Supplier engagement tools, such as surveys asking for emissions data, may sound like a straight forward solution for achieving supply chain sustainability intelligence. But when it comes to carbon accounting, supplier surveys can be a time-consuming, ineffective and ultimately unnecessary approach.
Here’s why organizations relying on supplier surveys for emissions data might be wasting resources and contributing to supplier fatigue — and how Ideagen Carbon Accounting offers a smarter alternative.
Organizations often believe sending surveys or questionnaires to suppliers is the most practical and effective way to collect supplier emissions data, such as Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions, product carbon footprints or information on emissions reduction targets. However, this strategy faces several critical challenges:
Supplier surveys often yield poor engagement. Data shows that only a minority of suppliers are likely to respond to emissions data requests, leaving significant gaps in your supplier emissions data.
For the majority of suppliers that do respond to emissions data requests, the requested data is already publicly available, often found in sustainability reports or regulatory disclosures. Many customers asking the same common supplier to re-submit this data causes supplier fatigue, leading to decreased participation.
Preparing, sending, tracking, quality reviewing and integrating the results of supplier emissions surveys into your carbon accounts — is time-consuming and error-prone. This makes surveying an inefficient method for covering your entire supply chain.
With Ideagen Carbon Accounting, you don’t have to rely on supplier surveys to achieve supplier-specific emissions data for your Scope 3 carbon accounting. Here’s how we streamline your supply chain emissions accounting:
Ideagen Carbon Accounting searches the entire public domain for emissions data already disclosed by your suppliers. This mitigates the need to request emissions data directly from suppliers and avoids the time spent doing it manually.
When we find your suppliers have disclosed the relevant emissions data, it undergoes a thorough quality and completeness review by our team of carbon accounting experts to ensure compliance with carbon accounting standards and methodologies. This helps ensure the supplier emissions data used in your Scope 3 accounts is accurate, helping you avoid the risk of misreporting and build better supply chain emissions intelligence.
Supplier emissions data that passes our quality and completeness review is then integrated into your Scope 3 carbon accounts. You can see every supplier for which supplier-specific emissions data was available and used in your emissions calculations and compare supplier emissions intensities.
You avoid burdening your suppliers with unnecessary surveys and questionnaires. Your suppliers have more time to engage with you on sustainability initiatives, for which manual, 1-to-1 engagement is truly essential and valuable.
By automating supplier emissions data collection and providing important quality assurances, we help you maximize supplier-specific data coverage in your Scope 3 carbon accounts and save precious time and resources. You and your suppliers have more time to collaborate on high materiality hard-to-obtain data and emission reduction partnerships.
While supplier surveys may be ineffective for general corporate emissions data, or product-specific emissions data, they remain suitable for collecting non-public data, which maybe important for your sustainability efforts. Supplier engagement should be focused on the most material suppliers and high-impact areas, where additional, private or custom insights can support accurate emissions accounting and meaningful emission reductions.
Why waste time and resources on a process that yields limited value? With Ideagen Carbon Accounting, you can automate the collection of trusted supplier emissions data, enhance accuracy and improve data coverage — with no burden on your suppliers.
Talk to us about simplifying your supply chain carbon accounting today.
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