Planet Metrics puts life cycle focus on enterprise carbon management

One thing I’m learning about the enterprise carbon accounting (ECA) software market is that not every vendor that can be lumped into this new niche focuses on tracking greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from a company’s facilities and its more directly controlled operations. Some vendors, such as Planet Metrics, take a broader life-cycle modeling approach in which the user company analyzes the extended carbon impacts upstream and downstream in its value chain.

To find out more about this vendor, I interviewed Andy Leventhal, founder and CEO of Planet Metrics. Leventhal says that while it’s a positive step that companies use ECA packages or spreadsheets to track the carbon emissions related to their facilities and directly purchased transportation, this typically represents only 10 percent of an enterprise’s total carbon footprint. The remaining 90 percent stems from the activities that take place further upstream and downstream in the supply chain.

“Our distinction is that we … manage the 90 percent of the problem that resides upstream in your supply chain,” Leventhal says. “We create packaging models, materials models, suppliers models, transportation models, and those models allow a company to really understand their full commodity-price risk exposure, and their climate-price risk exposure.”

Furthermore, says Leventhanl, the Planet Metrics solution allows users to run what-if scenarios to see what would help reduce carbon emissions in the broader value chain, while also testing the best ways to minimize risk when trends such as rising fuel costs are anticipated. “You can run scenarios, and do substitution analysis of your packaging, your materials and ingredients, or your transportation and suppliers,” he says.

Planet Metrics’ solution is offered under a software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery model. The company, says Leventhal, began two and half years ago, but the product was just recently announced. Two customers have been announced, with a total of 10 customers projects in the works, he says.

As for competing vendors, Leventhal doesn’t name another ECA start-up, but rather vendors of life-cycle assessment (LCA) tools such as SimaPro and GaBi. The difference between these tools and Planet Metrics, according to Leventhal, is that LCA tools are typically used to assess one product at time, while Planet Metrics looks at enterprise-wide impacts. Leventhal also contends that LCA tools are more geared toward scientists and technicians, whereas Planet Metrics is geared toward business users. The “power users” of Planet Metrics would typically be a cross-section of people in product management and product innovation, purchasing managers, supply chain managers, and people in the sustainability group.

Planet Metrics hasn’t developed pre-built, automated integration to product lifecycle management (PLM), enterprise resources planning (ERP), or LCA tools, but is beginning to talk to other vendors about this possibility, says Leventhal. To date, says Leventhal, users simply import some data from other systems when building the models. The main implementation focus, he adds, is getting the models right, rather than creating automated links to other systems.

Besides looking far upstream into the value chain (e.g., the carbon involved with growing crops for raw materials) for carbon impacts, the Planet Metrics solution can also model far downstream from classic product delivery–such as carbon impacts from the use of a product, or carbon impacts from reverse logistics and recycling.

Planet Metrics is an interesting vendor with its modeling of carbon emissions across the product life cycle and value chain. However, I doubt the much larger, established PLM vendors will cede carbon management modeling for product portfolios to a start up.  My bet is that there are, or will be, competing solutions in this area, or the possibility of combining carbon calculations from PLM or LCA with a solution like Planet Metrics.