In our last blog, we told you about one of latest products from Salesforce called Net Zero Cloud designed to help businesses measure and manage their carbon footprint in the aim of achieving net zero. Let’s discuss more about what it does in practice.
We previously talked about some of the out-of-the-box CRM Analytics (Tableau) dashboards. Three of the key ones are designed to measure your scope 1, 2 & 3 emissions. For those of you just starting out on your Net Zero journey, these scopes are (loosely) defined below, and establishing the measure of all 3 scopes will allow for the calculation of your organisation’s total carbon footprint:
Scope 1: Think of these as your direct emissions. This includes on-site energy, such as natural gas and fuel, refrigerants, and emissions from combustion in owned or controlled boilers, and furnaces as well as emissions from fleet vehicles (e. g. cars, vans, trucks, helicopters for hospitals).
Scope 2: Your indirect emissions – these include indirect greenhouse gas emissions from purchased or acquired energy, like electricity, steam, heat, or cooling, generated off-site and consumed by the reporting company. For example, electricity purchased from the utility company are generated offsite, so they are considered indirect emissions.
Scope 3: Indirect emissions from your value chain. These are emissions as a result of activities from assets not owned or controlled by the reporting organisation, but that the organisation indirectly impacts in its value chain. This could be upstream activities (from your supply chain) including emissions from fuel use, waste generated, employee commuting, etc from the production of your product; or downstream activities (e.g. from consumers) such as onward transportation & distribution, use of the sold products, end of life treatment, etc
(Source: Climatepartner.com: The complete guide to understanding Scope 1, 2 & 3 emissions)
So, from the start, we can see that Salesforce Net Zero Cloud is all encompassing for what it is setting out to measure. How does it capture and process the information? Well, there are a number of methods available to support this, and we will do a deeper dive in future blogs but here are a few highlights:
We know that it isn’t always possible to get access to your utility bills, especially if you are in serviced offices, for example, where there may be shared space that makes it impossible to get an accurate allocation. No worries, again Net Zero Cloud has the solution as it is automatically networked to 3 key databases (IEA, eGrid and electricitymap) which mean that we just need to plug in the address/region of the office and the relevant square footage and Salesforce will provide a good estimation of your energy usage and calculate the measure for you.
One for the future which is in development: The Bill Parser – this is a fairly cool tool that, in true Salesforce style, will do the hard work for you. You upload copies of your utility bills, for example, and Salesforce scans and extracts the information (using Einstein’s Optical Character Recognition) to populate your energy use records, which in turn roll up into your Carbon Footprint calculation
Net Zero Cloud also helps you ensure that you have comprehensive records in place to calculate your total Carbon Footprint. It provides a specific component that identifies if any energy records have been created that haven’t been assigned properly and allows you to mass-associate these to a Carbon Footprint calculation.
It also has a Fill Data Gaps flow as well which finds and fixes overlaps in our energy use records, and then goes fuel by fuel to identify any gaps we have in our reporting. We can then select a fill method - daily average, for example - to fill the gap (here is where we see how they named this particular tool I guess!). It will capture an audit trail on the data fill recommended figures and populate an audit report so that we can demonstrate our methodology in a transparent way for any external auditors.
There is a lot more under the bonnet of Salesforce Net Zero Cloud but these are just some of the tools that work in concert to give us an actionable and reportable data set in our quest for net zero.
Read our What is Salesforce Net Zero Cloud blog.
If you want to know more about Salesforce Net Zero Cloud, just contact us.