Power Platform | Achieve sustainability goals

In my first blog post in 2022, I´d like to focus on Sustainability. Every company follows individual, but also regulatory goals to achieve their mission on Sustainability. But many times, I got questions on what kind of impact a move to Power Platform could have. So, today I´d like to walk us through a couple of ideas around this.

First, let´s understand some regulatory requirements in terms of the reporting on Emissions. We got three scopes, two of them indirect and one of them direct. The third scope is devided into upstream- and downstream activities. If you want to know more about this or need more background, please follow this link.

As many companies are asked to build a reporting system around these three scopes, they struggle by some constraints. Typically, those are:

• Opaque supply chains (due to the diversity of legacy systems being used by partners and internally)
• Material and product waste (due to the complexity of „a product“)
• Lack of standards (in terms of collecting and conducting data)
• Reporting pressures and regulatory requirements (which are purpose to change)

When it therefore comes back to the question of „How does a movement or intro of Power Platform help in this context?“ – it´s not obvious to find the answers first hand. When Microsoft introduced the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainabilty last year, they first focused on four main areas, with simple to fulfill goals:

• Carbon
• Water
• Waste
• Ecosystem

and the goals of:

• Record
• Report
• Reduce

If you follow above link and walk through the capabilities of todays‘ Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability solution – as a Power Platform user – you might find some similarities or well known concepts.

In terms of connecting Emission data sources the connectors framework, regarding reporting and actionable insights the usage of a common data model and automation, and in terms of calculation a profile setup that defines rules and calculation models.

Power Platform users would easily think of being familiar with the connector framework as they use connectors in Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents, Power BI or Power Apps all day long. A common data model isn´t new to them either, as they make use of it by building on top of Dataverse, a well scalable and secure store to host data models. And if terms of rules and calculation models, you could easily think about calculated columns or rule engines, or even AI Builder assisted prediction.

When we step into the reporting area, we do find similarities with Power BI in terms of building dashboards to visualize and maintain data. To generate actionable insights, you´ll find AI Builder and Power Automate in combo and when it comes to score cards and goals, Power Platform users feel reminded of goal setup in a model-driven application.

Well, didn´t we expect this? When talking to Power Platform customers or those to become, I see them struggling with the fact of such a composite solution. They see a product first, not a platform approach. Microsoft is using a lot of their services in a combined fashion to lower the entry level to such a complex question of it´s own. They allow an easy entry by orchestrating and configuring instead of creating from scratch and adding new complexity.

Those Makers who dealed with Dataverse in the past and not only build a single application on top of it, will know how complex it could get, combining and dealing with data and build actionable insights on top of it or even automate processes.

Power Platform and it´s components therefore could be seen as adhesive technology to achieve your companies sustainability goals by answering the question of „Which digital functions and technologies are necessary to support sustainability solutions in companies ____ industry?„

And of course, it doesn´t stop here. Microsoft is adding the Azure, M365 and even 3rd Party Partner ecosystem to achieve more. As this might become a series of articles to highlight some typical challenges, I end this overview here. Until then,…