Ekinops cuts carbon reporting time from weeks to hours with Sweep

Background 

Ekinops is a French mid-market company of approximately 600 employees that develops telecommunications equipment and cybersecurity solutions for telecom operators and enterprises.

Listed on Euronext since 2013, the company has progressively embedded sustainability into its business operations, driven by a combination of regulatory requirements and genuine internal conviction.

As a publicly traded company subject to CSRD wave 1 reporting, Ekinops recently published its second sustainability report covering the 2025 financial year.

The company has been measuring and disclosing greenhouse gas emissions annually since 2021, following the GHG Protocol framework across Scopes 1, 2 and 3.

Ekinops’ total emissions (scope 1, 2 and 3) reduction targets are:

• -33% GHG emissions by 2030 (baseline: 2023)
• -53% GHG emissions by 2050 (baseline: 2023)
  (Trajectory aligned with a +2°C warming scenario)

Beyond climate action, Ekinops has prioritized diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives as core pillars of its sustainability strategy.

The company’s sustainability commitments are shaped by multiple stakeholder pressures: clients in Europe who represent 70-75% of revenue increasingly weight ESG criteria in procurement decisions, sometimes by up to 20%. Additionally, reference shareholder Bpifrance actively promotes sustainability among its portfolio companies. Meanwhile, Ekinops’ banking partners have indexed interest rates on growth financing to ESG performance indicators.

Challenge

Before adopting Sweep, Ekinops managed sustainability data through a fragmented, manual process that created significant operational burdens and business risks.

Activity data for the carbon footprint was collected through Excel spreadsheets scattered across the organization. Employee commuting information, a material Scope 3 category, was gathered via Microsoft Forms questionnaires.

External consultants then compiled and processed everything to produce emissions calculations. The workflow was cumbersome, generating numerous time-consuming iterations between Ekinops staff and advisors.

The sustainability team found the whole process to be very time-consuming and found that they lacked visibility of the result before the consultants delivered their work. The lack of transparency in the process meant that if data needed correction mid-process, it was complicated to manage.

Additionally, this dependency on external expertise created concrete business problems. For example, when auditors or stakeholders requested updates or recalculations, Ekinops was simply unable to respond quickly. The company was effectively blocked until consultant availability aligned with project timelines, a delay that could extend over a week for straightforward adjustments.

After completing its inaugural CSRD report, Ekinops conducted an internal review and reached two critical conclusions. Firstly, the company needed to improve data reliability, and secondly, it had to modernize collection methods. The existing approach was found to be incompatible with the speed, accuracy, and audit readiness that CSRD compliance demands, particularly as corporate and social responsibility (CSR) performance increasingly influences both competitive positioning in client tenders and access to favorable financing terms.

Solution

Ekinops launched a wide-ranging market review of ESG data management platforms, guided by clear selection criteria. French or other European vendors were prioritized, to ensure long-term alignment with evolving EU sustainability regulations.

Ekinops quickly recognized that an integrated solution, combining ESG data collection with carbon accounting capabilities, was essential to eliminate data silos and workflow inefficiencies.

After evaluating multiple vendors, Ekinops selected Sweep. The deciding factor was Sweep’s integration with Pomdoc, the tool Ekinops uses to draft its CSRD reports, enabling seamless data flow from measurement through disclosure.

Sweep’s AI assistant, Sweepy, delivered immediate value during Ekinops’ second CSRD reporting cycle. The sustainability team says Sweepy was the feature that saved them the most time in the first year. When Ekinops needed to substantially revise narrative disclosures to provide more complete, relevant, and better-organized information, Sweepy accelerated the rewriting process, reclaiming many hours that would previously have been spent on manual drafting.

The platform’s customizable questionnaire functionality has transformed how Ekinops collects employee commuting data, a key annual rendezvous for employees’ contribution to sustainability. Instead of manually transferring responses from Microsoft Forms into spreadsheets for consultants to process,

Ekinops now deploys customized surveys to all employees that automatically populate the appropriate carbon accounting categories and apply correct emission factors. A major improvement, which eliminates transcription errors and processing time, while providing immediate visibility on a per site basis.

Most significantly, Sweep eliminated Ekinops’ dependency on external consultants for routine updates and recalculations – as well as the associated costs and audit risks. To give a concrete example, when Ekinops refined its methodology for accounting for material inputs in Scope 3, auditors flagged that the change created comparability issues with the 2023 baseline and 2024 data. They required that Scope 3.1 emissions for both prior years be recalculated using the updated approach.

Sébastien Bernard tells us: “Without Sweep, I would have been blocked for more than a week due to our consultant’s unavailability at that time, and our dependency on her work. With Sweep, it took me 3 hours to recalculate Scope 3.1 for 2023 and 2024, and the next day I could send updated carbon footprints to the auditors.”

Using Sweep, the sustainability team has been able to retrieve historical data for 2023 and 2024, re-process it according to the new methodology, and generate updated comparative tables. What’s more, this was all achieved within three hours. The day after the auditors’ comment, Ekinops was able to send them the updated 2023 and 2024 carbon footprints and the comparison with 2025. Without Sweep, the team would have been blocked for more than a week due to their consultant’s unavailability at that time, and their dependency on the consultant’s work.

This shift from consultant dependency to in-house capability means Ekinops can now respond quickly to audit requirements, make data corrections as needed, and maintain better visibility throughout the carbon accounting process. These are all critical capabilities as the company works toward its -33% emissions reduction target by 2030 and manages stakeholder expectations in client tenders where CSR criteria carry significant weight.

Looking ahead, Ekinops is now publishing its fifth annual carbon footprint with improved data collection methods and greater control over the carbon accounting process.