Kids&Us: sustainability at the scale of a global education network
Kids&Us, an English school for children and teenagers founded in Manresa, operates more than 700 academies across more than a dozen countries in Europe, the Americas, and Asia, spanning company-owned, joint-venture, and franchised centers, and adds new entities every year.
Given that operational complexity, Kids&Us implemented Manglai to move away from manual processes for collecting data and calculating emissions and energy consumption, and to advance toward centralized, traceable environmental management across all its business units.
The challenge: scaling environmental data without losing control
Kids&Us's main difficulty was managing manual processes to collect data and calculate emissions and energy consumption across an organization with many business units spread across different countries, one that also adds new entities every year.
The turning point came with the need to streamline and strengthen its reporting processes ahead of a possible transition to CSRD requirements. On top of that, with the goal of being transparent about non-financial information, the company adopted the voluntary VSME standard.
- Complexity in collecting data from business units located in international markets.
- Difficulty guaranteeing traceability and comparing information as the organization's scope keeps changing.
- The risk that, given how hard the data was to obtain, it would be outdated by the time it was used.
The solution: from collecting data to report, to using it to decide
Kids&Us chose Manglai for a value proposition aligned with its needs and a competitive price, which allowed it to move toward more comprehensive sustainability management without oversizing the initial investment, with the option to grow the platform together over time.
- Automated emissions calculations: the feature that has saved the team the most time has been the automatic calculation of emissions from invoices, broken down by scope and consolidated into the carbon footprint.
- Fewer hours coordinating with finance: meetings with the finance teams, which used to require many hours of joint work, have become significantly faster, while confidence in the reliability and accuracy of the calculations has grown.
- One unified workflow: the platform brings together everyone actively involved in the process in a single, consistent flow.
For Kids&Us, having centralized, traceable data on a single platform brings a very high level of confidence for audits, reporting, and conversations with management and stakeholders, moving past a fragmented view of information toward a more complete, integrated one.
Manglai, a lever for a more strategic approach to sustainability
The most significant result for Kids&Us has been shifting from collecting data mainly to meet reporting requirements to using it as a basis for identifying growth opportunities. The company continues working to cover its full scope and consolidate its data collection, recording, and calculation processes, aiming to spend less time compiling information and more time interpreting trends and acting on improvement plans.