Introduction
If you run a lean import operation in Italy, complexity is not a surprise. Supplier negotiations span time zones, customs deadlines wait for no one, and the administrative burden grows a little heavier every year.
For McBolt, a company importing steel fasteners and bolts from Asia to serve the Italian market, the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism added a new kind of pressure. The threat was not one single regulatory crisis. It was the accumulating weight of an unfamiliar obligation on a team already stretched across administration, accounting, customs, and logistics, with no dedicated sustainability function to absorb it.
Customer overview
McBolt is part of a broader group of companies specialising in the import and distribution of bolts, fasteners, and ferrous materials, from standard steel screws and nuts to threaded bars and other steel hardware. The company sources primarily from China and other Asian markets, making cross-border compliance a core operational concern.
Importing is central to McBolt’s business model. The vast majority of the company’s stock is sourced internationally. Operations are lean by design, with Amalia Ballerino, Administration and Import Manager, covering administration, accounting, customs documentation, and logistics coordination, often simultaneously. Every day, she says, requires a degree of metamorphosis.
When CBAM entered the picture, there was no dedicated resource to manage it. Compliance had to be integrated into a workflow that was already full.
The challenge: a new regulation on an already stretched team
CBAM introduced a specific challenge for McBolt. Steel and fasteners sit squarely among the most heavily regulated sectors under the mechanism. Because the production of steel goods carries a significant embedded carbon footprint, importers of these materials are among those most directly exposed to both the reporting obligation and, eventually, the financial cost.
“Our sector is one of the most targeted. The bolt holds everything together, and yet nothing supports us when it comes to the regulations that surround us.” – Amalia Ballerino, Administration & Import Manager, McBolt
Beyond the sector-level exposure, McBolt faced three practical difficulties.
First, the regulation was entirely unfamiliar territory. With no prior experience of carbon reporting, and no internal specialist to rely on, navigating CBAM from scratch carried a real risk of costly errors, including incorrect data, missed deadlines, or non-compliant submissions.
Second, the team had no capacity to build that expertise independently. With administration already handling responsibilities across multiple business functions, adding a complex and evolving regulatory workflow was not feasible without external support.
Third, uncertainty about future costs added a financial planning challenge. With the regulation moving towards a definitive phase involving actual carbon payments through CBAM certificates, McBolt needed a way to estimate what the regulation would cost, broken down by supplier, product type, and country of origin, before the bills arrived.
Why McBolt chose ClimEase
McBolt’s decision to work with ClimEase followed the logic of the broader group. Other companies within the group had already engaged ClimEase, and their experience provided a credible foundation. Rather than conducting an independent market search, McBolt aligned with colleagues who had already evaluated the options.
The core need was clear: not just guidance on what CBAM required, but practical support in executing it, period after period, without having to build internal expertise from scratch.
“When you encounter something new that you don’t fully understand, you look for someone with more experience to help you navigate it. Otherwise you risk making mistakes.” – Amalia Ballerino, Administration & Import Manager, McBolt
What ClimEase offered, and what made it the right fit, was a combination of a structured workflow, platform simplicity, and hands-on support that allowed McBolt to meet its compliance obligations without diverting significant internal resource to the task.
Key decision factors included a clear and repeatable CBAM reporting process, the availability of ready-to-use data templates for each reporting period, a platform designed to be usable by someone without prior experience in carbon reporting or sustainability platforms, and a service relationship that could grow alongside the regulation as it evolves from transitional reporting to definitive financial obligations.
The solution: structured CBAM management with ClimEase
With ClimEase, McBolt moved from an improvised approach to a structured and repeatable compliance process.
In the early reporting periods, ClimEase handled the data preparation directly, generating the structured tables McBolt needed to submit through the official CBAM portal. Over time, Amalia took on more of the process herself, and found the platform considerably more accesible than she had expected.
