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Locus Technologies Receives 16th Consecutive EBJ Award for Information Technology in ESG

Environmental Business Journal (EBJ) recognized Locus for ESG software growth and innovation.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., 24 February 2022 — Locus Technologies, the leading EHS Compliance and ESG software provider, was awarded a 16th consecutive award from Environmental Business Journal (EBJ) for growth and innovation in the field of Information Technology in the environmental software with particular focus on ESG.

EBJ is a business research publication providing strategic business intelligence to the environmental industry. Locus received the 2021 EBJ Award for Information Technology by growing and innovating its unified EHS compliance and ESG software platform.

In 2021 Locus took a leading market position in the fast-growing space of ESG software. Locus’s ESG SaaS covers carbon data aggregation via a powerful visual calculation engine, investor-grade emissions calculations audit capabilities, reporting to multiple standards from a single data set, integration APIs, dashboards, and carbon reduction goal setting and tracking. This separates Locus from competitors as customers demand integrated net-zero ESG software that supports investor-grade data in disclosure rules such as the EU’s corporate sustainability reporting directive, mandatory TCFD reporting, and anticipated SEC action on climate disclosures.

In 2021 Locus continued to expand its ESG SaaS to include built-in business intelligence tools allowing for interactive, actionable insights into EHS and ESG data, forecasting tools to predict future ESG reporting, APIs linking to utility meters, and interfaces with other Locus and third-party systems that house ESG data. Locus’s ESG application is focused on “enter once, report many times.” The gold standard for multinational enterprises with many locations worldwide is to have a system configured to report to multiple organizations and many standards from a single dataset. Essential built-in reporting in the Locus ESG app includes state or federal regulations, internal CSR, and ESG based on whatever standard their organization adheres to, such as CDP, GRI, SASB, TCDF, or more recent World Economic Forum (WEF) attempt to standardize many voluntary standards.

Locus also expanded its ESG consulting expertise by becoming the first and only software provider to offer accreditation services under new Oregon DEQ guidelines requiring third-party verification for GHG and CFP programs.

Besides strong growth in ESG space, Locus also continues to lead the software for water quality management market with the addition of new SaaS customers in 2021, such as the City of Hillsboro, Oregon for water quality management and Westinghouse Electric Company for control of environmental and radionuclides data, cementing Locus’s market leader position in the space of nuclear facilities.

“Locus’s investment in integrated carbon management software and EHS compliance is paying off. As one of the early SaaS leaders in net-zero digital solutions for ESG reporting, Locus continues to provide value to companies that want to be credible with their carbon reporting and sustainability software.,” said Grant Ferrier, president of Environmental Business International Inc. (EBI), publisher of Environmental Business Journal.

“We would like to thank EBJ for recognizing Locus for a 16th consecutive year and for taking note of our industry-leading ESG software. We aim to continue expanding our software offerings to customers in 2022,” said Wes Hawthorne, President of Locus Technologies.

The Locus Technologies ESG Survey Tool

The Locus Technologies ESG Survey Tool enables users to email surveys and questionnaires directly from Locus to their supply chain. This is achieved without having to create usernames and credentials those receiving surveys.

When surveys are issued, the tool generates a secure link to each email recipient. Email recipients click the link, respond to the survey or questionnaire (without having to create a Locus username/password), and the data will be captured within Locus software for ESG purposes. Recipients of the link only receive access to their survey form, and nothing else in the system, and the links expire within a prescribed timeframe to further strengthen security.

The survey tool securely streamlines data collection from external entities who would traditionally never be given access to the system, including suppliers, vendors, sales channels and consultants. Once collected, the data can be immediately be used for ESG calculations and reporting.

Want to learn more about the Locus ESG Survey Tool? Reach out to our product specialists today!

ESG: Why Uptime of SaaS Vendors Matters

In a Software as a Service (SaaS) delivery model, service uptime is vital for several reasons. Besides the obvious of having access to the service over the internet at any given time and staying connected to it 24/7/365, there are additional reasons why service uptime is essential. One of them is quickly verifying the vendor’s software architecture and how it fits the web.

Locus is committed to achieving and maintaining the trust of our customers. Integral to this mission is providing a robust compliance program that carefully considers data protection matters across our cloud services and service uptime. After security, service uptime and multitenancy at Locus come as a standard and, for the last 25 years, have been the three most essential pillars for delivering our cloud software. Our real-time status monitoring (ran by an independent provider of web monitoring services) provides transparency around service availability and performance for Locus’ ESG and EHS compliance SaaS products. Earlier I discussed the importance of multitenancy in detail. In this article, I will cover the importance of service uptime as one measure to determine if the software vendor is running genuine multitenant software or not.

