See how ctrl+s provides in-depth insights into supply chain sustainability, while protecting sensitive customer information—all through Snowflake’s powerful, scalable Data Cloud.
Sustainability is an issue at the forefront of most companies’ agendas. But in complex, sprawling supply chains, identifying where carbon impacts come from can be extremely difficult.
Headquartered in Berlin, ctrl+s is on a mission to change this. The company has combined 20+ years of consulting experience with a vast repository of carbon data to provide detailed and easily accessible supply chain insights. ctrl+s is also sharing its expertise on carbon emissions in its blog series “Talking Numbers,” with the first article taking a detailed look at emissions hotspots in the machinery and equipment sector.
“Our main focus is to make it easier for our clients by providing the data, technologies, and methodologies that simplify sustainability management in complex supply chains,” said Marcel Severith, Managing Director and Co-Founder at ctrl+s.
The company offers two products. One is a comprehensive and advanced data set of emissions factors, made up of several billion rows of data, called matter+s. This data provides a statistical overview of the carbon impacts of supply chains to help identify reduction levers and assist Scope 3 emissions reporting.
The second product, supplier+s, is an online platform that allows companies to survey their suppliers and understand how each deviates from statistical averages.
But providing these insights requires a huge amount of data, along with a platform that makes it easy to ingest, access and understand that data. To this end, the company uses Snowflake’s Data Cloud to support its data activities.
A platform fit to support wide-scale, sustainable change
Gaining insight into emissions can be problematic for any large organization, but when it comes to Scope 3 emissions—those that come from your supply chain—visibility can be a major problem.
These emissions all take place outside of your organization, and can be dependent on anything from the manufacturing processes to the transportation choices of the thousands of suppliers that can contribute to a single product.
To provide insight into these intricacies, ctrl+s uses Snowflake’s platform and its data warehouse capabilities for all of its matter+s data, providing scalable, low-effort and almost instant access to sustainability insights. This data allows companies to comprehensively assess their complex global value chains, without having to conduct tedious and time-consuming data hunting activities.
In total, the platform provides insights into 500 industry sectors across all 257 countries, and their impacts along the entire supply chain—all the way down to raw material extraction.
For supplier+s, Snowflake acts as an operational data platform, allowing customers’ suppliers to complete a 19-question survey about their own carbon reduction activities. Once these surveys are completed, ctrl+s customers can track reduction efforts across their supply chains with minimal effort. And their individual suppliers can identify the emissions hot spots to focus on next as part of their own sustainability initiatives.
This type of activity would previously have meant manually sending spreadsheets to external consultants to gain insights. But with Snowflake, customers can automatically ingest data through a modern API, and access detailed visualizations that make in-depth insights easy to understand.
Simplicity, flexibility and data privacy
Snowflake’s platform provides a range of benefits that made it suited to ctrl+s’ use case, the first of which is its breadth of capability, which allows a company still in its early stages to get everything it needs in one place.
“We really wanted to limit the number of IT providers we’re dealing with,” said Severith. “We wanted an established platform that could connect to our clients and make it easy for them to access insights. Having everything we need in one platform is really beneficial.”
Another huge benefit is that Snowflake allows ctrl+s’s customers to gain insights into their own supply chain activities without having to hand over any sensitive information—something that can be a sticking point for understandable reasons.
“A lot of our clients are really reticent about handing over data to external parties,” said Moritz Nill, Co-Founder and Managing Director at ctrl+s. “With Snowflake we’re able to provide them with our data while ensuring all their sensitive data stays within their own systems, which is a huge benefit to them.”
Above all, it’s the flexibility of Snowflake’s platform that allows ctrl+s to provide a customizable service to its clients, combining data sources in a simple, intuitive and unrestrictive way.
“With Snowflake, we don’t have to force companies into using a specific off-the-shelf software solution,” said Severith. “Our clients need to adapt their processes. And they want to integrate data from lots of different places and use lots of different tools, like Tableau and Power BI. Snowflake is able to integrate everywhere, which allows us to be incredibly flexible in the way we meet our customers’ needs.”
It was this ability to cater to specific customer requirements that led to ctrl+s developing an important part of its offering. The company’s supplier+s platform was originally developed alongside Siemens before being introduced to the broader market.
The tech giant used supplier+s to have suppliers answer specific questions about their sustainability metrics. The platform then provided data visualizations to ensure insights were not only easily accessible, but also easily digestible.
As the value of these insights was clear to both parties, the feature was then rolled out to all ctrl+s users.
A sustainable and scalable future
Still in the early stages of its Snowflake journey, ctrl+s will continue to scale and evolve its offering, exploring further features of the Snowflake Data Cloud and Snowflake Marketplace, such as the Data Clean Room, in the future.
Right now though, ctrl+s has a data platform that allows it to provide a modern, unique and simple solution to the problem of ensuring sustainability in complex supply chains. And, in turn, help some of the world’s largest organizations reduce their impacts on the planet. Plus, with matter+s now listed on Snowflake Marketplace, the company is already giving users access to a unique set of emission factors.
“Snowflake plays a central role in supporting our activities across both of our platforms,” said Nill. “Our services are all about data, so having the simplicity, flexibility and scalability of Snowflake opens the door to an exciting future.”