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In this blog, we explain how creating scorecards and goals empowers you to curate sustainability metrics and track against your organization’s key business objectives. We also share other recent updates to Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability designed to help you manage, track, report, and gain better insight into your sustainability data. 

Use scorecards and goals to achieve your sustainability objectives

Sustainability reporting can be a complex process. Sustainability Manager includes a new capability that simplifies the process, making it more accessible and manageable for you to communicate your organization’s sustainability achievements. With scorecards and goals, you can curate your organization’s sustainability metrics and track them against your organization’s business objectives. 

Create a scorecard, which you can use to chart your organization’s sustainability metrics, encapsulate them within a scorecard, and designate an owner to guide its advancement. 

Create goals, the benchmark of your organization’s sustainability trajectory, which can be seamlessly integrated with the scorecards. These goals, whether entered manually or derived from interconnected data streams, provide a dynamic framework for sustainability targets, adaptable to the shifting tides of your organization’s needs. 

Using the scorecards and goals feature, you can mark goals as aligning to the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), giving your organization the ability to highlight the scientific rigor and global recognition of its sustainability efforts. By including a baseline year, the goal-setting process deepens, offering a historical perspective from which you can measure and assess progress. Finally, the dual capability of manual updates or automated system tracking enables you to not only set but actively pursue and achieve your organization’s sustainability goals.  

The scorecards and goals capability transcends the mere establishment of targets, fostering a culture of engagement and accountability. It provides a centralized platform for setting, monitoring, and updating sustainability goals, which is crucial for accurate disclosure reporting. With the ability to connect goals to data sources, you can ensure that your organization’s reporting is data-driven and reflects real-time progress towards its sustainability targets. This feature simplifies the complex process of sustainability reporting, making it more accessible and manageable for organizations of all sizes to communicate their sustainability achievements transparently to stakeholders.  

Calculate emissions using IEA factors within Sustainability Manager 

Multinational organizations can now calculate emissions using International Energy Agency (IEA) emission factors within Sustainability Manager, with some restrictions as governed by IEA. Using the IEA factors can help you understand your organization’s carbon footprint and develop strategies to reduce emissions, as well as help with regulatory compliance, risk management, and cost reduction. 

The IEA factors library is available to download from Microsoft Cloud Solution Center. The IEA emission factors are available to use alongside all other emission factor libraries within Sustainability Manager. This feature is available within Sustainability Manager Premium.

Learn how to calculate emissions with the IEA emissions feature. 

Create and associate meter entities with a facility within Sustainability Manager 

For Scope 1 and Scope 2 emission categories, customers collect utility consumption data from utility providers through bills and, in some cases, through real-time devices like meters. The consumption reported in utility bills and real-time devices are recorded through utility meters (per collection device configuration). 

Now deprecated, Sustainability Manager previously included an optional meter text attribute for purchased energy and stationary combustion. However, since the consumption is recorded at a facility level and the meter is the device used to record this consumption for each facility, the meter must be associated with a facility within Sustainability Manager. 

You can now create and associate multiple utility meters (entities) with the facility entity in Sustainability Manager. This will enable you to track and report energy consumption for emissions calculations, as well as water usage at a facility level within your organization. 

Note that reports by meter is a future enhancement. In the meantime, you can use custom reports to add meter-based pivot views. 

Transfer data connections across deployments 

Sustainability Manger includes advanced ingestion capabilities. A connection is made of several parts:   

• The data source connectivity specifications  
• Mode of ingestion such as Power Query, Excel, or from a custom data provider  
• Mapping of source shape to the Sustainability Manager data model  
• Execution context, such as scheduling  

Enterprises need repeatable, verifiable processes across deployments; so, once a connection is specified, it can be transferred across deployments or environments. Now, environment administrators can use application lifecycle management (ALM) with Microsoft Power Platform to transfer connections across environments.   

Learn more about how to copy connections from one environment to another. 

Gain insights into your organization’s sustainability progress with Microsoft Copilot Studio templates 

The Sustainability Insights Copilot template (preview) was recently added to Copilot Studio. The template enables you to get insights and see data about your organization’s sustainability goals and progress and can be tailored to suit your organization’s specific needs. Information can be publicly shared in the form of reports, documents, and records. For example, a company’s sales and marketing professionals might be required to respond to queries from customers about the company’s sustainability progress on various sustainability fronts like measuring across environmental metrics, social and governance stats and indexes, energy meters, pollution indexes, and biodiversity impact.  

You can create and deploy a Sustainability Insights Copilot template as you would for any other Copilot template in Copilot Studio. 

Once deployed, your copilot is ready to field questions.  

You can configure the template with more sources of knowledge and other system of records, leveraging connectors to respond to related queries better.  

Enhanced Scope 3 categories now generally available in Sustainability Manager 

We’re excited to announce that Sustainability Manager has successfully completed the verification process for several Scope 3 categories of the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol. The following categories are now generally available:  

• Category 3: Fuel-and energy-related activities  
• Category 10: Processing of sold products  
• Category 11: Use of sold products  
• Category 14: Franchises  
• Category 15: Investments 

This update spans across various features, including import, activity data, calculations, and documentation, ensuring a seamless user experience.  

The verification process was comprehensive, involving a rigorous assessment and validation of data, methodologies, and calculations related to these Scope 3 categories. Independent experts conducted a thorough review to ensure accuracy, consistency, and compliance with industry standards.  

We’re committed to providing you with reliable and transparent tools to manage your sustainability efforts. The general availability of these enhanced Scope 3 categories marks a significant milestone in our journey towards empowering organizations to achieve their environmental goals. 

Learn more about sustainability solutions with Microsoft 

• Bookmark Microsoft Industry Blogs: Sustainability for the latest updates, including new capabilities in Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability.  
• Discover solutions with Microsoft Sustainability Manager. 
• Explore the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability Community, where you can find answers to questions and connect with peers and experts. 
• See what’s new in Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability June 2024.

Want to learn more about Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability? Sign up for news and updates. 

The post Simplify reporting with real-time insight into your sustainability progress appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

To address this growing need, Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabric (preview) can help organizations take sustainability data in any format, organize, and normalize the data for sustainability regulatory reporting. This quantitative data reporting approach is complemented by a joint solution from Accenture and Avanade that leverages generative AI to provide qualitative insights. This enables organizations to manage workflows associated with multiple sustainability reporting frameworks globally, including CSRD, Global Report Initiative (GRI), and the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB). Organizations can optimize both quantitative data from Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability solutions and qualitative data with Accenture and Avanade’s generative AI-powered solution. 

The solution integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Sustainability Manager, offering a comprehensive platform for managing sustainability key performance indicators (KPIs) across different frameworks. The solution’s collaborative features, generative AI-enhanced insights, and streamlined data integration can help organizations simplify compliance-related processes. Meanwhile, the improved richness of its sustainability reporting enables organizations to take more effective actions to achieve their ESG targets.  

Sustainability data solutions in Fabric

Unique capabilities that provide prebuilt and preconfigured Fabric resources

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Navigate the complexities of reporting frameworks

All ESG reporting frameworks carry their own complexities. However, the CSRD has been top of mind in 2024 for organizations in and outside of the European Union as they begin to gather, analyze, and report the required data. This is no simple task—the CSRD encompasses 12 standards and 82 reporting requirements, which amounts to approximately 500 KPIs and over 10,000 underlying data points. In addition to managing this large array of ESG data, companies face other significant challenges associated with CSRD compliance and data management including reporting on the entire value chain versus only on their own organization. The evolving nature of sustainability criteria and metrics further complicates the reporting process. 

Navigating the intricacies of a multitude of reporting frameworks and intricate regulations necessitates extensive data gathering and assimilation. The process of ESG reporting often engages various departments and resources within an organization, introducing its own set of risks and costs. The more manual a process, the more opportunities there are for errors to occur, and the complexities of each reporting framework require time, diligence, and accuracy. A proficient solution can help simplify the process and effectively aid in the generation of accurate reports with fewer resources required. 

Accenture and Avanade’s generative AI-powered solution allows users to select from different reporting frameworks and adapts to the specific requirements of the chosen framework, displaying relevant categories and reporting structures. Users can access the breadth and depth of their data and translate it into the necessary reporting frameworks. This flexibility is crucial for organizations that are subject to multiple reporting obligations or need to adhere to international standards beyond local mandates. 