Service Uptime

If your software vendor cannot share uptime statistics across all customers in real-time, they most likely do not run on a multitenant SaaS platform. One of the benefits of SaaS multitenancy (that is frequently overlooked during the customer software selection process) is that all customers are on the same instance and version of the software at all times. For that reason, there is no versioning of software applications. Did you ever see a version number for Google’s or Amazon’s software? Yet they serve millions of users simultaneously and constantly get upgraded. This is because multitenant software typically provides a rolling upgrade program: incremental and continuous improvements. It is an entirely new architectural approach to software delivery and maintenance model that frees customers from the tyranny of frequent and costly upgrades and upsell from greedy vendors. Companies have to develop applications from the ground up for multitenancy, and the good thing is that they cannot fake it. Let’s take a deeper dive into multitenancy.

An actual multitenant software provider can publish its software uptime across all customers in real-time. Locus, for example, has been publishing its service uptime in real-time across all customers since 2009. Locus’s track record speaks for itself: Locus Platform and EIM have a proven 99.9+ percent uptime record for years. To ensure maximum uptime and continuous availability, Locus provides redundant data protection and the most advanced facilities protection available, along with a complete data recovery plan. This is not possible with single-tenant applications as each customer has its software instance and probably a different version. One or a few customers may be down, others up, but one cannot generally aggregate software uptime in any meaningful way. The fastest way to find if the software vendor offers multitenant SaaS or is faking it is to check if they publish online, in real-time, their applications uptime, usually delivered via an independent third party.

Legacy client-server or single-tenant software cannot qualify for multitenancy, nor can it publish vendor’s uptime across all customers. Let’s take a look at definitions:

Single-Tenant – A single instance of the software and supporting infrastructure serves a single customer. With single-tenancy, each customer has their independent database and instance of the software. Essentially, there is no sharing happening with this option.

Multitenant – Multitenancy means that a single instance of the software and its supporting infrastructure serves multiple customers. Each customer shares the software application and also shares a single database. Each tenant’s data is isolated and remains invisible to other tenants.

A multitenant SaaS provider’s resources are focused on maintaining a single, current (and only) version of the software platform rather than being spread out in an attempt to support multiple software versions for customers. If a provider isn’t using multitenancy, it may be hosting thousands of single-tenant customer implementations. Trying to maintain that is too costly for the vendor, and sooner or later, those costs become the customers’ costs.

A vendor invested in on-premise, hosted, and hybrid models cannot commit to providing all the benefits of an actual SaaS model due to conflicting revenue models. Their resources will be spread thin, supporting multiple software versions rather than driving SaaS innovation. Additionally, suppose the vendor makes most of their revenue selling on-premise software. In that case, it is difficult for them to fully commit to a proper SaaS solution since most of their resources support the on-premise software. In summary, a vendor is either multitenant or not – there is nothing in between. If they have a single application installed on-premise of customer or single-tenant cloud, they do not qualify to be called multitenant SaaS.

Before you engage future vendors for your enterprise ESG reporting or EHS compliance software, assuming you already decided to go with a SaaS solution, ask this simple question:

Can you share your software uptime across ALL your customers in real-time? If the answer is no, pass.

Multitenancy Explained

And if the vendor suddenly introduces a “multitenant” model (after selling an on-premises or single-tenant software version for 10+ years), who in the world would want to migrate to that experimental cloud without putting the contract out to bid to explore a switch to well established and market-tested actual multitenant providers? The first-mover advantage of multitenancy is a considerable advantage for any vendor. Still not convinced? Let me offer a simple analogy to drive home the point as to why service uptime and multitenancy matter: Tesla vs. Edison–War of Currents.

The War of Currents was a series of events surrounding the introduction of competing electric power transmission systems in the late 1880s and early 1890s that pitted companies against one another and involved a debate over the cost and convenience of electricity generation and distribution systems, electrical safety, and a media/propaganda campaign, with the leading players being the direct current (DC) based on the Thomas Edison Electric Light Company and the supporters of alternating current (AC) based on Nikola Tesla’s inventions backed by Westinghouse.

