I often see confusion around this cloud, and with the rename and the many improvements it has had over the releases I thought why not try to shed some light?
Why me?
For the ones that may not know, beside all things Salesforce and Agile, my focus is to help organisations to reduce waste. Waste of time, effort, energy, money, materials… I’m a Circular Economy professional (Cambridge), Biomimicry Practitioner, wrote a book about Sustainability and business, part of the Agile Alliance Sustainability Initiative, and I support my village with a ‘re-wilding’ program, being the designated representative for it in the Climate Change Wiltshire group.
This is where my heart and energy goes: to leave the place better than how we found it.
Therefore NZC comes at a key crossroad for me: where skills and quest intersect.
Why now?
Regulations are coming! Here is a brief summary:
- US 22 > SEC required for publicly traded
- EU 22 > CSRD oct 22 expand scope +
- Brazil 21 > ESG Disclosure
- India 22 > top 1000 listed to report sustainability
- Singapore 22 > disclose for listed in exchange
- China 22 > environment footprint for listed companies
- NZ 21 > 200 large financial institutions
- UK > ESOS 250 em or 44mil (energy)
- UK > listed companies +500 empl+£500m turnover Report Climate related risks and opp within energy and carbon or strategic report
What is Net Zero Cloud trying to solve?
Right now as a Sustainability Manager there is a huge manual effort put into collecting, aggregating, auditing and compiling data to generate reports. Net Zero Cloud being Salesforce technology can act as an enabler to automate and ease this.
Another reason, related to the above, is that as a Sustainability Manager the process is so REACTIVE, meaning you only know how you have done AFTER the fact, too late to fix it. Net Zero Cloud can act as enabler of real time insight and for an organisation to be more proactive.
Also data collection related, is that it’s quite fiddly to process most-often siloed and convoluted data. Net Zero Cloud being Salesforce technology can enable integrated data, business logic and UX.
And well as the regulations that are on the way as mentioned, down the line this will be required and with tax implications.
Differences vs other SF stuff
There are some key differences between other Salesforce products, even industry solutions, which I think are worth uncovering:
1) Salesforce creates you data!
Seriously, through the set up and the updates Salesforce creates data records. The reason for this is extracting from key governing agencies to enable calculations into carbon emission equivalents. (A carbon dioxide equivalent or CO2 equivalent, abbreviated as CO2-eq is a metric measure used to compare the emissions from various greenhouse gases on the basis of their global-warming potential (GWP), by converting amounts of other gases to the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide with the same global warming potential.)
Essentially this uses reference data from things like the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), US Energy Information Administration (EIA), International Energy Agency (IEA), UK Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS), Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol, etc.
2) Automations
You have for example CBECS related data in place and the BEI builder if you need to create your own records; BEI being Building Energy Intensity.
As well as DPE (Date Processing Engine) processes to be run such as the Initiate Calculations to aid with Emissions Forecasting, or the application of Inflation Rates.
3) Multi-industry
Salesforce already has multiple ‘clouds’ as industry solutions. Yet Net Zero Cloud covers more than one: Carbon Accounting, Circular Economy (waste management), Water Risk Management, partial DEI…
And I wouldn’t be surprised if more areas will join in. As Natural and Social capital are quite wide areas, yet are highly interrelated.
A wrap
Ok let’s leave it at that for now, perhaps next up is for us to cover the architecture?
What do you think? (Pop in a comment!)
** Of course there are Trailhead modules on this! >
https://trailhead.salesforce.com/modules?sort=NEWEST&products=products-net-zero-cloud