Streamlining data management using Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service

Accenture and Avanade’s solution addresses the dual challenges of qualitative and quantitative data in sustainability reporting, utilizing Azure OpenAI for enhancing its reporting capabilities, especially for qualitative data input. Using Azure OpenAI to create an AI assistant, Accenture and Avanade’s solution offers a unified platform for sustainability reporting, simplifying the process of compiling CSRD reports, making it easier for users to interact with data and generate reports quickly.  

• Qualitative data management: Leveraging Azure OpenAI integration, Accenture and Avanade’s solution assists in drafting responses to qualitative questions, such as detailing a company’s sustainability policies, practices, and goals. This AI assistant ensures that responses are not only in keeping with reporting standards but also reflective of best practices and forward-thinking sustainability strategies.  
• Quantitative data management: The integration of Microsoft Sustainability Manager allows for the automatic import of calculated quantitative metrics. This means that insights or recommendations provided by Accenture and Avanade’s solution is informed by the data in the user’s ESG platform. The AI assistant enables identification of trends and patterns in both qualitative and quantitative data sources, aiding in a more holistic analysis.   

An enhanced collaborative workflow  

One of the biggest pain points that companies have related to ESG reporting is managing the approval workflow with multiple process and approval steps. It’s important to have a trail of accountability, which depending on organization size, can exist across several departments and users. Accenture and Avanade’s solution enables organizations to assign responsibility and accountability, thereby streamlining the process of preparing the report and its associated approval processes.   

Importantly, team members can work on the same sections of the report simultaneously and the platform maintains comprehensive audit trails of all changes made to the report. This transparency is vital for accountability, enabling team leaders to monitor progress and ensure that all contributions align. 

Learn more about sustainability solutions

By facilitating clear communication, structured workflows, and shared access to data in Microsoft Sustainability Manager, Accenture and Avanade’s generative AI-powered solution enables teams to work together toward their sustainability reporting goals. 

To learn more about Accenture and Avanade’s generative AI-powered solution and how it can be customized for your industry and region, register for a complimentary workshop.  

The post Leverage AI to simplify CSRD reporting   appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

They decided to migrate their 10-year-old architecture and technology stack to a cloud-based solution to support their long-term goals and operate more efficiently. The question was how to make the move while also keeping the power on.  

At Microsoft for Government, we work with organizations and agencies around the world to help solve these kinds of challenges. We help each organization navigate their unique requirements and chart a path that works best for them, balancing the promise of AI and cloud native applications with the need to be more cost efficient, secure, and compliant.  

For Energinet, the solution was to build a new digital operating system based on Microsoft Azure, which is improving efficiency in automating energy balancing processes, lowering costs, and resolving issues in 15 minutes that previously took an hour. Modernizing helped them meet their near-term requirements, and it positioned them to remain agile and open to change as opportunities evolve.  

Azure Migrate and Modernize and Azure Innovate

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Migrate to innovate—the benefits of modernization

In many government organizations, the migration to cloud computing has long been mitigated by important concerns, including cost, security, and a need to maximize legacy systems. As cloud technology has matured, however, the barriers to adoption have declined as the price of inaction has risen.  

With the promise of AI to deliver new efficiencies and opportunities for service improvements, cloud migration is now clearly the best path forward, provided it is done in ways that meet an organization’s unique requirements.  

For government organization, the advantages of cloud computing are compelling, and easier to realize than before. Governments that choose to migrate to Azure are realizing important benefits in many areas of their greatest concerns—among them: 

• Performance and resilience: Azure enables businesses to scale their operations globally with ease, with purpose-built infrastructure, dynamic compute capacity, scalable storage, and real-time disaster-recovery options. Governments such as the State of Alaska are migrating to Azure to achieve their vision of becoming digital public service innovators. To expand access to secure services, Alaska migrated 700 applications and one-third of its infrastructure in just three months. They not only achieved better resilience, cost efficiency, and security, but with the state’s vast geography and often isolated communities, the migration also sparked a cultural shift by bringing agencies together and unlocking unexpected value. 

• Security: To counter the expanding cybersecurity threat facing governments, Azure is supported by more than 8,500 security experts, more than 100 compliance certifications, and a cloud-native application protection platform that spans the application and infrastructure stack. Microsoft plans to invest USD$20 billion in security in the next five years to continue our commitment to a safe future.¹ The importance of ensuring world-class security was a key factor in the decision by Qatar’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology to digitize government operations with Azure. The ministry established information assurance measures and security programs that not only enhanced the government’s data security and operational efficiency, but also achieved $7.3 million in cost savings. 

• Hybrid and multi-cloud management: Azure supports hybrid, multi-cloud, and edge environments with Microsoft Azure Arc, a solution that allows governments to build applications and services with a consistent development, operations, and security model across deployments. This proved essential for the World Bank, which provides lending services in 189 developing countries around the world to help lift people out of poverty. They wanted to build applications and services that could extract insights from their SQL Server estate and multiple cloud infrastructure providers. Using Azure Arc, they streamlined their cloud migration journey, built new solutions, and gained unexpected efficiencies. 

• Cost savings: By migrating to Azure, customers can optimize costs and resources by consolidating solutions and choosing from a variety of consumption models and flexible migration approaches. For example, the Statistical Office of Republic of Serbia saved time and money by conducting the nation’s first-ever paperless census using a hybrid cloud solution, which reduced the time required to publish official results from 18 months to just six. The solution delivered faster data encoding and more accurate results, and the Statistical Office of Republic of Serbia was able to streamline maintenance while ensuring optimal security, real-time monitoring, and improved data quality.  

A 3-step approach to becoming AI-ready

Modernization, which provides for greater scale, efficiency, and flexibility, also positions an organization to explore the benefits of AI. Governments recognize the potential of AI to generate new cost efficiencies and to power new offerings in service delivery. In the near term, this is motivating many to accelerate their digital transformation journeys. 

Implementing a cloud migration strategy is an absolute prerequisite to adopting and innovating with AI in a government organization. The cloud provides the hyperscale performance required for generative AI functionality, and a modern data strategy not only consolidates disparate data systems but also ensures access control and data security.  

Cloud migration is a long-term process, and the journey is unique to every organization. Whatever the course, governments should remain mindful of the following three steps, which are key to becoming AI-ready in ways that are efficient, effective, and responsible. 

Step 1: Co-locate data and workloads in the cloud

Strategically placing applications, databases, and AI resources into the Microsoft Cloud ecosystem delivers exponential improvements in performance and prepares data and services to take advantage of new AI innovations.  

Step 2: Infuse Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and copilot integrations

Once your data and applications are co-located, you are ready to take advantage of AI services such as Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365, which integrates generative AI into everyday productivity applications, and Azure OpenAI, which enables the development of customized copilots, plugins, integrated AI services, and much more.  

Step 3: Ensure secure and responsible AI

From the outset, AI innovation should be delivered with the highest standards for security, assurance, and trust. Beyond taking a leadership role in ensuring safe, secure, and trustworthy AI at a global level, Microsoft provides comprehensive guidance for governments to ensure secure and responsible AI in their efforts, such as the Microsoft Responsible AI Standard, and Microsoft responsible AI practices.   

Continue your modernization journey and become AI ready 

No matter where your government organization stands in its digital transformation, Microsoft and our network of global partners are ready to help you move forward. For more, please explore the following resources: 

• To learn how Microsoft is helping governments solve society’s biggest challenges, see our Microsoft in Government website.  

• For guidance, expert assistance, and resources to help move to Azure, visit Azure Migrate and Modernize and Azure Innovate.  

• To develop a cost management strategy when migrating or operating in the cloud, see Cloud Migration Cost Management Resources.  

¹Microsoft commits $20 billion to advance cybersecurity following meeting with President Biden, Windows Central.

The post Migrate to innovate: How governments are modernizing in advance of AI appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

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In this blog, we show you how the ESG value chain solution in Microsoft Sustainability Manager enables you to gather data directly from your value chain partners, streamlining supplier engagement to gain a more comprehensive and accurate picture of those suppliers’ environmental impacts that contribute to your own company’s impacts. With better access, management, and integration of shared sustainability data, you can get ahead of Scope 3 data challenges and move faster toward your targets. We also share what we’re doing to drive improved data sharing globally, and we highlight recent updates to Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability. 

