Credit: Arnott's
Microsoft partner Sentient Dynamics has wrapped up the deployment of an emission-reporting solution to meet local environmental obligations for food brand parent company The Arnott’s Group (TAG).
The solution, Below Baseline, was deployed on top of Microsoft Sustainability Manager – software that automates manual processes to record and report emissions. Sentient’s solution itself meanwhile provides Australian National Greenhouse Emissions Regulation (NGER) reporting functionality.
Additionally, Sentient also provided common data pipelines and connectors to platforms like Databricks, Snowflake and SAP, as well as Azure Forms Recognizer AI models that read common energy bill PDF formats and ingest the data into Microsoft Sustainability Manager.
Essentially, this means Arnott’s can use Microsoft Sustainability Manager with localised emission factors and claims it is the first organisation across Australia and New Zealand to use the base Microsoft solution.
Additionally, Arnott’s is also the first company to use Below Baseline, according to James Diekman, principal consultant at Sentient, as well as being the first time it has worked with the Microsoft partner.
Credit: Sentient Dynamics “Arnott’s were seeking an agile Microsoft partner with expertise in sustainability, carbon emissions and data and AI [artificial intelligence], which we have,” he said. “We’ve been working in this space for a few years now helping other organisations, such as Cotton Australia provide transparency to the cotton supply chain in Australia.”
As a result of the solutions, Arnott’s was able to see increased visibility of its emissions activities, allowing them to report the impact and progress of them in near-real time for the first time. In turn, Arnott’s can review and expand its sustainability strategies, as well as inform and update relevant stakeholders about its goals.
Development of Below Baseline started in August last year, while the deployment for Arnott’s began in January of this year and wrapped up in March.
Prior to using the Below Baseline and Sustainability Manager, Arnott was challenged with consolidating and analysing data across multiple sources, which in turn hindered its ability to manage and achieve emission reduction targets.
Now, with the emissions reporting and analysing solutions in place, Arnott’s was able to track their progress towards its carbon emissions from 100,000 down to 90,000 tons within the next year.
Last year in July, Sentient designed and built a business evidence and reporting tool for the NSW government agency Local Land Services.
