The 5 Biggest Pain Points of Sustainability Data Reporting and Why I Joined Sustaira to Solve Them!
Sustaira’s Global Sustainability Lead, Rory O’Sullivan, shares common struggles with sustainability data aggregation and how Sustaira helps solve them.
As a sustainability manager you are constantly under strain to do more with less, constantly have to prove the value of your initiatives and fight for resources. This has not changed in the last decades. What has changed however are number of stakeholders you have to make happy and the number of demands they have for you, whether that be in tender requests, regulatory reporting requirements or ESG-tied executive pay. To name but a few. Alone it can be a daunting task, made only worse when one also has to satisfy these demands with data that has to be brought forth from an organization like water from a stone. The result of this can be two things, either you choose only to satisfy some stakeholders which represent the most salient and pressing value add for your department, leading to short term rewards at the sacrifice of long-term success. Or, you have to sacrifice your methods, take short-cuts and make bigger and bigger assumptions, leading to incorrect projections, reports and greater risk for your organization. There is another way however.
“I joined Sustaira after working several years in corporate sustainability, constantly having to make a balance between time spent getting the data right and time spent making our business more sustainable. In the middle between the need to report above and the need to gather from below. That which cannot be measured cannot be improved after all. And a satisfying experience though it was, I found there were a number of issues I had which came up time and time again. After speaking with my peers in other companies I’ve summarized these following five phrases we all too often hear…”
“We don’t have enough resources”
And by resources we often mean FTE. For a small team or a small organization diverting a whole FTE to track sustainability data, and gather it from the business can be tough. Especially when that extends to suppliers and clients. Also, investing in large multi-year technology projects to save a bit of time or deliver marginally improved data quality is a very difficult argument, especially in uncertain times.
2. “Our data is fragmented across many silos and entities”
This was by far one of the most frustrating things. Knowing that the insights I needed were out there but being unable to access them in an efficient way, or without having to ask a lot of time from a local resource. For example, data for tracking just emissions from commuting (just 1 out of 15 scope 3 categories) may need to be gathered from all of the following: 3rd party lease car providers, fuel card providers, internal HR systems, payroll data on reimbursements, and/or employee surveys. If you have multiple 5 independent subsidiaries you are accounting for this could be as many as 20-30 data sources to calculate ONE emission category. And that is before you account for differing definitions, metrics, and policies for narrative disclosure etc.
3. “We have some of the data but it’s in an old system”
Legacy systems are a headache. On one hand, great that the data is being gathered. On the other hand, undertaking a complex multi-year software migration when the old contract might still be valid is a battle I never want to fight. And as a sustainability manager you probably don’t have the time to fight. The only option in this case is sadly all to often to let it go, or undertake manual collection.
4. “Manual transfer of the data takes too long”
Copying and pasting data from one excel to another doesn’t just take too long, it also creates a huge possibility for inaccuracy and something verifiers or auditors will not be happy with. Especially with CSRD compliant reporting standards maintaining the audit trail is essential and something which will make manual copying and pasting a thing of the past.
5. “This isn’t a priority right now”
No successful organization isn’t without their fair share of short-term thinking. There will always be budgetary pressure, or some year end reporting push. Proving the worth of your sustainability efforts is just one struggle you have to have against these, but it’s also about getting the resources and making the forecasts to get those long-term investments. Protecting your resources is easy when you can show results, but when results are expected in 5-10 years time, or maybe never, or you can’t say when … that is more difficult.
“The above challenges are just a handful of the experiences I’ve heard from peers in the sustainability world or have faced myself. I came across Sustaira whilst looking for answers to them: the need to do more with less, to meet reporting timelines, to communicate to business partners why you need their people, time and investments, or to mesh with old and new IT systems. The flexibility of Sustaira's solution with an underlying low-code platform is really the incredible thing.”
Rory O'Sullivan, Global Sustainability Lead at Sustaira
Jeroen (Sustaira’s Product Lead) showed me the sustainability planner and scenario analysis app (something I had been looking for for a while). I assumed it had taken teams of 15 people 3 months to create and would require very specific data inputs to help an organization. However, these assumptions were wrong, within 2 weeks he had made this app by himself. And the data inputs could be configured to whichever organization was using it with just as much ease. This was the nail in the coffin for me, seeing this I knew I didn’t just want to see if I could implement Sustaira at one company, but I wanted to help many more sustainability managers who were in my position. If you’d like to see how we can solve your pain points, please get in touch today to book a demo or request more information. Contact us via https://www.sustaira.com/getstarted
