How Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability can enable Sustainable Value Chains

The world is facing an extraordinary challenge—to stabilize our society by transforming common practices to help us achieve global net zero. Given the urgency, scope, and scale of the task, all sectors have an important role to play, including the private sector. Stakeholders, governments, regulators, and customers are demanding that organizations act swiftly to reduce their environmental impact and demonstrate their progress. Organizations of all types, sizes, and sectors will need to fundamentally transform common practices to meet the new sustainability imperative—to operate with less environmental impact and deliver on their ESG commitments while continuing to balance investments to grow operational excellence, business revenue, market share, and shareholder value.??In addition, many customers need to fulfill the ESG reporting requirements of the most common standards, such as GRI, TCFD, CSRD, EU Taxonomy and more with predefined sustainability metrics. For example, on January 2023 the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) entered into force.

Microsoft has been working to become more sustainable for more than a decade, and experience has shown us that prioritizing both organizational and digital transformation is critical for lasting change. We’re making progress toward our bold commitments to become carbon negative, water positive, and zero waste and protect more land than we use by 2030, and to build a Planetary Computer.

Our products, services, and devices are built with sustainability in mind, and we are invested in delivering the world’s leading platform for technology solutions to environmental challenges—with security, privacy, and compliance built-in. Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability empowers organizations to accelerate sustainability progress and business growth by bringing together a set of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) capabilities across the Microsoft Cloud portfolio plus solutions from our global ecosystem of partners. By bringing these capabilities together, we are enabling organizations to gain the transparency and insights they need to understand their Environmental footprint, Social and Governance aspects, but also ?embed sustainability through their organization and value chain, and create new value in a changing landscape.

With the dedicated, new Microsoft Sustainability Manager, we’re unifying data intelligence and enabling comprehensive, integrated, and increasingly automated sustainability management for organizations no matter where they are on their sustainability journey. Microsoft Sustainability Manager is an extensible solution that enables organizations to more easily record, report, and reduce their environmental impact through stronger data connections that deliver actionable insights.

What makes Microsoft Sustainability Manager stand out?

• Disparate data integration. Microsoft Sustainability Manager helps integrate disparate data from across an enterprise and value chain—from virtually any business system, solution provider, or vendor—and centralizes it with the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability data model. It includes prepackaged integrations with many business systems, ERP systems(SAP, Oracle, etc), or platforms(Salesforce, Google) to break down data silos.
• Simplified data calculations. It includes built-in calculation methodologies for Scopes 1 and 2 and Scope 3. The solutions strength arises from the prepackaged content of different libraries, calculation models and emission factors that can also integrate third parties sources, such as LCAs. The nodular structure of Sustainability Manager and Power FX will also enable customers and partners to build complex calculations to address specific needs. Sustainability Manager pulls through Scope 3 data, about the emissions Microsoft generates, based on the use of Microsoft cloud services(Azure, M365, etc), from Emissions Impact Dashboard applications.
• Seamless, embedded collaboration and planning. The integration of Microsoft Teams enables sustainability contributors to seamlessly collaborate around Sustainability Manager data and insights and make detailed, strategic plans within the flow of work—helping streamline and speed up their workflow.
• Power Platform: Sustainability Manager is build in Power Platform and can combine Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI to Solve data deficiencies and Increase productivity. Customers and partners can use Microsoft Azure and Power Platform to extend the core capabilities of Sustainability Manager quickly and easily, with custom industry vertical or horizontal solutions, such as new formulas or reports. More specifically, customers can use power apps and power automate, to automate the data collections and validation and streamline their sustainability process.
• Reporting: Sustainability Manager streamlines your reporting functions to employees, stakeholders, regulators, and the public. Also customers can use Power BI which is embedded, to visualize more accurate and reliable intelligence about the environmental impact, and the sustainability progress in near real time, but also to include Social and Governace KPIs that are important to produce the regulatory reporting and provide feedback to thrid parties rating companies. It includes both export functions and configurable reports to ease preparation for audits and quantitative public reporting.
• Goals & Scorecards: Microsoft Sustainability Manager helps organizations set and track their progress against incremental and long-term targets with scorecards, which can be used to set goals based on any entity within the application, to either manually or automatically track progress, and to visualize and monitor progress against benchmarks like carbon neutrality.
• Partner ecosystem opportunity. Sustainability Manager is extendable by our growing ecosystem of partners who are attaching rich and robust digital solutions to support reporting, governance, and emissions reduction initiatives with additional analytics, digital twins, and AI-driven automation. They’re also providing connectors to unlock data for organizations on the front end of Sustainability Manager.
• Roadmap: We have an exciting roadmap for Microsoft Sustainability Manager, and we'll continue to expand and enhance it with every release.
• Implementation: Unlike other similar platforms, Microsoft Sustainability Manager is simple to adopt. A typical implementation ?usually takes place within a quarter and of course customers can start small with a pilot. Once the pilot is finished, organizations will understand the nuances that they will want to change, to create a more value such as factor mappings, facility names, dimension factors they want to bring in or different libraries or emission sources. ?Microsoft partners offer a wide range of prepackaged services for Sustainability Manager implementations from Pilot to full blown. In addition, Microsoft Sustainability Manager offers a free 30-day trial to experience the solution.

Working together with our Customers and Partner, with shared ambitions, we can amplify our positive impact and create new opportunities to grow businesses, sustainably. We’re delivering powerful products and solutions to help organizations unify data intelligence and gain the visibility needed to drive sustainability efforts and business transformation. We can bring together environmental, financial, and operational data to inform more credible, value-based decisions—to reduce environmental impact while also growing businesses, retaining operational excellence, and increasing shareholder value.

Don't miss the momentum: Companies that prioritize sustainability now are the ones that will thrive in the long run.

Find more about Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability.