How Michels Measured 3 Years of Emissions in 6 Weeks with Gravity

About Michels Corporation

Established in 1959 in Brownsville, WI, Michels Corporation is an international leader in energy and infrastructure construction. Through organic growth, strategic acquisitions, and an understanding of its customers’ current and future needs, Michels has expanded into the civil, energy, energy transition and renewables, foundations, marine, mission critical, transportation, and water and wastewater industries.

Michels Corporation and its subsidiaries (“Michels”) are supported by 10,000 people, 18,000 pieces of heavy equipment, more than 60 offices in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe. In 2025, Michels was named the 38th largest contractor on the Engineering News-Record (ENR) Top 400 list.

With Michels’ scale – spanning diesel, gasoline, natural gas, and on-site renewable energy generation – emissions data management is a significant operational undertaking.

‍

The Challenge: Spreadsheet-based, manual carbon management

For years, Michels tracked emissions the way many large companies do―manually, in spreadsheets, stitching together data from multiple sources across an organization that changes constantly. Fleet and fuel data come from several separate departments and processes, and utility bills from across dozens of sites in different formats and units. International operations added billing cycles and language barriers on top of that. The Michels Sustainability Team has deep institutional knowledge, but the process of pulling everything together for reporting was painful and slow.

With pressure mounting from customer requests and sustainability assessments, as well as emerging reporting obligations in international markets for energy management, Michels needed to build a credible, repeatable emissions reporting system. They came to Gravity with a clear goal: complete Scope 1 and Scope 2 coverage for historical United States and Canadian operations for 2025, with an internal deadline in less than 6 weeks.

From the outset, Michels treated this as a three-way partnership – business, IT, and platform – where each brought something the others couldn’t. Michels’ Sustainability Team, led by Anne Allen, Director of Environment and Sustainability, brought deep knowledge of emissions sources, historical data, and carbon accounting practices. Michels’ IT organization, led by Lisa DeSanctis, Director of Core Enterprise & IT Services, brought project discipline, data governance, and technical oversight – assigning a dedicated project manager to establish delivery cadence, issue tracking, and escalation paths so an aggressive timeline never came at the cost of data integrity. And Gravity brought the automation engine that turned clean inputs into audit-ready outputs in minutes instead of months. A strong Environmental and Sustainability Analyst paired with an equally strong Business IT Systems Analyst anchored the day-to-day work, validating source system outputs against enterprise data standards and ensuring the solution met Michels’ security and audit requirements. None of the three could have delivered this result alone. Together, they turned what had been a manual, months-long reporting burden into a six-week sprint with results the organizations could stand behind.  

‍

The Solution: Automated calculations and AI utility bill scanning

Gravity and Michels started by jointly mapping Scope 1 and 2 emission sources to make data ingestion seamless. Before any data was uploaded, Gravity and Michels configured 39+ sites with meter-level emission sources, established naming conventions across fuel types and subsidiary companies, and connected the dots between what Michels already knew about their operations and what the Gravity platform needed to compute their carbon footprint.

The Michels team did their homework. They invested effort upfront in reconciling their source data, rationalizing their organizational hierarchy, and deciding how to handle longstanding accounting questions they had never been forced to resolve before. That preparation paid off on the platform―when data went in, the results came back in seconds, and Gravity’s automated validation was done in minutes because inputs were clean and Gravity’s audit-ready system made outputs transparent.

Gravity’s AI bill scanning handled utility invoices across sites and formats, including tests for German-language invoices. Automatic routing of utility bills and duplicate detection meant the team could upload with confidence rather than babysitting each file. For data gaps, Gravity implemented an estimation methodology aligned with the team’s historical practice. All estimates were fully documented and auditable.

“I’d be lying to you if I told you we weren’t basically running up and down the hallway from excitement. We put everything into the system, compared it to what we had, and it panned out.”
~ Anne Allen, Director of Environment and Sustainability, Michels Corporation

‍

The Results: Fast, audit-ready, and actionable measurement

Michels moved so quickly they expanded their goal of measuring 2025 emissions to include 2023 and 2024 as well, finishing in only 6 weeks and ahead of their March 31 deadline. Michels now has a Scope 1 and Scope 2 footprint they can stand behind, with full traceability from raw source data to final emissions figures.

The speed and reliability of the results came from clear ownership: Sustainability owned emissions decisions, IT owned delivery discipline and data quality, and Gravity accelerated execution through automation.  

“A big part of the success was that Gravity was easy to use, but we also really took the time to ask: What data do we have? Why do we have it structured like this? What can we be doing to improve our processes with Gravity? And once everything got into the system, it was wonderful to see how easy it was. All we could think was ‘did we just upload all of that data and get it validated within minutes? This can’t be this good.’”
~ Anne Allen, Director of Environment and Sustainability, Michels Corporation

Michels came out of the exercise with dashboards breaking down Scope 1 and Scope 2 by operating entity, year-over-year trends, and unit conversions requested by different reporting audiences. For a corporation that previously did all the work in spreadsheets, the shift was significant. The data and processes that used to be a reporting burden can now become an operational tool to inform energy management and decarbonization projects.

With Scope 1 and Scope 2 complete, Gravity will continue as the platform of record as Michels’ reporting program matures, supporting additional data categories, future reporting cycles, and regulatory requirements across the jurisdictions where Michels operates.

‍