TCS Envirozone™
Realize sustainability goals at an accelerated pace
Industry
Highlights
- With businesses across industries exploring solutions, partnerships, and ideas to address some of the most pressing environmental challenges, sustainable development has become a necessity.
- The United Nation’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have brought a new dimension to compliance with global sustainability standards such as the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), Greenhouse Gas (GHG) protocol, European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS), and so on.
- TCS Envirozone™ is an end-to-end solution that helps businesses mitigate ESG risks. It enables increased visibility into supplier sustainability and ensures EUDR adherence by leveraging blockchain and satellite imagery and incorporating sustainability as a service.
Overview
Sustainability is a focus area for businesses across the world, and its strategic importance is only going to grow.
Corporations are addressing complex sustainability challenges by changing their business functions and aligning them with the United Nation’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
As consumers adopt eco-friendly lifestyles, companies are having to ensure that their practices foster sustainability. They are striving to make clean, green, and ethical products to be part of the sustainable product labels trend. One of their major focus areas in this endeavor is the supply chain.
TCS Envirozone™, a comprehensive cloud-based solution, tracks and mitigates supplier-sourcing risks and improves procurement decisions for a sustainable supply chain in compliance with EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) and other sustainability regulations. The digital solution is powered by sustainability data ecosystems and enables tracking of key SDG activities. This helps organizations balance over 700 key performance indicators (KPIs) related to environment, social, and governance (ESG) parameters. For example, forest health, traceability, EUDR compliance, Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certificate management and compliance, baseline water stress, greenhouse gas emissions, child labor, and human rights risks. The solution helps organizations change the way they collect data to assess sustainability performance and mitigate brand sustainability and supply chain risks.
With TCS Envirozone, businesses can gain visibility and control of upstream procurement, traceability, packaging, manufacturing operations, and downstream distribution risks to build a sustainable enterprise. The solution addresses various sustainability imperatives such as achieving net zero, producing 100% recyclable products, and sourcing raw materials sustainably. It empowers them to take timely decisions to execute their corporate social responsibilities aimed at achieving sustainability goals.
TCS Envirozone provides the required technology interventions to businesses for upstream supplier sustainability, operational sustainability, and downstream efficiency. It helps them achieve their goals in the areas of responsible sourcing, carbon management, decarbonization, circular economy, sustainable finance, and audit and compliance reporting.
Solution
TCS Envirozone is a next-gen solution that caters to the diverse sustainability requirements of businesses across industries.
It offers the following features:
Enables responsible sourcing: It tracks key SDG activities for risk and sustainability assessment by leveraging scenario analysis built on artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI-ML) predictive systems. It supports sustainability compliance operations by enabling the onboarding of farmers or warehouse owners, customizing input screens for pre- and post-harvest data, and enhancing data accuracy for farmhouse or warehouse coordinates through Google geo-tagging.
Tracks carbon footprint through carbon management systems: The solution’s inbuilt forecasting models offer a detailed view of Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions across the value chain. This helps businesses meet the greenhouse gas (GHG) emission protocol requirements and Science-based Targets initiative (SBTi) and Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and audits.
The AI-ML-backed solution can predict year-on-year emissions against the base year and compute the reduction targets that would result in the annual goals predefined by the business. Logistics companies can leverage this ready-to-deploy, sustainable line-haul application to estimate and manage carbon risks from freight emissions due to product transport and distribution. The solution helps manage carbon disclosures and enables an efficient fleet emissions management system.
Powers a circular products economy: TCS Envirozone enables organizations to create sustainable packaging solutions using the 5R sustainable packaging framework – reuse, reduce, recycle, renew, and redesign. It also helps recover post-consumer recycled (PCR) plastic through IoT-based smart collection points to reduce plastic in landfills, helping achieve circular economy goals. TCS’ solution helps companies compare products and brands sold in a locality and control brand risks. For instance, IoT-based smart collection bins can identify the plastic content in various products. This can help companies determine the quantity of plastic that is due to be recycled.
The extended producer responsibility (EPR) module helps organizations avoid the potential risks of paying penalties and taxes through the solution’s embedded ML-based models. It enables them to accurately forecast the costs involved in recycling plastic and other packaging material and helps enhance their brand image.
