Microsoft Sustainability Manager configuration guide

Article
01/18/2024

Microsoft Sustainability Manager guides you in the process of deploying and configuring your solution. In addition to all the documentation and training that you find on Microsoft Learn and other resources, the configuration guide provides a guided, contextual configuration experience inside the app itself. It gives you step-by-step guidance about how to configure Microsoft Sustainability Manager.

For best practices around deploying Cloud for Sustainability, go to Well-Architected for Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability.

Getting started

Getting started requires planning for other key aspects beyond the configuration itself. Here are some examples:

Understand what is involved. At a high level, configuration involves defining your organization, importing operational data, setting up calculations, creating goals, and running reports.
Plan for the level of effort. Depending on your organization's size, familiarity with carbon accounting, and sustainability goals, you can expect the implementation and configuration period to take a few months for your first scenarios. This solution can be implemented incrementally.
Gather your team. There might be multiple people in your organization who can help facilities managers, IT staff, department heads, and others. To support this effort, many organizations use a cross-functional team that has a range of responsibilities.
Follow the steps. Some steps can be done in a different order or in parallel. However, for your first scenarios, we highly recommend that you follow the order that is outlined in the configuration guide. This approach helps ensure that you get the correct data in the correct place and achieve the best results. Get help if you need it. If you become stuck along the way, remember to return to the configuration guide, where you can find links to Help articles, video tutorials, and more in the context of the step that you're completing.

Using the guide during your entire journey

The configuration guide is helpful throughout the life of your solution. During your trial, the configuration guide helps you explore the solution and learn by using your own data. During implementation, the configuration guide helps you to remember the minimal steps that you learned during your trial. However, it also provides a recommended configuration path if you're an experimented implementer. During operation of the solution after you complete the initial deployment, the configuration guide will help you discover new features as they become available and enable those features to expand your solution.

Configuring Microsoft Sustainability Manager

You'll enable Microsoft Sustainability Manager by completing the following configuration milestones:

Remove any sample data (optional). In the trial version, you can use the sample data to learn about the capabilities. However, if you want to use your own data, you can start fresh and remove the sample data. In the paid solution, you'll start with no sample data. Therefore, this step isn't required.
Define your organization. The next few steps guide you through the process of defining your organization. Be sure to complete this process before you go any further. You'll start by creating a company profile, then set up your organizational structure and hierarchy, and then add some facilities.
Set up reference data. The next few steps help you set up your reference data. This reference data includes important information such as fuel types, vehicle types, facilities, spend types, and contractual instrument types. Some reference data is unique to your organization, and some come from standard or industry sources.
Set up calculations. After your emission factors and other reference data are in place, you can start to design the calculations that you'll use to calculate the emissions produced by your activity data. The setup of the calculations breaks it down into two concepts: factor mappings and calculation models.
Import data. Data collection is one of the most important steps in the process of defining your greenhouse gas emissions and carbon footprint. Microsoft Sustainability Manager provides a streamlined data collection process that you can use to import the required activity data, reference data, and even precalculated emissions data.
Run a calculation. After you've set up your factors and reference data, defined calculation models, and imported your activity data, you're ready to put it all together and calculate emissions.
Validate analytics and set reports. Analytics reports present your calculated emissions in an organized way, so that you can detect trends or explore your data. These reports are updated soon after your calculations are run and let you review the outcome of your calculations in an aggregated format. You can also export data in predefined report formats that include groupings for emissions and activity, and other dimensions. You'll use those formats to do deeper analysis and prepare other types of reports that aren't covered here.
Define your sustainability goals. Scorecards and goals can help you curate sustainability metrics and track them against your company's key business objectives. After you create a scorecard that includes some goals, you can periodically check how the scorecard is progressing and make any required adjustments.
Set up Teams collaboration. At times you may want to share and discuss data, reports, analytics, or goals with other people in your organization. To help make those conversations contextual and collaborative, we're making Teams Chat available directly in Microsoft Sustainability Manager.

You might have to repeat some milestones and steps many times to enable all your scenarios. However, you should focus on enabling one scenario first. For example, if you decide to start calculating emissions for purchased electricity under scope 2, follow the whole configuration process once to bring in the reference data that is connected to that activity (including contractual instrument types, if they're applicable), and to bring in the models, emission factors, profiles, and so on. Then view the results of this process in the automatically generated analysis reports. By observing the end-to-end process in action with minimal data, you can more easily go on to expand your solution for other sources of emissions. Start simple and keep expanding.

Defining your strategy

By following the configuration guide once for one emission source, you'll gain insight into how you can optimize and expand your solution. If you ask for help from a partner, the partner may guide you to define the strategy first. This article isn't about an implementation guide. However, keep in mind that, by defining a configuration strategy, you'll enable the solution to produce results and visibility into your environmental impact.

As you use the configuration guide in the app, you'll soon discover that we provide different methods and formats for bringing in data, and different methods for using factor mappings to optimize your models. (For example, you can organize your scorecards and goals to better reflect how you track your progress.) After you enable your first end-to-end scenario, or if you're working with an experienced partner, take the time to plan and define the strategy for bringing in other emissions sources, depending on your operational scope and needs, so that you can record, report, and reduce your emissions based on your established goals.

The key is to keep things simple at the beginning. For example, while you can start by using Excel files to import data, the goal is to automate by using the time and use connectors, so that you get a continuous stream and can view your operation's impact on emissions in near real time. This process is a journey, and you'll be able to refine it. The configuration and operation of Microsoft Sustainability Manager are flexible enough to enable you to meet your initial basic scenarios. However, you'll also be able to cover your enterprise-grade requirements for a global deployment and continue to make progress.

Accessing the configuration guide

To access the configuration guide for the first time, you can select Open configuration guide in the introduction banner at the top of the Home page in Microsoft Sustainability Manager. A new pane shows you the process to configure, and you can start from there. Select the first step. When you've completed it, select Next at the bottom of the guide. Continue until you complete the process. You can always reopen the guide at any time and continue. The guide tracks where you stopped the last time that you used it.

The guide tracks the progress at the organization level. Therefore, all the team members can have visibility into the progress.

If you dismiss the introduction banner at the top of the Home page, you can access the configuration guide from the upper-right platform menu by selecting the book symbol next to your user initials.

As you use the app, you can keep the configuration guide open if you want. In this way, you can get contextual help as you configure, and you can access all the resources that you need to learn and configure.

Guidance assets in the configuration guide

Every node in the configuration guide represents a feature or core action that you must perform. Every feature can have substeps that can be expanded or collapsed as you require. The order of the features in the configuration guide represents the recommended path that respects dependencies and help you successfully enable the solution. Remember, some steps can be repeated as you expand your solution.

Every step can contain valuable guidance assets. Depending on your learning style, you might need one or more of them.

Here's a list of these guidance assets:

A description of the step to highlight its importance.
Instructions that explain how to complete the step, and that include links to the page that you can use to complete the step. Therefore, you don't have to search the menu: the guide helps you get to the correct place.
Access to more documentation for the step. Sometimes, you just need more details.
Access to brief videos that showcase the process under the step and provide some tips.
Access to templates if data is involved. Most of the data in Microsoft Sustainability Manager can be imported for a quick start and operation. You can also enable the solution in this way. Templates guide you to provide the minimal data that you'll need.
Glossary terms that bring core concepts where you need them if you're new to the sustainability domain.

Thank you for choosing Microsoft Sustainability Manager. You're doing important work, and we're here to help.