With electricity supplies in their infancy, much depended on choosing the right technology to power homes and businesses across the country. The Edison-led group argued for DC current that required a power generating station every few city blocks (single-tenant model). In contrast, the AC group advocated for a centralized generation with transmission lines that could move electricity great distances with minimal loss (multitenant model).

The lower cost of AC power distribution and fewer generating stations eventually prevailed. Multitenancy is equivalent to AC regarding cost, convenience, and network effect. You can read more about how this analogy relates to SaaS in the book by Nicholas Carr, “Big Switch.” It’s the best read so far about the significance of the shift to multitenant cloud computing. Unfortunately, the ESG/EHS software industry has lagged in adopting multitenancy.

Given these fundamental differences between different modes of delivering software as a service, it is clear that the future lies with the multitenant model.

Whether all customer data is in one or multiple databases is of no consequence to the customer. For those arguing against it, it is like an assertion that companies “do not want to put all their money into the same bank account as their competitors,” when what those companies are doing is putting their money into different accounts at the same bank.

When customers of a financial institution share what does not need to be partitioned—for example, the transactional logic and the database maintenance tools, security, and physical infrastructure and insurance offered by a major financial institution—then they enjoy advantages of security, capacity, consistency, and reliability that would not be affordably deliverable in isolated parallel systems.

Locus has implemented procedures designed to ensure that customer data is processed only as instructed by the customer throughout the entire chain of processing activities by Locus and its subprocessors. Amazon Web Services, Inc. (“AWS”) provides the infrastructure used by Locus to host or process customer data. Locus hosts its SaaS on AWS using a multitenant architecture designed to segregate and restrict customer data access based on business needs. The architecture provides an effective logical data separation for different customers via customer-specific “Organization IDs” and allows customer and user role-based access privileges. The customer interaction with Locus services is operated in an architecture providing logical data separation for different customers via customer-specific accounts. Additional data segregation ensures separate environments for various functions, especially testing and production.

Multitenancy yields a compelling combination of efficiency and capability in enterprise cloud applications and cloud application platforms without sacrificing flexibility or governance.

Want to learn more? Reach out to our product specialists today.

Selecting ESG Software? Watch out for these 7 Red Flags

One of the biggest recent trends we have seen with novice ESG providers (both startups and major software providers new to the field) is a lack of substantial software tools presented. What is lacking is covered up by grandiose statements about the efficacy of their options. These statements are so vague that they could cover anything if you switched out references to ESG with any other nouns, since these providers don’t show their tools transparently.

Here are seven red flags to be aware of when selecting ESG software:

These providers prominently share statements and statistics about the current ESG climate, without any offering of how their software fits into the picture. This is a major ‘tell’ that someone is jumping on the ESG bandwagon without adequate expertise or software tools.
There is a lack of explanation about how their tools directly improve your ESG program. There is no mention of their dashboards or reporting options or other integrated tools. A seasoned software provider will happily share the specifics of what they offer.
You’ll find over-the-top flashiness on their website, but there are no software previews to be found. If they’re not showing an example of their software, it may be because it lacks functionality, or is theoretical.
Their site is filled with buzzwords. They will talk about reaching net-zero, about how their software is expert-led and data-driven. They will offer no insight as to how they meet these goals.
They will shy away from offering demonstrations. Instead, they will seek to have conversations where they make lavish promises about what their software will be able to do in the future. They may be quick to offer a PowerPoint presentation, but you’ll find that many organizations are reluctant to show their software in action. You deserve to see the software you intend to purchase.
No case studies or current customers can be found. If there’s not an example of their software in use, then it may not be worth exploring, or it may not exist.
If an ESG software provider has grown by acquisition, there are likely issues with software integration and staffing knowledge/support for the product. And if they’re owned by investors, it’s inevitable that they’re being packaged to sell, and they’ve raised prices to meet the needs of the investor.

So, what should you look for in an ESG Software Solution instead?

When selecting an ESG software solution, don’t waste your time with something that either isn’t functional or doesn’t exist. More importantly, your software should have a long track record of usability and be backed by years of expertise. Locus ESG software is proven and is a vital part of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey’s Clean Construction Program. It also helps Del Monte Foods meet their sustainability goals by improving analyzation and forecasting.

Want to learn more? See it for yourself. Reach out to our product specialists today.

