Last month Scope 5 launched an integration with Concur, the leading provider of integrated travel and expense management solutions.
As you can imagine, the announcement generated tremendous interest. This blog summarizes answers to frequently asked questions about the integration of Scope 5 with Concur.
Does the announcement with Concur pertain only to air travel, or to the entire trip?
The partnership with Concur allows us to easily capture, on behalf of customers, reliable activity data for all transportation modes. Although this release focuses on innovations for air travel, Scope 5 already tracks and normalizes all forms of mobile combustion emissions for customers, including air, rail, ferry, and road, such as public, private, rental cars, and employee commute. This Concur partnership overcomes a major barrier: businesses are not able to easily collect reliable data for these activities.
Many of our customers have focused primarily on air travel because it often has the highest per-trip emissions. However, the ability to automatically collect travel activity data for additional modes of transport means that customers can understand the emissions impact of each, and make smarter, more informed choices that reduce overall trip emissions.
How does the integration work exactly?
Concur sources raw activity data like origin airport, destination airport, and a class of travel. Scope 5 then applies industry-standard best practices and emissions factors from authorities such as DEFRA, IPCC, EPA, and WRI to calculate emissions.
Scope 5 maintains collected activity data (and calculated emissions) over time and categorizes the data by multiple attributes. Now customers can analyze their business travel emissions, and identify trends both over time and by categories such as business unit, geographies, class-of-travel, and common origin/destination city pairs.
Scope 5 is continually working to surface sustainability data in a way that gives customers choices that they can act upon. As we continue to enhance this offering, expect to see differentiation based on such parameters as the time of travel, airline, and vessel, even specific flights.
If someone expenses a flight and a taxi as part of the trip, how does it calculate carbon footprint?
Performing these types of calculations is our area of expertise. Scope 5 first converts each leg of your travel data to activity data (such as miles traveled, vehicle type, fuel consumed, etc.), extrapolating where information is missing. Scope 5 then categorizes the data and then applies industry-standard emissions factors. For further detail on Scope 5’s handling of this kind of activity, check out the Featured Articles on our Resources page.
Do companies download Scope 5 from the Concur App Center?
Scope 5 functionality is not available within the Concur platform. It does not require a download. Concur customers would contract with Scope 5 directly for the service, and they would access it through the cloud. All they would do in the Concur app center is click to authorize Scope 5 to pull their travel data from Concur.
What should I do next?
If your company uses Concur and has a meaningful sustainability initiative, then leveraging Scope 5’s integration means you can make a positive business impact overnight by moving to the forefront of emissions calculation technology.
You can learn more about Scope 5’s cloud-based software solution for improving environmental and economic impacts by visiting us on the web.