Data-driven sustainability

Data-driven sustainability

How much impact does your business have on the environment? This question is more relevant than ever. Consumers increasingly demand sustainable products, and governments and the EU will soon require companies to measure and reduce their environmental impact.

Ideally, businesses contribute to a better environment, such as by reducing CO₂ emissions and energy consumption. But where do you start?

Sustainability starts with insight

The first step toward sustainability is understanding where you currently stand. With dashboards in tools like Tableau or Power BI, you can easily perform a baseline measurement and track the progress of your sustainability efforts. These dashboards not only provide insights but also guide you to take targeted actions and improve sustainability step by step.

Below, we explore how various types of dashboards help businesses analyze and reduce their environmental impact.

Emissions from employees and transport

Travel to work, clients, or events generates CO₂ emissions. Using data from, for instance, your fleet management system, you can quantify emissions by fuel type. Whether it’s business trips or truck transportation, all data can be directly linked to Tableau or Power BI. This gives you a clear picture of where you can make sustainable changes.

Understanding building energy consumption

Offices, factories, and warehouses consume electricity and gas. Monitoring energy use per building or department quickly reveals high-consumption areas. This helps you reduce waste, benefiting both the environment and your energy bill.

Renewable Electricity Consumption

A crucial step in pursuing sustainability is understanding and improving your company’s electricity consumption. To illustrate this, below we show a graph depicting a company’s total energy consumption over the years. The graph clearly shows the shift towards more renewable energy purchased and a decrease in non-renewable electricity. This is a concrete example of how data can provide insight into the greening of electricity consumption.

Paper consumption

Paper consumption might seem small, but it has a significant environmental impact. By analyzing your paper usage, you can take steps like digitizing processes or using recycled paper. Reducing paper use is not only eco-friendly but also cost-effective.

The University of Maryland uses the dashboard below to show trends in paper use over the past 15 years.

Planting trees

In addition to reducing paper usage, companies can consider tree-planting initiatives as part of their sustainability efforts. While it may take years for these trees to absorb a significant amount of CO₂, dashboards can illustrate the progress of such initiatives. A positive impact on the climate starts with sufficient insight. At Cadran Analytics, we help our customers get a grip on their data using Business Intelligence. We do this by building dashboards that are fully tailored to your needs.

And from the moment you have access to your own dashboards, you can see the positive impact of the measures you take. These could be small measures, such as replacing the lighting in the office with LEDs. Or larger measures, such as reducing a factory’s energy consumption by reusing heat from the production process.

Understanding Sustainability Data with Business Intelligence

Are you ready to discover the power of data-driven sustainability? Learn how you can use business intelligence to reduce your impact on the environment and make your business thrive. Make an appointment with one of our experts and discover how Business Intelligence can help your businesses become more sustainable

Finally, Tableau itself recorded a webinar on actions that can be taken. Watch the 30-minute recording here. Tableau’s parent company SalesForce itself has already achieved environmental neutrality in its chains.

The University of Maryland has even raised its sustainability development goals further. Check out their very impressive Tableau dashboards.