Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability: 4 week Proof of Concept

Sustainability is not just a catchphrase anymore. The SEC recently announced their intentions to have companies’ operations that are likely to have a material impact on the environment and their business publicly disclosed. The SEC is suggesting that companies report their greenhouse gas emissions over a period of time.

To help companies prepare for this reporting, RSM is offering a proof-of-concept engagement using Microsoft’s Sustainability Manager. This engagement will allow companies to track and report their Scope 1, and 2 emissions; Scope 3 emissions are also available to be tracked but not expected to be required for reporting in the short term.

This engagement is intended to utilize as much out-of-the-box functionality as possible to prove the features meet your company’s individual needs. The engagement will encompass the following:

• Review your company’s reporting goals
• Focus on your operations and business activities resulting in emissions that must be reported
• Confirm the following out-of-the-box functionalities are a match for your company:
  • Reports (excel based emissions reports)
  • Models
  • Calculation profiles
  • Power BI dashboards
• Leverage the US EPA emissions factor library as the basis to calculate your emissions
• Provide import templates to collect your pertinent facility and corporate structure data
• Calculate the revenue density per organizational unit
• Build one of each of the following connection types to pull data to your Cloud
  • Flat file (excel/csv)
  • PDF
  • API connection to a utility company (if available and capable of using Power Query functionality)

The engagement is slated to be 4 weeks in duration consisting of design meetings, system configuration and testing. After the 4th week, the system will be available for your review for a full 30 days. If you choose to continue the trial system can be converted to a production system or the configurations can be migrated to another instance.

At the end of the engagement your company will have:

• A working Microsoft SustainabilityManager that will be available for 30 days
  • The ability to export data and configurations from the trial instance
• Three connections that can be used as templates for subsequent connection builds
• Data created from these connections will be visible in the existing dashboards
• Ability to provide a GHG emissions report using the out-of-the-box excel report

The following items are not included in the engagement but can be added at an additional cost:

• Updates to the existing Power BI dashboards or creating new dashboards
• Updates to existing reports and creating new reports
• Additional connections
• Custom coding to enable the connection to a specific utility
• Any custom code, custom fields, workflows or automation other than what is expressly included in scope
• Scope 3 emissions tracking
• Import or manual creation of historical business activity

Proof of concept timeline:

• Week 0
  • Setting up a trial environment
  • Provide data templates for Organization Unit (OU), Facility and Region to prepare for initial conversations
  • Request sample utility data and invoices
• Week 1
  • Kick-off meeting
  • Product demonstration to project team
  • Provide import templates for revenue per OU
  • Discuss models and calculation profiles provided by Microsoft and confirm they are appropriate for your company
• Week 2
  • Confirm supporting data
  • Begin building Connections
• Week 3
  • Review and confirm connections
  • Initial run of models and calculation profiles
• Week 4
  • Set up auto-refresh of calculation profiles
  • Set up connection schedules
  • Review and configure up to three scorecard items to track other company specific ESG efforts
  • Proof of concept is live and available to run for 30 days.

*Pricing will vary based on project scope.

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