Spotlight on Scope 3 data collection and sharing

Gathering and processing value chain data can be especially resource-intensive and time-consuming for large and global organizations with thousands of value chain partners that do business with them, are otherwise invested in their organization, or whose data they need to collect. The ESG value chain solution simplifies this process by providing a centralized and secure platform to collect, validate, and aggregate data from these partners.

Enable precision Scope 3 emissions data collection

Improving the quality and reliability of your Scope 3 emissions data from indirect upstream and downstream activities requires precise, granular data from your value chain partners. With ESG value chain surveys, you can request either the qualitative and quantitative data you need or different datasets from different groups of partners. Surveys help you gain a deeper and more nuanced understanding of your Scope 3 emissions and pinpoint the areas where you can make the most impact.

Scope 3 emissions accounting also requires ongoing engagement and communication with your value chain partners. With ESG value chain solution tools, we have simplified the supplier data collection process. Organizations can invite, onboard, and collect data from partners, helping you increase confidence in Scope 3 accounting processes and data.    

Additionally, you can use suppliers’ ESG ratings provided by EcoVadis to see how critical players across your value chain are doing on multiple ESG fronts, for extra visibility into your value chain and supplier footprints. To enable EcoVadis ratings in Microsoft Sustainability Manager, you need to have an account with EcoVadis.

What’s next for the ESG value chain solution?

At Microsoft, we began using the ESG value chain solution to collect data from our own value chain partners in early 2023. Now we’re combining what we’ve learned with feedback from customers to plan for future improvements to the solution, with our next expansion planned for Fall 2024.  

How we’re driving broader improvements in sustainability data sharing

Among the biggest challenges in sharing sustainability data is the fragmented and often duplicative manual effort required to share data across value chain partners. To help streamline this process going forward, we’re enabling suppliers and their customers to automatically share and interpret the required data for their own calculations and reporting. This data ranges from the inputs required for carbon accounting, such as energy data, to more granular supply chain data that’s emerging from initiatives like WBCSD: PACT Product Carbon Footprint (PCF) and the European Union Digital Product Passport (DPP).

Microsoft is actively supporting and participating in this effort through initiatives like Carbon Call to better understand and share greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions data, and the WBCSD: PACT initiative, to help develop the global standard for calculating and exchanging Scope 3 emissions data across value chains. We believe these initiatives will help create a more transparent and consistent sustainability data ecosystem. 

We’re also working to create sample reference accelerators based on these initiatives, to help our customers and partners leverage Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability and expand the data-sharing ecosystem. To learn more, sign up for the WBCSD Pathfinder Accelerator private preview. 

MASSIV+: Working toward net-zero supply chains through cross-industry data sharing

Microsoft is also an active participant in the MASSIV+ consortium of industry leaders in Sweden, working to create a common platform for sharing and validating sustainability data across the consortium’s collective value chain. MASSIV+ aims to enable more accurate and transparent reporting of GHG emissions, starting with Scopes 1 and 2, to more accurately calculate Scope 3 emissions. The partnership aims to achieve net-zero supply chains by 2030 to 2050. 

MASSIV+ is defining a new framework around what data to share through its new Sustainability Data Exchange Protocol, layering an organization’s data from high-level company and location data to more granular product-level data through protocol messages. Eventually, MASSIV+ will look to expand capabilities supporting how the data is shared through data spaces that define data sharing policies and contracts.

What’s new in Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability continues to add ESG capabilities to help you accelerate your sustainability progress. Read on for details—and check out our updates page to see a comprehensive summary.  

Analytical reporting extensibility

Addressing your organization’s unique sustainability analytics requires a customized approach. With the analytical reporting extensibility in Microsoft Sustainability Manager, now in preview, you can create custom analytical dashboards using the built-in insight pages across emissions, water, and waste as your baseline. Customizing your Microsoft Power BI dashboards to highlight the content most important to your organization will enable faster analysis and decision-making. 

Users can select Copy on any emissions, water, or waste report page. This will create a copy of the built-in analytics report pages and will enable them to: 

• Edit and delete existing analytical page components. 
• Add new metrics or components. 
• Change chart types. 
• Personalize the page layout. 

Once the analytics pages have been tailored to your organizational requirements, simply save your changes and the new dashboard will be available by default to all users who have reporting privileges. Users can switch between the custom and standard dashboards through the custom dashboard (preview) toggle. 

CSRD reporting enhancements

Organizations can generate quantitative reports that extract emissions, water, and waste data from Microsoft Sustainability Manager to satisfy the requirements of the European Union Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). Understanding the key requirements and data to include in your CSRD preparation report is paramount to a successful disclosure. Once you understand the requirements, you can easily map metrics or data points to the requirements. 

This mapping provides you with enhanced efficiency and accuracy when disclosing through CSRD. Organizations no longer need to sift through all their sustainability data to determine what to include to meet the requirements. The quantitative data captured through Microsoft Sustainability Manager can be included in this updated assessment template. 

See the requirements and steps to generate a quantitative preparation report.

Audit of disclosure requirements in Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager

Region-specific regulations, such as CSRD, require organizations to perform an assurance audit on the disclosures prior to report submission. Organizations need a mechanism for sharing curated disclosure data along with associated evidence documents required for substantiating the data during the audit process. Assigned auditors need the ability to review the disclosed data and evidence documents against the disclosure requirement and provide their comments.  

Auditors can visualize this data against regulatory requirements by using Compliance Manager. With Compliance Manager, you can help ensure your organization’s adherence to CSRD requirements. Auditors can then review the data and the corresponding evidence documents in Compliance Manager against the disclosure requirements and input their approval status along with comments. 

Organizations with Sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabric (preview) will be able to compute and disclose the required ESG metrics for the sustainability regulations like CSRD. This ESG metrics data can then be visualized in the Compliance Manager against the CSRD assessments leveraging the Purview Sustainability data solutions connector. This way that auditor would have a seamless experience to monitor the status of completion and approvals, plan subsequent actions, and more effectively manage compliance with sustainability regulations. 

Learn how to enable audit of disclosure requirements in Compliance Manager.

Enhanced country or region mapping capabilities

Some organizations are structured in such a way that regional compliance standards apply to part, but not all, of their operations. These organizations may need to pivot calculations based on specific countries or regions. Microsoft Sustainability Manager now supports the ability to specify custom country or region entries. You can associate an activity or emissions record with a country or region and then design and run relevant calculations. 

Learn how to create and use custom country or region values in Microsoft Sustainability Manager.

Keep learning about Microsoft sustainability solutions

During the first week of May 2024, the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability product team hosted our first-ever Technical Summit. The goal was to help our customers and partners understand more complex capabilities and to provide tips and tricks for driving the most impact from Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability features. This included four days of expert-led how-to sessions—all recorded for on-demand reference in our Learn Documentation. Check out the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability Technical Summit. 

More resources: 

• Bookmark Microsoft Industry Blogs: Sustainability for the latest updates, including new capabilities in Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability.  
• Learn more about Microsoft Sustainability Manager. 
• Explore the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability Community, where you can find answers to questions and connect with peers and experts. 

Want to learn more about Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability? Sign up for news and updates. 

The post Optimize sustainability data management across your value chain appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Ahead of the fair, we also published a new report in collaboration with MIT Technology Review Insights uncovering the current state and ambitions around AI in the manufacturing industry. The report clearly indicates that manufacturers are excited about the potential of AI and plan to make significant investments over the next two to three years to deploy AI at scale to unlock innovation and enhance efficiency.

Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing

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Transforming the manufacturing value chain with AI

The Microsoft experience focused on how AI transforms the manufacturing value chain: starting with accelerating product development cycles, improving efficiency in the factory, making operations more sustainable, and finally empowering every employee across business functions with the latest AI tools. These four opportunities manifested as the four distinct neighborhoods in the booth, with demos and customer stories populating each one.

1. Unlock innovation in design and engineering

AI has the potential to unlock a tremendous amount of innovation in design and engineering by allowing manufacturers to simulate and generate new options faster. It can help accelerate development cycles for new products and services as shown by our customers Kuka & Schneider Electric, how manufacturers can accelerate the programming of industrial robots and programmable logic controllers (PLCs) with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, significantly speeding up development times. Siemens, along with customer Harting, showcased how generative AI can be used to speed up the design process of new industrial connectors and revolutionize mass-customization. Additionally, our partners Threedy, PTC, Hexagon, Capgemini, and Ansys showcased how applying technologies from digital twins to mixed reality to the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing accelerates product development cycles.

