What are benchmarks?
Benchmarking is a tool you can use to measure your emissions against other companies, products, or emission processes in your industry. Benchmarks are a helpful tool for you to be able to compare yourself, and communicate your sustainability to your customers and stakeholders.
How can I use benchmarks?
To access your available benchmarks in Carbonhound, navigate to your Reporting page and click on the Benchmarks Tab. You will be able to create and edit your benchmarks through this page. To view your actual benchmarks against your data you can create a Benchmark report on the Reporting tab.
Read the full guide for creating, managing, and viewing your benchmarks here.
Where do benchmarks come from?
Benchmarks are created using publicly reported data from companies, these reports can be sourced from databases like CDP, or from company ESG reports. All of the benchmark sources are linked within the benchmark details.
Our methodology for Industry Average benchmarks is to aggregate verified data from publicly disclosed company data and creating an average for that region.
If you would like a custom benchmark to compare your data against you can reach out to our support team and we can create it for you.
Benchmarks & Intensity Metrics
There are two types of benchmarks: Absolute and Intensity. For Intensity benchmark types there is an Intensity Metric assigned to them so you can manage the data entry for that intensity type.
For example, if you wanted to scale your emissions by Total Employees and compare to another companies emissions by Total Employees.
All of this is possible through your benchmarking tab, if you have any questions or feedback please let us know, and if you need help with a specific part of the benchmarking journey please review our help docs on benchmarking.
How to create a benchmark
To create a benchmark navigate to your Reporting page and select the Benchmarks tab.
Click Create New
Within the dropdown browse to see which Benchmark you would like to apply to your data
Once you have selected a benchmark you will be able to see the connected categories for that benchmark, before you compare data ensure you have reported the same categories.
Click Next
Rename your benchmark if you would like
Apply the benchmark to your Collection, Location, or Business Unit of choice. Whichever collection you select will be compared to the benchmark
If you would like to compare all of your data make a collection with all of your sources.
Click next
Your benchmark has been created and you can now view that benchmark report in your Reporting tab.
Viewing my Benchmark Reports
Navigate into your Reporting tab in your Reporting page.
Select a Benchmark report type
Select which benchmark you would like to display
Select which date range you would like to see data for
Click Run Report button
View your data
Troubleshooting your Benchmark Reports
If you don’t see data for your benchmarks it’s likely you do not have intensity data for that give time period and the data might not generate.
To fix this you can navigate into your Sources page and select the Intensity Metrics
Select the Intensity Metric you would like to add data for
Add the data for the time period you are reporting on
Navigate back into your Reporting page and try to generate the Benchmarking report type again.
If you have any other issues with Benchmarking please reach out to our Customer Support team and we will ensure we get it fixed for you!