Aids in decarbonization: Industries such as power, transport, and manufacturing that are ought to undergo heavy decarbonization have a high demand for technology services and solutions to meet sustainability goals. Enterprises are raising capital through green bonds and sustainability bonds to fund these initiatives. Additionally, this helps in monitoring and tracking carbon credits and carbon offsets.
Supports sustainable finance: This feature offers a financial analysis-based forecasting model for standardization of emissions across the value chain.
Audit and compliance reporting: The feature related to audit and compliance reporting pertaining to EUDR leverages blockchain satellite imagery and uses the due diligence statement (DDS) for audit and compliant purposes to combat deforestation and promote sustainable practices within supply chains. The inbuilt AI-ML accelerators enable validation of supplier and vendor certificates and licenses (FSC, Rainforest Alliance, Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) and so on) and subsequently derives supplier risk assessment with insights and recommendations for any course correction.
Offers sustainability as a service: In addition to the six themes, we have outcome based managed services to operationalize sustainability insights mined from the solution. The service is driven by a team of sustainability practitioners and analysts with relevant domain and industry knowledge as well as business context.
Figure 1 provides an overview of TCS Envirozone’s functionalities across the value chain.
Figure 1
An overview of TCS Envirozone™
Figure 1
The features of TCS Envirozone (see Figure 2) help companies assess the environmental impact of their operations, verify the origin of raw materials, collect geolocation data to ensure products are de-forestation free, assess and mitigate risks, and establish due diligence systems.
Figure 2
Features of TCS Envirozone
Figure 2
Benefits
TCS Envirozone equips organizations with everything they need to achieve their sustainability goals.
Key benefits include:
- Enhanced traceability: The solution increases traceability of product packaging and supplier data to enable companies to conduct scenario analysis for switching suppliers, raw materials, and geography. It enables audit traceability on supplier data for evidence submission for supply chain sustainability reporting.
- Compliance in reporting and global sustainability standards and benchmarks: TCS Envirozone helps businesses comply with reporting standards of ESG parameters and EUDR requirements along with supplier risk assessments. It also helps in adhering to the ESRS framework.
Sustainability performance: TCS’ solution helps reduce the time taken for sustainability performance disclosure by 90-95% from 10 months to two weeks, positioning the company as a responsible brand.
Reduced ESG risks: The solution increases visibility on carbon allocation across the value chain to improve supplier sustainability and reduce ESG risks. It assesses the carbon footprint of Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions, including direct and indirect emissions, raw materials, upstream and downstream logistics and distribution, and fuel and energy, thereby enabling an auditable carbon management system.
Improved process time: TCS Envirozone brings down costs by leveraging a reliable platform to cut down process time by 80%.
Predictive systems and intuitive dashboards: Inbuilt AI-ML accelerators facilitate predictive mechanism and effective decisioning by users, while interactive dashboards make it easy and intuitive for users to derive insights.
Real-time decision making: TCS’ solution empowers decision makers to take real-time sustainability-related decisions across the value chain with the goal of protecting the people and planet while yielding profits. Leveraging the managed services module of the solution, businesses can focus more on the strategic aspects of sustainability while leaving day-to-day processes and activities to our team of proven experts.
Sustainability metrics: TCS Envirozone provides granular visibility into key sustainability metrics, empowering business leaders to take timely decisions in executing corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives and adhering to the UN SDGs.
The TCS advantage
TCS Envirozone has been widely recognized in the industry and by four of the leading analyst firms.
A partnership with TCS can help businesses take advantage of the following key differentiators:
Industry-recognized solution: TCS Envirozone and our other innovative sustainability solutions are on the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability, which helps businesses plan, design, and implement their ESG strategies.
Experience in delivering sustainability engagements to global enterprises: Our global database mapping platform obtains key sustainability factors from multiple external data sources and internal activity data systems and provides sustainability performance assessment using globally accepted estimation methods based on geographic and business-specific contextual understanding.
Innovation labs and centers of excellence: TCS’ industry and domain professionals across our network of Innovation Labs and the TCS Sustainability CoE bring extensive expertise and a unique set of ideas and business models to accelerate customers’ sustainability journey. We help ensure ESG risks are addressed on time to help businesses move forward into a low-carbon and socially inclusive world.