Dealing with ‘embedded carbon’ throughout the supply chain is a major challenge to many organisations seeking to manage their sustainability effectively, according to Integrated fm, developers of the Sustainability iQ solution for managing sustainability data.

“If you’re taking sustainability management seriously, it’s necessary to look not just at your own carbon emissions but also those from the manufacture of the products your organisation consumes,” notes Integrated fm’s Steve Dingley. “All products have some embedded carbon but by assessing the sustainability performance of suppliers it’s possible to minimise your own carbon footprint through judicious product selection.

“However, that also means you have to gather accurate data from a much wider range of sources and bring it all together with your own data to produce meaningful reports. This is a major challenge for many organisations and our work with many companies has shown that attempting to modify general Management Information Systems, or generic products such as spreadsheets, simply won’t deliver the required functionality,” he added.

Sustainability iQ is a highly configurable and fully scalable online solution that is able to collate environmental and other sustainability data from a wide range of sources throughout the supply chain, delivering massive savings in management time. As such, it is the world’s first truly auditable management system for CSR and sustainability, specifically designed to harvest, validate, audit and publish all the data needed to formulate and implement a sustainability/CSR policy

Built on over 20 years experience of managing operational data, Sustainability iQ is fully web-enabled and highly configurable to suit each organisation’s processes, as well as industry-wide standards (e.g. Defra, Accounting for Sustainability). It can import data from a wide range of sources, including FM software, supply chain partners’ systems and from spreadsheets – with the ability to input data direct into the system as well. All data is validated and made available for fast evaluation and reporting, with a full audit trail of origins and any changes.

Sustainability iQ enables reporting by service type (utilities, waste etc) and/or service line (heating, lighting, glass recycling, paper recycling, etc.) – collated by department, building, region or entire global portfolio – over any time period, while also taking account of seasonal variation. It can also be compared directly against corporate sustainability targets (e.g. electricity consumption, carbon emissions, travel mileage).

A digital dashboard facilitates reporting at all levels from macro overview down to granular detail, populating pre-prepared report templates for even greater time-savings. Reports can be generated in a range of formats, including PDF and Excel.