You may have heard about SNOW, IBM's new consultancy service for streamlining supply chains. It has helped COSCO (you've undoubtedly seen the name on shipping containers) lower CO2 emission by 15 percent and lower logistics costs by 23 percent.

All well and good, but how does it work? Here's a snippet of what SNOW, which stands for Supply Chain Network Optimization Workbench, entails from the press release:

SNOW was developed by IBM's China Research Laboratory and is built on a service-oriented architecture foundation, using WebSphere and other IBM-brand software products.

The tool is designed to look across five major logistics areas:

-- Product -- evaluating CO2 emissions impact of materials to aid in identifying alternatives;

-- Sourcing -- considering impacts of CO2 emissions in selecting suppliers;

-- Production -- determining CO2 emissions associated with manufacturing processes;

-- Warehousing -- considering storage requirements and their attendant environmental impacts;

-- Transportation and distribution -- analyzing CO2 emissions for transportation modes, shipment sizes and service levels.

IBM also offers Environmental Product Lifecycle Management Green Sigma, and Carbon Tradeoff Modeler services to help companies green up their act and save quite a bit of dough in the process. More info on those are available here.