Embodied Carbon in the Construction and Building Operations Industry

When we look at all the new construction in the next 20 years, we see the critical role embodied carbon plays. The world urgently needs to address carbon emissions from buildings and construction, constituting almost 40% of global carbon emissions. Of those total emissions, building operations are responsible for 28% annually, while building materials and construction (typically referred to as embodied carbon) are responsible for an additional 12% annually.

The construction industry is the world’s largest single industry. Oxford Economics estimates the global construction market at $10.7 trillion in 2020. The market is expected to grow by $4.5 trillion between 2020 and 2030 to reach $15.2 trillion.

Unlike operational carbon emissions, which can be reduced over time with building energy upgrades and the use of renewable and nuclear energy, embodied carbon emissions are locked in place upon completion of construction. The owners and construction industry must handle embodied carbon now if we hope to achieve climate change goals by target dates. Embodied carbon typically precedes Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions and should be added to those for any new construction.

Achieving zero embodied emissions will require adopting the principles of reusing, reducing, and sequestering, including retrofitting existing buildings, using recycled materials, and designing for deconstruction. Reducing means material optimization and the specification of low to zero carbon materials. Sequester means including the design of carbon sequestering sites and the use of carbon sequestering materials.

Just three materials – concrete, steel, and aluminum – are responsible for 23% of total global emissions (most of the materials used in the built environment). Concrete is the second most-consumed substance on Earth after water. Overall, humanity produces more than 10 billion tons, about 4 billion cubic meters of concrete and cement per year, or about 1.3 tons for every person on the planet, more than any other material, including oil and coal. The consumption of concrete exceeds that of all other construction materials combined. Making modern cement and concrete has a heavy environmental penalty, being responsible for 5% or so of global carbon emissions. And yet, most of those emissions are not accounted for during regular carbon reporting protocols. Steel and aluminum are not much different.

All companies that want to be credible with their carbon reporting need software tools for embodied carbon tracking and management. For this reason, Locus has developed a SaaS application to manage and report embodied carbon data in real-time during construction projects. The Locus Embodied Carbon app, part of the ESG toolset, advances environmentally friendly infrastructure design and increases the ability to track and reduce emissions before being built in the new structure forever.

Locus’s Embodied Carbon management software automates carbon emissions management throughout the design and construction processes. It is one of the most ambitious real-time carbon management software programs in the US. Locus Embodied Carbon app helps site owners, construction companies, and the supply chain reduce embodied carbon from on-site construction activities and reduce air pollution from construction activities.

Locus Embodied Carbon application combines the advantages of Locus Platform’s multitenant SaaS with its powerful configuration tools and APIs that, for example, stream carbon data from construction equipment to online software. The construction industry now has precisely the ESG software solution they need to fit their business processes for the low carbon construction program management to incorporate other EHS compliance and Sustainability data on the same unified platform in the future.

Locus to Provide GHG Verification Services in Oregon

Locus Technologies has received accreditation by Oregon DEQ for GHG and CFP verification services.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., 21 December 2021 — Locus Technologies (Locus), industry leader in environmental compliance and ESG software, has been accredited by the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) to provide verification services for mandatory greenhouse gas (GHG) reporting and the Clean Fuels Program (CFP). Locus is the first of a select few to receive approval for verification services.

The accreditation allows Locus to provide verification services for GHG emissions reports, which are now mandatory for facilities in the State of Oregon. The verification team at Locus consists of experts in all reporting requirements. Locus’ in-house Lead Verifiers are certified in all reporting types, including air contamination stationary sources, electricity suppliers, fuel suppliers, natural gas suppliers, natural gas systems, and process emissions. Locus verifiers are also certified for all report types under the Oregon CFP.

The Oregon Environmental Quality Commission (EQC) updated their rules in May 2020 to enhance the data collection of Oregon’s greenhouse gas emissions. The adopted rules incorporate existing reporting and emissions accounting protocols into rule and improve the specificity of how emissions data are calculated, reported, and verified. The regulation requires mandatory reporting and verification of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by third-party verifiers like Locus, starting in 2022.

“Locus is proud to become an accredited GHG and CFP verification body for the state of Oregon, as we have been in California since the inception of that program. We are continually committed to staying informed on new and updated ESG reporting frameworks, which we accomplish first and foremost through domain expertise. Our field expertise and industry knowledge allow us to provide a vital service, while also further expanding on our ESG software to support these new reporting programs” said Wes Hawthorne, President of Locus.

