The Carbon Trust is a not for profit company created by the UK government to help businesses and public organisations to reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, through improved energy efficiency and developing low carbon technology.

Following our work with The Carbon Trust on a web development project, we were asked to work with them on a BI assignment. The initial brief was to build a data mart to integrate data from the transactional web application used to manage surveys with customer information from salesforce.com, and provide a mechanism to deliver information from the data mart to users via the Intranet. We recommended a solution built on the Microsoft BI platform.

Today, we have an ongoing agreement to maintain and extend the Carbon Trust data warehouse. For example, we are currently working towards integrating data from finance (Exchequer), a custom forecasting solution developed in house, and a system for managing payments to Carbon consultants managed by a third party.

The system is used not only to deliver intelligence to end users, but also to share data with other applications. For example, the data warehouse processing provides an intermediary between Salesforce and Purchase Ledger, pushing XML data into the finance application on a nightly basis.

The BI application is vital to The Carbon Trust as demonstrating Carbon savings is the purpose of the organisation. Reports are delivered to a wide range of internal and external customers, including government departments, such as DEFRA.