IBM Envizi and Microsoft Sustainability Manager: where the supplier data comes from

Both of these are systems of record. IBM Envizi describes itself as a solution for ESG data that combines analytics, reporting and planning; Microsoft Sustainability Manager describes itself as an extensible solution that unifies data intelligence for sustainability management. Neither of them ships a database of emissions for the companies you buy from, and both say so, in their own documentation, if you read the calculation pages rather than the product pages.

That is not a criticism. It is the architecture, and it decides what you still have to go and find. DitchCarbon provides verified emissions data for over 2 million organisations, so procurement, sustainability and finance teams can measure and act on supply chain and portfolio emissions from one source.

Do either of them hold emissions data on your suppliers?

Only what your suppliers have already sent them, and that distinction is the one that reorganises a shortlist. Both platforms store supplier-specific figures perfectly well. Neither arrives with any. A store and a source behave completely differently on the day you go live, and the difference does not close over time so much as it depends entirely on how much of other people's time you can command.

Every supplier-specific figure in either system got there because somebody at that supplier filled in a form. That is worth stating plainly, because both products are described in language that makes the platform sound like the origin of the data rather than the container for it.

IBM Envizi. Supply Chain Intelligence captures supplier and product-level transaction data, integrated from ERP and financial accounting systems, and its calculation engine applies what IBM calls the best available method: spend-based, average, hybrid or supplier-specific. Supplier-specific figures exist in the system once a supplier has supplied them. IBM's own documentation describes the route: organisations send priority suppliers a survey to provide product carbon footprint data, and send them a survey to provide total corporate emissions and revenue. Nothing in IBM's published material describes a pre-existing dataset of named-company emissions.

Microsoft Sustainability Manager. Scope 3 is calculated from activity data the customer stores in the platform. Categories 1 and 2 default to the spend-based method: cost multiplied by an emission factor, against EPA commodity codes, using 2018 EPA supply chain factors with a currency and inflation adjustment. Category 15, financed emissions, uses the PCAF attribution formula, where the investee company's emissions figure is an input the customer supplies. The one third-party supplier dataset Microsoft names is EcoVadis, and Microsoft is precise that it is ratings data covering environment, labour and human rights, ethics and sustainable procurement. A rating is not a tonnage.

So on both platforms, on day one, your Category 1 number is your spend multiplied by a sector factor. Every supplier in a category carries the same intensity, which completes a report and settles nothing about which supplier to call. The figure becomes supplier-specific only for the suppliers who answer.

Which makes the survey the load-bearing part of the whole architecture, and it is the weakest available method of getting data at scale. It works on the counterparties you can actually lean on, which is usually the large, engaged, already-disclosing end of the list, and it is precisely there that you needed it least, because those organisations have generally published something already. Down the tail, where the coverage gap really sits, a survey is a request for unpaid work from a company that has no reason to prioritise it. The response rate is the ceiling on the whole programme.

What do they ask your suppliers to do?

Both have a native collection capability, and both are honest that it is a survey.

Envizi's sits inside Supply Chain Intelligence: a centralised portal for collecting corporate emissions, product carbon footprints, emissions targets and ESG risk data, with dashboards for tracking engagement levels against PCF data requests. Worth knowing that Envizi has a second, separate module called Surveys and Assessments, which is for internal stakeholders rather than suppliers. The two are easy to conflate from the module list.

Microsoft's is the ESG value chain solution, and it is a Premium feature. It has two parts: a value chain data hub inside Sustainability Manager where you initiate invitations and surveys, and a Power Pages portal template you deploy to request data from suppliers. Setting it up is a Power Platform exercise — installing the Microsoft for Sustainability Supplier Engagement solution from the admin centre, the enhanced data model, and Dataverse and Outlook connections wired up before a survey can be emailed. Premium includes capacity for 2,000 authenticated Power Pages users, and beyond that you buy more.

The constraint on both is the same, and it is not the software. It is that a supplier's sustainability team is usually one or two people, and every buyer running its own programme asks them the same questions in a slightly different order. Time spent on the fifteenth version of the same form is time not spent cutting emissions. Any model that has to ask a supplier before it knows anything about them adds to that queue, whoever is running it.