Building on over a decade of GHG verification experience, Locus remains the only software provider for collecting, managing, and reporting GHG emissions that is also an accredited verifier. Using this expertise, the software includes unparalleled tools for transparent and auditable calculations for GHG programs.

Don’t Trust Your ESG Reporting to Just Anyone

Is ESG the new gold rush? Some tech giants and startups seem to think so. With each passing day, more and more software providers throw their hat into the burgeoning ESG ring, hoping to cash in. While it’s perfectly reasonable for these companies to seek out profitable endeavors, most of those companies have limited real-world experience with ESG reporting and software. You may want to think twice about trusting your critical ESG reporting to someone looking to ride the wave toward a quick buck.

Locus has been developing and supporting ESG solutions for over two decades, before the ESG acronym ever made its way into headlines and boardrooms. In addition to the years of experience, Locus places great emphasis on domain knowledge, hiring experts in environmental science, engineering, sustainability, and mathematics to name a few. Our solutions are built and supported by these qualified experts, opposed to developers who are frantically cobbling together a solution that they can rush to market.

It takes years to develop a foolproof system for handling massive quantities of complex data. In a recent piece written by President of Locus, Wes Hawthorne, he delves into the importance of having accurate, audit-ready ESG reporting. Data quality and reporting accuracy have been pillars of Locus’ success since our founding in 1997.

Do more for your ESG program than applying a cookie-cutter tool meant to meet the bare-minimum needs of the many or an application that is new and untested, and unfit for your requirements. Our robust solutions help you manage impact, create reports with ease, and meet your ESG goals effectively.

Contact Us to Get Started Today

Carbon Offsets Have a Huge New Problem—Wildfires

As if the world of calculating forest and natural assets to be used as carbon offsets for big businesses isn’t complicated enough, now there’s a huge new, unexpected issue. Wildfires are threatening the underlying nature itself.

A pyrocumulus cloud from Oregon’s Bootleg Fire can be seen for miles as it burns in the Freemont-Winema National Forest. As of Thursday night, the fire had burned more than 400,000 acres, including forest that had been preserved to compensate for greenhouse gas emissions elsewhere. Photo: National Interagency Fire Center.

The wildfires in the American West this past summer, including one big fire in Southern Oregon, the Bootleg Fire, torched a large percentage of land set aside for carbon offsets. Another fire in Washington State threatened an Indian reservation carbon offset project. Companies who produce greenhouse gases pay nature and forest reserves to maintain and build themselves out to help trees pull carbon from the atmosphere. The offset allows the companies to claim they are carbon neutral. The more they pollute the more they pay. A growing financial market for offsets in Europe, the UK and now China is based on the premise these assets can be correctly measured and managed.

That premise routinely comes under fire, as one forest is different from another, some trees in the same forest suck carbon at a different rate then others and, of course, there’s no way to tell how a forest used as an offset today will look 100 years from now. Now the natural land is coming under fire literally. In order to counteract CO₂’s climate-warming properties, a carbon offset project needs to promise to sequester carbon permanently. That’s because CO₂ can linger in the atmosphere for up to 1,000 years. If the carbon that is avoided or removed ends up getting released, then the program is flawed. The impact of the fires is already generating calls from advocates who argue carbon output needs to be reduced at its source, not offset with money and accounting gimmicks. Those are legitimate arguments but as we are nowhere near approaching a global scenario like that, offsets are our best shot to make polluting more expensive and ultimately reduce it.

The problem is that the offset market is developing so fast that all the parties in it — buyers, sellers, brokers — are profiting, and so are thinking of new ways to grow it. Already, ideas about securitization of carbon offset assets, where they would be packaged into tradable derivatives, like mortgages or interest rate products, are catching on.

This feeds into more participants in the carbon market, and as a result, higher prices, and then more participants on that. On the European Trading System for carbon prices, the value of futures contracts for UK carbon topped $100 (£ 72.4 pounds) in late September amid the country’s petrol delivery crisis. But none of this compares to what could happen if global leaders can advance the idea of an international carbon price and emissions trading mechanism at the United Nations’ COP26 global climate summit in Glasgow in November.

The carbon market, one way or another, is certain to develop in coming years, and with it, the potential for abuses. Those can be fought by new regulations and better policing of markets. But at present, there is nothing to stop the natural threat of fires or other disasters on the underlying offset assets. In the investing world, we call these developments Black Swans. Something completely unexpected that comes along and upends markets. Kind of like China’s sudden attack on its tech industry this past summer, and its impact on Chinese stocks worldwide. It is another sad and ironic tragedy of climate change that global warming itself is destroying the very tools we have to fight it.

