Achieving net zero targets will be a substantial challenge for most businesses, requiring meticulous planning, resource allocation and frequent progress monitoring. The journey involves overcoming obstacles such as coordinating across various functions and managing extensive data. Verco’s innovative software, MyVerco, offers a solution by unifying key datasets and providing actionable insights through powerful visualisations. This article delves into the complexities of managing net zero plans and how MyVerco can transform these challenges into a streamlined, data-driven process. Discover how this cutting-edge tool can help your organisation meet its climate goals efficiently and effectively.
Living with a net zero target
Many businesses have now adopted net zero targets, either for parts of their operations or covering their whole value chain. This immediately creates a need to plan GHG reduction activities in detail, forecast their impact, obtain the resources for deployment and then to measure progress and report frequently, usually to a variety of internal and external stakeholders. In turn this creates new requirements to coordinate across multiple business functions, and to collect and manage substantial amounts of data.
Specific challenges that can arise in the pursuit of achieving challenging net zero targets include:
- Linking together disparate datasets, that are managed by separate teams and for different purposes.
- Forecasting whether planned projects and initiatives will be sufficient to meet GHG reduction goals.
- Assessing the aggregate costs and benefits of competing GHG reduction strategies, and having the information available to construct business cases to obtain the necessary resources.
- Prioritising investments, allocating capital to those that will make the greatest GHG impact and financial return. Keeping these plans up to date, given the ever-changing landscape of energy prices, capital costs, changes to business plans and emission factors.
- Monitoring the current implementation status of projects and initiatives, and keeping such data up to date.
- Articulating the whole endeavour into a credible Transition Plan, which ticks the boxes of what such a plan should include e.g. details of capital investment required.
From target setting to implementation
These challenges are not easily overcome with the approaches that were normally used to set the targets in the first place – e.g. the sustainability team leading the process and the supporting analysis being conducted via spreadsheets that few engage with, other than those who built them.
In the period following target setting we have commonly seen multinationals struggle to consolidate plans from different regions. Site-level information also tends to go out of date quickly. For those working at the group level, as sustainability teams often are, there is a constant need to request and refresh site level data, which soaks up scarce resources.
In the most progressive companies, net zero ambitions are considered part of everyone's job, not just the sustainability leads. But individuals typically need data presented in particular ways to play their part. For example, a site manager may want to schedule a series of improvement measures to meet site KPIs and to track the real time energy performance of their site, whereas the finance director needs to see the rolling 5-year annual capital requirement of business divisions to align with the GHG reduction trajectory.
Managing net zero plans presents new challenges to traditional business practices. While all businesses are used to managing the implementation of capital plans, managing net zero plans is a different beast. It is likely to be an evolving strategy with aspects of the traditional capex plans, plus other non-capital measures and incorporating broader business forecasts. There are also more external influences, procurement actions, and future technologies to consider. Timescales may extend out decades rather than years.
Digital solutions for net zero
Verco has used its first-hand experience of observing these challenges to devise a new software solution, called MyVerco. The innovation is to enable a company's key net zero datasets to be joined together. MyVerco then provides a powerful set of visualisations and outputs to bridge the current gaps between data, insight and action. It provides companies the means to create a single ‘point of truth' for their net zero programme, thereby greatly facilitating the challenge of meeting climate targets.
The first release of MyVerco features three interlinked modules:
- MyProjects is to manage large portfolios of projects. It allows users to see all projects in one place and to drill down by various categories, track their status and milestones to keep delivery on track. It can be populated via bulk uploads e.g. from existing project lists or entered directly into the platform on a project-by-project basis. Projects are automatically suggested based on scenarios and anomalies selected in data. Those responsible for project implementation can keep their projects up to date, then others in the business can view the outputs at a granular or more summary level as desired.
- MyPathways is to forecast and track progress at the top level. Drawing on data from MyProjects and the organisation's GHG inventory, it shows the aggregate impact of projects over time in terms of costs and emissions. This is visualised alongside targets and other benchmarks of the users choosing, so that progress can be seen at a glance. Users can explore alternative implementation scenarios based on live project information and contextual information.
- MyPerformance is the successor to Verco's Carbon Desktop software, already used by hundreds of sites worldwide to monitor, target and report on the energy performance. MyPerformance features state of the art diagnostic tools and AI-based alerts for anomaly detection. It is built to ingest data automatically from the spectrum of sources – meters, sensors, IoT, email, FTP, along with the ability to input and edit data manually if need be.
This trilogy of modules provides a comprehensive set of software tools to manage net zero programmes. It is particularly suitable for those with complex decarbonisation challenges such as the management of multinational real estate portfolios, or manufacturers and retailers with highly distributed value chains.