2. Enable intelligent factories

Making factories smarter is top of mind for manufacturers. In this area of the booth, we showed customers how they can improve quality, resource utilization and accelerate issue resolution in the factory with industrial IoT, data, and AI. Along with our partners Accenture, Avanade, Sight Machine, Rockwell, and AVEVA, we showcased the manufacturing data solutions in Fabric (preview) and the Copilot template for factory operations on Azure AI. These solutions help manufacturers unify their information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) data estates in an industry standard data model on Fabric. The Copilot template then uses this unified data to answer questions asked in natural language to help resolve issues on the factory floor. In addition, we showcased solutions from partners such as Tulip, TCS, SymphonyAI, SAP with Syntax, Cognite, Weavix, and Unmanned Life and from customers including Andritz, Chevron, Electrolux, and Ecopetrol that utilize Microsoft Azure IoT Operations, Azure private multi-access edge compute (MEC), Azure AI, Fabric, and more to enable intelligent factories.

3. Create resilient and sustainable operations

Manufacturing companies are looking to make their supply chain and service operations more resilient and sustainable. In this neighborhood we showed how they can achieve their goals using the power of cloud, AI, and mixed reality. In collaboration with Volvo Penta, we showed how using Microsoft Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service and Guides improves technician training, service manager workflows, and eventually, delivers better customer outcomes for their marine engines. With Caterpillar, we showcased how their Service Information System built on Azure provides detailed service information for CAT products from 1977 up to today. We also showcased Microsoft Sustainability Manager, which helps organizations to record, report, and reduce their environmental impacts through the power of data and AI. Our partners Blue Yonder, O9, and Tools Group demonstrated the power of cloud and AI to make supply chains more resilient.

4. Enhance employee productivity with AI

AI has the potential to unlock productivity and innovation for employees in all areas of the business. In this area of the booth, we showcased how Microsoft Copilot in products such as Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Security, Microsoft Power Platform, Fabric, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Windows, and Bing on Surface devices can empower employees across business functions in the manufacturing enterprise to achieve more. We showcased how Microsoft Copilot for Security and Microsoft Defender for IoT empower security teams to protect their OT environments, bringing collaboration to the forefront by reducing knowledge barriers for securing such environments. In the Fabric demo, we showed how manufacturing customers can use the suite of analytics workloads in Fabric, Copilot in Fabric, and direct integration with generative AI models to transform their factory operations.

The BMW Group showcase was the connecting thread between each of the booth neighborhoods. Built in collaboration with Hexagon, NVIDIA, PTC, and Rockwell Automation, business leaders and dignitaries could experience how technology enables cutting-edge transformation through AI-assisted design, connected data, and agile production for organizations like BMW Group. Featured in the exclusive Hannover Messe press tour highlight, which hosted more than 40 international journalists, this demo garnered significant attention for depicting how the integration of technology is changing manufacturing as we know it.

Thought leadership and continued innovation

A space for thought leadership, the Microsoft theater was very busy this year, bringing together C-level leaders, innovators, and business leaders eager to learn about how technology is changing the sector, what their peers are doing, and the importance of diversity within manufacturing. This space connected customers to the experts: creating a unique forum of innovation where solutions to complex industrial problems were revealed, and where ideas were brought to life.

Covering topics from the return on investment (ROI) of 5G factories, to delivering practical insights for how exactly to build your own copilots, the theater sessions delivered valuable insights on the most pressing questions the industry faces today. Here are a few highlights of the theater sessions:

• Celebrating women in manufacturing brought together influential voices of women in manufacturing to explore their career journeys, achievements, challenges, and best leadership practices to inspire the next generation of female talent.
• Industrial transformation with AI: A discussion with Kraft and Schneider Electric shared how cloud, IoT, and mixed reality technologies together with AI are reshaping entire value chains.
• Microsoft partners, including IBM, PwC, Fractal, DXC, Honeywell, and Rescale spoke about how their solutions built with Microsoft technologies can help transform all aspects of manufacturing from design and engineering to the factory floor.
• Microsoft Intelligent Manufacturing Award showcase, in partnership with Roland Berger, celebrated the winners of the fifth annual Microsoft Intelligent Manufacturing Awards (MIMA), a prestigious award recognizing innovation in digitalizing the manufacturing industry in Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). The award honors the most promising and innovative digital best practices from the industrial and operations sectors: production, purchasing, supply chain, engineering, and after sales. This year’s MIMA winners were Mercedes Benz, Northvolt, Malvern Paralytical, Wilo, Andritz, and Danfoss.

Learn more about solutions from Microsoft

Finally, we would like to thank our customers and partners who joined us at the booth as exhibitors, along with the thousands of attendees who visited the booth to engage with us and looking forward to Hannover Messe 2025. To learn more about the latest solutions for manufacturing, please visit Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing.

The post Microsoft experience at Hannover Messe 2024: Accelerating industrial transformation with AI appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

It is no wonder then that AI is so appealing to leading insurers. Its amazing ability to glean insights from data, create documents, and enable people to build powerful solutions using natural language promises to help insurers meet the unprecedented demands of the moment. This is central to our vision for intelligent insurance and our work with Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services.  

Most of the insurance companies we talk to are seriously exploring generative AI. For many, however, the scope of the opportunity is so wide-ranging that it can be difficult to identify productive early steps. Fortunately, there is an option available today that can deliver clear near-term productivity benefits and also help lay the groundwork for a successful long-term AI journey. 

How Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 can impact insurance 

Imagine two years ago if a vendor promised a solution that resulted in employees spending 64% less time on email or that resulted in 70% of employees self-reporting as more productive. What seemed unbelievable until very recently is the impact of Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 just months after its introduction last year.  

Copilot for Microsoft 365 is a unique offering that integrates generative AI features into the Microsoft 365 applications that many employees use on a regular basis. In effect, it is a real-time, intelligent assistant built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Microsoft Teams, and more, applying the power of large language models (LLMs) to an organization’s data to significantly reduce the time and energy required to perform an endless number of rote tasks.  

In November 2023, Microsoft surveyed 297 early adopters, across industries, to quantify the impact of Copilot for Microsoft 365. As detailed in the Work Trend Index Special Report, it delivered significant productivity gains among employees, with the promise of fostering broader organizational improvements over time. This is especially exciting for insurance companies, which have a wide range of roles that could benefit from this assistance. 

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How Copilot for Microsoft 365 empowers six key roles in insurance 

On the one hand, insurers operate in a world of exacting processes, strict compliance, and regulatory considerations. On the other hand, competitiveness demands greater efficiencies, faster speed to market, and improved customer service. Copilot for Microsoft 365 addresses both dimensions. Among its many benefits, it helps employees easily find and navigate business data, analyze trends, and rapidly create insightful reports and documents, without requiring the company to build customized solutions for specific use cases.  

In our work with insurers, we have identified multiple ways that Copilot can assist in key roles across the business.  

1. The agent and broker, who markets, advises, sells, and services insurance coverage for policyholders, can use Copilot to: 

• Help customers understand their insurance options, with customer-specific reports and summaries of products written in plain language. 
• Provide prompt customer service, with a fast and accurate summary of a Teams meeting with a customer, including recommendations and actions.  
• Be more responsive to customers by generating customized emails in response to specific queries and needs. 

2. The claims employee, who handles claims from first point of contact to resolution, can: 

• Accelerate settlement discussions by drafting summarizations of claims content and meeting recaps.  
• Enable contact center employees to be more efficient when assisting policyholders when they first report a loss. 
• Summarize and annotate company policy, processes, and guidelines to expedite processing of claims. 

3. The underwriter, who assesses risk factors in providing insurance to customers, and helps to establish policy pricing, can: 

• Research multiple sources of data and insights in evaluating risk and pricing options.  
• Get instant access to guidelines and regulations relative to an application. 
• Summarize complex documents used throughout the underwriting process. 

4. The financial advisor, who provides insurance policies and annuities to clients based on their financial situation, can: 

• Combine insights such as changes in the market and client life events to inform and personalize financial planning discussions.  
• Manage accounts more efficiently by summarizing emails, chats, and meeting notes, and drafting presentations specific to the client based on existing documents and data. 
• Improve customer follow-up with emails that recap conversations and include draft proposals based on discussions. 

