To successfully meet their sustainability goals and reporting requirements, organizations need the right tools and solutions to fit their needs. Microsoft Sustainability Manager continues to evolve, giving organizations increasing visibility into their environmental impacts and greater ability to turn that intelligence into targeted outcomes.
We’re excited to announce the availability of Microsoft Sustainability Manager Intelligent insights (preview), an AI-powered tool that empowers organizations to perform deeper analysis on their emissions data.
In this blog you’ll learn more about Intelligent insights, other recent enhancements to Microsoft Sustainability Manager, and get details about the new plans.
Intelligent insights
Find insights that matter the most
Perform deeper data analysis with new AI-powered insights
When tracking their carbon emissions, organizations often miss valuable insights hidden in their data. Now in preview in Microsoft Sustainability Manager Premium, Intelligent insights enables organizations to extract and analyze such information from their emissions data through outlier, trend, and correlation insights.
Intelligent insights is an AI-powered analytics tool that will be enabled during trial or after purchase of Microsoft Sustainability Manager Premium.
Whether you’re identifying missing data or highlighting relationships between facilities, Intelligent insights empowers you to extract key insights needed to make more data-driven business decisions.
In the Analytics area, Intelligent insights are divided into three categories:
Outliers can show you sudden spikes or drops in your emissions, help you identify missing data, and reveal cases in which an aspect of your business is contributing an anomalously significant portion of your emissions when compared to others.
For example, Sustainability practitioner Amy from Contoso, a fictitious company, uses outlier insights to identify facilities within her organization that are missing data. Using an expected range, Amy can manually input estimates for the missing months, helping to improve the quality of Contoso’s overall reporting.
Trends show the direction in which your data is trending, over time, either in an increasing or decreasing manner. Additionally, anomalous trends, grouped as subtypes of trend insights, can help you identify facilities or organizational units that are trending significantly faster than others in the same direction.
Continuing with our Contoso example, Amy uses trend insights to quickly identify facilities that are contributing a significant amount of the emissions for a particular region and connects with the facility managers to identify the causes and develop a mitigation plan.
Correlations highlight significant data relationships across contexts, helping you predict an outcome or identify a link between two or more conditions.
Finally, Amy uses correlation insights to track the progress of three United States facilities that recently transitioned to 100% renewable energy, monitoring their reduction over time to decide whether to expand this initiative to other facilities in the region.
All insights are generated monthly and can be scheduled by an admin within Microsoft Sustainability Manager.
Identify patterns and visualize emissions with key influencers and forecasting
Detailed insights for effective decision-making are paramount to achieving sustainability goals. Two new analytics enhancements help increase the level of intelligence delivered through Microsoft Sustainability Manager:
- Key influencers help organizations identify patterns showing increasing or decreasing emissions. As the patterns are established, you can quickly identify the most significant contributing factors driving emissions up or down.
Key influencers in Microsoft Sustainability Manager help organizations identify patterns and the contributing factors driving emissions up or down.
- Forecasting enables you to visualize your organization’s future emissions, providing information to determine whether early intervention is required to meet sustainability objectives.
Forecasting in Microsoft Sustainability Manager helps organizations visualize future emissions.
Gain efficiency and productivity with the new Microsoft Sustainability Manager home page
Also new with this release, a redesigned home page, within Microsoft Sustainability Manager, facilitates learning, common actions, and access to helpful resources. Stay up to date on the latest features as well as those planned for future releases. Act on common tasks like goal setting, data imports, and calculations. Leverage video content, including demos and presentations, to boost your knowledge and efficiency. And gain easy access to configuration guides, product tours, help articles, and much more.
The redesigned Sustainability Manager home page.
Introducing Microsoft Sustainability Manager Essentials and Premium
Organizations have a wide range of sustainability data management needs. To better meet each organization’s particular data and analytics needs, Microsoft Sustainability Manager plans—Essentials and Premium—offer a choice of basic or expanded capabilities.
As of November 1, 2023, organizations can choose:
- Microsoft Sustainability Manager Essentials, which includes all the features available in general availability. Essentials capabilities help organizations build a solid foundation for managing their environmental sustainability data and preparing for sustainability reporting.
- Microsoft Sustainability Manager Premium, which includes all the benefits of Essentials plus expanded capabilities in key areas such as value chain management, allocations, and AI, along with more data storage. Premium is designed for organizations that are looking to solve more complex reporting and reduction challenges and need to report across all the environmental categories while delivering insights for reduction.
Comparison of Microsoft Sustainability Manager Essentials and Premium plans.
Try Microsoft Sustainability Manager Premium
Effective November 1, 2023, when you sign up for a Microsoft Sustainability Manager trial, you’ll gain access to all the features in Premium for 30 days. After the trial period ends, you’ll be prompted to choose between the two offerings based on your organization’s sustainability goals and business needs.
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