Enter Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability data and AI solutions. These include technologies like Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft Sustainability Manager, and Microsoft Copilot which together enable organizations to centralize and standardize complex ESG data for analytics and reporting and unlock critical data intelligence to help them move forward.  

We’re excited to share details about the latest capabilities in Cloud for Sustainability that build on this potential, providing the opportunity to implement transformative, industry-targeted solutions for both our customers and our partners. 

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability

Data and AI capabilities to help you transform for the future using environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data intelligence

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Three powerful new ways to advance sustainability with AI  

At this year’s Microsoft Ignite, we announced our latest AI innovations empowering organizations to improve their ESG data transparency, gain insights to advance toward their goals, and continue to grow sustainable business opportunities. These features were developed to meet the needs of key sustainability decision makers and practitioners, such as chief sustainability officers, chief financial officers, chief data officers, and chief information officers. 

1. General availability of sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabric, built into Fabric to leverage the single, AI-powered platform for centralizing enterprise data and analytics. Using these solutions, organizations can take care of their ESG data analytics in one place, driving progress faster by simplifying and accelerating analytics, collaboration, and decision making.  

Sustainability data solutions enable organizations to: 

• Centralize and transform disparate data into one sustainability data lake that conforms to a standardized ESG schema.
• Build custom insights for carbon, water, and waste by connecting to their data in Microsoft Sustainability Manager.
• Compute, visualize, and analyze ESG metrics for regulatory standards like Corporate Sustainability Disclosure Regulation (CSRD) by using prebuilt and custom metric definitions.
• Generate social and governance insights from disparate social and governance data in the ESG data lake.
• Report and analyze Microsoft Azure emissions data by collecting and processing the emissions data in the ESG data lake.

Now, there’s also next-generation AI and the power of large language models (LLM) to accelerate our customers’ work in Fabric at every layer. Users can simply describe the visuals and insights they’re looking for, and Copilot in Microsoft Power BI will do the rest.  

All in conversational language, users can: 

• Create and tailor reports in seconds.
• Generate and edit calculations.
• Create narrative summaries.
• Ask questions about their data.

With the ability to easily tailor the tone, scope, and style of narratives and add them seamlessly within reports, Power BI can also deliver data insights even more impactfully through easy-to-understand text summaries.  

Explore Sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabric and learn how to deploy the solutions.  

2. Coming soon: External reporting in Microsoft Sustainability Manager (formerly Project ESG Reporting). To address ESG reporting complexity, enhance efficiency, and provide greater transparency for ESG reporting, we’ve developed templates based on various ESG standards or frameworks. Using these, organizations can more easily create, complete, and approve comprehensive reports across both quantitative and qualitative metrics. 

The reporting templates map to: 

• Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) 
• Australian Sustainability Reporting Standards (ASRS) 
• Business Responsibility and Sustainability Reporting (BRSR 1 and 2)
• Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)
• International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS 1 and 2)
• Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) 

Organizations can also add standards manually or with a .CSV file.  

This feature is available in Microsoft Sustainability Manager Essentials and Premium and in Power Apps as simply Microsoft Sustainability Manager.  

3. Sustainability agents. New prebuilt and custom agents are designed to help organizations rapidly uncover insights on a Microsoft AI platform such as Microsoft Copilot Studio or Azure AI Foundry. Agents can integrate company data for real-time retrieval and be surfaced to users in a multitude of ways, from canvas apps to supported enterprise applications such as Microsoft Sustainability Manager. 

Using a Sustainability Insights agent, organizations can quickly configure an AI assistant to get insights and data about their company’s sustainability goals and progress. They can assess sustainability efforts year over year or in comparison to other organizations while quickly accessing general knowledge around sustainability. 

As compliance standards continue to evolve, it’s crucial to have the ability to quickly adapt and meet diverse needs, such as varying standards by geography or industry. With agent templates, organizations can use LLM with their data aligned with the Cloud for Sustainability schema to help meet sustainability standards like the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) fee.  

The CBAM agent (coming soon) helps organizations estimate their fee for “carbon leakage” around less stringent climate policies in non-European Union (EU) countries. This can occur when EU-based companies move carbon-intensive production abroad or when EU products are replaced by more carbon-intensive imports.  

The agent helps to ensure that their carbon pricing is factored into imported goods while supporting the EU’s climate objectives, maintaining competitiveness, and avoiding potential regulatory penalties. Using it, you can leverage Copilot to: 

• Align your carbon fee with CBAM.
• Put a price on carbon-intensive goods imported into the European Union to help ensure that the carbon prices of imports and domestic products align.
• Estimate your carbon fee to be paid on CBAM. 

These solutions are available in AppSource and the Power Catalog. 

Partners: Build a solution practice with Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability  

Are you a systems integrator or independent software developer? By partnering with Microsoft, you can take advantage of the Microsoft Cloud platform, which extends beyond Dynamics 365 and Power Platform to Microsoft 365 and Azure and includes industry clouds, enabling you to empower your customers and deliver industry solutions faster.  

