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What is Catalyst Zero?
Catalyst Zero brings together McKinsey's sustainability expertise with our proven transformation experience. Our fully tech-enabled digital platform, combined with our unmatched proprietary data and expert insights, allows you to match decarbonization decisions with broader business goals. With Catalyst Zero, you can accelerate sustainable growth at every step of your sustainability journey. We can provide insights on product, asset, and company levels.
How it works
Our proven approach drives transformative decarbonization
Baseline
4-6 weeks
Baseline & assess footprint
- Rapidly understand overall carbon footprint
- Benchmark against selected peers and internally
- Prioritize focus areas (e.g., main locations, sites, products, suppliers)
Value
~2 weeks
Define abatement potential & pathways
- Develop initial view of abatement levers
- Estimate abatement potential & cost / investment needs
- High-level view on emission pathways under different scenarios
Plan
~8 weeks
Set targets & develop granular plan
- Build granular, bottom-up plan of initiatives (with detailed business case and planning)
- Prioritize and sequence initiatives
- Commit to and set targets (incl. SBTs)
Act
12 months+
Move to action & monitor progress
- Kickstart implementation and establish right governance
- Build capabilities on all levels of the organization
- Monitor progress and revise plan on an ongoing basis
What it looks like
Baseline
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- Data ingestion from all major ERPs, AI-driven supplier-harmonization and spend classification
- Baseline on company, asset & product-level using supplier location and materials spec
- Engine with 18,000+ emission factors, 70+ sector benchmarks
Value
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- Automatic selection from 5,000+ levers based on baseline
- Rapid establishment of abatement curves and pathways
- Interactively view changes in MACC based on selected levers
Plan
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- Cost & impact business cases to refine levers into initiatives and inform sequencing
- 1,000+ product cleansheets to create tailored initiatives
- Expert-led support for new initiatives design
Act
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- Proven technology for transformation management, in operation for 10+ years and with 155k active users
- Automated reporting providing full transparency and single-source of truth
- Feedback loop to reconcile progress made against target
Benefits
Faster progress
- Baselining and decarbonization across different levels (company, asset, product)
- Ability to link spend cube to deep and granular emission factor database
- Proven transformation management tools to execute at pace
Better outcomes
- Continuously updated, industry-leading emission factor database, decarbonization lever library and datasets for spend categorization
- Supplier engagement module to refine value chain emissions
- Seamless link from levers to implementation, combining CO2e abatement and cost
- Single-source of truth with dashboards and KPIs geared towards external reporting
Optional add-ons
- Ability to include internal carbon price in business cases & supplier engagement module
- Broaden scope to include other Environment, Social and Governance topics (e.g. water, waste, diversity), climate risk assessments, and market sizing for new technologies
Proven technology
- Single digital interface for great user experience
- Flexible to interact with and ingest data from existing systems
- Fully cloud-agnostic deployable, ISO 27001 certified and security-compliant
- Software architecture components used and proven by 1,000s of organizations
Catalyst Zero meets the needs of your key stakeholder groups
Sustainability Office
- Check progress per initiative versus leading KPIs and lagging KPIs
- Generate status report for board and external stakeholder (KPIs, GHGs, Financials)
- Weigh different scenarios and pathways
R&D
- Assess GHG implications of different product design choices
- Calculate business case versus impact on GHGs
Supply Chain Management
- Collect GHG product information from suppliers in a consistent way – track progress per supplier over time
- Analyze impact of different sourcing choices
Product Managers
- Set product-level decarbonization pathways, including business case
- Assess full GHG emission reduction and cost from implemented levers
Sales
- Develop sales material for specific products; GHG footprint of specific product for specific customer, plus reduction plan
- Pull data from system for streamlined responses to GHG-related-requests in RFPs
McKinsey and Microsoft are joining forces to create an integrated offering
Sustainability leadership
Industry landmark research on the Net Zero transition, advise leaders in every sector of the economy
Deep sectoral experience
Extensive experience building custom climate risk models across industries
Decarbonization applications
Industry-leading proprietary platform (i.e., Catalyst Zero that supports decarbonization transformations, including carbon baselining, decarbonization planning and pathways, initiative execution and impact monitoring)
Cloud
Cloud for Sustainability (CfS) environment for automatically capturing and processing company data (from multiple primary sources)
Integrations
Deep capabilities to integrate with external and internal data sources and systems (e.g., ERPs)
Scalable solutions
Experience supporting clients in scaling their architecture on top of Azure and in building “solutions accelerators” to support high quality enterprise-grade solutions
… that can deliver industry-shaping climate impact
Accelerate transformation
- Acceleration of decarbonization transformation deployment
- Integrations with company data infrastructure (e.g. ERP integrations, connectors with various data sources)
Automate data feeds
- Radical transparency and automation of data feeds required to monitor impact of decarbonization transformation
Scalability and conviction
- Ability to more transparently disclose with various stakeholders (including auditors for external reporting)
- Increased confidence on trajectory of impact of decarbonization transformation
Here are some client examples
Automotive player reduced carbon emissions by ~22% and material cost by 10% by identifying cost efficient levers for decarbonization and increasing usage of recycled materials
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Nearshoring strategy for a specialty retailer in Europe generated ~5% cost reduction, 10-15% leadtime reduction, and 5-10% CO2 footprint reduction
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A global player in specialty minerals announced SBTi compliant target with 80% NPV positive levers
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Pharma leader prepared for their Science Based Targets journey by Quantified Scope 3 baseline line for 15 GHG protocol categories
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By working with us, you will have access to
Experts
Our industry and functional experts will be on the ground where and when you need them.
Helpdesk
Our helpdesk will keep doors open and commit to addressing your concerns efficiently and effectively.
Training
We offer coaching and build capabilities for your teams to deliver sustained improvements.
Implementation
We partner with you and co-create a firm path to implementation as part of the project.
