Using Alteryx for Sustainability Reporting on a Global Restaurant Chain
Customer's Challenge
A global restaurant chain must report its restaurants’ gas emissions based on the amount of electricity used in each location due to the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol. The company emits a scope 2 report each semester and reviews it annually. The process is all done on a spreadsheet with more than 25 sheets and values being brought in from many different files.
Scope 2 emissions are indirect emissions from the generation of energy that is purchased from a utility provider. In other words, they are all greenhouse gas emissions that are released into the atmosphere from the consumption of purchased electricity, steam, heat, and cooling.
phData's Solution
phData Analytics team brought an Alteryx solution that centralizes all of the results in a easy to read report, standardizing the results for several years and error-proofing the formulas that were manually typed into the spreadsheet.Â
The entire solution took 8 weeks to be done and allowed the company’s Sustainability team to start running the process monthly, as it took far less hours to be done.
Results
By developing the Alteryx solution, phData’s team was able to reduce a 40+ hour process to just 3 hours. Also, by standardizing the way the files are read and setting up a formatting template for all inputs, the team was able to reduce human errors when mapping data for different countries.
The Alteryx solution reads from several inputs and divides the analysis depending on the type of calculation and location of the restaurant. Calculations done involve location-based and market-based emissions for CO2 (Carbon dioxide), CO2e (Carbon dioxide equivalent), CH4 (Methane) and N2O (Nitrous oxide). The end of the workflow unites all the results again in a standardized way before writing the final formatted report, which is saved on a folder easily accessible to the Sustainability team.
The Full Story
Creating an emission report for a global restaurant chain can be quite burdensome due to differences in how each country regulates their emissions. Having to do this all manually adds an extra step of difficulty to the report.
For several years the company has been creating and reconciling all the results manually. This was a tiresome process and took more than a week to get it done, as files came from several different places and the spreadsheet used became so big with formulas that just opening it took a while.
phData’s goal was to build an automation to save time, limit human error and improve the performance when creating the Scope 2 Emissions Report.
Why phData?
phData’s wide range of expertise on self-service analytic platforms initially attracted the client. The case was strengthened when phData’s expert Alteryx Artisans offered to deliver a solution within the required parameters with the already purchased resources.
Brief Workflow Overview
Here’s an overview of how the Alteryx workflow looks like. The left side contains inputs, the middle has all the calculations and formulas, and the right side has the data union and file writing. The process reads data from 7 different locations and allows the user to specify the year of analysis through a user interface.
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