athenahealth – FNU Nazeera Jabin – 2025
Summary
Nazeera Jabin played a pivotal role in advancing athenahealth’s sustainability efforts by designing and implementing a strategic supplier engagement pilot aimed at understanding where the opportunities are to influence Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions within the company’s supply chain. Her work focused on creating a comprehensive scoring matrix to evaluate supplier sustainability performance, segmenting suppliers by their emissions impact and readiness to engage. This led to the creation of a tiered supplier engagement strategy, aligned with industry best practices and science-based targets.
Goals
As a major portion of athenahealth’s environmental footprint arises from Scope 3 emissions related to purchased goods and services, the fellowship set out to address the significant challenge of improving supply chain transparency and sustainability performance. The goal was to engage high-impact suppliers to collect accurate baseline emissions data and assess their sustainability maturity, enabling athenahealth to formulate a prioritized, data-driven supplier engagement strategy. This effort aligns with broader corporate ESG priorities and aims to identify levers for decarbonization through the supply chain.
Solutions
Nazeera led a multi-faceted approach, starting with identifying and prioritizing 33 suppliers based on combined spend and emissions. She designed a survey capturing data on governance, disclosures, targets, and engagement readiness. Results were integrated with stakeholder insights and benchmarking to build a weighted scoring matrix across six metrics: spend, emissions, strategic importance, data availability, engagement readiness, and sustainability signals. This enabled categorization of suppliers into three tiers’Leaders, Emerging, and Followers’each with distinct engagement pathways. Her approach included analyzing emissions data with external verification to close gaps, proposing tailored plans for high-impact suppliers, and supporting others with training, incentives, and reporting tools. She drew from programs like Walmart’s Project Gigaton, Microsoft, and Unilever to adapt proven frameworks, while collaborating with procurement, legal, and ESG teams to identify opportunities to embed sustainability into core processes.
Potential Impact
The fellowship established a scalable framework to extend engagement across a broader supplier base, proposing plans for custom supplier engagement that would strengthen supplier capacity and embed sustainability in the procurement process. A tiered engagement model ensures data-driven, measurable climate efforts to maximize potential across the supply chain. The framework aligns with Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) and investor expectations, positioning athenahealth for long-term climate leadership. The pilot achieved a 74% supplier response rate demonstrating strong readiness for collaboration. This work created a collaborative platform internally and across the supplier ecosystem, positioning athenahealth for continued growth in their climate beyond the fellowship.
