Breitling automates carbon emissions data management with the Salesforce Net Zero Cloud solution

The luxury watchmaker partners with Capgemini and Salesforce to implement a platform that automates data management and visualization in order to better understand its carbon emissions while reducing the workload and increasing the data accuracy associated with these processes

Client Challenges: Breitling wanted to pursue its net zero future vision, but had to contend with time-consuming data collection and management processes.

Solution: Working with Capgemini, the company implements the Salesforce Net Zero Cloud (NZC) to automate data processes, improve visibility, and reduce the time and errors associated with manual work

Benefits:

Faster and more accurate data management
Standardized data organization and reporting
Greater visibility into sources of emissions
A single data source to build added value analytics
Collaborative tool to share information inside Breitling organization and with wider ecosystem, including suppliers

Businesses across all industries are currently prioritizing efforts to achieve net zero emissions. However, such initiatives require more than good will and action. Any company that wants to achieve true carbon neutrality needs to have strategic resources in place that will simplify the logistic processes that support such an effort.

When Breitling, a producer of luxury watches founded in 1884, began its net zero journey, it relied heavily on manual processes for data entry, which had resulted in excessive complexity as the company drew information from multiple sources and had to undergo time-consuming and laborious carbon accounting. To address this and smooth the road to carbon neutrality, Breitling decided to introduce the Salesforce Net Zero Cloud (NZC), which offered a solution compliant with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol standard, in an effort to simplify data management processes.

After having conversations with Salesforce about the cloud platform, the watch maker concluded that it would be best served by bringing on an additional implementation partner. Such an organization needed technical expertise with Salesforce solutions to ensure that the solution supported the business’ long-term net zero vision. This brought Breitling to Capgemini and the partnership had its origin.

Rolling out the cloud platform

Working collaboratively, Breitling, Capgemini, and Salesforce began the implementation project. This started with the creation of a roadmap that defined the scope of available data as well as the actions needed to make the NZC a collaborative and centralized system.

Once Breitling and Capgemini agreed on a scope and implementation plan, they launched a series of three sprints that built towards the final launch of the solution. Each sprint followed a similar general format wherein the project team collected carbon emission data in units or spend, transformed and calculated appropriate emissions factors with tools already included in Salesforce NZC or received those factors directly from suppliers, and built a more effective reporting dashboard. The sprint covered all available data related to direct emissions, such as company vehicles, facilities, and purchased energy, as well indirect upstream and downstream emissions.

By the end of this process, Breitling had a thorough understanding of the emissions across the entirety of its business activities and possessed a new selection of tools that streamlined future data collecting, monitoring, and reporting processes. With the Salesforce NZC, the company standardized its methods of gathering and organizing critical data. In addition, the partners automated the mapping between existing data sources and the NZC, improving data accuracy and reducing the amount of time needed to enter data.

Building towards carbon neutrality

Moreover, the Salesforce NZC centralized Breitling’s emissions factors while simultaneously automating their calculation so that the company could view the results based on scope, location, or market. Finally, through its global vision reporting dashboard, the solution provided a substantially higher degree of visibility into the company’s emissions data. It enabled synthesis reporting for carbon accounting and enabled Breitling to monitor the entirety of the carbon data lifecycle.

Now that the watch maker has standardized and centralized its emissions data tracing with the Salesforce NZC, the company is prepared to take the next recommended steps on its path to true carbon neutrality. Breitling will continue to collect carbon data at scale throughout its entire value chain and fine-tune its measurement accuracy while also creating a carbon data management system to report on the business’ overall carbon footprint.

All of this will support the company’s engagement with stakeholders responsible for downstream emissions as part of a decarbonization program while Breitling continues to expand the capabilities of the NZC. This will involve the inclusion of new features, such as Science Based Targets to set and track the company’s progress towards Net Zero, supplier engagement with a link to Ecovadis (a rating program for suppliers), and Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) report generation.

Net zero is a lofty and important goal. With Salesforce NZC and its partnership with Capgemini, Breitling is now poised to make substantive progress towards full carbon neutrality as part of its vision for the future.