Iconic Kiwi home improvement brand Mitre 10 has been a cornerstone of Kiwi DIY and home improvement since 1974, with a reputation for serving and supporting communities across Aotearoa. As part of its extensive sustainability commitments, Mitre 10 created a dashboard using Microsoft Power BI that’s making it easier for its stores to manage emissions and empower members to make meaningful progress towards its local and national sustainability targets.
As a co-operative with a real community focus, Mitre 10 has made a strong commitment to sustainability, taking action across its 84 stores and national support centre to reduce its impact on the environment and meet ambitious FY30 and FY35 waste and emissions goals. The business has supported many environmental causes, from Project Takahē and Trees That Count to leading numerous product stewardship schemes to reduce the waste going to landfill across the country.
Customers can recycle a wide range of materials through Mitre 10 stores, from plastic plant pots and batteries to lightbulbs, polystyrene, timber and paint. To meet its targets, Mitre 10 introduced a number of sustainability initiatives at both the national and regional level, but tracking progress across stores was proving difficult.
Being a co-operative of independent stores, each with their own operating conditions and priorities and budgets, there was a need to make sustainability reporting across the network easy and transparent so it could track performance as a whole and help individual stores meet targets.
“As a co-operative, we can’t mandate members to change their vehicles in the next three years, for example. It’s up to them to make the decision on behalf of their business. We needed an easy way to bring everyone on the journey with us,” explains Julie Roberts, Head of Sustainability at Mitre 10.
With stores responsible for their own waste diversion initiatives, solar or EV investments, as well as water and energy use monitoring, the challenge was to create a system that not only tracked this data but empowered store operators to make smarter, eco-friendly decisions.
“We’re committed to reducing our environmental impact as a business, but without measuring and tracking our outputs, we can’t actively set goals to manage and reduce that impact,” says Julie. “Our thinking is, what gets measured gets monitored. And if you can monitor it, you can manage it.”
Encouraging healthy co-opetition through transparency
To address this challenge, Mitre 10 decided to leverage Microsoft Power BI – a suitable and scalable platform that easily integrated with their existing Microsoft Azure ecosystem – and develop a custom sustainability dashboard. It was a serious undertaking that had to be designed to fit Mitre 10’s complex operations. The dashboard needed to reflect every store’s sustainable transition plans, tracking all of Mitre 10’s product stewardship schemes, data on measures such as electricity, water, waste, and vehicles/machinery, and local initiatives from each store.
Because the co-operative’s sustainability initiatives are constantly evolving in line with new opportunities, the dashboard needed to be easy to update by Mitre 10’s sustainability team, allowing for ongoing additions and incorporation of feedback and upgrades.
“Being able to own our own data was really important to us. We didn’t want to outsource the information to someone else to manage,” says Julie.
The key to successful implementation of the dashboard was making it accessible to every store in the network. “We wanted to create an opportunity for friendly ‘co-opetition,’ making everything transparent so everyone could see how everyone else was performing against their sustainability targets and get inspired to do more, sooner,” Julie explains.
Visual dashboard a “gamechanger”
In 2023, the dashboard went live. And, says Julie, “Having a centralised dashboard to track and visualise our sustainability efforts has been a gamechanger.”
As well as their own individual results, and those of other stores, Mitre 10 members can now see a graph that shows them at a glance how they’re progressing against the network’s targets and what their impact has been on the co-operative’s collective goals.
Stores now have a clear view of their environmental impact in one place, enabling store operators to take meaningful action to reduce waste, lower energy consumption and make their operations more sustainable. Since implementation, the increased measurement and management through the dashboard has led to some impressive economic savings and tangible improvements in sustainability outcomes.
Mitre 10 saw scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions fall by 199.42 tCO2e on the previous year (comparing FY24 V FY23). Stores have seen a noticeable reduction in energy usage by using the dashboard to track power consumption and identify areas for improvement. Waste diversion efforts have also been enhanced, with stores monitoring waste streams and spotting where more could be recycled.
“Using Microsoft, Mitre 10 store operators have been empowered to make better choices in their sustainability practices and see their efforts reflected month-to-month. It’s a visual indicator of how they’re tracking. It shows what would happen to their emissions if they didn’t do anything, versus if they took certain steps, extended out to FY35. It also gives the support office sustainability team visibility of which stores need more support at a click. There’s no need to sort through spreadsheet,” Julie says.
The visual nature of the dashboard makes it easy for store operators to engage with the data and share progress with their teams. It’s also made audits and reporting significantly easier, saving time and improving accuracy.
“We’re thrilled to see Microsoft technology empowering workers to make a positive change not just for Kiwi employers like Mitre 10, but which benefits the community as well,” says Vanessa Sorenson, Managing Director, Microsoft New Zealand. “Huge kudos to Julie and the Mitre 10 team for what they’ve created. This project is a great example of how what could be dense, dry data can be leveraged in creative ways to inspire new behaviours, save costs, and do more for the planet.”
Evolving for the future
With a goal of continuous improvement, Mitre 10 is exploring ways to enhance the dashboard even further. Future updates could include integrating generative AI to suggest sustainability initiatives directly to store operators to help reduce emissions, enabling them to make even smarter decisions.
Mitre 10 also plans to expand the range of data tracked by the dashboard, potentially incorporating more granular environmental metrics that could drive deeper insights into each store’s operations, especially as Mitre 10 is aiming to address scope 3 emissions across its whole supply chain. This will allow for even greater innovation as the dashboard continues to mature and adapt to evolving business needs.
“Ultimately, we’re trying to reduce the friction for our stores and make being sustainable easy for them. We’re excited to see how this tool will evolve, and we’re continually collecting feedback on what other improvements members want us to make – the engagement has been fantastic,” says Julie.