Use our cloud platform and resources to: 

• Accelerate your innovation and reduce time to market by leveraging industry-specific capabilities, data models, connectors, and APIs on a foundation of security and compliance.
• Make investments in content, programs, incentives, and offers that will help you scale as you go.
• Co-sell industry solutions alongside Microsoft by using our commercial marketplace and increasing your visibility with software certifications.

To support your solution practice, we offer Cloud for Sustainability resources, such as sandbox offers, learning paths, online technical summits, architecture guidance, sales assets, Azure Marketplace and AppSource, and more.  

Are you already a partner? Join our Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability Insider Program to participate in preview conversations with program members from other organizations and the engineering team.   

Looking for a Cloud for Sustainability partner or solution? Visit AppSource. 

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.

The post Drive transformative business with new AI features in Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability appeared first on Microsoft Sustainability Blog.

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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 Sustainability Blog.

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 Sustainability Blog.

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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 Sustainability Blog.

Copilot in Microsoft Sustainability Manager

Streamline and expedite several processes with the sustainability lifecycle

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Save time and effort creating calculation models with Copilot in Microsoft Sustainability Manager

In the dynamic landscape of sustainability, accurate calculations are the bedrock of informed decision-making. Whether measuring carbon emissions, water usage, or waste reduction, sustainability practitioners rely on robust calculation models. However, creating these models can be complex and time-consuming. That’s where the new create calculation models with Copilot feature, now in preview, comes in. 

The driving force behind creating calculation models with Copilot is accessibility. We recognize that sustainability practitioners come from diverse backgrounds, and not all are experts in mathematical modeling. Our goal is to democratize the process by allowing you to express your calculation requirements in natural language. By bridging the gap between technical jargon and practical needs, we’re empowering you to focus on sustainability outcomes rather than wrestling with formulas. 

Here’s how it works:

1. Natural language input. To generate a calculation model, simply describe the calculation you need. For example, you can input “Determine emissions from mobile combustion based on distance.” 

2. Automated model generation. Behind the scenes, intelligent algorithms parse the input, identify relevant variables, and construct a calculation model.

Once generated, the calculation model is ready for immediate use. You can now integrate it into your sustainability reports, dashboards, and compliance assessments. 

By automating the model creation process, Microsoft Sustainability Manager reduces the time and effort required for you to build the calculations you need, freeing you up to allocate your time toward strategic initiatives rather than number-crunching. Create calculation models with Copilot provides a user-friendly experience. It isn’t just about formulas, it’s about empowering sustainability practitioners to drive positive change. By simplifying the complex, together we can move closer to a greener, more sustainable future.

Demonstrate compliance with the energy data model in Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability

Energy is often a priority area for organizations when kickstarting their sustainability journey, largely due to availability of data and the ability for organizations to quantify both financial and carbon-related benefits. Customers, investors, employees, and the public increasingly expect organizations to demonstrate their commitment to sustainability and responsible energy management. Providing accurate and transparent energy-related data can enhance your organization’s reputation and potentially generate support from stakeholders.  

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability provides a dedicated energy data model (preview) to help you track generated, purchased, and used energy for your portfolio, independent of the carbon tracking available within Sustainability Manager. This data model will enable you to unify, standardize, and streamline energy data collection and storage from utility bills, smart meters, utility solutions, and on-site energy generation systems, along with associated consumption patterns across multiple sites and geographic components, within the unified data model. You can utilize the energy lifecycle components to consolidate, standardize, and integrate energy to ensure data integrity, confidentiality, and compliance with regulatory requirements, thereby enhancing trust, transparency, and accountability in internal and external sustainability disclosures. By leveraging a centralized and structured energy model framework, you can demonstrate compliance with renewable energy targets and regulatory requirements. 

Improve carbon emissions reporting with activity to emissions traceability

In today’s sustainability-driven landscape, organizations turn to advanced solutions such as Sustainability Manager to monitor and mitigate their environmental footprint, with a primary focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants. However, ensuring the accuracy and credibility of emissions data poses a significant challenge, given the intricacies of global supply chains, diverse data collection methods, and the potential for errors or discrepancies. This underscores the critical need to meticulously trace underlying activity data within Sustainability Manager to bolster transparency, accountability, and precision in tracking and reporting emissions data.  

Activity to emissions traceability (preview) is a new feature in Sustainability Manager that enables you to trace and link underlying source activity data to emissions records, provided those calculations occur within the system. This capability addresses the pressing need for accurate, transparent, and reliable emissions reporting by providing a comprehensive traceability mechanism for all activity records tied to carbon emissions quantification. Not only does this feature empower you to gain deeper insights into your organization’s environmental impact, but it also streamlines the verification process for external auditors, regulators, and stakeholders. Activity to emissions traceability also enhances the credibility of sustainability reports and minimizes the risk of misrepresentation or greenwashing.  

Create a Microsoft Power Query template to streamline and accelerate data import

The new Power Query guided experience is a comprehensive ingestion approach available within Sustainability Manager. It allows you to import data for multiple entities through multiple sources, all through a single import. Power Query templates in Sustainability Manager are available to help you with Power Query data imports. The templates automatically provide the right structure for all data attributes required to successfully import your data.

