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The truck I drive leaves a relatively Big-Footish 13 mile per gallon carbon footprint along my typical drive to Minneapolis or Mankato. The local garbage service only picks up one dumpster at the end of my driveway (which unfortunately does not contain a recycling canister). And there are regularly way too many lights left on in my house.
This week a new prospect approached me with the challenge of needing to identify his company’s overall carbon footprint. Apparently he is a part of an internal corporate initiative to identify the existing company footprint in an effort to implement measures to reduce it. Seemed like a large overall undertaking to me initially.
After chatting further, the key piece of data he really wanted to know seemed really quite simple:
“What is the distance in miles traveled for every shipment my company produces?”
For the record, his company is a book publisher. They ship thousands of books daily to all kinds of destinations. For all shipments, there is an origination address and destination address. RPG API Express, meet Google Distance Matrix APIs!
Our software, RPG API Express, enables companies running on the IBM i platform to easily leverage web services like this one from Google and incorporate them into their existing business processes. After some minor customization, one of my developers illustrated to my prospect specifically how Google was returning the precise mileage data needed for his recent shipments. Now, the IT Director at the book publishing company can:
That’s intentional change for a greener planet.
Now where have I heard that before? As an IBM business partner, we get to join in and contribute to this very small piece of a much greater goal within IBM.
But can I keep my truck?