Building a new internal climate emissions dashboard for greater transparency
Building a new internal climate emissions dashboard for greater transparency
Bain has been certified carbon neutral since 2012, but a few years ago, it took even more aggressive action to cut its footprint further. At the time, employees couldn’t see the impact their travel had on emissions. The sustainability team led a project to construct an emissions dashboard that showed employees in all offices their real-time influence to help them make environmentally friendlier decisions.
These teams used data to highlight high-carbon travel
Bain’s sustainability, internal data and analytics, and travel teams worked together to make air travel emissions data visible and actionable on one dashboard.
These teams used data to highlight high-carbon travel
Bain’s sustainability, internal data and analytics, and travel teams worked together to make air travel emissions data visible and actionable on one dashboard.
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Bain Capability Network (BCN)
The BCN’s Global Sustainability team worked with TSG to resolve questions around data methodology and assure the quality of the data. They then helped translate the data into terms all employees would understand.
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Finance
The Global Sustainability team, which sits partially within finance, led the dashboard project. They supplied the strategy for cleaning the data, transforming it to conform with Bain’s greenhouse emissions guidelines, and displaying it in terms all employees could understand.
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Global & Local Operations
The Global Travel team contacted Bain’s various travel vendors who provided the data that powered the dashboard. They also advised on what types of travel might be easiest to curtail, and in what regions.
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Product, Practice, and Knowledge (PPK)
The Reporting & Analytics team in New Delhi now owns and maintains the emissions dashboard. They help add new emission types, glean insights, and make performance improvements.
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Technology Solutions Group (TSG)
The Data & Analytics team scoped the project, transformed and calculated the emissions data, and built the initial pilot dashboard. Today, they continue to add more data sources and carbon emissions to build a fuller picture of business travel (hotel, auto transportation, public transit, more) and maintain the process for ingesting and calculating data.
Background
In late 2021, Bain’s Chief Sustainability officer, Sam Israelit, noted that the company was spending a lot of time manually capturing carbon data. It was so cumbersome, the people responsible could only manage to produce one readout per year. That meant that any employee who engaged in greenhouse gas-emitting activities—notably, traveling, or asking their teams to travel—wouldn’t know their impact until far too late. And whenever partners or clients were curious about Bain’s emissions data, it took a long time to calculate, which limited the number of requests the sustainability team could serve.
Sam wondered if things could be more efficient. Could people be notified quarterly or monthly? Might that help everyone hold themselves accountable? At this time, Bain had just enacted a five-year, science-based target to reduce travel-related carbon emissions by 35% per full-time employee. Sam and the team decided they could use this improved reporting project to make progress toward that emissions target, and Casey Stelmach, Sustainability Practice Manager, took the lead.
The plan
Casey and the team first focused their attention on air travel. Before the pandemic, this had accounted for roughly 70% of the company’s emissions. It had of course dropped along with travel restrictions, but Bain has dozens of global offices and travel was expected to rebound as countries reopened and clients wanted Bain back onsite. The sustainability and travel teams brainstormed ways to reduce unnecessary travel—for example, encouraging more teleconferencing and reevaluating who needed to be present at meetings. It became clear that for employees to reconsider travel as the default, and for the entire company to hold itself accountable, everyone would need to see their detailed emissions information monthly.
The team agreed that the best option was to build a widely accessible internal dashboard. It’d need to guide employees who had no knowledge of greenhouse gas metrics to make the right decisions. And it would need to combine data from many travel providers, like airlines, car rental companies, and travel booking systems.
The sustainability and travel teams enlisted the Technology Solutions Group (TSG) to scope the project.
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Which travel vendors could provide data?
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How could the team get more complete and standardized data from vendors?
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How would Bain extract, transform, and load the data?
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What would the dashboard look like?
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What was the ideal dashboard user experience?
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How could the teams ensure the dashboard reached its full potential?
Approach – Integrating many data types into one dashboard
Part of the reason emissions readouts had been so cumbersome was the data was complex and varied. There were nearly a dozen sources, and each reported in different formats that needed to be interpreted, cleaned, and standardized. The Global Sustainability team worked with the Data & Analytics and BCN teams to gather these data sources and build an interface that could reflect all travel data around the globe. They standardized those data sets across sources to bring that data into Bain’s business intelligence platform.
In some areas, the project required translation. In Latin America, for example, vendors were unsure why Bain was making these requests. A Bain analyst in Mexico City clarified the project’s importance and encouraged them to participate.
The Data & Analytics team built mockups in PowerPoint and within five months, they had launched the first prototype Global Travel Tool dashboard with data from the largest travel vendor. They rigorously tested it with users to ensure it was intuitive, incorporated more data sources, and, by the end of that year, launched a second related dashboard to track carbon emissions. That second dashboard was itself a big accomplishment and allowed Bain to manage carbon budgets for internal travel covering all major functions, which drove a huge percentage in emissions savings.
The results
The global emissions dashboard has achieved even more than it was intended to. Rather than infrequent updates, it presents them monthly. Bain’s leadership now receives quarterly progress reports from it, and this past year, the sustainability team used it to calculate Bain’s overall carbon footprint. Most importantly, people booking travel can see their office’s data and make cleaner decisions, and provide that data to clients.
people have viewed their office’s emissions, and it’s available to 12,000+
projected reduction in air travel emissions compared to 2023 forecasts