When designing a Power Query template, you can save and reapply a pattern for different activity details or sources. Power Query templates also support transfer of usage between users. An advanced user can set up a Power Query template for other sustainability practitioners to use on known input data shapes, as well as reuse a repeatable pattern to accelerate setup consistently.  

Let’s say a user wants to create a template for mapping electricity, but the patterns need to be repeated from different sources. The source could be a parameter, or the “evidence” is different but everything else is the same. Previously, you would have to re-create the Power Query ingestion, mapping, and more. Using a Power Query template, you can create once and enter only the parameters that need to change for a new connection. The advanced user can create the template but can’t run it if they don’t know the connection details. The sustainability practitioner can use the template to create the connection.

Further, with a new feature coming soon that will allow our growing list of partners to develop ingestion connections, you can package Power Query templates as a standalone package that can be distributed publicly and applied by customers. 

New Sustainability Manager features coming soon

Starting April 2024, a new what-if analysis (preview) feature will allow you to forecast the impact of business practice changes on your overall emissions. Look for this and other changes coming to Sustainability Manager that will help you make informed decisions on how to reduce your organization’s carbon footprint and achieve your sustainability goals.  

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. 
• Want to learn more about Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability? Sign up for news and updates and try it for free.
• Discover solutions with Microsoft Sustainability Manager.
• Learn about new data solutions and generative AI advancements in Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability.
• Learn how to improve your circularity data with Microsoft Sustainability Manager.
• Learn about the new Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability Community portal, a vibrant hub for learning, connecting, and contributing.

The post Use natural language and generative AI to create calculation models, streamline data collection, and improve reporting appeared first on Microsoft Sustainability Blog.

Gather and analyze all your ESG data in one place with Microsoft Fabric

With sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabric (preview), you can analyze your organization’s environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data together with your other enterprise data to inform more holistic decisions and better-targeted outcomes. Gather, harmonize, and transform sustainability data into meaningful, actionable insights, and use advanced analytics and powerful AI to help you prepare data for analysis, regulatory reporting, and AI-driven innovation.  

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability

Empowering organizations to accelerate sustainability progress and business growth

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You can also use sustainability data solutions in Fabric to validate your data and track progress against publicly available data and industry benchmarks. All this comes with a shared governance model across various capabilities and a unified space for your data stewards and sustainability practitioners to interact through Microsoft Fabric.  

Four solution capabilities help you holistically meet your sustainability requirements:  

1. ESG data estate (preview) helps you centralize and standardize ESG data from your disparate data sources to compute, analyze, and disclose ESG metrics for various regulatory reporting and analytics requirements.  
2. Microsoft Azure emissions insights (preview) enable you to report and analyze your Microsoft Azure usage–related emissions data at subscription and resource levels. 
3. Environmental metrics and analytics (preview) help you generate custom reports, metrics, and analytics insights across carbon, water, and waste by connecting to your data in Microsoft Sustainability Manager.  
4. Social and governance metrics and reports (preview) provide insights, dashboards, and metrics to support your needs across various sustainability directives.   

Build your ESG data estate (preview) 

Sustainability disclosures, analytics, and reduction initiatives require rich ESG data sets that originate from disparate sources, and this data needs to be unified and standardized to improve its efficiency and value. sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabric (preview) provides pre-built data pipelines and lakehouses to combine social and governance data from different enterprise systems with environmental data from Microsoft Sustainability Manager and other systems. 

With your ESG data estate in place, you can process unified sustainability data to compute ESG metrics for sustainability disclosure requirements such as Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), Global Reporting Innitiative (GRI), and many others using provided prebuilt data processing artifacts. You can run this process on demand or on a schedule.

Built-in dashboards let you view data and insights from a variety of perspectives—such as by facility or operating unit—and use workflows to help prepare reports. You can mark the metrics required for CSRD and other disclosures and prepare the reports to share with auditors. 

Gain detailed Microsoft Azure emissions insights (preview) 

The typical IT efficiency journey for many organizations starts with migrating and then optimizing workloads in the cloud, which involves factoring potential emissions reduction strategies. Microsoft Fabric facilitates this process by enabling you to unify and analyze your Azure emissions data against your cloud usage.  

With all your Azure emissions data in Microsoft Fabric, you can query and drill down into Azure resource-level emissions for advanced reporting and analysis. Use pre-built data pipelines that ingest and store resource-level Azure emissions data in tabular data. And use Power BI dashboards to drill down and compare emissions data across subscriptions and resources, helping to identify patterns that evolve with time and usage.  

Note that all Azure customers can now easily access data and insights related to their cloud usage-based emissions by simply signing into the Azure portal and navigating to Azure carbon optimization (preview). This feature provides an overview of your subscription’s emissions data for the past 12 months and by service type—such as virtual machines or storage. 

On the Emissions Details page, you’ll see a monthly breakdown of the top Azure resources that contribute to your organization’s total emissions. By comparing this data to the previous month, you can see the percentage change and identify resources to turn off or utilize more efficiently. On the Emissions Reductions page, you’ll find recommendations to improve your organization’s cloud efficiency and sustainability. 

