Calculating PCFs presents several challenges for businesses. Finding accurate emission factors and mapping them to each component in a product's BOM requires specialized knowledge. This complex and time-consuming task demands sustainability expertise that many companies lack. The problem scales dramatically for organizations with large product portfolios and frequently changing material compositions. This creates significant maintenance burdens as they attempt to track environmental impacts at scale. To make carbon footprint creation faster, simpler, and more accurate, Siemens SiGREEN introduced a new feature: powered by Climatiq Autopilot, the AI Emission Estimator takes activity data from bills of materials, such as line items or component descriptions, and automatically matches it to the most relevant emission factors to calculate CO2e.
Challenge: Most companies lack data or resources to get started with product carbon footprints
The SiGREEN team recognized that estimating product carbon footprints without primary data from suppliers was challenging for most of their users. Although their platform already supported PCF aggregations, the manual and expert-driven nature of sourcing data for emissions calculations made it difficult for less technically-versed customers or those managing large product portfolios to use it at scale.
Therefore, the team was looking to simplify the estimation process and make it more accessible. They needed a solution that could automate the identification and mapping of relevant emission factors, scaling calculations across diverse product datasets.
Their criteria were:
- Comprehensive and reliable emission factor data: The SiGREEN team wanted to provide accurate, high-quality emission factor data without needing to collect, verify, map, and maintain data in house.
- Smart emission factor selection: To simplify the PCF creation process for their users, they wanted a solution that would ease the burden of emission factor mapping and calculations, even when domain knowledge is lacking.
- Easy integration: The team was looking for an integration to embed directly into SiGREEN, offering a native solution that would be familiar for their users.
The goal was to create “an entry-level solution that’s designed to be really easy to use even with very little domain know-how,” explains Philipp Timmen, director of strategy and partnerships at SiGREEN.
This search led the team to Climatiq Autopilot.
Solution: Simplifying product carbon footprinting with AI-powered automation
To enhance PCF estimation, the Siemens SiGREEN team chose Climatiq Autopilot to develop the AI Emission Estimator. Autopilot is an AI-powered emission factor mapping engine that instantly matches text from purchase orders, BOMs, or invoices to the correct emission factors from the Climatiq database.
A few aspects made the decision straightforward for the team:
- Data granularity: Autopilot ensures reliable PCFs, leveraging Climatiq’s 80+ emission factor datasets and spend- and activity-based calculations.
- Accessibility: Climatiq Autopilot makes PCF estimation more accessible by automatically matching component names or descriptions from BOMs to emission factors, offering a more intuitive approach for users without deep carbon accounting expertise.
- Speed and accuracy: Philipp and the team had compared Autopilot against alternatives and found that it was three times faster than the average industry LCA tool at surfacing emission factor data, with highly accurate results supported by source trails and match confidence scores.
- Embeddability: The Autopilot API integrates directly into the SiGREEN platform, enriching business data at the source.
Ultimately, Autopilot offered SiGREEN a faster, more cost-effective path to high-quality data mapping and estimations than in-house development.
Results: AI Emission Estimator launched within six weeks, with Autopilot’s emission factor matching three times faster than the average LCA tool
The integration provides users with an easy path to secondary data that they can integrate into PCFs and share with stakeholders, ensuring they meet market and regulatory demands and remain competitive. With the new user-friendly UI, product data from invoices or BOMs is easily transformed into reporting-ready PCF estimates, with best-in-class speed and accuracy.
“Our users can now source everything through us, which is really helpful for them,” says Philipp.
The SiGREEN team can focus fully on delivering enhanced value to customers, leveraging Climatiq’s expertise to handle the heavy lifting of emission factor collection, maintenance, verification, and calculations while Autopilot maps and matches emission factors.
As early adopters, Philipp and the team at SiGREEN were instrumental in shaping the latest version of Autopilot. Their close collaboration with Climatiq directly informed key improvements, including the ability to pre-filter emission factor results by data source, a crucial feature for users working with specific datasets. This was not just a feature rollout, but a chance for SiGREEN to influence Climatiq’s product roadmap.
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