There's a huge amount of value in simultaneously collecting financial, non-financial and sustainability data and information, says Mandy Leonard, Business Development Director at EOH Intellient.
In the past, businesses primarily focussed on financial reporting, but today far more emphasis is being placed on Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) sustainability reporting, she says. The challenge lies in identifying, collecting and consolidating this information.
The term 'integrated reporting on sustainability' may seem complex and time consuming, but with the right tools and processes in place, it becomes an invaluable asset to any company. "Looking at it broadly, we can define the process as reporting on figures over and above your financial numbers," says Leonard. "Essentially, it's more about the business, rather than about its fiscal state. There are over 200 questions that can be answered, and the relevance of these questions varies depending on the company type, size and industry. It helps business to understand and communicate the impact of their operations on critical sustainability issues such as climate change, human rights, corruption, and the like."
Although there's currently no direct legislation that enforces reporting, most listed companies go through the process as a matter of course. "Legislation is coming to enforce the process but, in our experience, most big companies do report," says EOH Intellient Operations Director Carl Janse van Rensburg.
"We have asked our clients what the motivating factors were to continue down this path and, more often than not, the answer is to ensure that their processes and operations are transparent and that investors, and the public at large, understand the ethical manner in which they conduct their business," Janse van Rensburg says.
Leonard continues, "To be truly sustainable, organisations need to entrench sustainability and ensure that financial and non-financial aspects of the business are managed alongside each other and that profits aren't generated at the expense of the environment, the communities in which they operate nor future generations."
"Sustainability reporting is a vehicle that businesses can use to communicate to stakeholders, both internal and external, about their sustainability journey, its imperatives, and its performance against its aspirational targets. It's part of being a responsible business."
Leonard says there are numerous advantages to implementing the GRI reporting system, because it allows management to really drill down into the daily operations of the organisation, and to tweak productivity, efficiency, and efficacy. The overriding challenge, however, remains the collection of the data and turning it into knowledge.
"This is especially true in large companies with multiple divisions and business interests," says Leonard. "How can they aggregate this information? There needs to be a solution that allows you to collect all the information and then report to your stakeholders or use the information internally to improve your business - taking the data, turning it into knowledge, and then being able to share it."
Janse van Rensburg expands on the challenges EOH Intellient has encountered when implementing its solution at a new client. "Many times the data is not housed in a central area. In addition, there are disparate systems that do not speak to each other, or the information is simply not within the system - it's kept on personal spreadsheets. This can become a nightmare when you are looking at a large company."
"Let's look at an example where a company has 10 divisions. In each division, there are different business units, and in each business unit there are two or three people answering questions pertaining to their particular sphere. And there are over 200 questions that need to be answered. This creates a massive amount of information. The answers have to be collated and given to a central authority, where a holistic picture can be generated and a complete answer produced," Janse van Rensburg says.
"You need an application that allows all the questions to extracted and merged into a single Word document, organised by question, by business unit, and eventually consolidated back to your central point. It must, however, be fully automated. This, in our experience, takes about three weeks off the turnaround time of a report and allows employees to concentrate on their primary task. We have managed to create an application that allows the sustainability manager to accomplish the reporting process in record time, without all the heartache associated with a manual system. The application is simple, scalable and based on Microsoft Office databases, so the value-proposition to the head of sustainability in the business is that it makes life easy when consolidating."
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