Enrich your understanding of environmental metrics and analytics (preview) 

To better understand your progress on reduction and other initiatives across carbon, water, and waste, you may need to define and compute custom metrics. Microsoft Fabric lets you connect to your relevant data in Microsoft Sustainability Manager and provides tables to query, compute custom metrics, and analyze the data further. You can enrich your sustainability data with the other corporate and business data for advanced machine learning–based analytics and leverage prebuilt Power BI dashboards for detailed insights and visualizations. 

Analyze your social and governance metrics and reports (preview) 

Increasingly, organizations are required to disclose their sustainability performance in social and governance areas—for example, for CSRD. To address this need, Microsoft Fabric enables you to unify and prepare disparate data from corporate systems handling human resources, health and safety, and corporate governance data in a single ESG data estate. From there, you can compute and report social and governance metrics required for disclosures and use Power BI dashboards to visualize and drill down into selected areas. 

Introducing Copilot in Microsoft Sustainability Manager: Quickly turn your sustainability data questions into insights 

When you’re working with disparate ESG data from across your operations and value chains, getting answers to critical questions quickly can be challenging, potentially slowing down progress toward sustainability goals. Copilot in Microsoft Sustainability Manager, now in preview, immediately delivers insights from your data based on natural language queries.  

Ask Copilot a question and it will work across Microsoft Sustainability Manager to quickly understand environmental data and provide an answer. For example, you can ask Copilot the right global warming potential (GWP) value for a given gas and assessment report (AR) version. With Copilot’s assistance, you can more confidently work through tasks like drafting reports on your organization’s emissions or CSRD environmental metrics for a quarterly update. Copilot helps you generate the draft reports, reducing your preparation time. 

Copilot can also help simplify and accelerate complex processes within Microsoft Sustainability Manager, such as creating a calculation model for your mobile combustion data. Within seconds, a calculation model is created using natural language, and within minutes these emissions are calculated, providing a more complete picture of reduction opportunities. 

Copilot in Microsoft Sustainability Manager is trained on Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability data schemas, making it an effective and knowledgeable tool for improving efficiency across various tasks.  

Magnify your visibility into your ESG data with AI-powered insights 

It’s important to trust the accuracy of your organization’s ESG data, which can be large and complex. The faster you can identify errors or missing data, the faster you can resolve or fill in the data. Intelligent insights in Microsoft Sustainability Manager, now available in preview, provides the visibility into your ESG data needed to help identify outliers, trends, and correlations.

See where data needs cleaning or where you need more complete data. This feature scans your organization’s data within Microsoft Sustainability Manager and identifies opportunities—both short-term and long-term—for reductions that align to your sustainability initiatives. Insights are based on historical trends, seasonality, and data anomalies. Looking deeper into the results, you can identify opportunities for reduction in your organization’s Scope 3 emissions.  

Learn more about how intelligent insights can help you make sense of an increasingly complex data landscape. 

Now generally available in Microsoft Sustainability Manager 

Track, manage, and report your water and waste sustainability data 

In addition to expanding AI capabilities, we’re continuing to evolve Microsoft Sustainability Manager to meet broader environmental sustainability objectives. Along with carbon emissions data capabilities, water and waste sustainability data capabilities are now generally available.  

Organizations can track and report their water accounting, water usage efficiency, and compliant water discharges across multiple facilities, safe water discharge regulations, and water usage disclosure standards. Microsoft Sustainability Manager helps you understand the sources and quantities of waste generation at your facilities and how the waste gets disposed of. This can further help you discover avenues to increase waste recycling for specific waste sources and reduce off-site waste disposal through landfills and incineration.

Simplify supplier data collection with ESG value chain solution  

We’re excited to announce the general availability of ESG value chain solution in Microsoft Sustainability Manager, enabling you to gather data more directly and securely from your suppliers. You can use the data to calculate suppliers’ emissions and gather partner-specific emission factors to calculate your Scope 3 emissions based on your consumption with those partners.

Experience the new capabilities in action with This is AI…for Sustainability  

Hear from Melanie Nakagawa, Chief Sustainability Officer, Shelly Blackburn, Global Vice President for Sustainability Go to Market, and Satish Thomas, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Industry Clouds during this free digital event. Get guidance on your sustainability journey and learn how to drive business transformation with Microsoft data and AI solutions. Watch the webcast on demand.

Learn more about sustainability solutions with Microsoft

• Want to learn more about Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability? Sign up for news and updates and try it for free.
• Discover solutions with Microsoft Sustainability Manager.

The post Drive sustainability transformation faster with new data and AI capabilities appeared first on Microsoft Sustainability Blog.

Since launching Well-Architected for Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability earlier this year, we have continued to grow and evolve our support for Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability. The latest updates reflect changes in the product roadmap and feedback from valued partners who have been an integral part of the Well Architected for Industry framework design. We have also added Well-Architected for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare and Well-Architected for Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services. 

Microsoft offers several technical resources. The Well-Architected for Industry framework focuses on broad implementation and architectural guidance reflected in the graphic below. Combining this with the product and feature documentation, customers and partners get unified direction for successful implementations. 