“The platform is quite intuitive. Even for someone who isn’t particularly comfortable with this type of tool, I find it practical and not at all complex. Whoever designed it made it simple, and that matters.” – Amalia Ballerino, Administration & Import Manager, McBolt
This growing self-sufficiency is significant. When the most recent reporting period required updates to supplier information, Amalia completed the process independently, a clear step forward from where McBolt started.
The platform’s continuous improvement has also matched the evolution of the regulation. Each update has adapted to what the official CBAM portal requires, reducing the risk of misalignment between what ClimEase produces and what the submission system expects.
More recently, ClimEase introduced a cost simulation feature that allows McBolt to upload monthly or quarterly customs data and model its expected CBAM liability under both best-case and worst-case scenarios. The tool accounts for country of origin and commodity code, reflecting the fact that the cost of compliance varies significantly depending on where goods come from and what they are. A threaded bar and a standard screw may carry different carbon intensities and, therefore, different financial exposure when CBAM certificates become payable.
Results: two years of uninterrupted CBAM compliance and growing capability
Since joining ClimEase at the start of CBAM’s transitional phase, McBolt has maintained continuous compliance with every reporting obligation across the full two-year transitional period.
Key outcomes include:
- Every CBAM reporting deadline met across the full transitional phase, with no penalties or late submissions
- A team with no prior carbon reporting experience now managing quarterly submissions independently, without dedicated sustainability resource
- Reporting that started as a fully assisted service has become a self-sufficient internal process, handled by a single administrator alongside a full accounting and logistics workload
- Full visibility into best-case and worst-case CBAM cost scenarios ahead of the definitive phase, thanks to ClimEase’s cost simulation feature
- A supplier engagement programme now underway across the group, with the goal of replacing default values with supplier-specific emissions data and materially reducing long-term cost exposure
“The last couple of times I’ve had to update supplier data, I’ve done it on my own. The platform let me do that. That’s the kind of thing that matters when you’re managing everything yourself.” – Amalia Ballerino, Administration & Import Manager, McBolt
Preparing for the definitive CBAM phase
As CBAM transitions from reporting obligation to financial mechanism, McBolt is taking a pragmatic approach. The cost simulation feature within ClimEase is the next tool Amalia plans to engage with directly, modelling the financial scenarios that the regulation will create based on McBolt’s actual import data.
The questions ahead are not abstract. Different tariff codes may carry different carbon
intensities and, consequently, different CBAM rates. Understanding which product lines and which suppliers carry the highest carbon cost exposure will directly inform sourcing and pricing
decisions for steel fasteners importers across the EU.
“Once I get through the balance sheet period, I want to sit down with the platform, run the simulations, and understand what the numbers will look like. At least then I’ll know what I’m facing next year.” – Amalia Ballerino, Administration & Import Manager, McBolt
Looking further ahead, ClimEase is also beginning a supplier engagement programme that will involve working directly with McBolt’s supply chain to collect actual emissions data, replacing the estimated default values currently used in calculations with supplier-specific figures. With more accurate upstream data, McBolt’s CBAM assessments will become more precise and, potentially, more financially favourable, reducing the gap between default-value exposure and actual carbon cost.
Wrap up: turning CBAM compliance into a manageable process
For McBolt, CBAM arrived as an unfamiliar regulatory obligation layered onto an already demanding operation. Without internal carbon reporting expertise, without a dedicated compliance team, and without margin for error, the risk of getting it wrong was real.
With ClimEase, CBAM has become a structured, repeatable process, one that a non-specialist can now navigate independently, and one that is gradually evolving from a quarterly reporting exercise into a tool for financial planning and sourcing strategy. Over two years, McBolt has gone from zero CBAM experience to managing its own submissions, with a clearer picture of what the regulation will cost and how to reduce that exposure through better supplier data.
“You have to start somewhere. We started with ClimEase, and two years in, the process works. Now we need to understand what it will cost us, and the tools are there to help us do that.” – Amalia Ballerino, Administration & Import Manager, McBolt