Business Situation
What matters to Synagro is helping communities implement green, sustainable composting solutions. When you run water down your sink or flush your toilet, it travels to a wastewater treatment facility where chemical and technological processes separate the water from the solids. If these solids went straight to a landfill, they’d produce large amounts of harmful greenhouse gas emissions. Composting them, on the other hand, mitigates emissions and puts the waste to positive use. That’s the role Synagro plays, and as North America’s largest recycler of organic by-products (also known as biosolids), the company serves more than 800 municipalities across the US.
To better serve its municipal customers, Synagro employees needed a more detailed understanding of the company’s own carbon emissions along the operations chain. In searching for an automated solution that could ingest large amounts of data from multiple sources and perform complex modeling of this data on a regular basis, company leadership turned to the Microsoft Sustainability Manager (MSM) and asked Avanade to help them unlock its full value.
“What matters to Synagro is being a trusted adviser to our municipal customers and helping them implement green, sustainable solutions for dealing with their biosolids; solutions that are rigorous from both a regulatory and environmental perspective. At the end of the day, we’re helping communities keep their water clean.”
Solution
MSM is part of the Microsoft Sustainability Cloud solution, powered by Microsoft Azure, which provides sustainability management by unifying data sources and automating manual processes. With this, organizations can record and report on emissions more efficiently and use that data to identify ways to eliminate them. Our relationship with Synagro began with a series of workshops conducted by Avanade Advisory to understand the company’s needs and shape its journey through collaboration. A proof of concept was then created within six weeks, bringing together multiple data sources in real time – from the quantities of biosolids that are processed to the electricity usage and fuel usage at both composting facilities and during transportation – to create a comprehensive picture of Synagro’s total carbon footprint.
Results
With MSM in place, Synagro has a new starting point on its journey to increase efficiencies and lower carbon emissions while helping its customers do the same. As the company scales up the MSM solution, employees can begin using the data more broadly to explore how to improve the health and safety of employees and the people living in the communities the company serves.
To renew and grow through continual change, sustainability must be core to how your organization does business. Contact us to rethink sustainability with digital.