Designing and implementing Microsoft Industry Clouds solutions requires benchmarking against best practices. To address this need we have introduced industry relevant self-assessment tools for Well-Architected for Microsoft Sustainability Manager. These tools help implementers work through a scenario of questions and recommendations that result in a curated guidance report that is actionable and informative, based on the project phase (plan, design, development, deployment, and operations). These self-service evaluations can highlight crucial opportunities for improvement based on specific environments and offer recommendations to improve results and increase reliability and deployment performance.  

Well-Architected for Industry

Guiding principles that you can use to improve the quality of your industry cloud workloads

Explore resources

Well-Architected for Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability

“At KPMG we’re excited to embrace the most recent updates to Well-Architected for Industry, Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability content. This framework aligns with our approach of leveraging the latest technology from Microsoft and KPMG knowledge of climate and ESG data to enable successful Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability implementations. Our real-world experience and collaboration with Microsoft have enabled us to provide feedback on this content and is a significant opportunity for us to further assist our clients in their sustainability journeys.“

—Tegan Keele, KPMG Climate Data & Technology Leader.

The Well-Architected for Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability resources have been updated with a focus on data management and the Microsoft Sustainability Manager implementation journey, introducing best practices and performance-efficient Sustainability Manager workloads. The latest updates have been codesigned with select systems integrator (SI) partners such PwC, Fellowmind, and KPMG by using their experience in implementing Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, offering guidance to optimize and refine systems cohesively, based on market-tested best practices.  

In addition, revisions to reference architectures for Sustainability Manager and Emissions impact dashboard provide visibility into the building blocks of the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability platform. We added guidance for data management, application lifecycle management, and environmental strategy to further help customers and partners. 

The newly released Sustainability Manager Implementation Assessment Tool helps examine workloads through the lens of configuration and extension scenarios and across the Well-Architected pillars. This assessment tool allows implementers to work through one primary assessment across the planning, design, and go-live of the Sustainability Manager implementation journey.  

• Plan and benchmark minimum viable product or the first iteration of Sustainability Manager implementation 
• Benchmark core Sustainability Manager design considerations 
• Benchmark against a checklist of deployment best practices 

Well-Architected for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare

Well-Architected for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare is now generally available and helps implementers create efficient solutions for care management, patient outreach, and patient service center. Setting up the data estate is a critical design component for healthcare. To accomplish this, we’ve provided an extensive reference architecture that helps design the right solution while deftly navigating data management. This resource provides operational and analytics reference materials along with implementation recommendations. 

The following image shows an end-to-end lifecycle of health data. In our reference architecture, we provide a comprehensive and structured approach adopted by organizations to manage their entire health data ecosystem effectively. 

We are excited to include best practices and checklists for design and deployment of the first party solutions. To take this a step further, we also share entity relationship diagrams (ERD) to illuminate the data models for certain solutions. 

Well-Architected for Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services

“As the launch partner and early adopter of Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services, we recognize that the Well-Architected Framework provides key implementation guidance and reference architectures. These are crucial for designing, deploying, and managing effective solutions in the financial services industry, and they facilitate our development of innovative products built on Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services.”

—Gokhan Cakiroglu, Chief Technology Officer, VeriPark.

Well-Architected for Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services recently launched, giving support to architecture deployments of specific Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services solution components: unified customer profile for retail banking and wealth management, onboarding essentials (preview), and document intelligence (preview). We understand the critical importance of designing the data estate correctly, especially for enabling unified customer profile. This release has operational and analytics reference architectures and step-by-step implementation journeys. 

The framework incorporates best practices and considerations for design, deployment, and monitoring of first-party solutions. We also share ERDs of our data model and have an open-source plan for unified customer profile. Using open source provides flexibility and makes it easier for customers and partners to extend customizations. Deployment guidance for this is also available. 

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services Assessment Tool (preview) enables implementers to pick the assessment areas (for example, Well-Architected for Industry best practices and industry-specific applications) and the phase of the project (plan, design, development, deploy, and operations) to scope for assessment.  

One assessment, four use cases: 

• Assess workloads across well-architected pillars.
• Review and benchmark against a best practices checklist for design, deploy, and monitor.
• Evaluate extension scenarios. 
• Review data estate strategy and data conversion design.

Using the results, implementers can refine solutions and continue to improve performance and reporting.  

Get started with Microsoft resources

With these frameworks, it’s never been easier to advance Microsoft Industry Clouds solutions and take your organization to the next level. Find resources below and start your journey towards optimization. 

Well Architected for Industry: 

• Well Architected for Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability 
• Well Architected for Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services 
• Well Architected for Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare 

Assessment tools: 

• Microsoft Sustainability Manager | Well-Architected Assessment
• Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services Assessment Tool

The post Well-Architected for Industry: Optimize Microsoft Industry Clouds implementation appeared first on Microsoft Sustainability Blog.

Well-Architected for Industry

Guiding principles that you can use to improve the quality of your industry cloud workloads.

Read the overview

Guiding your Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability journey 

With increasing global regulations and a push to net-zero, organizations are seeking to accelerate their sustainability progress and business growth. Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability is a comprehensive and extensible solution that brings together a set of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) capabilities from Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and solutions from our global ecosystem of partners. We recently announced Microsoft Sustainability Manager, a Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability solution, is being expanded to give customers fuller visibility into their environmental impact across carbon, water, and waste. New capabilities will help customers create a comprehensive ESG data estate and prepare them to meet new reporting requirements.  

