Challenge

thyssenkrupp Rasselstein, one of Europe’s largest manufacturers of packaging steel, serves clients in more than 80 countries globally. This leads to Scope 3 emissions associated with transport and distribution (categories 4 and 9). Wanting to efficiently drive emissions reduction initiatives, the company had to resolve the lack of real-time logistics GHG emissions data, which affected data quality and availability across fragmented systems.

Solution

thyssenkrupp co-innovated with Celonis, a digital technology pioneer in process mining, to develop a data-driven shipping emissions reduction application. The app analyses truck movements out of thyssenkrupp’s sites and, coupled with contextual data, calculates the associated emissions. It is built on the Celonis Process Intelligence platform and leverages the carbon engine application programming interface (API) from Climatiq, a carbon calculation engine. It serves as an intermediary between customers’ IT systems and various analytical dashboards, algorithms and automation processes that run on top of it.

To address the data quality challenge, Celonis and Climatiq aligned with domain experts to craft logic-based parameters to fill in any gaps in datasets and create a special module to validate existing data computed by the application. The Climatiq calculation engine is accredited by and follows the Global Logistics Emissions Council (GLEC) framework to ensure comparability and standardization.

Impact

Over three months, the app analysed more than 49,000 outbound truck movements with activity data from enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, resulting in a granular and automated calculation of total emissions of more than 58 million kgCO2e. Through intelligent optimization of truck load factors, an emissions reduction potential of more than 4.5 million kgCO2e was identified. The app empowered Thyssenkrupp to automatically compute emissions using input data from IT systems, incorporating them into transactional systems to guide processes and decision-making.

Several takeaways resulted from this collaboration: ERP data provides a strong basis for automated and granular measurement. Distance-based emissions measurement per shipment (rooted in ERP data) enables accurate emissions measurement, target-setting and performance improvement. Finally, shipment emissions data shared with customers can strengthen relationships and help with customers' own carbon accounting.

Featured in our paper "The “No-Excuse” Opportunities to Tackle Scope 3 Emissions in Manufacturing and Value Chains"