Gartner has recognized Climatiq in the 2024 Cool Vendors in Cross-Functional Supply Chain Management Technology. Below is our take on the trend towards adding new ESG and sustainability technology into supply chain processes.
With the introduction of new sustainability regulations, combined with demands from investors and consumers, companies are feeling pressure to measure and reduce their emissions. This has led to carbon emerging as a key performance metric alongside traditional measures such as profit and costs. At the same time, more recognition has been given to the weight of indirect emissions (scope 3) that occur along companies’ value chains, which typically comprise 70-90% of their entire emissions.
However, companies are realizing that indirect emissions are the hardest to evaluate, which makes meeting these new demands difficult. Carbon metrics are typically detached from planning, strategy and decision-making processes, making it hard to operationalize emissions reductions. On top of this, traditional methods for calculating emissions are fraught: manual calculations are resource intensive and error-prone; building a carbon calculation tool in-house requires a similarly large workload and risk; at the same time, adding an external tool comes with its own learning curve and can lead to toolstack overload.
The rise of carbon as a key metric, coupled with challenges in accurately measuring emissions – especially scope 3 – has prompted many businesses to turn to their existing software providers for help. This is where Climatiq comes in.
By integrating Climatiq’s API-based carbon calculation engine, supply chain management platforms can extend their offering with scope 3 carbon insights. In doing so, their customers get real-time visibility into their carbon footprint so they can weigh CO2e alongside economic indicators, optimize their end-to-end supply chain, and comply with evolving sustainability regulations. This allows them to consciously design and optimize their entire supply chain – from selecting suppliers with CO2e in mind, to using process data to assess production emissions, to picking transport methods, to considering warehouse and inventory waste impact. They then have all the necessary emissions data to provide compliant reports about CO2e created by products and operations.
Climatiq offers the largest database of scientifically-vetted emissions data, covering scope 1, 2, and 3 activities such as procurement of materials, manufacturing, and transport. Powered by this database, Climatiq’s tailor-made calculation APIs cater to all stages and business activities along the supply chain.
Software providers considering adding carbon reporting to their platform can integrate Climatiq as an alternative to building a calculation solution from scratch. This helps them accelerate their product roadmap, quickly incorporating carbon insights to meet customer demand. Passing the complex task of calculating emissions to a trusted third party also reduces compliance risk and removes the need to both maintain their own solution and stay up to date with changing regulatory requirements. As a result, their customers can operationalize their carbon management and reduction efforts within the tools they already know and use.
In its Cross-Functional Supply Chain Management Technology research, Gartner highlights how “vendors selected for this research each offer a novel approach to the use of embedded or emerging technologies with respect to the critical priorities of ESG and sustainability, as well as composite AI.” We're glad to be recognized as one of the five Cool Vendors for this category, which we believe demonstrates a major shift towards new and innovative approaches to integrating technology into supply chain processes.
Disclaimer
Gartner, Cool Vendors in Cross-Functional Supply Chain Management Technology, Christian Titze, Kevin Lawrence, Brock Johns, Federica Stufano, Miguel Cossio, 21 August 2024
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and The GARTNER COOL VENDOR badge is a trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc., and/or its affiliates, and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
