Meera Iyer

Co-founder, KilnLedger | Practical carbon accounting for small factories | Ex-consultant

I’m building KilnLedger to help small factories understand their emissions without creating another full-time paperwork job. After six years in operations consulting, I wanted to work closer to the people handling electricity bills, production logs and difficult trade-offs every day. I spend a fair amount of time on factory floors around Mumbai, turning messy records into something owners can actually use. I believe in small, boring changes that survive a busy month—not big promises that need perfect conditions.

Building a carbon-accounting platform for small manufacturing businesses with a co-founder and a lean team. Lead customer discovery, onboarding and emissions-data workflows, with regular visits to factories in Vasai, Bhiwandi and Taloja. Focus on making electricity, fuel and production records usable without adding unnecessary work for factory teams.

Worked with mid-sized manufacturers on resource efficiency, operational reporting and supplier sustainability requirements. Built practical tracking tools and helped teams move from one-off assessments to repeatable monthly routines.

Supported manufacturing projects through site visits, production-data analysis and process mapping. Learned to check what a spreadsheet assumes against what actually happens on the shop floor.

Carbon Accounting, GHG Protocol, Manufacturing Operations, Customer Discovery, Resource Efficiency, Data Analysis, Product Strategy, Process Improvement, Stakeholder Management

English, Hindi, Tamil, Marathi (conversational)

A factory accounts manager gave us useful feedback this week: “Please don’t make me type the same number twice.” Fair. We had added a field that looked sensible in our internal review but duplicated information already on the electricity bill. We removed it. Building for small factories means respecting the person who is also handling payroll, chasing a supplier and answering three calls while using your product. One less field is not an exciting launch announcement. It is still progress.

Visited a unit in Vasai yesterday. Before opening our dashboard, we spent half an hour finding out where the diesel purchase records actually lived. Answer: partly in a register, partly in invoice photos on someone’s phone. That is not a failure of intent. It is the starting point. Our job is to make the next month easier to record, not to deliver a lecture about the previous twelve. Came back with fewer assumptions and a much better onboarding checklist.

One thing I carried from consulting into KilnLedger: write down who owns the next step. One thing I had to unlearn: assuming a detailed recommendation makes that step happen. A monthly meter-reading routine needs a person, a date and somewhere obvious to put the number. It also needs a backup for when that person is on leave. Not glamorous work, but this is where a lot of useful reporting either becomes dependable or quietly disappears.

We have started asking a different question at the end of customer onboarding: “Which part would you stop doing if we weren’t here next month?” It has been more useful than asking whether the session was helpful. If the answer is everything, we have probably designed a process that depends too much on us. The goal is a routine the factory team can keep running. Ideally, one that still works during a rushed dispatch week.