FEM Foundations is a set of foundational questions for businesses beginning to measure the environmental impact of their manufacturing. You can only do the FEM Foundations assessment if you have never completed a FEM assessment before. The purpose of FEM Foundations is providing a light-weight assessment to help you get started measuring your environmental impact and tracking mitigation practices and prepare you for doing a full FEM.
FEM Foundations does not provide a score and does not include benchmarking. FEM Foundations does include:
- Areas of Opportunities report
- CSV download with question answers
- Verification of results
Once you have purchased the FEM or Foundations module, make sure to choose the right module to be allocated to your account:
Once the module has been allocated, the user is redirected to the Facility Foundations dashboard, which resembles the FEM dashboard.
For guidance on the questions in the FEM Foundations assessment, click here and view Appendix A. FEM Foundations.
Can I complete FEM Foundations yearly?
No. Facilities that have not completed the FEM have the option to complete FEM Foundations, but the goal of FEM Foundations is to advance to FEM after the first year. After you've completed FEM Foundations once, you must advance to FEM.
How is FEM Foundations impacted by FEM 4.0 changes?
New questions that are applicable to FEM Foundations were added for FEM 2024. FEM Foundations continues to be an unscored, “miniature” version of the full FEM comprising Level 1 questions only and is not included in the benchmarking set of assessments.
The Foundations version can be edited any number of times, but once a facility moves forward with a full FEM, it is no longer possible to revert to Foundations.
FEM 2024 updates can be found here: https://support.worldly.io/hc/en-us/articles/30553471781147-Summary-of-Updates-to-the-Higg-FEM-4-0-For-FEM-2024.