Learn how OneSchema helped improve the efficiency and scalability of Watershed’s customer motion.
Watershed, a sustainability platform helping enterprises measure and reduce their carbon footprint, scaled its onboarding by automating data ingestion with OneSchema. By eliminating manual spreadsheet cleaning, Watershed empowered customers to upload complex business data seamlessly, unlocking efficiency, transparency, and faster time-to-impact on climate goals.
Watershed’s mission is to accelerate the climate economy. Watershed customers use the platform to power world-class sustainability programs.
One of Watershed’s value drivers is their leading climate science team. For most companies in the world, climate science isn’t among their competencies. Each time a company wanted to measure its carbon footprint and report emissions to investors, governments, or marketing reports, they had to employ specialized climate consultants. Watershed’s promise is to navigate a world of quickly changing climate science and distill it into methodologies for translating business data into concrete emissions numbers. By using their software platform instead of consultants, companies can more effectively weave climate outcomes into their ongoing reporting and operational planning.
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To do this, customers first upload all of their business activity data to the Watershed platform. This can include datasets such as travel data, financials, supplier or vendor statements, utility data, and more. Datasets can be extremely tailored to a particular company and what they do. For example, a retail customer’s data would look different than a software company’s.
Historically, companies uploading data could enter data into the Watershed platform in one of two ways. One option was for their customers to transform and clean the data themselves until it was in a usable format before submitting it. The second was Watershed’s services team reformatting the files on behalf of the customer.
For either option, time and energy which could have otherwise been leveraged towards strategic initiatives was necessary to ingest the data.
As Watershed supported larger and larger enterprises, the number of data files from its customers grew exponentially. To address rapid customer expansion, Watershed employed a services team to clean spreadsheets for customers to ensure successful ingestion.
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To scale further, the Watershed team prioritized an initiative to automate their customer motion, transforming Watershed into a highly automated software platform. The first motions they sought to automate were data transformation and validation.
When Watershed evaluated OneSchema, they looked for two things. The first was around the data ingestion itself. One of the most durable goals of the data ingestion team was the speed of successful uploads for customers. In an ideal world, customers are focusing all their time on reporting, reducing emissions, and other strategic initiatives - not data cleaning or data ingestion. The second was around observability. Since carbon footprints are, in some cases, going into regulatory or financial reports like the 10K, it was important for Watershed to allow auditors to trace back through data lineage and see all the variables behind the calculations. That level of transparency has been crucial for enterprise customers of Watershed.
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Today, OneSchema is a core part of the user journey for Watershed customers. After Watershed clarifies templates and structures for customer data, OneSchema makes it possible to efficiently automate CSV imports to match Watershed’s target templates.
Most notably, OneSchema’s UI intuitively communicates the required formatting for their imports, which has empowered customers to proactively identify and fix issues themselves during the upload process. These types of corrections, previously invisible or burdensome to handle, can now be efficiently resolved in bulk. This shift has unlocked major efficiency gains for both customers and Watershed’s internal teams.
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Beyond data ingestion, Watershed is exploring additional internal use cases for OneSchema. Maya credits this in part to the OneSchema team’s strong user empathy when designing new workflows with the Watershed team.
In her words, “When we share a user need that we think is really important, OneSchema makes a really impressive effort to understand it, get on the phone with us if necessary to understand what our core motivation is, why it's important, and think through different options of how the flow could work.”
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Watershed, a sustainability platform helping enterprises measure and reduce their carbon footprint, scaled its onboarding by automating data ingestion with OneSchema. By eliminating manual spreadsheet cleaning, Watershed empowered customers to upload complex business data seamlessly, unlocking efficiency, transparency, and faster time-to-impact on climate goals.
Watershed’s mission is to accelerate the climate economy. Watershed customers use the platform to power world-class sustainability programs.
One of Watershed’s value drivers is their leading climate science team. For most companies in the world, climate science isn’t among their competencies. Each time a company wanted to measure its carbon footprint and report emissions to investors, governments, or marketing reports, they had to employ specialized climate consultants. Watershed’s promise is to navigate a world of quickly changing climate science and distill it into methodologies for translating business data into concrete emissions numbers. By using their software platform instead of consultants, companies can more effectively weave climate outcomes into their ongoing reporting and operational planning.
To do this, customers first upload all of their business activity data to the Watershed platform. This can include datasets such as travel data, financials, supplier or vendor statements, utility data, and more. Datasets can be extremely tailored to a particular company and what they do. For example, a retail customer’s data would look different than a software company’s.
Historically, companies uploading data could enter data into the Watershed platform in one of two ways. One option was for their customers to transform and clean the data themselves until it was in a usable format before submitting it. The second was Watershed’s services team reformatting the files on behalf of the customer.
For either option, time and energy which could have otherwise been leveraged towards strategic initiatives was necessary to ingest the data.
As Watershed supported larger and larger enterprises, the number of data files from its customers grew exponentially. To address rapid customer expansion, Watershed employed a services team to clean spreadsheets for customers to ensure successful ingestion.
{{quote-1}}
To scale further, the Watershed team prioritized an initiative to automate their customer motion, transforming Watershed into a highly automated software platform. The first motions they sought to automate were data transformation and validation.
When Watershed evaluated OneSchema, they looked for two things. The first was around the data ingestion itself. One of the most durable goals of the data ingestion team was the speed of successful uploads for customers. In an ideal world, customers are focusing all their time on reporting, reducing emissions, and other strategic initiatives - not data cleaning or data ingestion. The second was around observability. Since carbon footprints are, in some cases, going into regulatory or financial reports like the 10K, it was important for Watershed to allow auditors to trace back through data lineage and see all the variables behind the calculations. That level of transparency has been crucial for enterprise customers of Watershed.
{{quote-2}}
Today, OneSchema is a core part of the user journey for Watershed customers. After Watershed clarifies templates and structures for customer data, OneSchema makes it possible to efficiently automate CSV imports to match Watershed’s target templates.
Most notably, OneSchema’s UI intuitively communicates the required formatting for their imports, which has empowered customers to proactively identify and fix issues themselves during the upload process. These types of corrections, previously invisible or burdensome to handle, can now be efficiently resolved in bulk. This shift has unlocked major efficiency gains for both customers and Watershed’s internal teams.
{{quote-3}}
Beyond data ingestion, Watershed is exploring additional internal use cases for OneSchema. Maya credits this in part to the OneSchema team’s strong user empathy when designing new workflows with the Watershed team.
In her words, “When we share a user need that we think is really important, OneSchema makes a really impressive effort to understand it, get on the phone with us if necessary to understand what our core motivation is, why it's important, and think through different options of how the flow could work.”
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