EcoNexus: where finance meets ESG.
Cheapest supplier, or greenest supplier? Wrong question. EcoNexus computes the trade-off instead of arguing about it.
What it is
A SaaS prototype built for the RSM FinTech course. EcoNexus helps coffee companies select suppliers by balancing financial goals (cost minimisation) with ESG goals (water usage) through weighted goal programming, a multi-objective optimisation technique where the company sets the weights.
The initial focus is the coffee industry, where sustainable sourcing is paramount for players like Starbucks, Nespresso and JDE. The tool takes supplier attributes, demand and goal weights, then returns a prescriptive sourcing plan plus dynamic scenario analysis for when supplier information is uncertain.
The work
- Formulated supplier selection as a weighted goal programming problem with demand and capacity constraints
- Implemented the optimisation core in Python with the Gurobi solver
- Built the web application in Flask with scenario analysis and visualisation
- Designed the input model: supplier attributes, total demand, goal values and weights
Concepts
What it taught me
Sustainability disputes dissolve surprisingly fast once you turn them into an objective function with explicit weights.