Record, Report, Reduce!

Sustainability is good for business being it retail, manufacturing, financial services, energy, or public sector. Multiple companies leverage technology to solve sustainability challenges (see e.g. Sustainability. Good for Business. Executive Playbook). Quantifying the carbon emission is only the beginning. The other areas include:

Infrastructure transformation (Sustainable Platform) meaning reduction of CO2 emissions via cloud migrations.
Remote work & collaboration (Sustainable Operations) meaning fully digitalized operations and online collaborative software that removes the need for physical presence at specific work locations, reduces business travel and employee commuting.
Societal development (Sustainable Ecosystem) meaning emerging partnership on tech-enabling sustainability.

*“Microsoft Sustainability Manager is an extensible solution that unifies data intelligence and provides comprehensive, integrated, and automated sustainability management for organizations at any stage of their sustainability journey.”* (Microsoft Sustainability Manager overview). First of all, it allows the recording of the emissions footprint of any organization and its value chain. Additionally, it supports the emission analysis and reports preparation, enabling proactive emissions monitoring to plan sustainability strategies. Lastly, thanks to the ability to set goals, it is possible to take actions to reduce the emissions footprint. The benefits of using Microsoft Sustainability Manager include:

User-friendly interface and extensibility thanks to the foundation of bulletproof Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Power BI.
Dedicated and standardized Data & Calculation models based on good practices and standards for sustainability in greenhouse gases emission area set by the organizations leading in the field, like IPCC and EPA, among others.
Automation of manual processes of data ingestion, through rich set of data connectors to multiple data sources being it files, databases, online services. and other sources.

Based on the organization’s activity profile, size and location, the reporting and regulatory requirements change. Therefore, it is essential to correctly identify the reporting requirements at the beginning of the process. For this purpose, conducting business-oriented Proof of Concept that ends up with ready-to-use Minimal Viable Product (MVP) is the best approach recommended by Microsoft (Recommendations for implementing Sustainability Manager) and Elitmind.

The process should start with the identification of each organizational unit participating in the evaluation. As a next step, it is important to define the organizational structure, indicate facilities and their locations. To ensure the process is efficient, the decision body should nominate main stakeholders in the process, including the Sustainability/Regulatory Specialist who will lead the entire reporting activity. Then, there are a couple of mandatory steps to be successful:

Requirements identification
KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) setting
Data collection
Data ingestion
Calculation configuration & review
Data reporting
Results evaluation
KPIs verification and review

Proof of Concept is the best approach to check the technology in real life and showcase Microsoft Sustainability Manager capabilities, but it is also building a blueprint to replicate by the team consisting of many stakeholders (Sustainability and Regulatory Specialists, Area Experts, Data Analysts, Data Engineers, Report Tool Developers and Administrators) and responsible for future reporting enhancements by adding new data sources, KPIs, or goals.

At Elitmind we accelerate the development of organizations by making data usage their competitive advantage. We work with companies that have built or want to build a work culture based on data values. What counts for our clients is not only the final product but also the speed of implementation and flexibility. We are committed to environmental sustainability, and we maintain the culture of diversity & inclusion. Elitmind is part of the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability initiative (see Shaping a Sustainable Future; e-book available in polish). We rely on Microsoft Sustainability Manager internally and we are happy to share our hands on experience with the solution.

Who are we?

We are passionate about data and artificial intelligence.

We believe that a data culture can improve the world.

What do we do?

We save time and money by automating data processing.
By replacing error-prone manual processes with automated workflows, we help to increase quality, eliminating as many human errors as possible.

Microsoft Power BI

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