Carbon River's Carbon Engine enabled the calculation of an organisations environmental impact through the classification of spend from their financial ledger. By classifying each entry against a database of categories an analyst is able to determine the environmental impact that purchase has made (greenhouse gasses, acidification etc).

When this analysis is performed against the entire organisations purchases an accurate view can be made of their impact on the environment. This then enables the analyst to make recommendations that can not only reduce those organisations environmental impact but also opportunities for cost savings and alternative initiatives to improve their impact - such as highlighting their primary contributors to their impact and areas that alternative can be proposed.

Before my involvement with Carbon River analysts, we performing their analysis using a single Excel workbook per client which would typically have hundreds of thousands of spend line items (that organisations financial ledger). Each of these lines would then have to be updated line by line with the relevant category using a simple VBA based user interface which was cumbersome and slow. This process would typically take weeks to complete.

I was brought on to design and build a web-based version of the previous Excel workbook. The final solution I delivered reduced the multi-week analysis effort down to hours by aggregating spend line items into their descriptive columns enabling analysts to map categories en-masse and refining their classifications on less aggregated levels based on their descriptive fields.

Additionally, I created an analytics layer which enabled the data to be explored based on the thousands of impact types (such as CO2, CH4 etc), performing hundreds of thousands of calculations in sub-second timeframes.

During my time with Carbon River, I was also involved with acquisition discussions and meetings with investors and acquirers resulting in the acquisition of the intellectual property.

Highlights

  • Converted a legacy Excel based workbook with sophisticated VBA scripts to a secure and scalable multi user Web application.
  • Implemented a streamlined environmental impact category mapping work flow that led to a reduction of mapping effort. Previously this would take on average a week and was reduced to hours.
  • Created reporting that was capable to calculating millions of data points in less than a second and outputting inaights for use in company annual reports and corporate environmental change decision making.