We've been busy enhancing our report features in FoundationFootprint™ over the last three months.

In the past we were very conscious not to inundate our users with reports that are configurable in every way imaginable as it often deterred the user from using them. I've seen it in many applications-it simply takes too much effort to understand how to use the features and get anything meaningful out of the system.

So we concentrated on having a selection of reports that were based on whatever business unit, facility, asset or supplier was selected in the page. Likewise with the emission sources. Two clicks away was the same in depth analysis whether it was electricity, gas, fuel, water, raw materials or mobile phone use.

And to compliment these automatic reports we created plenty of "half done" reports where the user simply needs to select the items of interest and two or three other parameters such as a date range and click go. Both methods gave users virtually instant access to really useful and meaningful information.

But that being said we were getting a steady stream of requests for a full blown report builder. So we did it. And as well as creating your own reports for personal use you can share them with another user, your team, your business unit or everyone and also have FoundationFootprint™ send the reports to you on a schedule that you define.

And users can now make real time reports available to the general public. Reports such as their absolute carbon footprint as well as the ongoing carbon intensity of their products, services or supply chain.

Something else we've been working on over the last few months, in partnership with Beckstones Services, is Granite™, an online document, project and timesheet management system for the construction industry.

The built environment makes up a large proportion of emissions globally as does the actual construction process. Granite™ reduces the costs and environmental impact of the construction process in many ways:

1. it improves communication between designers, architects, drafters, builders and the client reducing the likelihood of errors and costly modifications
   
2. it significantly reduces fuel costs and time for trips between offices and sites to deliver drawings, and obtain mark ups, alterations and signatures
3. and it significantly reduces printing costs as modifications can be made and viewed online

Furthermore, FoundationFootprint™ can be used to forecast and track the carbon footprint of the full lifecycle of buildings and whole developments from concept, through construction, operation and decommission.

For more information on Granite™ contact Beckstones.

It's been sometime since I last published a blog post. We've been busy to say the least.

From an engineering perspective we've been busy building the Report Builder in FoundationFootprint™. More about that in a later post. We also released a local government edition of FoundationFootprint™ that follows the draft GHG Protocol Public Sector Standard.

Operationally we've been moving our infrastructure to a new cloud provider. Now we have dynamic scalability meaning a million users can hit FoundationFootprint™ at the same time and the resources will automatically scale up to meet demand. We have automatic offsite backups three times a day and uptime is guaranteed 99.999%. Great peace of mind for our customers.

On the business development front we've been busy talking to local councils in the Auckland area regarding the upcoming SuperCity move and the Rugby World Cup 2011 preparations. We've been developing our FoundationFootprint™ Reseller Program across Australasia which has met with a lot of enthusiasm and we've also been moving into the dairy, forestry and transport sectors with great results. This has coincided with the release of our NZ ETS Compliance module for the Forestry sector.

The first drafts of the GHG Protocol Scope 3 and Product Accounting and Reporting Standards were released to the Technical Advisory Group today of which Revolution ID is a member.

I'm really excited about these two new standards. As well as giving businesses globally a direction on how to manage these, often difficult exercises, it means we can move forward with more certainty on these features within FoundationFootprint™.

Up until now we had been using our best guess / common sense ideas of how to manage supply chain emissions in FoundationFootprint™ and the British PAS 2050 for product life cycle.

The drafts are not available for general release (yet?) but more information can be found at http://www.ghgprotocol.org/standards/product-and-supply-chain-standard.