Published 21.06.23
Get to Net Zero with Makersite
Net Zero is an ambitious goal. The great thing is that the more you work on the first part, the less you need to invest into the second.
Net-Zero is an ambitious goal. It involves reducing carbon emissions associated with your business, as well as removing carbon from the atmosphere to balance out remaining emissions. The great thing is that the more you work on the first part, the less you need to invest into the second.
Beyond demonstrating leadership an increasingly crucial global problem, reducing carbon emissions can have a positive impact on your bottom line through energy savings and material efficiencies. It can also lead to new services that drive revenue. The transparency you create in the process will directly help you make your supply chains more resilient and mitigate business risk. If done right, it is a great framework to use to understand and improve your business.
Getting to Net-Zero the right way can seem unattainable with today’s approaches and shortcuts like carbon-offsets may seem like a pragmatic approach. However, this need not be the case. We put together a guide to help expose some of the key challenges and propose ways to avoid or overcome them successfully.
From materiality assessments to baselining and monitoring, this is how we help companies worldwide to get to net-zero.
Step 1: Find what is material to your business
The first step is to find out what is relevant to you. Actually, Scope 3 emissions include 15 categories designed to help companies create a systematic framework to measure, manage, and reduce emissions across their value chain, regardless of their industry or activity. Based on your business activity, you can already exclude the categories that don’t apply to you. Typically a screening project will help here – with the back of the envelope calculations based on readily available procurement data. Make a list of high priority areas and address these in greater detail in the next step.
How we help: Our experts have experience in what to typically focus on vs what are the red-herrings. We can help you navigate this step quickly and avoid time-consuming, potentially costly sidetracks.
Source: GHG Protocol
Step 2: Identify data sources
Map the activities you need to quantify with sources of information already existing within your organization. We’ve shown you some examples below. The key is to only use data that you already have and not setup new data collection processes. Where you lack information, approximate first and elaborate later. Create a table where every Scope 3 category is connected to its data source within your organization alongside a plan to extract and map the relevant data. The goal is to create a system that will not only give you your carbon footprint but also provide an ongoing monitoring system based on established business processes. This will enable you to set targets, monitor progress in detail, and relate that progress directly to business activities.
How we help: Our platform is designed to ingest large amount of inhomogenous data from different systems, and to create digital twins of your organization which can be used for lightening fast environmental calculations. Data can be protected at a granular level – ensuring that highly confidential information is only accessible to authorized team members. Tens of AI-powered APIs are available to integrate with your systems and make this process simple and fast. Data cleanups can be done on Makersite which eliminates the need to make changes to your existing systems – typically one of the most costly steps of integration projects. Integrated collaboration features enable your teams to work simultaneously on the same data model – so the impacts of changes can be seen immediately. Makersite also provides access to most Life Cycle databases within a single subscription.
Step 3: Establish a baseline and set a target
One of the most important aspects of setting a baseline is being able to track progress against it. Without a system-based approach as described above, monitoring progress is prohibitive from a cost and effort standpoint. This is where most scope 3 projects fail to deliver value to the business.
In order to set ambitious targets that are also realistic, a clear understanding of the available opportunities for reduction is also crucial. This becomes possible when your baseline calculations are based on raw business data. You can quickly identify low-hanging fruit and develop a robust plan to achieve more challenging goals down the road.
How we help: Your data is always up-to-date and accurate, without ongoing efforts. Makersite gives you access to the latest Life Cycle data so you can re-baseline your data when new information becomes available, without any effort. BI tools can connect directly with Makersite’s APIs to deliver meaningful dashboards and share progress across the organization.
Step 4: Identify and assess opportunities to reduce emissions
Reducing carbon impacts is a collaborative effort. Different teams will need to work together to identify and evaluate opportunities. Different functions within the organization will have different perspectives such as feasibility, costs, risk, etc. By making these evaluations easy and transparent, you can accelerate progress towards your goals.
How we help: Makersite is the only platform in the world that supports multi-criteria analyses. In addition to the environmental perspective, opportunities can be evaluated from their cost, risk, and supply chain dimensions. Our Artificial Intelligence will analyze your operational data and automatically identify carbon savings opportunities. Engineers can easily compare components to their alternatives and quickly see the impacts of design changes on the company objectives, alongside the perspective of their regulatory compliance, supply risk, and cost of production, simultaneously. Analyses, decision making, and reporting are considerably sped up, to up to 100x faster than with traditional systems.
