A Single Unified View of Sustainability:
Taming Multiple Languages, Character Sets, and Formats from Around the World

THE CHALLENGE

A Global Manufacturing Company had three ERP systems, far-flung operations and invoices in 14 different languages for energy and water. With only 1.5 FTEs on the sustainability team and no access to developer resources, the in-house team did not have the resources to solve the data challenge. And with new vocabulary and requirements for sustainability, the team was unsure if they were lining up the data correctly for carbon accounting and visualizations.

After the manufacturer reached out to GLYNT.AI, the first point of engagement was a proof of concept, demonstrating the end-to-end flow for selected locations. This not only verified the technical capabilities of GLYNT.AI, but also started the conversation that leads to a shared, specific understanding of what carbon accounting and reporting requires.

THE SOLUTION

To begin the company collected the invoices for 2023 and 2024 from their global teams. The team leaders were relieved they no longer had to attempt to decipher invoices and type data into spreadsheets. Instead, they could simply forward energy and water invoices to the central system. And when automated forwarding was set up, their task was even lighter.

As a manufacturer, the company had substantial energy and water use at some facilities, leading to utility bills containing 5 to 20 meters. This granular, meter-level usage and cost detail is valuable, as it helps to identify usage anomalies and cost savings, but the sustainability team was stumped on how to organize the complex data. GLYNT.AI set up automated processing that broke out the granular data and harmonized it for unified reporting.

Next, two customized output formats were created. The first enabled automated data ingestion by the company’s carbon accounting software, and the second output had the granular, meter-level data for use by the procurement team for expense management.

GLYNT.AI automatically translated all the invoices during processing, providing data in a single language and with standardized units of measure. The sustainability team conducted a round of reviews with the global managers to verify the results. Thereafter, automation took over.

Today the sustainability data flows are fully automated, and reporting is done on a quarterly basis. Scattered efforts and the stress of reporting in a time crunch was replaced with reliable, verified, automated data flows.