Plugins

Sage X3 Reforestation As A Service (RAAS)

Unlocking Potential

Plugin Summary

As a Sage Business Partner, we wanted to do more than just commit to planting a limited number of trees in an ad hoc fashion. Instead, Mysoft wanted to integrate tree planting right into Sage X3, allowing our successes as a business to translate into successes for the environment instantly.

Who Is It For?

Any Business that is utilising Sage X3

What Will You Gain?

A free-of-charge plugin that allows you to set rules that work for you to plant trees based on set targets. Beyond helping to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere over their lifetime, trees have other environmental benefits, such as helping to restore biodiversity and ecosystems that have been damaged by humans, as well as reducing soil erosion & degradation.

Where Will You Find me?

Upon installation the plugin will create a new function in your Sage X3 which is accessible from the sitemap in master menu. From there you can setup, control and configure your campaigns.

More Detail:

Selection of Providers:

The tree-planting industry has been tainted with multiple examples of greenwashing. With that in mind, we started our evaluation of tree-planting API providers with a set of criteria in mind. We discovered quickly that there are many options available, and through a narrowing process we ended up shortlisting three for comparison: More:Trees, Digital Humani and The Good API.

To compare these different options, we established a few important criteria:

Donation Ratio: A high percentage of donated money should go to tree planting.
Efficacy: The trees should get planted, not just say they are.
API quality: The API should be flexible and rich; we should be able to plant and retrieve previous planting data from the API.
Visibility: There should be an easy-to-view dashboard from the API provider, providing transparency and visibility of outcomes.
Testing: They should provide a sandbox for testing on our development server, allowing us to build the best integration possible.

Based on these criteria, Digital Humani stood out as the strongest contender.

They take no money off the top of donations, all money is processed directly by one of their tree-planting partners such as OneTreePlanted.
They provide the option to choose from many projects with different partners allowing flexibility to choose a project we like the best with a planting company we view as reliable.
They have a detailed API that allows us to retrieve data such as the number of trees planted in a given month, the number of trees planted by the user, etc.
They have a clear dashboard showing plants by day/month/year, with a log of each plant.
They have a separate sandbox dashboard and API to allow us to develop without any worries.

Additionally, they have some other benefits outside of our criteria such as being able to get certificates for trees planted if the project partner is OneTreePlanted, and they are a registered charity in Canada.

The Complete Solution; From Sage X3 to Tree Planting

At the end of Phase 1, our solution has 4 new Sage X3 functions: Projects, Campaigns, Campaign Groups, and Process Tree Planting:

Digital Humani Project imported into Sage X3

Projects

Projects is a simple table view that imports all the tree-planting projects currently available via Digital Humani from the list of providers; the projects are tied to a planting partner and a location around the globe – giving people the choice of where to plant and with whom.

Tree Planting Campaigns & Groups

Tree planting campaigns

The campaign screen includes all the criteria for planting 1 tree. We can set the sales-to-planting ratio here, for example, 0.1 of a quantity will plant 10 trees for every 1 unit.

All campaigns are tied to a planting project with Digital Humani.

Campaigns are organised into Campaign Groups which are applied to the customer.

Tree Planting Triggers

Tree planting requests are generated when a new sales invoice has been created where the customer has a campaign group defined. The number of trees to plant gets updated if the invoice is modified until the invoice is posted.

Manually process tree-planting requests

Process Tree Planting Requests

Finally, we have to plant the trees. For this, we use our Press Tree Planting function. This is a simple tick box with an ‘OK’ button to process all outstanding tree-planting requests.

Typically, this will run on the X3 Batch Server (Scheduler) and will not need to be run manually but is useful to have the option to run it manually from the menu. We created a Batch Task that processes all planting requests at the end of the day.

Digital Humani Dashboard

The dashboard created by Digital Humani is a great place to view all the planting done so far. In this example, you can see two days where we pushed a bulk set of manual plant requests.