As part of the Well-Architected for Industry framework, we have curated context-relevant implementation guidance to support the entire solution development lifecycle starting from design and architecting to operational monitoring. The framework consists of five pillars of architectural excellence including reliability, cost optimization, operational excellence, performance efficiency, and security. Project Managers, Solution Architects, Developers, operational team members, and System Administrators can benefit by applying these pillars to their workloads. 

The Well-Architected for Industry framework is intended to provide substantial benefits to partners and customers. For instance, a partner hired to configure Microsoft Sustainability Manager can leverage the framework to design reliable and scalable architecture to build their customer’s carbon emission calculations and reporting workloads. By incorporating security practices, the partner can ensure robust data protection and compliance with industry standards. Additionally, the framework’s performance optimization guidance enables the partner to enhance the application’s responsiveness and user experience. The framework also assists in establishing effective governance and operational processes, ensuring visibility and control over the application’s infrastructure. Ultimately, the partner can deliver a successful solution to their customers, meeting their requirements while adhering to best practices and industry guidelines. 

“As a trusted implementation partner of Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, we see benefits for our clients using the Well-Architected for Industry approach. By leveraging these guidelines, KPMG can deliver more efficient and innovative implementations, enabling our clients to accelerate their path to enterprise environmental insights and improved sustainability reporting.”—Rob Fisher, Global ESG Advisory Leader, KPMG.

Reference architecture 

Reference architectures are a viable starting point during the initial solution modeling and design sessions and paint the holistic picture of the core components of Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability. As an example, a Solution Architect can leverage the reference architecture for Microsoft Sustainability Manager to identify the required data ingestion strategies and extensibility needed for emission calculations. Further, reference architecture can be leveraged to identify the project tasks, and bill of materials during the estimation phase of the implementation. For an IT admin, the reference architecture provides a detailed view into the components that need to be managed and maintained by the customer through their processes such as user permissions, and the components that are self-managed by the system such as the analytics data lake and dataverse components.  

We have launched reference architecture for Microsoft Sustainability Manager and the Emissions Impact Dashboard for Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365. These guidelines also provide guidance on security, user interface, analytics, and integration—including a clear sense of separation between extensible and managed components and capabilities.  

Design principles 

The Well-Architected for Industry framework provides a set of design principles for customers and partners to align their implementation with exacting standards of reliable and scalable solutions. Built on the five pillars of architectural excellence, the design principles provide guidance for building sustainable and scalable solutions.  

During implementation, a Project Manager, for example, can calibrate the effectiveness of the Microsoft Sustainability Manager configurations and customizations by mapping the solution design against the recommended design principles. A Solution Architect can prepare and validate the strength of their emissions calculation design by leveraging the design principles. The principles range from the effective use of role-based privileges to setting up an extract, transform, and load (ETL) strategy which can help partners and customers map their final design against the design principles.  

Design principles and the subsequent detailed sections on design areas can fundamentally shape the decisions made during the design process of the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability Workloads.  

Learn more about design principles for Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability.

Best practices and go-live checklists  

To further assist in the deployment of Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, the framework provides deep guidance with go-live checklists, and best practices for every stage of design, deployment, and monitoring.  

Users can use the assets to determine the approach to configuration, security, reliability, cost optimization, and how to optimize performance efficiency.  

During the deployment of Microsoft Sustainability Manager—the deploy checklist can be referenced to ensure the licensing and deployment activities are planned against the checklist. It is common for partners and customers to overlook details such as allocating enough storage space or creating an environmental strategy. The detailed checklist in the Well-Architected for Sustainability framework helps project teams not only make the solution ready for go-live but also validate the design and mitigates risks across design, deploy, and monitor phases, ensuring implementation success.  

Checklists and best practices provide further consistency and standardization of the design and implementation guidelines in addition to mitigating risks and adding efficiency. This is accomplished by encapsulating the best practices and lessons learned from customers and partners through their feedback.  

Learn more about Deployment checklists for Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability Manager.

Learn more 

Join our team at Microsoft Inspire on July 19, 2023, to learn how ESG reporting rules impact customers and create opportunities for partners like you.

Learn more about Well-Architected for Industry and Design principles for Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability.

Microsoft Inspire: CSRD and ESG session

Learn how ESG reporting rules impact customers and create opportunities for you.

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The post Announcing Well-Architected for Industry: Improve workloads and solution deployments appeared first on Microsoft Sustainability Blog.

It’s been a year of many advances for Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability. Now, with the expected onset of new environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting regulations, including those coming from the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), we’re announcing powerful new capabilities to help organizations collect and manage more ESG data. Microsoft Sustainability Manager, a Cloud for Sustainability solution, is being expanded to give customers fuller visibility into their environmental impact across carbon, water, and waste. And new capabilities will help customers create a comprehensive ESG data estate and prepare to meet new reporting requirements. 

Read on to learn about these latest updates. You can also join Microsoft Chief Sustainability Officer Melanie Nakagawa and other sustainability leaders exploring the latest tech innovations helping companies address regulations—June 15, 2023, at 10:00 AM Pacific Time and then on demand.

