JDE Peet's wanted to embed sustainable non-financial targets into business decisions to ensure these commitments were kept top of mind. To do so, the company needed an organization-wide platform for sustainability where data is collected and harmonized, reporting is automated and analytical dashboards are available. This meant establishing a central ESG data hub for sustainability commitments that connect the siloed business operation to the value chain with sustainability data.

EPAM and JDE Peet's created a roadmap for impact management to help achieve its carbon reduction goals. As a first step and near-term win, the teams focused on developing a carbon accounting tool, which would serve as the foundation to embedding sustainability targets into business decision making.  

We created workshops to help facilitate discussion around ‘what good looks like’ not just from a sustainability perspective but also in the ways the teams collaborated. From these workshops, teams were educated on agile ways of working, or cross-functional, self-organizing entities that can define, build and test the sustainable features or data products. By applying basic principles and agile best practices, the team can create value every two weeks. Additionally, the business units were able to define their requirements for data management analytics to gain transparency and be more equipped to manage sustainability goals.

As EPAM’s data analytics and consulting teams heard from JDE Peet's about its sustainability goals, we leveraged one of our key methodologies – backcasting — to help bring this vision to life. Starting with the ideal future state, we worked backwards to current state and what products and platforms should be developed to help get to that vision. Through this exercise, we determined that a near-term win would be adding carbon accounting as an integrated monitoring KPI in 2023. Carbon accounting is the beginning of the journey for JDE Peet's to move to activity-based reporting, which would include sustainability commitments tracking. 

An example of this type of data source could be the green coffee data about the country of origin or weights in finished products.

Then, we calculate from highly granular data up to a SKU based on sales quantities of finished goods – meaning overhead carbon emissions calculated on emission category level and then proportionally allocated to all SKUs sold. An example here would be packaging data from product specifications about composition of materials and weights.

With carbon accounting in place, JDE Peet's can begin leveraging margin financial and non-financial metrics to evaluate business performance.