5. The leader or manager, who manages multifunctional teams in complex organizations, can: 

• Quickly create new business plans and update objectives and key results (OKRs) or key performance indicators (KPIs) based on existing documents and organizational inputs. 
• Gain new insights on product sales and industry trends based on myriad sources. 
• Quickly build presentations with discussion notes for specific leadership events.  

6. The contact center representative, who listens to customer needs and provides solutions through inbound and outbound calls, can:  

• Recap customer meetings and conversations. 
• Proactively identify issues, and draft recommendations or resolution messages, to distribute to targeted recipients or channels. 
• Measure sentiment and conversational trends associated with conversations or posts. 

Key considerations for successful adoption of Copilot for Microsoft 365

As with any promising new technology, realizing the full value of Copilot for Microsoft 365 adoption requires careful planning and implementation across the organization.  

There is no single roadmap for success. The key is to clearly define how Copilot will support business strategy. Some insurers choose to invest in a significant upgrade of their technical infrastructure. For example, global property and causality insurer Canopius migrated from dual datacenters to Microsoft Azure, determining that it would help meet their goals across international markets and set the stage for AI solutions, including Copilot for Microsoft 365. Other companies choose a more incremental approach based on their current cloud investments.  

From a technology perspective, AI innovation in insurance can only happen on a modern cloud platform that delivers hyperscale computing power with the requisite security and regulatory compliance attributes. Concurrently, you need a clear data strategy to ensure that all data made accessible to AI is properly protected by permissions and access controls, so that only the right people in the right roles can access sensitive information. Data governance and accountability structures are also essential. 

Then, it is important to recognize that readiness is as much a cultural challenge as a technical one. Employee training and support are essential costs that should not be shortchanged.  

Getting started with Copilot for Microsoft 365

For insurers considering adopting Copilot for Microsoft 365, our advice is to start with your Microsoft solutions partner and Microsoft representative and discuss developing a plan. We often advise companies to start small, and begin experimenting on a role-specific basis, in cases of specific friction or bottlenecks that copilots can immediately address. This helps you identify important issues and sets you up to experiment with broader scenarios and role types.  

But as previously noted, every AI journey is unique. The important thing is simply to begin. For a framework and supporting resources to help foster successful adoption of Copilot, see our Copilot Success Kit. For more on the impact of Copilot on business productivity and creativity, see the Work Trend Index Special Report. For a roadmap to create business value with AI, see The AI Strategy Roadmap.  

The post How Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 is redefining insurance, one role at a time appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

During this wave, we’ve invested heavily in the development of copilot templates to enhance capabilities and integration across various industries. These customizable templates offer improved operational efficiency, enhanced customer engagement, and seamless integration with existing technology, all while supporting a diverse, global customer base. Copilots are valuable assets for Microsoft Industry Clouds customers, helping to drive customer and partner success. Microsoft’s partner ecosystem extends our offerings, with systems integrators and independent software vendors enabling factory data ingestion from different systems and building custom UI experiences for the copilot templates on Microsoft Azure AI.

Here’s a look at what’s been delivered since the release plans announcement in January 2024.

Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing

Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing is introducing new solutions in preview to optimize factory operations. These include manufacturing data solutions in Microsoft Fabric and a copilot template for factory operations on Azure AI. These solutions enable manufacturers to ingest and unify data from diverse sources, standardize and enrich data for seamless interoperability, and utilize custom copilots for querying data through conversational interfaces. Fabric allows users to maximize the value of factory data and uncover operational insights for production optimization by unifying information and operation technology data into an open and secure data platform. The copilot template for factory operations on Azure AI enhances responsiveness and streamlines communication across teams and roles.

Azure Data Manager for Agriculture

This release of Azure Data Manager for Agriculture includes new copilot templates that can empower organizations to build agriculture copilots with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service. These templates provide a powerful tool for organizations to use generative AI and data to optimize their operations and engage better with their customers. Customers are bringing generative AI to life for farmers. ITC, a multi-industry enterprise, has created, Krishi Mitra, an AI copilot, developed using Microsoft copilot templates. With this application, ITC seeks to empower farmers by providing them with timely and relevant information that can boost productivity, increase profitability, and enhance climate resilience.

Copilot templates can support use cases based on tillage, planting, crop protection, harvesting, and other types of farm operations. Users can submit queries such as “show me active fields” or “what is the average yield for my field?”. These use cases can help input providers to plan equipment, seeds, applications, and related services and engage better with the farmer.

Using data from Azure Data Manager for Agriculture and other sources, copilots can provide insights on topics like disease risks, yield forecasts, labor needs, crop protection, weather impacts, and harvest windows. Enabling seamless retrieval of data and allowing for plugins, embedded data structures, and subprocesses to be selected as part of the query flow allows organizations to extend their copilot use cases to many roles and scenarios along the agriculture value chain.

Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty

Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty is a solution that helps public sector organizations use the public cloud and advanced technologies while helping meet security, sovereignty, and regulatory requirements. The latest release of Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty introduces updates and new features to streamline the configuration and deployment of sovereign environments. Guardrails and codified architectures reduce complexity and make the process of building sovereign environments more predictable and repeatable. New preview tools include assessment, policy compiler, and drift detection analysis tools, as well as a new Azure service that allow users to create and deploy Sovereign Landing Zones (SLZs) within the Microsoft Azure Portal. Guidance includes sample reference architectures for using large language models (LLMs) and Azure OpenAI Service with SLZ, as well as guidance on workload migrations and Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Dataverse configurations.

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability

In February 2024, Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability announced new data solutions and generative AI advancements in Fabric, providing new levels of speed and efficiency in processing data to help drive faster progress toward sustainability goals. These new features include sustainability data solutions in Fabric and natural language queries with Microsoft Copilot in Microsoft Sustainability Manager, among other AI-powered features now available in preview.

In March 2024, new features were added to Sustainability Manager, including the ability to create calculation models with Copilot using natural language input, a dedicated energy data model to help track energy usage, activity to emissions traceability to link underlying source activity data to emissions records, and the ability to create a Microsoft Power Query template to streamline and accelerate data import.

Additional release updates to Cloud for Sustainability include enhancements to environmental, social and governance (ESG) insights with what-if analysis to help organizations build the relationship between forecasting and reduction goal planning. Users can link forecasts to existing goals to track actual progress alongside the projected ones. In addition, forecasts with the same historical data can be layered onto a single view, allowing for faster analysis of optimal reduction opportunities.

Another new feature is the ability to import and calculate with product carbon footprint data. This feature allows you to use product carbon footprint data to calculate and understand value chain emissions in Sustainability Manager more easily. Organizations can determine the greenhouse gas emissions that are associated with a product family and more easily import and manage this data within Sustainability Manager.

Azure Data Manager for Energy

Azure Data Manager for Energy is expanding geo availability, adding the Australia east region. This additional region is enabled for both the standard and developer tiers of Azure Data Manager for Energy. Users can now select “Australia east” as a preferred region when creating an Azure Data Manager for Energy resource using the Azure portal.

External data sources (EDS) (preview) allow data from external data sources aligned with the OSDU® Technical Standard to be shared with an Azure Data Manager for Energy resource. EDS is designed to pull specified data (metadata) from OSDU-compliant data sources through scheduled jobs while leaving associated dataset files (such as LAS and SEG-Y) stored at the external source for retrieval on demand.

Microsoft Cloud for Retail

Microsoft Cloud for Retail now includes new features in its retail data solutions architecture, an industry-specific workload for unifying, enriching, and modeling industry data on Fabric. Retailers can take advantage of the available list of connectors, application templates, and business intelligence capabilities, which can be easily configured. Retail data solutions offer application templates tailored for retail-specific scenarios, accelerating time to market. These templates serve as customizable and extendable starter kits, allowing retailers to adapt them to their unique requirements. Additionally, application templates and connectors from specialized partners are available. These capabilities enable the seamless use of data to produce unique insights that can’t be achieved in isolation.

One of the new features is the copilot capabilities in Fabric, which bring new ways to transform and analyze data, generate insights, and create visualizations and reports in Fabric and Microsoft Power BI. Another new feature is the Sitecore OrderCloud data connector, which can be used to bring commerce data from Sitecore OrderCloud (preview) into Fabric in real time. The connector performs transformation and orchestration on top of the data from Sitecore OrderCloud to map it to the retail industry data model, reducing engineering effort and accelerating time to insights.