See how far Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability has come over the past year.

Faster time to insights with Project ESG Lake (preview)  

With increasing market and stakeholder pressure to adhere to new ESG reporting rules and best practices, as well as growing demand for generative AI-based experiences, organizations around the world are exploring ways to apply and analyze data in new ways. The ability to predict risk and measure and manage sustainability issues across the entire operation and value chain hinges on the ability to stitch together a complex set of disconnected data sources and services and conduct a deep analysis of sustainability, operational, and financial data.   

As a result, many organizations are rethinking their data management systems and embedding sustainability more intentionally into their core business models and operations. The journey starts with organizing the data estate—from gathering, aggregating, standardizing, and analyzing data to tracing data back to the source to support audit activities.   

Today we’re introducing Project ESG Lake to help organizations better manage and prepare their data for holistic analysis and ultimately advance their progress toward achieving sustainability goals.  

The solution offers an expansive ESG data model with more than 400 tables covering carbon, water, waste, social, governance, biodiversity, and general business areas. Using it, organizations can build a comprehensive data estate, centralizing and transforming data from across business units and supply chains into a standard schema that’s ready for advanced analytics and reporting. Greater visibility into activities across the business will help decision-makers improve ESG and business performance while boosting long-term competitiveness.  

Project ESG Lake empowers organizations to bring together ESG data from various source systems and standardize it to the ESG data model to build a centralized ESG data estate.  

With this solution, organizations can: 

• Bring calculated emissions data from Microsoft Sustainability Manager or other third-party solutions into their ESG data estate, leveraging data integration and transformation frameworks that are offered within Project ESG Lake.  

• Integrate their Microsoft-based emissions related to their usage of Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 into their ESG data estate. The data can be transformed and standardized to the analytical ESG data model using Project ESG Lake’s transformation framework to prepare for analytics and reporting initiatives. 

• Further enrich their data using external datasets that are offered through Project ESG Lake across various sustainability categories, including biodiversity, climate risk, energy, and ESG.

• Leverage standardized ESG data in Project ESG Lake in the new Microsoft Fabric, an end-to-end, unified analytics platform that enables developers to leverage the power of generative AI against their data and helps business users glean meaningful insights from their data. Fabric can be used to access, deploy, and compute the solutions and services offered by Project ESG Lake. 

• Connect aggregated and standardized ESG data in Project ESG Lake to a set of Power BI reporting templates aligned to ESG data models. These can help organizations accelerate the analysis and reporting of ESG categories and to visualize applicable metrics in Power BI. Power BI reports and visualizations can be customized to focus on specific metrics and targets for reporting initiatives. 

Enhanced ESG reporting capabilities to improve regulatory preparedness 

To get ready for regulations, customers need to understand their compliance posture, track required actions, and document evidence for upcoming regulatory initiatives. They also need to shore up data governance practices to prepare for audits and reporting. To address these needs, we’re rolling out targeted features and ultimately will provide a range of prebuilt ESG reporting templates aligned to major ESG regulatory reporting standards and workflows.  

CSRD template in Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager: Starting in July 2023, customers can learn what is required to be CSRD-ready according to preliminary European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS). ESRS regulations are expected to be finalized in the second half of 2023. The template will help organizations begin to collect the data they need for ESRS reporting and will evolve once new standards are adopted. 

Reporting and goal alignment: Also in July 2023, organizations can use new capabilities in Microsoft Sustainability Manager to help collect quantitative emissions, water, and waste data aligned to preliminary ESRS regulations and track progress against Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) designations.¹ 

Comprehensive emissions data management to capture the entire carbon footprint 

To ensure complete accounting of their emissions impact, organizations need to collect and manage data for all categories of emissions across their operations and supply chains. Our final round of Scope 3 emissions calculation models in Microsoft Sustainability Manager—in preview in June 2023—enables customers to store, calculate, and report all 15 Scope 3 categories. Microsoft Sustainability Manager has supported Scopes 1 and 2 since its general availability in June of 2022. 

Emissions related to the processing of sold products—Scope 3 Category 10 (preview): The processing of sold products can have a significant environmental impact, particularly in industries where processing often involves energy-intensive activities like heating, cooling, and refrigeration. With Scope 3 Category 10 coverage, organizations can calculate emissions associated with this processing and identify areas where they can reduce their environmental impact and work toward more sustainable practices. These can include lowering indirect emissions generated from the processing of intermediate products sold by the reporting company but processed by third-party manufacturers before use by the end consumer. 

Emissions from the use of sold products—Scope 3 Category 11 (preview): With the calculation of Scope 3 Category 11 direct and indirect emissions associated with the use of sold products, organizations can identify potential climate-related risks as well as the competitive advantages of developing low-carbon products and working with suppliers to reduce emissions. 

Emissions from franchise operations—Scope 3 Category 14 (preview): Calculation of Scope 3 Category 14 emissions—including indirect emissions created by franchise operations—enables businesses to identify opportunities to improve their supply chain sustainability and reduce costs across all locations. Managing franchise emissions can help improve brand reputation, customer loyalty, and regulatory compliance while attracting and retaining franchises.  

