OSTP moves toward CO2 emissions neutrality with Microsoft Sustainability Manager

Sustainability: A natural Nordic value

Situated in a region filled with natural beauty, Nordic-based OSTP Group manufactures welded stainless steel tubes, pipes, and fittings, necessary in industries like water treatment, construction, shipbuilding, and energy and environmental solutions. Recently OSTP’s tubular products have also been used in the EV battery giga factories. OSTP emphasizes sustainability, reflecting the cultural values of its surrounding area. “I’ve spent most of my career in the Nordic countries, where there’s a long tradition of care about the environment,” says Andrea Gatti, CEO at OSTP Group. “It was not difficult to convince our management team to be committed to sustainability. It comes naturally to them.”

The company has long worked with a sustainability roadmap to improve the sustainability work and lower their CO2 footprint. This work also makes use of the company’s broader move towards digitalization. “Digitalization comes into many aspects of our work. Our industry is very competitive and it’s clear that digitalization improves efficiency,” Gatti explains. “We wanted to utilize data to improve speed and quality for our customers, who rely on our products to perform well.”

While OSTP stainless steel products are 100 percent recyclable, steel production is a major contributor to global CO2 emissions. OSTP wanted to minimize its environmental impact and set a lofty goal. “We want to be CO2 neutral at our own sites by 2025,” says Gatti. “For us, the priority is minimizing our base footprint, and to do that, we need to measure emissions very carefully—and very accurately.”

Already, the ability to track data has helped OSTP attain dramatic results. “Since the introduction of our sustainability road map, we have seen a reduction in direct CO2 emissions from our OSTP production sites by roughly 70% between 2021 and 2023,” says Gatti. “This has been done through shifting to green electricity, replacing fuel with renewable fuel, shifting to electric vehicles, making energy savings projects, and aiming for greater efficiency in all our processes.”

The company also prioritizes compliance with the European Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). The CSRD is a mandate from the European Union requiring companies to report sustainability information in three categories: Scope 1 (direct emissions), Scope 2 (indirect emissions), and Scope 3 (upstream and downstream activities such as transportation, operational waste, and purchased goods and services). To simplify CSRD compliance for all, OSTP wants to provide its employees and customers with automated, accurate reporting on emissions data.

With these ambitious targets in view, the company needed to build a cloud-based system that could aggregate information and deliver insights quickly. “We’ve started to measure emissions and make the data transparent to our customers,” Gatti says. “That forward movement gives us a competitive edge.”

Achieving real-time emissions reporting

With the help of Microsoft partner Fellowmind, OSTP built a digital platform featuring Sustainability Manager, an Azure data platform, and other Microsoft technologies to gather and report on available CO2 emissions information. The platform utilizes Sustainability Manager to unify OSTP’s data intelligence, giving the company’s employees a comprehensive view of the impact of its operations and value chain. “Just as in sports, measuring your current performance is what allows you to improve,” Gatti says. “That’s why Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability and Sustainability Manager are so important. With their help, we can measure emissions accurately in real-time—and starting from there, we can take concrete actions to reduce our impact.”

OSTP has done a proof of concept using Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability to digitize sustainability reporting, optimizing the use of emissions data across the company and providing transparency to customers. “We’re using data to identify other areas beyond CO2 where we can reduce our environmental footprint,” says Anders Brännbacka, Operations Development Manager, Jakobstad and Digitalization Coordinator at OSTP Group. “We’re also targeting operational efficiency and see that as a synergy to drive our sustainability measures.”

Going forward, OSTP can use the flow of information to search for more efficiencies, insights, and improvements. The up-to-date stream of emissions data benefits customers, too. Because CSRD requires reporting on Scope 3 emissions, getting accurate CO2 data when they buy a product from OSTP saves time and effort in preparing emissions reports. “We want to be transparent through the whole chain so customers can see and make the right choices based on the facts,” says Jyrki Sironen, ESQ Manager Jakobstad and Sustainability Manager at OSTP.

Automation, visibility, and transparency

Automated reporting enables OSTP to spend less time collecting data and more time analyzing the current situation, empowering the company to take faster steps toward its CO2-neutral goal. “The OSTP Sustainability Manager implementation enables us to gather all the data that we need for our sustainability reporting in an automated way,” says Brännbacka. “It also allows us the possibility of applying AI to aid our decision-making to optimize our sustainability roadmap.” 

The digital platform also provides centralized visibility—so everyone from executives to frontline business workers can access the data they need.

To date, OSTP has implemented the digital platform at its production site in Jakobstad, Finland. “We are already collecting live data from our production processes, but the next steps will be to add more data sources and more transactional data to Sustainability Manager,” says Sironen. “The digital platform and Microsoft tools help optimize the process of data reporting so we can concentrate on decision making.”

The company remains committed to transparency—and uses its new flow of data to demonstrate that commitment. “In the future, we want to become more and more accurate and transparent in our reporting,” says Gatti, “and this digital platform is helping us achieve that goal.”

Find out more about OSTP Group on LinkedIn.