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

The 2024 release wave 1 also brings new features and innovations to Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. One of the new features is the ability to improve clinical and operational insights by ensuring health data is accessible across provider, payor, and pharma; and facilitating clinical, operational, and performance analytics using healthcare data solutions in Fabric (preview).

Some other new features in the 2024 release wave 1 for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare include support for additional data storage needs, support for availability zones for Microsoft Azure Health Data Services, FHIRLink Power Platform connector, and the ability to use the digital imaging and communications in medicine (DICOM) service with Azure Data Lake integration.

Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit

Microsoft Tech for Social Impact is proud to announce the April 2024 release for Fundraising and Engagement. This release brings significant enhancements, mainly to nonprofit gift processors, including valuable enhancements to Fundraising and Engagement Azure services and new Stripe API (payment intents) integration. Customers who rely on Stripe for their payment processing can now benefit from the latest Stripe APIs, addressing the requests of current customers and the requirements of future customers. It is highly recommended that customers upgrade and use the new Stripe API when creating a payment processor associated to a configuration profile. For more details, read more here.   

Learn more about Microsoft Industry Clouds

• Official Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing documentation
• Azure Data Manager for Agriculture Preview
• Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Agriculture Preview
• Official Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty documentation
• Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability documentation
• Microsoft Azure Data Manager for Energy
• Official Microsoft Cloud for Retail documentation
• Official Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare documentation
• Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit documentation

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One of our newest AI-powered features, what-if analysis (preview), is designed to help you forecast the impact of business practice changes on your organization’s carbon emissions. Read about this and other exciting new features now available in preview within Sustainability Manager.

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Accelerate carbon reduction planning with what-if analysis

Now in preview, the new AI-powered what-if analysis feature in Sustainability Manager enables you to forecast the impact of business practice changes on your overall emissions footprint so you can implement more informed carbon reduction strategies. Using your historical data and corresponding calculation models, the what-if analysis tool intelligently forecasts forward for both your existing strategy and a new strategy that you’re considering.

For example, Susan is a sustainability manager working with her team to plan their organization’s sustainability initiatives for the following fiscal year. She uses what-if analysis to compare the impacts of several business practice changes her team is considering. Using the information provided, Susan and her team plan the top three initiatives predicted to enable the biggest advances toward the company’s carbon reduction goals.

What-if analysis will help you determine the most effective ways to reduce your organization’s carbon footprint and achieve your sustainability goals.

Using the what-if analysis tool, you can:

• Customize AI modeling using your organization’s carbon activity data and return forecasts in MTCO2e.
• Apply predefined scenarios that allow users to tailor analysis to your organization’s needs.

With customizable scenarios spanning across all three scopes of emissions, the what-if analysis tool is designed to accommodate the unique needs of every organization. Whether you’re considering transitioning to renewable energy for one of your facilities or comparing potential suppliers, what-if analysis can help you quickly and easily understand the potential impact of those changes on your carbon emissions.  

At our This is AI … for Sustainability event in February 2024, Södra, a forestry company based out of Sweden, spoke at length about the value of knowing what to invest in when it comes to an organization’s sustainability journey. They highlighted the immense value add of what-if analysis in Sustainability Manager, detailing how the customizable and data-driven results can help immensely when it comes to making the best possible investment for their organization.

What-if analysis can help your organization transition from simply ingesting, calculating, and reporting on your environmental data to driving impactful decisions and change. Learn more about what-if analysis.

Use Copilot in Microsoft Sustainability Manager to analyze complex ESG documents

Also now in preview, document analysis, powered by Microsoft Copilot in Sustainability Manager, enables organizations to seamlessly upload and query environmental, social, and governance (ESG) documents in natural language for the information they need. This new feature is designed to help you save time and effort in finding and extracting relevant information from your ESG documents.

After uploading your documents, select up to five that you’d like to query. Copilot will then quickly parse the contents of each document and return the information you need, along with any necessary citations leading to the source of that answer. 

Let’s use Lisa, a procurement officer at Contoso Coffee Company, as an example. Lisa is conducting a lateral comparison of sustainability reports from three suppliers. She asks Copilot for each company’s carbon reduction goals for the next five years, along with how they’re planning to increase transparency and collaboration with their customers. With this information, Lisa can effectively compare the data-driven goals and commitments made by these suppliers and make an informed decision when choosing a supplier that aligns most closely with her company’s own strategy. 

Document analysis can help at any stage of your sustainability journey, from learning about calculations through Greenhouse Gas Protocol’s Scope 3 Calculation Guidance to comparing supplier reports and understanding complex reporting requirements. Whether you’re at the record, report, or reduce stage in your journey, document analysis can help you find the information you need to create timelier and more data-driven decisions for your organization. Learn more about document analysis.

Identify patterns and visualize water and waste with key influencers

Detailed insights are paramount to effective decision-making and achieving sustainability goals. In November 2023 we announced key influencers, an analytics enhancement that helps organizations increase the level of intelligence delivered through Sustainability Manager related to carbon emissions. This enhancement now includes support for water and waste. 

Key influencers (preview) provides visibility into patterns driving increases or decreases in key water and waste scenarios. Specifically, the water scenarios supported are water withdrawn, water discharged, and water consumed. Waste scenarios include waste generated, waste disposed, and waste recovered. As the patterns are established, you can quickly identify the most significant contributing factors driving increases and decreases.

ADEME emission factors now available in Sustainability Manager

Emission factors are a fundamental tool for accurately calculating emissions and developing emissions control strategies. They exist for every emission source or category applied to activity data. By leveraging these factors, organizations can quantify the environmental impact of their operations.

ADEME (Agence de la transition écologique) plays a pivotal role in supporting France’s transition to a more sustainable future. ADEME emission factors aid in measuring and mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. Now available in Sustainability Manager, these factors provide essential data for estimating emissions associated with various activities, such as energy consumption, transportation, and industrial processes.

The benefits of ADEME emission factors integration to you include:

• Precise calculations for accurate emissions assessment. ADEME emission factors provide granular data specific to French contexts. Whether you’re assessing energy consumption, transportation, or other activities, these factors enhance the accuracy of your emission calculations. Imagine a manufacturing facility in Lyon. By using ADEME emission factors tailored to the region’s energy mix, the facility can precisely estimate its carbon footprint. This precision allows targeted reduction strategies.
• Localized insights and regional context. Organizations operating in France can now align their sustainability efforts with local standards. ADEME emission factors ensure that emission assessments reflect the unique environmental context of the region. For instance, a vineyard in Bordeaux can use ADEME emission factors to evaluate emissions related to vine cultivation, winemaking, and distribution. These localized insights empower informed decisions, such as optimizing transportation routes or adopting renewable energy sources.
• A holistic approach to sustainability. Incorporating ADEME emission factors contributes to a comprehensive understanding of your carbon footprint. It’s not just about direct emissions; it’s about the entire lifecycle. Consider a Parisian hotel. By factoring in emissions from guest transportation, food sourcing, and waste management, the hotel gains a holistic view. This informs choices like sourcing local produce or implementing energy-efficient lighting.

To load the ADEME emission factors, select the ADEME factor set in Solution Center and install them to your Sustainability Manager environment. Once integrated, these factors become part of your toolkit for informed decision-making, reporting, and continuous improvement.

See the Carbon Base® public database of emission factors.

Calculate waste-generated values to better understand usage and environmental impact

Organizations don’t always have the instrumentation in place to measure and track waste quantities at a facility, potentially impacting their waste sustainability progress. Sustainability Manager now includes a new capability to help you estimate your organization’s waste quantities through intensity-based factors, which play a crucial role in understanding usage and impact on the environment. The waste estimation (preview) feature allows you to estimate waste disposed and waste diverted values that together constitute the total waste generated.

With waste-generated calculations, you can define intensity factors to estimate the waste disposed or waste recovered. For example, estimating the waste disposed as a percentage of the total square foot area of the facility can help you calculate the total waste-generated values. You can customize and configure these intensity factors based on any parameter that is defined. You can also configure the time interval for which you want to define the estimated waste-quantity values and use these estimated values to accelerate your organization’s waste sustainability journey. Learn more about waste estimation.

