IBM Corp. yesterday rolled out a modeling tool aimed at helping manufacturers understand the carbon impact of their supply chains on the environment and analyze the trade-offs they must make every day among service levels, quality, cost, and carbon dioxide emissions.

IBM expects manufacturers to use the Carbon Tradeoff Modeler tool to analyze both the carbon emissions and trade-offs within the four walls of the enterprise and the emissions impact of their end-to-end supply chains, including suppliers, logistics providers, and other partners.

“We’re seeing a lot of companies looking at carbon emissions, along with water usage and other concerns, in the manufacturing process,” said Karen Butner, global supply chain management lead at the IBM Institute for Business Value, in an interview with Managing Automation. “But some are also beginning to look at these issues up and down the supply chain as they realize they can’t pass the buck.”

IBM isn’t the only company looking to cash in on growing sustainability awareness among manufacturers. Earlier this week, insurance company Fireman Fund announced what it called Manufacturers’ Green Coverage Endorsement, an insurance program that, in the event of a loss, replaces manufacturing plants and equipment with greener alternatives. Also this week, Hewlett-Packard Co. announced its Enterprise Printing Assessment Service, which analyzes a company’s printing operations in terms of carbon emissions. And in January, Llamasoft rolled out a new version of its supply network modeling software, complete with tools to help manufacturers calculate their “green quotient.”

The Carbon Tradeoff Modeler, developed by IBM’s research organization, is built around a constraint-based planning engine, Butner said. The tool extracts data about shipments, orders, inventory, and other processes, and then analyzes that data, allowing manufacturers to understand the carbon implications of their operations and the effect that different operational decisions would have on those emissions. The tool, for example, can show how carbon emissions are affected by different packaging options, transportation mode choices, inventory and sourcing policies, and energy choices.

The tool has multi-tier capabilities, so it can be used to evaluate the effects of different decisions up and down a supply chain.

Implemented as an on-premise software product, the Carbon Tradeoff Modeler will most often be used as part of a broader services engagement in which IBM will help manufacturers plan a sustainability strategy, Butner said.

So far, she noted, the Carbon Tradeoff Modeler is being used mainly for strategic planning purposes. The product currently does not integrate directly with supply chain management or execution systems, although IBM will consider that possibility, Butner said.

IBM, itself, has been using the Carbon Tradeoff Modeler for the past 18 months, she said, and a few customers have recently been using the tool. Early experience, she said, has shown that customers are most interested in analyzing shipment sizes in terms of carbon emission benefits vis-a-vis inventory and manufacturing costs.

IBM expects most interest in the Carbon Tradeoff Modeler tool to come from manufacturers in high tech, electronics, consumer packaged goods, industrial products, and automotive verticals.