Swisscom empowers teams, partners and customers to reduce emissions with Sweep

Background

Swisscom is a major telecommunications provider in Switzerland and Italy. They’ve been voted the world’s most sustainable telecommunications company by the World Finance Magazine in 2020 and 2022. Their climate goals echo their leadership as they aim to decarbonize across their supply chain by 2025, andgo beyond scope 3 by helping their customers set and reach emission targets.

"Swisscom has been committed to reducing its environmental impact for decades. With our 2025 carbon neutrality target, we aim to further reduce emissions within our organization, across our value chain, and our customers too,” says Res Witschi, Delegate For Sustainable Digitalization at Swisscom.

Problem

Most of Swisscom's emissions come from the components and devices they purchase from suppliers and manufacturers. Reducing their total footprint means addressing these indirect emissions – known as scope 3 emissions.

With a network of over 4,000 suppliers, this was a massive coordination task. Doing it in spreadsheets made it even harder. For one, not all of them have the same level of carbon literacy or are at the same stage of their climate journey. Not only was it hard to get data, let alone good quality and frequent data, Swisscom couldn’t monitor emissions in real-time or simulate scenarios and reduction action.

"A person with the patience of an angel would have to send hundreds of emails and organize meeting after meeting to get the relevant data, then manually enter it into Excel spreadsheets. This quickly becomes confusing, especially when you work with thousands of suppliers," says Witschi.

Solution

Swisscom was looking for a tool that could streamline carbon management processes: From automating and coordinating data collection across business units, suppliers and investments, to optimizing carbon reduction and contribution efforts. Once they’ve imported existing carbon data in Sweep, they’ll be able to:

• Integrate historical information with new data and transition seamlessly from excel sheets to carbon management software.

• Use surveys to automate data collection across their entire organization and value chain.

• Compare different reduction initiatives to build the most effective decarbonization strategy.

“The supreme discipline isn’t measuring emissions, but reducing them. With Sweep, we can model various reduction initiatives and decide which measures to give priority to. This means we can build a solid, evidence-based roadmap to achieving our climate targets, and fine-tune this along the way based on real-time changes in data," says Witschi.