DitchCarbon starts from what organisations have already published, so for a great many of them no request is needed at all: you can rank the spend by embodied emissions, calculate the baseline and start acting before anyone is contacted. Where a figure does need improving, the request goes out prepopulated with what that organisation has already published and addressed to the named sustainability contact rather than a generic inbox, so they review and correct rather than compile. A four-step maturity ladder sorted against embodied emissions decides who is worth asking.

Which emission factors does each one use, and when?

Neither publishes a total count, which is the right instinct, because a factor count is not a differentiator. Nor, it turns out, is the source list. The middle column below is the one everybody can fill in and it is very nearly the same everywhere. The column that decides what your number is made of is the last one.

Compiled August 2026 from each vendor's own documentation.

Read across that last column and the shortlist question changes shape. It is not which factors a platform holds, because they all hold much the same ones. It is where in the order it reaches for one, and how much of your baseline ends up there.

On both of these platforms a generic factor is the starting position and stays the answer for every supplier who has not replied. On DitchCarbon it is the last resort after three more specific methods have been tried, and because the method is recorded per organisation you can count the difference rather than argue about it. Ask any vendor to show you that proportion on your own list. A platform that cannot produce the number is telling you something by not having it.

How do the three compare?

Table compiled August 2026 from each vendor's public documentation. Capabilities change, so check the current position with any vendor before a decision.

Can you run DitchCarbon alongside either of them?

Yes, and unlike some comparisons on this site, that is the honest answer rather than a diplomatic one. Both of these are systems of record for the corporate inventory and the disclosure, and neither builds its own supplier emissions dataset. That is precisely the shape of platform a data layer sits underneath.

Microsoft has built for it explicitly. Sustainability Manager runs on the Microsoft for Sustainability data model in Dataverse, which is extensible; Microsoft publishes named data provider connectors, supports Power Query and Excel imports, and documents how a partner builds an import connector and distributes it privately or through Microsoft Marketplace. Third-party emissions data landing in Dataverse and feeding the calculation is a documented pattern, not a workaround.

Envizi's ingestion is broad, pulling from ERP systems, IoT and metering platforms, utility providers, spreadsheets and supplier portals. IBM's Emissions API points the other way, letting developers and ISVs embed Envizi's emissions calculation in their own applications, so it is IBM's factors going out rather than third-party company data coming in. There is no named emissions-data partner published for Envizi, which makes the integration route a conversation rather than a documented connector.

Run either way, the effect is the same: Category 1 and Category 2 stop resting on sector averages, the reporting stack you have already implemented does not change, and the suppliers who were never going to answer a survey still carry a figure. Run on its own, DitchCarbon is the platform. Measure the organisations you buy from or invest in, engage them for better information, forecast against their own targets, then track performance at counterparty, group, account or portfolio level.

What happens once the baseline exists?

A baseline nobody acts on is an expensive spreadsheet, and this is the half of a shortlist that usually goes unexamined because every vendor's demo stops at the dashboard.

Forecasting and targets

The forecast runs each organisation's actuals forward on a two-year and a five-year trend to 2050, and draws alongside them the trajectory that organisation's own stated target requires. The gap between trend and trajectory is the answer. Where the underlying Scope 3 reporting has missing years, large swings or patterns suggesting a reporting change rather than a real movement, a notice sits above the chart telling you to treat it with caution, linked to the disclosure it was built from.

Worth stating rather than blurring: forecasting is projection rather than measurement, and the UL Solutions verification that covers the calculator does not extend to it. What is projected is the organisation's own reported history carried forward.

Targets sit in a register rather than a badge, each carrying its scope, on-track status, base year, target year, reduction rate and source, with SBTi-validated targets separated from self-declared ambitions and the original wording quoted. Across a portfolio, SBTi progress can be weighted by embodied emissions, by spend or by count, and the three give different answers: weighted by count a portfolio can look poor while the organisations carrying most of the footprint are all committed.

