Fater adopts Microsoft Sustainability Manager for efficient carbon footprint tracking and ESG reporting

“At Fater, we always say you only get what you measure.”

Daniele Eccher, Corporate Sustainability Senior Manager is speaking to one of the guiding principles of a company that has made sustainability a cornerstone of its corporation.

Fater is a leading Italian company making home and personal hygiene products that are sold to over 37 countries worldwide. It estimates that about 3 out of 4 Italian households use at least one of their products, as cited by the Consumer Panel YouGov in September 2024.

The company needed to drive their environmental data management, collection, analysis, and reporting with more traceability and audibility. 

Microsoft Sustainability Manager, built entirely on Microsoft Power Platform, offered the perfect solution. 

Written into its sustainability charter, Fater considers respect for the environment an important factor in making decisions, planning, and business processes. It has long been committed to monitoring and reducing environmental impacts resulting from its operations, including its product creation.

Fater wanted to streamline that process and decided to implement Microsoft solutions.

“The possibility to have a holistic view on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) data when it comes to sustainability was what drove us,” says Eccher. “This natural link between Fater’s vision of ESG across all aspects being fully embedded in business is what we have found in Microsoft.”

Measuring with meaning

Sustainability is one of Fater’s pillars and it touches every action the company takes - from deciding which packaging to use for its products to how it serves its employees. 

Fater’s focus on sustainability began in 2000 with its first environmental and sustainability and welfare projects developed.

In the past, Fater used Microsoft Excel to manage environmental emissions data and to forecast, which presented risks for error and lacked agility and reliability for its simulation results. 

With Microsoft Sustainability Manager, Fater expects more efficient, agile, and reliable data management for emissions calculations and ESG reporting. The solution is built entirely on Microsoft Power Platform, which makes it easier to adopt and extend for business users. 

ESG reporting specifically can be a challenging and complex process for sustainability practitioners who need to report against regulatory reporting frameworks.

With its external reporting in Sustainability Manager capabilities, the solution helps with the creation, completion, and approval of comprehensive reports across both qualitative and quantitative metrics for Global Reporting Index (GRI) and Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) compliant reporting. Additionally, Fater early previewed and tested Copilot in Sustainability Manager, which helps with writing qualitative and quantitative responses to fulfill ESG disclosure requirements by finding the relevant data from uploaded documents and suggesting how to write facts that meet the disclosure requirements.

“We chose Microsoft because it’s an important part of our digitalization journey and AI process adoption. Microsoft Sustainability Manager is integrated with the Microsoft solutions we use and allows us to have real and easy communication with the people in Fater,” says Carmine Scorrano, Head of ERP Systems & ICT Customer Care and ICT Communications.

Furthermore, Scorrano added that Microsoft Sustainability Manger has allowed them to add different Power BI dashboards including what if scenarios that give Fater the ability to evaluate the impacts of raw material changes in terms of carbon footprint.

A people-first approach

Alongside Fater's commitment to sustainability is its people first approach.

“Fater is driven by a strategy called People First and this is the basis of everything we do. That is fundamental to understanding how we manage technology and sustainability,” says Cecilia Coletta, Communication and PR Senior Manager. 

“Our ambition is happiness. We want to achieve happiness and amplify it for our consumers, our customers, and the communities around us. It is reflected all over the organization.” 

Coletta further explains that sustainability and digitalization are linked to this people first strategy by focusing on improving lives through concrete actions.

“We try to listen to the needs of our employees, customers, stakeholders, every day, then create real, concrete actions to improve their lives,” says Coletta.

The partnership with Microsoft has allowed Fater to drive that approach to new heights.

In a 2022/2023 annual survey of the internal climate at Fater, 78% of employees reported a positive attitude toward the company.

A prime partnership

Part of what has made the adoption of Microsoft’s sustainability solutions successful thus far is that Fater found an ideal partner with EY, who provided continuous support throughout the entire process. 

EY assisted Fater with three key components.

“Throughout the adoption and implementation of Microsoft’s solutions, EY played a critical role by working hand-in-hand with Fater,” says Guido Ballarin, Director, Sustainable Finance Practice.

Fater uses the GRI as a framework for reporting and one of their needs was to add a single interface to manage all data created for sustainability. 

An important piece of the implementation was leveraging Microsoft Sustainability Manager’s extensibility capabilities as a single data platform for environmental, social and governance analytics. 

EY extended the Microsoft solution by adding the opportunity to gather data-selected social and governance metrics and allowing Fater’s reporting performances with a set of Power BI dashboards.

Fater is also an early adopter of the Microsoft Copilot capability in Sustainability Manager’s external reporting solution for adherence to CSRD and GRI standards. This feature allows, for example, to automatically retrieve factual data points by uploading customer documents with quantitative and qualitative information.  

These AI capabilities empower Fater’s team to automatically identify data that can be used as an accelerator for the external, regulatory reporting duties, driving savings in report preparation.

The other core objective of Fater’s new ESG solution is to exploit simulation and forecasting capabilities to evaluate product-related decarbonization strategies. Fater has a technology innovation department that works daily to improve its products. One of the most important tasks performed by this team is to simulate activities on the bill of material of each product Fater produces. The objective is to simulate the impact on emissions related to specific raw materials supplied or bill of material items used to produce a single product. 

To achieve this goal, Sustainability Manager’s extensibility capabilities allowed for the development of an embedded Power App with Power BI dashboards that allows to simulate the impact of the carbon footprint based on changes in bill of materials and other strategic levers.

Future Sustainability Outlook

Fater has its eye on improved sustainability now and in the future.

Organizations like the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTI), a corporate climate actions group that enables companies and financial institutions worldwide to play their part in combating the climate crisis, serve as a compass to help steer Fater towards long-term sustainability goals. 

SBTI develops standards, tools and guidance which allow companies to set greenhouse gas emissions reductions targets in line with what is needed to keep global heating below risk levels and reach net-zero by 2050 at the latest.

“Fater joined SBTi in 2022 and our decarbonization targets were validated by SBTi, both near-term 2030, with the ambition level of contributing to maintain global warming below 1.5° versus pre-industrial era, and Net Zero by 2040,” says Eccher. “Scope 3 emissions play a huge role in our work, so their accurate and reliable accounting is fundamental.”

This summer, Fater will run the first test to determine the progress of its new reporting initiative, a step towards achieving its broader sustainability goals. 

“It's a continuous improvement in measurement and the possibility to drive simulation on future impact of potential change,” says Eccher.