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Carbon Analytics Platform for a Vehicle Fleet
World Health Organisation
Leveraging advanced analytics to help track and reduce emissions.
The World Health Organisation’s (WHO) Fleet Services operates a fleet of vehicles that aims to support their programmes in a safe, cost-effective and sustainable way. The fleet team is tasked with monitoring the activities that deliver aid globally that comprise journeys of various load and length.
The WHO participates in the UN-wide Greening the Blue Initiative to transition towards greater environmental sustainability in its operations. As part of this initiative the Organisation continually measures, reports on and analyses its fleet’s carbon emissions globally.
The entire project was enabled by TerraMar’s fleet management technology that provided the vital datasets the solution was to be based on.
What we did
The Challenge
The World Health Organisation (WHO) Fleet Services wanted to improve reporting on carbon emissions from its global vehicle fleet, specifically understanding data quality issues and gaps.
As its fleet of land vehicles contributes a significant part to its global emissions, the Organisation was interested in getting a closer look at the data from a current data analytics best practice perspective to be able to draw additional insights.
The consumers of the final product would include data practitioners and key stakeholders involved in tracking and optimising land fleet carbon emissions.
Interactive solution for relevant insights
The WHO had been collecting data from journeys since 2018 but had only been tracking fuel consumption since 2020. Therefore, there were data quality issues and inconsistencies that we needed to handle to enable them to make the most accurate estimate across the entire fleet.
The team at the WHO had access to a large dataset provided by TerraMar. They were interested in an intuitive analytics solution that would also be data-science enabled, allowing users to develop it further using Python as their approach to carbon emission reporting and analysis evolves.
Infinite Lambda set out to design and implement an interactive solution that would enable WHO’s Fleet Services to access up-to-date insights on its carbon emissions.
SQL-based stack to connect data and deliver advanced reporting
We started by assembling a team and assessing tools in order to select the most efficient stack for the project.
Our analytics engineers put together an SQL-based stack that would connect all data sources and support data processing. We chose a tool called Hex for building the application, which can connect directly to a variety of databases – in our case, Snowflake. Hex’s unique feature is ‘chained SQL’, a series of successive data transformations that can be created, linked, and visualised. It was important to be able to illustrate how different methodological approaches and constraints had been applied at each stage in the process. We also made sure the solution we built was data science enabled, allowing the user to develop using Python on top of the application at a later point should the need arise.
[Visualising the dependencies between each piece of analytic code in HEX ]
We built a solution that allowed users to log in, apply filters and access the reports they needed. It enables key stakeholders to explore the data on their own, independent of internal data management and reporting processes and timelines.
[A simple interactive application built in Hex ]
When it came to the period that had no emissions data tracked, the solution would allow for improved estimates to fill in the gaps.
Finally, the stack we selected checked all of the boxes regarding functionalities but also considered the client’s requirements for flexibility and immediate deployment.
The technology we useD
Transparently Tracking and Reporting on Fleet Emissions
We designed and delivered a solution to enable the World Health Organisation to explore and analyse the carbon emissions generated by their fleet in a more flexible format.
The reports and application cover all land vehicles and all countries where the WHO operates vehicles. The app allows data consumers to filter by country, compare emissions among vehicles and perform detailed drill-downs within the data sets.
We always build with the user in mind and this project is no exception. Here, reports show how calculations are done for ultimate transparency. Stakeholders can easily stay on top of data quality corrections and understand why a certain methodology has been applied. The data analysts on the client’s side benefit from this commitment to transparency and are able to verify the approach. This contributes to trust in data without overcomplicating the solutions itself.
This way, stakeholders can go as granular as they need for the purposes of their analyses and perform the comparisons that would help them draw emissions insights to support their sustainability objectives.
The carbon analytics solution we built for the World Health Organisation Fleet Services can easily be applied to similar cases, as long as raw data is available in a SQL-based warehouse.
We would like to thank TerraMar for facilitating this project and providing valuable data access. It is their remarkable technology that enabled our work and was key for the WHO’s sustainability team’s efforts to improve carbon tracking.
[Users generating additional analysis and visualisations of their choice ]
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We have helped over 50 organisations to deliver projects at different scales with over £100m in ROI.
We have helped over 50 organisations to deliver projects at different scales with over £100m in ROI.
