• 0 ➔ 1 product
  • Strategy
  • Research
  • Product design

Supplier emissions pilot

Designed a new product and proposition for a higher-value customer segment, helping shippers automate supplier emissions collection and reporting in one platform.

Role
Head of Product & Design, hands-on IC
Team
Product trio (Product, Design, Engineering)
Date
2024-25
Supplier data collection request form alongside the resulting supplier email

The challenge

The challenge was to find a higher-value customer segment for Pledge and design a supplier emissions workflow we could validate through a paid pilot.

What we learned

30+
Hours of discovery
10
Countries
12
Industries

Three recurring problems shaped the product direction:

  • Supplier emissions data was fragmented across spreadsheets, PDFs and email.
  • Suppliers used inconsistent calculation methods and reporting formats.
  • Sustainability teams spent significant time manually collecting, normalising and validating data.
Discovery call research database
Selected quotes from supply chain and sustainability leaders
Customer jobs, pains and gains research mapped across themes

Choosing the product direction

The findings pointed to one opportunity: give shippers a single place to request, collect, review and report supplier emissions data.

We focused the pilot on the riskiest assumptions and the core workflow customers needed to replace spreadsheets and email.

Turning insight into a product

We designed the core journeys for requests, follow-ups, submission review and resolving missing or inconsistent data.

Making data credible

Accuracy indicators and reporting outputs helped teams assess data quality, validate submissions and share reliable results.

Fragmented supplier emissions data workflow
Identifying the pain points
Proposed connected supplier emissions product workflow
What’s the solution?

Validating the direction

We used the paid pilot to validate the proposition, workflow and data model with customers running real supplier programmes.

It confirmed demand for a central workflow and exposed the data-quality and ingestion gaps we needed to solve before wider rollout.

Supplier data collection prototype shown during a customer feedback session
Design exploration for single and aggregated emissions accuracy indicators

Defining how the product should behave

We mapped the complete supplier collection lifecycle, including states, actions, CTAs, notifications, events, failure cases and the underlying data model, to define how the product should behave before translating it into the interface.

End-to-end supplier emissions collection workflow from request through calculation, review and reporting
State diagram mapping supplier request statuses, actions and transitions
Working table mapping request statuses to calls to action, events and resulting states

Bringing the system into the product

We translated the underlying workflow into connected experiences for collecting, reviewing and reporting supplier emissions.

The system model defined the rules; the product design turned them into something teams could operate day to day.

Supplier data collection dashboard and submission activity view
Supplier collection review screen with emissions summary
Emissions dashboard showing metrics and supplier comparisons
Logistics emissions report builder and published report

Outcome

3
Committed pilot customers
1
Pilot converted into a long-term customer
Healthy pipeline
Progressing through procurement

GL Events described the value clearly: “Pledge made it easy to collect and consolidate emissions data from suppliers, saving us time and giving us clear, reliable insights into our logistics emissions.”

Pilot feedback directly shaped the product, including third-party emissions imports, supplier-level visibility, accuracy scoring and validation, and more flexible ingestion methods.