Microsoft has been diligently reporting its carbon emissions, energy and now water use through the Carbon Disclosure Project for the last seven years. Our process for sourcing, gathering and analyzing data can be quite challenging as it often starts months in advance and involves many stakeholders from across the business. And with 90,000 employees, working in roughly 640 buildings across 112 countries worldwide, turning this data into actionable information is the type of challenge we enjoy, and one that we think information technology is in a unique position to address.
To help us address this challenge, we’ve recently adopted CarbonSystems’ Enterprise Sustainability Platform (ESP), a cloud-based application that automatically captures and extracts data from a myriad of sources, including smart meters, energy providers, suppliers, waste processors, internal business systems, and even paper-based documents. Collecting data on such a large scale will help us improve our reporting processes and make publishing our environmental impact to organizations like the Carbon Disclosure Project easier. We are also excited about the opportunities to integrate powerful analytics that add intelligence to our existing systems, helping us uncover even more opportunities to understand the impact of our operations and identify areas where we can improve.
Using the CarbonSystems platform, it will be possible for Microsoft to:
- Streamline the tracking and reporting process of critical energy and environmental data, giving us a more complete picture of the company’s overall environmental impact.
- Use performance analytics to prioritize and improve decision-making, like identifying travel reduction opportunities to save money and carbon emissions.
- Understand and verify the impact of efficiency investment and initiatives, such as airside economization for datacenters.
We’re excited about the role that CarbonSystems’ ESP will play in helping us achieve our environmental goals. By more efficiently collecting, analyzing and sharing environmental data, we hope to unlock new levels of understanding about the resources we use in order to help us reduce our impact on the environment.
For more information on Microsoft’s adoption of CarbonSystems’ Environmental Sustainability Platform, please visit Carbon Systems’ press release here.