Learn more about sustainability solutions with Microsoft

• Bookmark Microsoft Industry Blogs: Sustainability for the latest updates, including new capabilities we’re introducing across Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability. 
• Discover solutions with Microsoft Sustainability Manager.
• Explore the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability Community portal, a vibrant hub for learning, connecting, and contributing.

Want to learn more about Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability? Sign up for news and updates and try it for free.

The post Advance your carbon reduction strategy with intelligent forecasting and data analysis appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Manufacturing is one of the most data-intensive industries, as massive amounts of data are generated from sources such as sensors, machines, enterprise systems, and human interactions. However, most of this data remains siloed, unstructured, and underutilized, thereby limiting the potential for data-driven insights and innovation. To overcome this challenge, manufacturers need a unified data estate that can connect, enrich, and model data across information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) systems—enabling easy access and analysis of data for every employee.  

We are announcing the private preview of manufacturing data solutions in Microsoft Fabric and copilot template for factory operations on Azure AI, under the Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing. These solutions help manufacturers unify their OT and IT data estate and accelerate and scale data transformation for AI on Fabric, our end-to-end analytics software as a service (SaaS) based platform. The copilot template for factory operation on Azure AI helps manufacturers to create their own copilots for their frontline workers using their unified data. They can use natural language to work with the data and handle scenarios such as root-cause analysis, knowledge discovery, training, issue resolution, asset maintenance, and more.  

These solutions, alongside our partners supporting it, will be showcased live for the first time at Hannover Messe Industrial Conference 2024.  

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Manufacturing data solutions in Fabric 

Manufacturing data solutions in Fabric brings together OT data like factory sensor telemetry, and IT data like inventory data, into a unified data foundation in Fabric. The solution extends the value of the data by enriching it with the relevant context, following an industry standard International Society of Automation (ISA-95) information model. For example, the temperature reading of a production equipment at a specific time (OT data), is overlayed with all the information of the batch of material going through that machine, from the production order from your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, or test result from your quality system (IT data). 

The solution ingests data from different factory sources ranging from the Internet of Things (IoT) devices to systems of records like manufacturing execution systems (MES), and more. The data is stored in Fabric for unification, enrichment, modeling, and aggregation. This unified data foundation provides a scalable and repeatable pattern to tackle all factory domain data projects—accelerating the pace of innovation, freeing up IT resources, and maximizing the value of current technology investments. 

Copilot template for factory operations on Azure AI 

Once the data is enriched and ready for AI, manufacturers can leverage the factory operations copilot template plugin to Azure OpenAI Service, augmented for complex manufacturing systems like MES. The copilot template validates results against the manufacturing data solutions through post processing to avoid hallucinations and provides responsible AI guardrails to ensure only relevant and safe responses are given within the manufacturing setting. The users, such as a Quality Engineer or Plant Manager, can use a custom interface, like a chatbot or a dashboard, to communicate with the data in natural language to obtain insights and make improvement decisions. 

To learn more about technical aspects of these solutions, review our deep dive technical blog.

Realizing the value of factory data with AI 

These solutions are already supporting leading manufacturers globally to tackle complex use cases like production monitoring, waste management, quality management, and worker enablement. 

Intertape Polymer Group increases production performance with factory data and generative AI  

Intertape Polymer Group (IPG) uses Sight Machine’s Manufacturing Data Platform to continuously transform data generated by its factory equipment into a robust data foundation for analyzing and modeling its machines, production processes, and finished products. IPG is now using Sight Machine’s Factory Copilot, a generative AI with an intuitive natural language chat interface, powered by the copilot template for factory operations on Azure AI. This tool facilitates the team’s ability to rapidly gather insights and direct work on production lines which previously operated like black boxes. Instead of working through manual spreadsheets and inaccessible data, all teammates—including production, engineering, procurement, and finance—have better information to drive decisions on products and processes throughout the plant, improving yield and reducing inventory levels.

“Our partnership with Sight Machine and Microsoft is ever evolving and continues to become more important to our daily operations within the plant, facilitating real time decisions on real time data.”

—Bill Bourgeous, Plant Manager for the IPG Tremonton, Utah facility 

Schaeffler, democratizing information access across their factory workforce

Schaeffler, a leading motion technology company, has embarked on a mission to democratize information access across their factory workforce. Employees can gain easy access to key metrics like scrap rates, yields (the proportion of usable or acceptable components), and energy usage over time using the chatbot. This will be vital to help drive cost and carbon reduction co-benefits.

“Artificial Intelligence, and in particular Generative AI, is already having an impact on the daily business at Schaeffler. Especially in the field of manufacturing and operations, the ongoing operationalization of AI solutions, combined with intensive training, enables us to optimize, rethink, and innovate the core of our company—our plants. As a leading motion technology company, Schaeffler has the ambition not only to participate but to proactively shape this ongoing transformation.”

—Stefan Soutschek, Vice President Digitalization and Operations IT, Schaeffler

Bridgestone is creating a unified factory data foundation to enhance product quality

Bridgestone is partnering with Avanade to confront production challenges head-on, focusing on critical issues related to production disruptions and scheduling inefficiencies, like yield loss, which can escalate into quality issues. As a private preview customer collaborating with Avanade, Bridgestone aims to harness the power of manufacturing data solutions in Fabric and the copilot template on Azure AI. Their goal is to implement a natural language query system that enables frontline workers, with different levels of experience, with insights that lead to faster issue resolution. The team is excited to establish a centralized system that efficiently gathers and presents critical information from various sources and facilitates informed decision-making and enhances operational agility across Bridgestone’s production ecosystem. 

“We are excited to accelerate our industrial transformation with AI in partnership with Avanade and Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing, particularly we recognize the disruptive ​potential of generative AI, and true to our values, we want to be at the forefront of innovation equipping our front-line workers with powerful tools, like copilots, to optimize our operations.“

—Bart Kerhofs, Vice President of IT for Bridgestone, Europe, Middle East, and Africa

Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing partner ecosystem 

These solutions are enabled by an ecosystem of partners with deep industry expertise. Systems integrators and software vendors enable factory data ingestion from different systems by building custom or proprietary connectors into Fabric—embedding the solution capabilities into their applications or building custom UI experiences for the copilot templates on Azure AI. We want to thank our private preview partners for supporting these solutions and our customers.

• Accenture and Avanade: Private preview implementation partners for manufacturing data solutions in Fabric and copilot template on Azure AI.
• Sight Machine: Manufacturing Data Platform and Factory Copilot on Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing.
• Litmus Automation: Litmus connector.
• AVEVA: AVEVA Connect and AVEVA Data Hub on Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing.
• Rockwell: Integration of Rockwell’s Plex Smart Manufacturing Platform with FactoryTalk DataMosaix and Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing. 

To learn more about each of our partners, review the deep dive technical blog. 

Learn more at Hannover Messe 2024 

With manufacturing data solutions in Fabric and copilot template on Azure AI, manufacturers can better connect factory ecosystems, drive productivity, and enhance business operations using conversational assistants and accessible data analytics from the factory floor. To watch a live demonstration of these solutions, discover the additional capabilities of Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing and our partners, and to engage with subject matter experts, join us at the Hannover Messe Industrial Fair 2024, in Hannover, Germany from April 22 to 26, 2024 in Hall 17 Stand G06. 

Explore Hannover Messe announcements and Microsoft AI solutions

• Read Azure IoT’s industrial transformation strategy on display at Hannover Messe 2024.
• Read Microsoft unveils AI features for manufacturers at Hannover Messe 2024.
• Build intelligent apps at enterprise scale with the Azure AI portfolio.
• Reshape how everyone accesses, manages, and acts on data with a single, AI-powered platform.
• Work smarter, be more productive, boost creativity, and stay connected to the people and things in your life with Microsoft Copilot.

The post Accelerating industrial transformation with Microsoft AI solutions appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

To address these challenges and help manufacturers work towards digital maturity, we are announcing manufacturing data solutions in Microsoft Fabric, and copilot template for factory operations on Azure AI, available in private preview. These solutions enable manufacturers to:

• Ingest and unify data directly from diverse sources across the factory ecosystem. 
• Standardize and enrich data according to the International Society of Automation (ISA-95) model for seamless interoperability.  
• Utilize custom copilots for querying data through conversational interfaces. 