Deciding what to do about it

Every organisation and emissions category is ranked by the share of your total footprint that acting on it would move, each line carrying a realistic reduction percentage, the tonnes behind it, and a named peer already reducing at that rate, drawn from that peer's own published report rather than generated. Every organisation also carries a score from 0 to 100 against its industry benchmark, broken down across six groups naming each criterion, its weight, the points earned and the source consulted. Filtering to the unearned criteria turns a scorecard into the engagement list.

Which of these publishes independent verification of the calculation?

Neither Envizi nor Sustainability Manager does, and both publish something adjacent that is easy to mistake for it. This distinction is worth spending a paragraph on because it decides what you can put in front of an auditor.

Take Microsoft's list at face value, because it is a good one and it is published openly, which is more than most vendors manage. Then notice what it covers. Those are audits of the infrastructure and the process. None of them examines whether an emissions figure is calculated correctly. IBM's Built on GHG Protocol mark is a conformance recognition for an accounting resource, not a third-party review of software. And a phrase like verifiable by external auditors means someone else's auditor could check the output, not that anyone has checked the engine.

The three things get blurred constantly in this market: verification of a vendor's calculation, assurance of your inventory by your auditor, and a security certification. Only the first is something a vendor can show you before you buy.

DitchCarbon is the only specialist Scope 3 tool with third-party assurance of its calculation methodology, and was the first company to earn UL Solutions' Sustainability Information Calculator Verification, in June 2025. The full working, including every vendor checked and the evidence for each, is in our benchmark, Who's really verified? A reality check on carbon software assurance. The underlying documents are downloadable from the DitchCarbon trust centre.

Ask any vendor on your shortlist for the declaration itself, not a page that says audit-ready. Audit-ready without a named verifier and a named standard is marketing.

What do they cost?

Microsoft publishes list prices, which is unusual enough to be worth using. Sustainability Manager Essentials is 4,000 US dollars per tenant per month and covers Scope 3 categories 1 to 9, 12 and 13. Premium is 12,000 US dollars per tenant per month and adds the rest of Scope 3, the ESG value chain solution, product carbon footprint management, the IEA factor library and Copilot.

Two things the headline price does not include. Microsoft's licensing documentation states that customers require two SKUs: the tenant-level Sustainability Manager SKU and a user-level SKU for each user, and the per-user price is not published. And a footnote notes that certain features require Azure meters and other Microsoft licences such as Microsoft 365 and Power BI. Budget the tenant price as a floor.

IBM does not publish prices. Envizi is tiered by data volume expressed in Accounts, from up to 1,000 through to 5,001 and above, with a calculator giving what IBM describes as an indicative number that is not a formal offer.

Neither of those is a criticism, and both are normal for enterprise software. The reason to raise it on a page like this is that the implementation is usually the larger number, and it is the one nobody quotes.

What if you are the supplier being asked?

Many companies reading a page like this are on both sides of the request. You are measuring your own suppliers, and a customer is asking you for the same thing, quite possibly through one of the portals described above.

If that is you, your DitchCarbon profile is already there and already carries your published reports, listed by year with the assurance status found for each scope. Claiming it lets you correct what we hold, add reports or certifications by drag and drop, and answer the questions buyers ask most often once, so any logged-in viewer from another organisation reads the same answer rather than emailing you for it. A disclosure to-do list shows year by year what we hold on you, marked complete or partial, and names the categories buyers expect but cannot find. There is no fixed form, a file in whatever format you already hold is accepted, and it is free. Claim your profile.

How do you check this before you commit?

The question that settles it is not which platform reports better. Both of these report well, and if you are already running Microsoft or IBM across the business there are good reasons the answer is one of them.

The question is what your Category 1 number is made of on the day you go live, and how much of it stays that way. Take a real sample of your suppliers, weighted the way your spend is weighted so the tail is properly represented, and ask each vendor three things: how many of these can you give me a company-specific figure for today, before any supplier is contacted; where did each figure come from; and what happens to the ones nobody answers for.

Run the test on us at the same time. DitchCarbon will do it free: send a sample of your supplier list to the coverage check and you get back what already exists for each organisation, the source behind every figure, and the gaps marked rather than filled in quietly.

DitchCarbon will show you what it already holds on your list, with the source and change history behind every figure. Numbers you can defend within 2 weeks.

Last reviewed August 2026.