Emissions associated with investments—Scope 3 Category 15 (preview): Financial institutions mainly report emissions in Scope 3 Category 15, which refers to emissions resulting from their investments. This is an essential activity that can be quite complex as it involves gathering data from external sources and using advanced allocation methods. To facilitate this process, Microsoft Sustainability Manager provides a reliable methodology that can be directly adopted or customized to meet the specific needs of financial institutions.   

Other emissions from fuel and energy—Scope 3 Category 3 (preview): Most organizations will soon need to account for fuel and energy-related emissions in their value chain—for example, coming from supplier-related activities as well as transportation and distribution losses of purchased energy. With Scope 3 Category 3 coverage, customers gain the same simple access to accounting procedures used for Scope 1 and Scope 2 fuel and energy categories but with additional considerations for value chains. Also, emissions from this category will be aligned to the appropriate scope for reporting purposes. This includes energy losses from transportation, distribution of purchased energy in Scope 2, and any other utility or fuel information not covered by Scopes 1 and 2. 

Flexible greenhouse gas global warming potentials assessment (preview) 

To generate more accurate calculations and help improve overall reporting and compliance, organizations can select a default greenhouse gas (GHG) global warming potentials (GWP) assessment report (inclusive of Assessment Reports 4, 5, and 6) set to use across all their calculations and still customize to a different set as needed within a calculation profile.

Waste data capabilities provide a unified view of waste sustainability data 

Waste data ingestion in Microsoft Sustainability Manager (preview): Organizations have lots of waste quantity and quality data from different sources, and they need to be able to efficiently enter that data and prepare it for waste sustainability use cases. They can now link new and previously entered waste data to relevant waste categorization and disposal reference data that has been entered into Microsoft Sustainability Manager. They can also account for undigitized data sources, such as utility invoices and email or paper-based lab test reports, using waste data entry forms.  

Waste quantity data visualization with Microsoft Sustainability Manager dashboards (preview): Organizations need detailed, current waste quantity data to drive accurate insights and reporting. They can now visualize up-to-date historical waste quantity data and filter, roll up, and drill down on the data at facility or organization levels, by time, waste type, and material granularity.

Waste sustainability disclosure using standard reports (preview): Organizations that need to drive corporate waste sustainability goals and meet external waste reporting requirements can now generate custom and regulatory waste sustainability reports in Microsoft Sustainability Manager to disclose periodic waste quantity data.

New water data capabilities helping customers accelerate water sustainability

Water revenue intensity calculation (preview): Organizations need to understand the efficiency of water usage based on overall revenue and meet external reporting requirements. Using Microsoft Sustainability Manager, they can calculate and report the total water consumed (in cubic meters) per net revenue across the organization. 

Water storage tracking (preview): Where significant quantities of inflow or outflow water are stored, organizations can report on total water stored and changes in stored water volumes to achieve compliance with external reporting requirements. In the event of negative values of water consumption, they can understand whether facilities and organizations are truly replenishing water in the ecosystem.  

Water sustainability goal-tracking (preview): Many organizations have complex water usage scenarios challenging their ability to make progress on water sustainability goals. Microsoft Sustainability Manager helps them overcome this complexity by creating and tracking water sustainability goals from individual facilities to their entire organization.  

Data lake export for Microsoft 365 and Azure emissions (preview): Through the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability API (preview) portal, customers can now export current and historic Azure and Microsoft 365 emissions directly to their Azure Data Lake Storage. They can aggregate emissions related to their Azure and Microsoft 365 usage directly in their Azure tenant to streamline analytics and reporting. This new capability also offers flexibility to connect data to other Microsoft and third-party data management and business intelligence tools.  

Accelerate your sustainability progress with additional resources 

Get news and updates. With regulations growing, we’re quickly innovating around ESG tracking and reporting. Sign up to receive email updates. 

Deepen collaboration with the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability community portal—coming soon. Connect and grow your knowledge as part of a vibrant customer and partner community. The new Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability portal will let you share and find answers to questions, discover valuable resources, submit product feedback—including feature requests and track updates—and join user groups and forums to talk about your areas of interest. 

Dive deeper with new Let’s Talk Sustainability Tech Talks—coming in July 2023. Want to know more about Microsoft industry solutions? Join expert-driven, action-oriented monthly discussions to meet the people behind the technology and get high-level concepts with live product demos. Each show will end with a knowledge review, a handful of takeaways, and recommended actions. Tech Talks will be based on real customer questions, helping you speed up your time to value while helping us refine the technology so you have a better experience. Stay tuned for details. 

Explore partner sustainability solutions for your industry. Find experts and solutions that can help you address your unique ESG data management needs, available today on Microsoft AppSource.   

Accelerate your sustainability journey

Drive operational and cost efficiencies to help meet your sustainability goals with Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability.

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¹ SBTi is a collaboration between the Carbon Disclosure Project, the United Nations Global Compact, World Resources Institute, and the World Wide Fund for Nature, providing guidelines and standards to help companies set emission reduction targets in line with climate science and Paris Agreement goals. Learn more. 

The post Introducing new ESG data and reporting capabilities in Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability appeared first on Microsoft Sustainability Blog.