Database Functionality for the Environmental Assessment of Consumer Products

McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry, MBDC, is a consulting firm dedicated to revolutionizing industries to ensure that products are reusable in biological or industrial cycles. MBDC analyzes the entire supply chain of materials used to make its products. All the data concerning a product is stored in a database maintained by MBDC. Prior to this project, employees of MBDC would manually sketch a map of a product´s supply chain to chart ingredient relationships, identify missing links of information, indicate ingredient assessment status, and display results. The project team has created a tool that allows MBDC to automatically view the status of data in the assessment process as well as any missing links of supplier information. If MBDC has completed assessment of the material, the tool provides indicators concerning the results of the assessment. MBDC works with a large amount of customers and it would be very beneficial if they could spend more time working directly with customers versus spending time on routine work. Using the Systems methodology throughout the project, the team first worked with MBDC to understand the requested functionalities of the database and then created a list of requirements based on the functionalities. Based on the requirements, the team generated over twenty alternatives. Evaluation and client input resulted in the selection of the best alternative. The team has constructed a functional prototype of the final system which, based on testing, meets all of the high priority requirements. Based on MBDC estimates of the amount of time saved per project with this tool, the team calculated that it will save the company 2,000 hours a year (Bolton, 2006).