Before we rolled out Scope 5 in 2012, I was collecting energy and fuel data from over 200 global offices and warehouses for three years using spreadsheets. I've learned a few tips and tricks from the rollout and from our first year of reconciling data entered in Scope 5 with historical data. I hope this is helpful.
#1. Get help from Scope 5 (Yoram, Carlos and crew) to migrate the historical data from your spreadsheets into Scope 5. They used a batch service to upload this data and it was effortles...at least it was for me. :) I couldn't tell if our data was accurate until I was able to compare three years of data and look for outliers.
#2. Train your users over Lync by sharing your screen. I spent about 40 minutes per call with groups of users, usally organized by country or time zone. I never created a manual or used Scope 5's help. I've never seen anyone actually use a software manual. I chose Scope 5, in part, because I knew it would be easy to train (over Lync) and easy to rollout (in the cloud), and easy to use given the UI and the intuitive node navigation.
#3. If you're working with users whose main job is not environmental data collection (i.e. green teams), set your deadlines with a few months cushion. I publish our CO2 footprint to the Carbon Disclosure Project annually on May 31st. So I gave the green teams a deadline of February 28. By April, almost all of the data was in.
#4. If you have distributed teams or users entering the data, assign responsibility for following up with users to regional leaders. In my organization we have regional green team leaders who follow up with around 40 people each rather than me following up with 300 people. This has the added benefit of helping people grow their leadership and addressing issues in their local context/geography/timezone.
#5. Configure the trackers to align with the billing cycles. This probably sounds obvious, but I originally configured the trackers for annual data entry because, historically, we collected data annually. When we empowered the green teams to enter their own data in Scope 5, they prefered to enter it as the bills came in, which meant I, or they, had to edit the trackers from annual to monthly. Not a big deal, but if I were doing it over I would have configured them all as monthly to begin with, and to enter costs directly. The "zero placeholder" record was very helpful in moving from annual to monthly trackers.
#6. Don't track every possible thing in the beginning, only track what is most important/impactful. As a services company, electricity and fuel makes up most of our footprint. That is all we required to be tracked initially. Many of our green teams now track paper and water. I set up additional trackers as they express a need for them, and I keep the tracker origination and set-up as a central function for now.
#7. Use charts, reports and fatal alerts to track who still needs to enter their data. Since we started with three years of historical data for over 200 offices, I can easily see which offices haven't entered their 2012 data by looking at the fatal error lists or by generating reports for activity in 2012 and looking for zeros. The distribution reports are especially helpful because I can export them to a spreadsheet and then sort on the zeros. Then I just sort that by region and send it to the regional green team leaders to follow up with the users. On every regional dashboard I created a column chart showing the 2012 emissions by branch. These charts clearly show which branches are missing bars for 2012 because they have not entered their data yet.
Good luck and have fun!
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