Data traceability

Calculating carbon emissions and tracking goals requires organizations to ensure there's no duplicate or redundant data. Microsoft Sustainability Manager provides built-in capabilities to handle data uniqueness across activity, reference, and system data.

Microsoft Sustainability Manager provides organizations with the control to define uniformity of uniqueness for data records. Define unique values in the optional origin correlation ID (OCID) field in the Microsoft for Sustainability data model entities wherever possible. This recommendation helps organizations trace their data from the external data sources to data ingested into Microsoft Sustainability Manager for auditing purposes.

The OCID is a unique identifier that organizations can use to correlate a record with its data origin, which can be helpful for auditing purposes. When they define unique values in the OCID field, organizations can ensure that their data is traceable and accurate.

Unique values in the OCID field have the following benefits:

• They help identify and resolve data errors.
• They help track the source of data changes.
• They help comply with auditing requirements.

In addition to the OCID field, Sustainability Manager also provides primary keys to uniquely identify records. Primary keys ensure that data isn't duplicated in a table, and they're also used to join tables together. For tables where the OCID field isn't populated, Sustainability Manager defines a unique record key based on the record type specific Primary key evaluation rule.

Overall, defining unique values by using OCID is a recommended practice that improves the accuracy and traceability of sustainability data. If you don't define OCID, you need to use a combination of record columns to determine uniqueness.

Next steps

• Design Custom Dimensions