AWS Cloud Analytics Solution for Sustainability and Regulatory Compliance

The Challenge Story

With the EU signing the European Green Deal, sustainability has evolved from a megatrend to a legal requirement. Therefore, several companies in various sectors have increasingly expedited their transformation process in their sustainability program. Naturally, many follow varied go- green approaches, prioritizing numerous fields such as production, research, development, retail, or distribution depending on their company profile and adaptation challenges.

With this perspective, our customer, a large automotive group and car manufacturer, is taking an ambitious action to go green with their sustainability program for their retail network. The customer is aiming to reduce the environmental footprint of their retail operations in line with the European Green Deal which requires achieving net-zero carbon by 2050.

Considering this, the first phase to reduce its environmental impact is to consistently and accurately measure CO2 emissions produced by their retail operations. After collecting information, the data will be processed and visualized using dashboards and reports revealing the key areas that require attention. Achieving such ambitious sustainability goals as one of the largest automotive groups in Europe compels a solid solution provided by an experienced partner.

Customer’s objectives:

• Scientifically and consistently measure CO2 emissions in retail operations.
• Identify areas of improvement for each market in electricity, heating, and fleet energy consumption.
• Become fully compliant with United Nation’s environmental, social, and governance (UN ESG) regulation.
• Achieve 30% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2030.
• Achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

Solution

To achieve the European Green Deal targets, it is critical to measure the carbon footprint of the retail network. Adastra designed and implemented an AWS-based cloud analytics solution and played a key role in the customer’s sustainability transformation. We supported the automotive manufacturer to measure and gather critical information regarding energy consumption in worldwide retail operations including heating, electricity, fleets’ fuel consumption and more. For this reason, Adastra’s AWS experts developed a web-based tool to securely collect data from approximately 500 dealers about their energy usage.

Our file uploader tool ensured the data provided satisfies the quality requirements by doing real-time data quality checks and providing feedback to the uploader explaining further actions required to correct the data. The collected data was transformed to develop visualizations and provide clear insights, further to be used in shaping dealers’ sustainability approaches to be both economically and environmentally sustainable. The analytics were eventually delivered to the business users using dashboards and report extracts.

Benefits

• Ability to measure and collect data from 500 dealers through web-based data templates with real-time data quality checks
• Infrastructure costs and carbon footprint are reduced in processing the data using serverless AWS services avoiding unnecessary usage
• Solution costs are also significantly eliminated due to using managed services avoiding the expenses of managing a complex architecture, updates and security concerns
• Obtaining key business insights regarding worldwide sustainability steps and a much clearer overview through user-friendly dashboards created with “Tableau”
• Lay foundations to achieve initial carbon footprint reduction and ultimately net-zero goals through data visualizations by 2030 and 2050