Environmental, social and governance (ESG) data integrity solutions
Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives are topics of discussion everywhere – in the workplace, social media, news outlets, and beyond. And for good reason.
Recent public advocacy efforts around climate issues, diversity and inclusion, data privacy, and more have been driving forces in pushing ESG to the forefront.
While stellar products and services used to be enough for businesses to attract new customers, investors, and employees – and win their loyalty over time – that’s not fully the case anymore. It’s still certainly a large piece of the puzzle for business success, but interested parties increasingly want to dive deeper and understand how the companies that they’re engaged with support sustainable ESG initiatives.
Why ESG is important
of investors considered ESG factors in their investments in 2020
of employees prefer to support or work for companies that care about the same issues they do
of consumers think companies should be actively shaping ESG best practices
So what does that mean for your organization? To move faster, remain compliant, and accurately demonstrate and quantify your commitment to ESG initiatives, your data strategy needs to prioritize data integrity – data that’s accurate, consistent, and has context.
Optimized ESG reporting built on trusted data
Let’s look at the big picture. Before ESG became a “household name” within the realm of business imperatives, many organizations were already making efforts to be environmentally friendly and inclusive.
But even if you’ve been doing this all along, how are you quantifying those sustainability efforts? Do you have a way to seamlessly and efficiently identify, extract and aggregate the granular data you need to produce impactful reports?
While environmental, social, and governance priorities will vary from one organization to the next, there are often a few big commonalities: reporting on ESG efforts are manual, time consuming, and costly processes.
Organizations need a flexible framework to efficiently identify, understand, and link the underlying data elements required for accurate, consistent, and contextualized ESG reporting.
But visibility that does not include data quality scores and metrics, including real-time data observability leaves you at risk of reporting and data insights that are not accurate. This leads to lack of trust in your ESG metrics that will impact not only the decision-makers within your organization, but investors and customers that are tracking your ESG analytics.
Ask yourself if your data …
- Is accessible across legacy and modern systems for complete reporting
- Can deliver the outcomes you need with timely tracking and scoring metrics
- Is easily found, understood, and linked to critical ESG KPI’s
- Is trusted with optimal quality and health to identify risk and improve business outcomes
Many organizations aren’t there quite yet – and data integrity is what can take things to the next level.
With more cost-effective data quality processes, time-saving automation of manual efforts, and overall greater confidence in data trust, you can be sure that your data-driven ESG reporting is making the impact you need it to.
| Goal | Org Stakeholders | Expected Outcomes | Objective | Capabilities Needed |
| Increase accuracy and efficiency of sustainability reporting | Chief Sustainability Officer Legal/Compliance Teams Finance Leaders |
Increased understanding and trust in ESG data Reduced manual effort of ESG reporting by 50% |
Identify ESG requirements and metrics Understand systems, data, processes that support ESG KPIs |
Data integration Data governance Data catalog Data lineage Data quality |
Make real-time decisions
Equally as important as reporting on your efforts after the fact, is having the ability to accelerate your decisions in real time. Innovative organizations understand that data leveraged for ESG is frequently critical in other business operations and analytics. Understanding the relationship of ESG data to related business processes exponentially increases the value of visibility and improving overall data trust. Data governance that illustrates relationships through data impact and lineage is critical to expanding the value of your ESG metrics and reporting.
Expand the value of your ESG initiatives
| Data to minimize risk | Data to deliver insights | Data to run the business |
| Reporting & Compliance | Analytics & insights | Operational excellence |
| Data protection | Net Promoter Score | Improve working capital |
| Risk and fraud | Website traffic | Customer care |
| Privacy | Targeted marketing | SAP/S4 HANA migration |
| ESG initiatives | Customer retention | Inbound quality levels |
| Regulatory compliance | Resource Analytics | Product traceability |
| Internal reporting | Customer 360° view | E2E SCM |
Organizations have found that the lower the real-time visibility, the greater the risk for potential negative ESG ratings that could result in expensive fines, bad press, and a loss of investors, customers, and top talent.
Alternatively, having that real-time visibility means more insight and protection of your key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics. When you can identify risks as they’re happening, there’s more opportunity to act upon them and ensure positive outcomes.
Take, for example, the case study of a major consumer product corporation. The company needed a unified data platform that provided data quality and a data catalog to enable real-time visibility for ESG operational value.
Why? It was discovered resource usage of one of their production plants was significantly more than other plants. With greater visibility into ESG KPI’s, the company can move forward with more sustainable, proactive business evaluations – making it easier to spot and remedy similar problems as they’re happening, rather than after the fact.
Data Integrity Suite
- Automated integration of ESG data for real-time access across complex systems
- Robust data quality rules and metrics for greater trust in reporting and insights
- Data changes proactively identified to take action to mitigate risk or improve outcomes
- Expanded visibility into ESG metrics and data relationships for added value to leaders and decision-makers
Improve ESG analytics: enrich with environmental and social initiative datasets
Along with enhanced reporting and real-time insights, let’s dive even deeper and bring your ESG analytics to the next level. This comes down to data enrichment: the addition of advanced third-party datasets to your internal business data to heighten your insights. What’s the need for this in practice?Take compliance, for instance. Increasingly strict ESG legislative requirements mean more reporting on the potential impacts of climate change on your organization. Without enrichment, you’ll have limited insight into environmental factors – making it difficult for analyzation.
But supplementing your internal data with dynamic risk datasets is a different story – granting insight into the likelihood of wildfires, flooding, earthquakes, and other impactful weather events.
With this powerful big picture understanding, you’re able to better manage risk and confidently make decisions that are faster and more informed.
The same goes for social programs. Perhaps you want a more thorough understanding of demographic trends and historical patterns. Demographic datasets help you understand not only the places where people live, work, and do business – but also where there are opportunities to support underserved communities and populations.
To gain more accuracy in your environmental, social, and governance risk and analytics metrics, data enrichment is needed to complete the picture.
What are Precisely’s commitments to ESG?
See what we’re doing to address climate issues, diversity and inclusion, data privacy, and more.
Data integrity expertise to elevate your ESG reporting and analytics
There’s no doubt about it: embracing ESG programs impact people, planet, and business.
But ensuring that your ESG efforts are comprehensive and compliant means building a solid data integrity foundation that supports success around your reporting and analytics.
Our team at Precisely is here to help throughout your journey.
Contact us today to find out how our data solutions can help you move forward with sustainable, smarter decisions, for the biggest impact.
