How Hypertherm Associates Integrated 15 Years of Emissions Data in Less than 5 Weeks with Gravity

About Hypertherm Associates

Hypertherm Associates is a leading U.S. based manufacturer of industrial cutting products and software. Its products are used by companies around the world to build ships, airplanes, and railcars; construct steel buildings, fabricate heavy equipment, erect wind turbines, and more. In addition to cutting systems, the company creates computer numerical control (CNC) machines and software that result in increased productivity and profitability for hundreds of thousands of businesses. 

Founded in 1968, Hypertherm Associates is a 100% Associate-owned company, employing approximately 2,000 Associates, with operations and partner representation worldwide. The company aims to deliver shared value for people and for the planet, as well as for the company’s profitability.

The Challenge: A carbon management solution that fell short

Hypertherm Associates has established ambitious environmental impact reduction strategies for waste, energy, and carbon emissions to be achieved by 2030. The company’s goals include carbon neutral operations (scopes 1 & 2) and a 50% reduction in the carbon impact of its products. Sustainability reporting needs at Hypertherm Associates have also grown in recent years, including preparations to report against California’s climate disclosure rules, under which the company would disclose climate-related risks aligned with the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD).

Hypertherm Associates’ sustainability team had a third-party carbon management platform to calculate the company’s emissions, but the team ran into significant challenges. The tool was difficult to learn, integrated data slowly (with new data sometimes uploading the next day), and lacked key analysis and dashboard capabilities. The team needed a new solution that could be learned quickly and ingest data rapidly, with built-in analysis and dashboards to streamline reporting and manage progress toward sustainability goals.

The Solution: Gravity’s software platform and climate expertise

“Carbon accounting and implementing reductions is challenging enough, and nobody needs the software to stand in their way,” said Robin Tindall, Director of Environmental Stewardship at Hypertherm Associates. "Carbon management software has the potential to allay your frustration or exacerbate it, and in this case, Gravity allayed our frustration.”

Hypertherm Associates needed to find a new partner that could enable efficient data uploads, calculate emissions, generate better insights and visuals, and prepare the company to report against California’s climate disclosure rules and other frameworks. They found an answer in Gravity’s software platform and Climate Strategy team.

Driven to achieve Hypertherm Associates’ sustainability goals, the sustainability team quickly onboarded to the Gravity platform. The team began integrating data right away, drawing on the platform’s embedded guidance and supported in weekly working sessions with Gravity’s Climate Strategy team. In under five weeks, Hypertherm Associates’ effort to capture holistic and accurate historical emissions enabled the company to migrate 15 years of data comprising scope 1, 2, and 3 greenhouse gas emissions, as well as energy use, waste, and water use. The team ingested 80,000 rows of activity data from sources including utility bills, expenses, and waste disposal, leveraging Gravity’s automatic bill scanning, utility API integrations, and emissions category templates.

“Gravity creates a virtuous cycle,” said Daren Dolley, Sustainability Analyst at Hypertherm Associates. “I’m able to quickly learn how to use the platform, pull in data, and immediately see results, which gets me excited to pull in more data. In the first five weeks Gravity also launched new features I’m able to use, which is not what I’m used to - it was already easy and it just keeps getting easier.”

Unlike Hypertherm Associates’ previous tool, Gravity ingested data and calculated emissions in minutes rather than days, ensuring accurate categorization and calculation. This ensured the Hypertherm Associates team could quickly improve the accuracy of its carbon accounting, for example by identifying and resolving a quality issue in its underlying logistics data. Gravity’s climate strategists, meanwhile, used the data migration as an opportunity to review the accounting approach for each emissions category, ensuring previous methodologies were carried over and identifying opportunities to improve. In close collaboration with Gravity, Hypertherm Associates was able to achieve accurate historical emissions accounting in weeks.

The Result: Enhanced carbon accounting and disclosure readiness

Hypertherm Associates was able to successfully capture 15 years of emissions, energy, waste, and water data in less than 5 weeks with Gravity. This allowed the company’s sustainability team to capitalize on their momentum and quickly generate actionable insights they could share with other parts of their business, as well as prepare for reporting to California’s climate disclosure rules.

With historical data and customizable dashboards at its fingertips, the Hypertherm Associates sustainability team was better prepared to identify insights and engage with other teams. For example, the team has already leveraged the Dashboards product to both identify excess water usage at a manufacturing site and empower their colleagues with data around waste to landfill.  With Gravity, the company expects to uncover additional cost-saving opportunities for waste management and fuel efficiency improvements across its operations.

In the first month, Gravity’s Climate Strategy team also provided Hypertherm Associates with targeted guidance to begin work on California’s climate disclosures, aligned with the company’s ambition to provide a thorough report aligned with TCFD. The Gravity platform will accelerate the company’s disclosure efforts, providing an accurate carbon footprint across scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions. Every row of data and calculation in the carbon footprint also has full traceability to source documentation, edit history, and calculation details, which will equip Hypertherm Associates to pass any third-party audits of sustainability data.

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