Microsoft uses Sustainability Manager, Power Platform, and Foundry to scale its sustainability processes with suppliers

Microsoft is serious about doing its part to protect the environment. As part of a broader strategy to address climate change and reduce environmental impact, the company has committed to becoming carbon negative by 2030 - removing more carbon from the environment than it emits. 

Microsoft is also delivering tools that can help its customers and suppliers achieve similar sustainability goals. One solution is its Microsoft Sustainability Manager. Built using Power Platform, Sustainability Manager provides a complete solution for environmental sustainability management.  

Sustainability Manager enables organizations to more efficiently record, report, and reduce their emissions and water or waste impact. The system empowers organizations to turn data insights into action, reducing environmental impact and strengthening social and governance compliance. The solution was designed to simplify the entire sustainability management process - unifying siloed data, running emissions calculations, social and governance aggregations, generating compliance reports, and delivering insights to guide reduction strategies.

A fully integrated, low-code system

A key advantage of Sustainability Manager is its ability to ingest data from virtually any source. Using Power Query connectors embedded in the user interface, customers can connect to a wide range of data repositories. Users also have the option to download structured Excel templates, populate them offline, and upload them directly into the system.

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data from a company’s external suppliers can be managed through Sustainability Manager using an integrated tool called ESG Value Chain – a secure portal built on Power Pages. Through the portal, sustainability teams can create emissions surveys, send structured data requests to suppliers, track submission status, and review and validate incoming data.

Behind the scenes, Power Automate flows standardize all incoming data and map it into Dataverse tables. Once data is ingested, Sustainability Manager applies built-in emissions calculation models to convert raw activity data into emissions metrics. Using data model schemas combined with Power Fx expressions, calculation models can transform something as simple as the miles employees have traveled or the fuel that they’ve consumed into its CO2 equivalent. 

Dashboards provide immediate access to critical sustainability data, while Power BI integration allows teams to tailor visualizations to their specific goals. This dual approach empowers organizations to make faster, more data driven decisions and reduces the need for custom analytics development.

All of these components and actions within Sustainability Manager can be managed in one application built in Power Apps. The app is also integrated with agents built on Copilot Studio, making it easier to find data, perform analysis, and generate calculations and report summaries.

A platform for innovative customization

Another benefit of Sustainability Manager is that it can be easily customized for a company’s specific sustainability requirements. “Sustainability Manager was built on the goodness of Power Platform, making it extensible for our customers to customize - and our partners to deliver their own native solutions,” says Sai Koduri, Senior Product Manager for Sustainability Manager at Microsoft. 

This is exactly what Microsoft did when using Sustainability Manager to support its own sustainability efforts.  

Supply chain emissions account for approximately 75 percent of Microsoft’s total carbon footprint. Collecting data from suppliers can be highly challenging, especially at scale. Previously, the Procurement Sustainability team expended significant manual effort, sometimes months, reviewing documents, validating calculations, and coordinating corrective actions. 

To address these scalability challenges, the team used Power Platform and Microsoft Foundry to add AI-driven automation to ESG Value Chain in Sustainability Manager. Now, documents submitted by suppliers are automatically analyzed by an AI model which extracts carbon emissions data to pre-populate a carbon survey. 

Azure Document Intelligence efficiently extracts text from various document formats submitted by suppliers. Azure AI Search functions as a sophisticated database, offering intelligent indexing and retrieval capabilities to enable large language models in Azure Open AI to extract relevant information from each document. Once processing is complete, the outputs are pushed to Dataverse. (Watch this technical deep dive.)

A “human in the loop” process enables suppliers and the Procurement team to check the AI-generated survey for accuracy. Any changes by users are stored in activity logs to easily identify areas for improvement of the model. From there, another model analyzes the data for completeness. Any errors or omissions are instantly flagged for the supplier in the portal, including auto-generated corrective actions. 

Previously, suppliers would wait several weeks for this type of feedback and analysis. Now, the process is nearly instantaneous. (See demo.) In addition, as suppliers update their emissions data, the system automatically reviews those updates and provides feedback in the portal in real time.

The combination of ESG Value Chain and AI-driven automation has delivered clear, measurable results with average review time per submission reduced from approximately 35 minutes to under two minutes—a 94% reduction. 

“With Microsoft Foundry, we’ve removed a lot of the manual review of supplier emissions data. Moreover, we’re better able to help our suppliers improve the completeness and accuracy of their data, enabling them to take corrective actions, faster,” says Liz Comley, Sustainability Director at Microsoft. 

Into the future  

Microsoft isn’t the only company that is leveraging the flexibility of Power Platform to customize Sustainability Manager. The Shaeffler Group, a leading German industrial and automotive technology company, has been using the low-code components of the system to more efficiently customized data input forms for its suppliers. PWC and ICONICS has used Sustainability Manager to build and extend their own sustainability solutions for their customers. 

As for Microsoft’s own customization of the solution, Koduri adds, “With Power Platform and Azure AI services, we’ve turned Sustainability Manager into a modern blueprint for how large organizations can use low-code platforms and generative AI not just to report on sustainability—but to operationalize it at scale,” says Koduri. 

That’s good for business and even better for the environment.