Colgate-Palmolive – Jamie Lam – 2024

SummaryJamie Lam contributed to the building of a digital infrastructure for Colgate-Palmolive’s supplier climate engagement program by cleaning, validating, and collecting supplier climate data, ensuring accountable measuring and decarbonization across scopes.GoalsColgate-Palmolive has set a Net Zero Target by 2040. As part of this vision, Colgate-Palmolive must reduce 90% of their Scope 3 emissions, the majority of which are from Purchased Goods and Services. Colgate’s Global Sustainable Sourcing team has already identified the most carbon-intensive priority materials as well as their corresponding suppliers to decarbonize. The team enlisted Jamie Lam to initiate a supplier climate data migration from an internal database to a new AI-enabled platform, which can bring further transparency down the supply chain as well as provide data continuity as Colgate collaborates with suppliers to identify decarbonizing strategies.SolutionsJamie took a three-pronged approach to the data:
-Ensuring data quality. Jamie manually created a new dataset from the 20+ internal databases Colgate maintained for supplier climate data. As part of this process, Jamie cleaned, validated, and collected relevant data across indicators around suppliers’ emission reduction targets, renewable energy share, material data accuracy, and decarbonization levers such as low product carbon footprint alternatives.
-Creating data governance for continuity. Jamie then created a flow chart as a how-to guide to outline the process the Global Sustainable Sourcing team took for future data owners to understand the project process and outcomes, as well as next steps.
-Analyzing risks and opportunities. Jamie advises a pilot migration project as Colgate begins to migrate the data. Jamie has identified a testing and training set of supplier climate data and has identified a process for product feedback and program optimization.Potential ImpactJamie’s work will help Colgate-Palmolive scale up their supplier decarbonization program by providing essential digital infrastructure to 1) track supplier climate progress, 2) get primary material emission factor data, and 3) identify actionable decarbonization levers across scopes and enable climate progress.