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Optimize production with manufacturing data solutions in Microsoft Fabric

Manufacturing data solutions in Fabric allows users to maximize the value of factory data and uncover operational insights for production optimization. This is accomplished by unifying information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) data into an open and secure data platform. Organizations can realize further benefits by getting manufacturing data ready for AI by enriching it with semantic context that follows an industry standard ISA-95 information model. 

Fabric enables customers to accelerate time to insight generation by unifying, enriching, and modeling manufacturing data in Fabric. The solution ingests data from a variety of sources such as factory-domain data from sensors, systems of record like manufacturing execution system (MES) and enterprise resource planning (ERP), and industrial automation applications. The data is then stored on Microsoft Fabric One Lake for unification, enrichment, modeling, and aggregation. This unified data provides a scalable and repeatable pattern to tackle all factory-domain data projects, accelerating the pace of innovation, freeing up IT resources, and maximizing the value of an organization’s technology investments. 

Customers can extract the full value of their factory data and existing manufacturing solutions landscape using manufacturing data solutions in Fabric. For example, a production supervisor conducting a root cause analysis to determine a correlation between material batches, machine utilization, and quality issues might spend weeks manually aggregating data from several systems and require IT support. With manufacturing data solutions in Fabric, the supervisor has quick access to contextualized data for analysis, completing it in hours instead of weeks. This saves valuable time and immediately provides insights that increase agility and innovation.  

Increase agility with copilot template for factory operations on Azure AI

Creating a unified data lake with manufacturing data solutions in Fabric is essential to optimize AI capabilities. Copilots can enhance responsiveness and streamline communication across teams and roles. We are building an industry-specific augmentation loop to help partners and customers use the Microsoft Copilot stack more quickly with out-of-the-box prompt templates, connectors, and skills all packaged as a standard plugin. Customers can then use natural language to get timely and accurate data from complex systems like MES, quality management system (QMS), and supply planning with minimal effort.  

With copilot template for factory operations on Azure AI, a production supervisor for example, can open a custom chatbot and quickly query the data in a conversational way and identify quality issues in minutes instead of hours. The copilot template is a managed application in the customer-tenant, offering organizations full visibility and control of their data. The template features the latest Microsoft technologies such as Azure AI models, Semantic Kernel, and Azure Cognitive Search, and is extended through the Microsoft third-party independent software vendor (ISV) ecosystem. 

Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing Partner ecosystem

Microsoft’s partner ecosystem with its deep industry expertise extends Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing offerings. Systems integrators and ISVs are enabling factory data ingestion from different systems by building custom or proprietary connectors into Fabric: embedding the solution capabilities into their applications or building custom UI experiences for the copilot templates on Azure AI. 

Accenture and Avanade—Manufacturing data solutions in Fabric and copilot template on Azure AI 

Empowering customers to unlock the full potential of their factory data, Accenture and Avanade collaborated on the development of the Avanade Manufacturing copilot, powered by manufacturing data solutions in Fabric, which facilitates innovation, operational efficiency, and data-driven decision-making. By leveraging data from various sources, such as MES, programmable logic controllers (PLCs), sensors, and ERP, the copilot enables seamless querying and generation of insights in natural language for factory workers.  

As leading global system integrators and trusted private preview implementation partners for Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing, Accenture and Avanade are spearheading the delivery of manufacturing data solutions and copilot templates. With expertise in integrating key Microsoft technologies, like Fabric and Azure OpenAI Service, and collaborating across the broader ISV ecosystem, Accenture and Avanade stand at the forefront of driving digital transformation in the manufacturing sector. 

“Avanade Manufacturing copilot, powered by manufacturing data solutions in Microsoft Fabric, can help AI systems understand data from diverse OT-IT systems that manage complex manufacturing supply chains, processes, equipment, and product ranges in near real-time. With our graph-of-graphs approach to knowledge management and the open ISA-95 standard, we’re able to supercharge the ask-an-expert capabilities of Microsoft Copilot. This is vital in an era of labor and skills shortages, rising production targets, and the need to cut costs and carbon emissions.”

—Brendan Mislin, General Manager, Avanade Industry X

To learn more about Accenture and Avanade Manufacturing copilot offerings, visit their AppSource page. 

Sight Machine Manufacturing Data Platform and Factory CoPilot on Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing

Sight Machine’s Manufacturing Data Platform (MDP) helps global manufacturers unlock the power of industrial data to increase profitability, productivity, and sustainability. Sight Machine makes it easy to integrate contextualized production data in Fabric. With its data and analytics tools, Sight Machine’s MDP enables companies to combine and analyze contextualized manufacturing data with financial, supply chain, ERP, and MES data. This allows for unprecedented levels of knowledge and enterprise-wide insight. Sight Machine’s Factory CoPilot leverages Microsoft factory operations copilot template on Azure AI to provide conversational querying of the data within the UI of the Factory CoPilot. This enables plant managers and quality engineers to interact with the data to uncover insights faster and accelerate issue resolution.  

“Until now, industrial companies have been unable to incorporate their manufacturing data as a full citizen of their data estates. With Sight Machine on Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing, companies can optimize production scheduling globally, determine which equipment is best at fulfilling an order, know which lines are at highest risk of going down, see the status of orders, and determine when to re-route them to another facility. It has never been possible to do this in a truly data-driven way.”

—Jon Sobel, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, Sight Machine 

Learn more about Sight Machine solutions on Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing, visit the Azure Marketplace.

Litmus Automation connector

In the dynamic landscape of industrial operations, Litmus stands at the forefront of data management, offering an advanced DataOps platform that seamlessly operates at the edge. With the ability to swiftly extract, normalize, and model data along with metadata, Litmus Edge empowers enterprises with edge data expertise. Paired with manufacturing data solution in Fabric, this collaboration pioneers a transformative approach, enabling the establishment of a robust hybrid edge-to-cloud infrastructure. From streamlining real-time machine dashboards to facilitating advanced machine learning, the synergy between Litmus and manufacturing data solutions in Fabric unlocks unprecedented efficiency and innovation, seamlessly bridging the gap between edge and cloud.

To learn more about Litmus solutions on Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing, visit the Azure Marketplace.

AVEVA Connect Industrial Intelligence Platform, integrated with Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing

AVEVA is collaborating with Microsoft on extending AVEVA’s Industrial AI Assistant to showcase how generative AI enhances supply chain production planning and plant floor production. It helps with scheduling, improving operational efficiency, and decision making in plants and across the supply chain. Using AVEVA’s Industrial Intelligence Platform, CONNECT, and Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing, AVEVA unifies and contextualizes production execution data and supply chain production planning data in Fabric. AVEVA’s Industrial AI Assistant provides a seamless conversational experience, through a copilot template on Azure AI, that empowers plant floor and supply chain employees with valuable insights to resolve issues and accelerate decision-making activities. 

CONNECT unifies an organization’s industrial ecosystem in a single, secure platform—helping users do more with industrial data, driving digital transformation in real time with powerful intelligence and robust insights. 

Users can easily access software as a service (SaaS) capability through CONNECT to create an industrial hybrid architecture that offers the robustness of on-premises industrial applications with the scale and accessibility of cloud. With CONNECT, companies can engineer smarter and operate better with an open and neutral industrial cloud platform. Organizations can promote sustainable growth by achieving transformation faster, reducing costs, and optimizing at scale. Lastly, manufacturers can connect their business to their ecosystem of partners and accelerate time to value using proven industrial expertise. 

Rockwell Automation’s Plex on Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing

Rockwell is collaborating with Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing to introduce natural language copilot experiences within Plex. These innovations aim to streamline quality issue resolution through corrective actions and root cause analysis.  

Corrective action teams often struggle with accessing the correct data and determining root cause. With today’s high workforce attrition, the ability to generate insights and share knowledge about a problem or process is also key. Leveraging Microsoft AI capabilities, Rockwell’s Plex Smart Manufacturing Platform will accelerate the resolution of customer complaints by swiftly identifying root causes and accessing critical data for corrective actions.  

Stay tuned as Rockwell and Microsoft drive innovation in quality management for manufacturing. 

“With the integration of Rockwell’s Plex Smart Manufacturing Platform with FactoryTalk DataMosaix and Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing, customers will benefit from transformative AI tools that help drive productivity, safety, and quality.”

—Anthony Murphy, Vice President, Product Management

Learn more at Hannover Messe 2024

Discover more about manufacturing data solutions in Fabric during a live demonstration at Hanover Messe in April 2024.  

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