Mosca’s journey to a scalable sustainability solution

Electricity, gas, water, raw materials, and waste volumes: Any carbon footprint calculation has to take numerous factors into account. The type and amount of data required vary from product to product, and values for the same material from various suppliers can differ. For some sources, important data is missing or cannot be used. Sustainability officers still have to examine it and then search for more reliable information in reference databases, if necessary.

The corporate carbon footprint data in the sustainability report must comply with the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHG) in accordance with the CSRD. Particularly difficult to determine are the Scope 3 emissions that occur outside a company’s direct sphere of responsibility. This also applies to the carbon footprint of every single product, which is increasingly being the topic in customer inquiries.

“The sustainability report is a huge task for companies to deal with,” says Luisa Swetlik. As Innovation Manager Sustainability at NTT DATA Business Solutions, she is familiar with the challenge from both her own experience and her collaboration with client companies. “The components of a product can be quickly retrieved as a parts list from SAP. But, gathering, reviewing and bringing together the associated emission levels in a structured way is a complex detailed procedure,” explains Swetlik. Currently, most companies have neither established processes nor suitable tools for doing this. Many companies are expected to submit a sustainability report in accordance with the CSRD for the first time in 2027.

From Excel to an integrated sustainability solution

Things are different for Mosca GmbH, a specialist in end-of-line solutions. This long-established medium-sized company produces machinery and materials for packaging and securing the transportation of unit loads. Here, management has had experience in preparing sustainability reports since 2021. “Initially, we used an Excel-based calculator to determine the product footprint. This was a lot of manual work, which meant it was time-consuming and prone to errors,” reports Ann Mertens, Sustainability Officer at Mosca.

The challenge? This approach proved unsuitable for providing effective support to all parties involved. “Very few people were able to handle the complex table structure,” recalls Mertens. However, because the required data is spread across different departments, it is not possible to collect data efficiently and automatically for the annual sustainability reports. Not to mention making quick adjustments if, for example, a workflow is modified in a production process or a supplier changes.

That is why Mosca set out to find a suitable solution for managing CO₂e emissions data, where “e” stands for “CO₂ equivalent”. The unit of measurement is used to compare GHG emissions of different gases in a single unit, namely the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide (CO₂). A project group specially established at Mosca quickly found the Sustainability Data Simplified solution from NTT DATA Business Solutions. “We’ve been working with the company as a partner in the SAP environment for years, so it made sense to take a look at their Sustainability Data Simplified offering,” explains Mertens.

“We actually developed our solution precisely for SAP user companies like Mosca,” says Florian Sackmann, Managing Director for Customer Engagement at NTT DATA Business Solutions. “Sustainability Data Simplified addresses companies that want to quickly implement an efficient solution for managing their sustainability data without needing a specific SAP version for it.” Sustainability Data Simplified provides them with a platform that adds the corresponding data to SAP master data from purchasing, logistics and production.

Sustainability officers can decide for themselves which source the solution should use to supplement data. As Mertens explains, Sustainability Data Simplified meets one of Mosca’s key requirements: “Above all, we need a flexible system. The solution allows us to process both the values of current databases such as Ecoinvent as well as individual supplier information.” One of the reasons why this flexibility is important is because the quality of the supplier information varies greatly. “It is very helpful that, with the new solution, we always have default values from accepted databases available and can compare them.”

In addition, no reference database provides the most accurate default values for all components of all products. There are specific databases for individual sectors that provide more precise data. “Sustainability Data Simplified makes it easy to record such data and assign it to the master data,” says Mertens. And because all data is attached to the SAP master, Mosca now has a single point of truth for all sustainability KPIs related to CO₂ and other attributes related to materials, machines, or plants. This avoids the duplication of work and inconsistencies that inevitably result when the same data is maintained in different places and different Excel lists.

More time for content review

The aim of Mosca’s sustainability officers is to always provide data that is as precise and reliable as possible. This often requires case-by-case decisions between different data sources. Because Sustainability Data Simplified facilitates and speeds up routine work such as processing the data structure with individual fields for different variants, Mertens and her team are able to focus on examining the content and selecting the data for the carbon footprint calculation. “The calculation itself is handled by the software in compliance with the GHG Greenhouse Gas Protocol,” says Luisa Swetlik.

Clear focus

When Sustainability Data Simplified was introduced, the project team focused on the straps product group. “We decided to do this because we are dealing with a manageable number of components and suppliers here,” explains Mertens. Within the specified time frame of six months, a scalable solution was developed as the basis for Mosca’s sustainability reporting. Mosca will gradually integrate the carbon footprint calculation for the highly complex, multi-variant machines used in end-of-line processes. The company will work with its SAP partner here as well.

Success factors: flexibility and understanding

“We really appreciate how NTT DATA Business Solutions responds to our requirements and needs,” says Mertens. This is evident, for example, in the rapid adaptation of Sustainability Data Simplified to special features such as the material numbers at Mosca that do not correspond to the typical SAP standard. “As a SAP partner, we are used to finding innovative solutions that help our customers get the most out of their standard applications,” explains Florian Sackmann. Ann Mertens agrees: “This flexibility, the open and non-bureaucratic communication, and an understanding of our workflows – these are the most important factors for successful cooperation, in my opinion.”