supply Chain Digest Letter on The Green Supply Chain. You will find an e-copy of that Letter, plus a wealth of other resources, on our new sister web site, TheGreenSupplyChain.com.

Example Green Supplier Scorecard

Source: Compliance Networks

The concept is simple at one level, but important at another: if a vendor has to ship a single PO in more than one shipment, that directly increases overall CO2 emissions for that order - in addition to transportation costs. Too often, companies have not well managed this, even at just a logistics level - Green Supply Chain adds a whole other dimension.

While many software companies have announced carbon calculators of one type or another, we've seen few examples of Green supplier scorecards. How a company thinks about direct versus indirect measurement will be an important decision point in their tracking systems development.

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