[sc_image width=”150″ height=”150″ src=”24014″ style=”11″ position=”centered” disable_lightbox=”1″ alt=”David Callaway, Callaway Climate Insights”]

About the Author—David Callaway, Callaway Climate Insights

David Callaway is founder and Editor-in-Chief of Callaway Climate Insights. He is former president of the World Editors Forum and editor of USA Today.

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6 Ways To Get Data Into Your EHS System

Locus provides multiple methods to populate EHS, ESG, or any environmental data, including the following:

Integrations

Locus provides a full suite of REST API’s, and SDK that can be used to populate data from external data sources. Typical uses include utility data, CEMS, meter data and IoT data.

Surveys

Locus Survey tool enables you to issue survey questionnaires to people outside your organization, and enables them to securely and seamlessly respond directly into the survey form. Typical uses include supplier surveys, audits and customer questionnaires.

Mobile

User input forms can be optimized for input on a phone or tablet, which allows quick uploads of photos and also geotags your data so you can ensure it was collected at the right location.

Excel and Text Files

Locus provides a full suite of Excel upload tools that allow you to import data directly from Excel or CSV files. This option also allows you to work offline and re-sync your data later. Typical uses include laboratory data, periodic monitoring data and data migrations.

Manual Data

Like any system, Locus provides tools for users to directly enter data into the system. These include Locus sophisticated data validation tools which employs machine learning techniques to identify data entries which may be invalid, with visual indications of the expect range or ranges.

Email

Locus can be configured to directly read email input (as text) and place it into the system. Typical uses include instances where external users initiate a conversation, which then may be responded to from within the system, such as an inquiry, issue, or an incident report.

Contact us to learn more

Send us your contact information and a Locus representative will be in touch to discuss your organization’s environmental data management needs and provide an estimate, or set up a free demo of our enterprise environmental software solutions.

5 Keys to Navigating ESG

With sustainability practitioners strained to deploy limited resources internally to navigate the myriad of standards and frameworks to meet the growing appetite for environmental, social, and governance (ESG) information, we continue to ask, “Isn’t there an easier way to do this?” Anyone who has worked to align standards and frameworks, corral internal champions around disclosure requirements, and marry quantitative performance data with narratives on management approach, knows that this is no easy feat.

The uphill battle to integrate data and other systems is often complicated by trying to pull others along in the organization—regardless of where their hearts lie.

So how is it that we can focus in on what’s relevant and minimize the reporting burden on others?

At the risk of seeming to oversimplify the process, I’ll attempt to breakdown some of the concepts mentioned here as a means for peering through the gray. The following five points have been central to my years of guiding organizations through this process.

1: Navigating the myriad of standards and frameworks:

Not only are there the long-time warriors (the Global Reporting Initiative, CDP, and the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board now merged with the International Integrated Reporting Counsel labeled as the Value Reporting Foundation), there are also larger north star initiatives, like the United Nation’s Global Compact or Sustainable Development Goals, and even those that are industry specific, like the Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark. There are also the investor-driven ratings and rankings, supply chain initiatives, and mandates disclosure requirements that organizations must contend with. Not everyone is blessed with sustainability departments powered by specialists of all types. In fact, most are managed by 1-3 individuals who often juggle multiple roles until they can prove the importance of an integrated strategy and leverage additional support. In the end, standards alignment comes down to one person dropping all disclosure requirements into an excel spreadsheet to make sense of all that is needed. There is no harm in this. It is a recommended first step in trying to better understand the nuances between all that is asked and whether it is possible to pull data to meet various requirements. The goal eventually, of course, is to automate reporting against all applicable requirements. Usually companies start by developing a comprehensive list of all that they can disclose, either initially or in the future. The key is not to exclude areas that the company is unable to immediately disclose on, but to press the “pause” button and keep those items in the horizon as areas that should be revisited in the future. Instead, stating where one is in the journey to retrieve information and manage inherent risks, while providing data for what is possible, is recommended. In that, clear “omissions” or “exclusions to the boundary” should be noted.

2: Determining the qualitative vs. quantitative:

Be it labor standards, human rights, training and education, resource consumption or greenhouse gases, there are both qualitative and quantitative features to grasp and disclose an organizations’ impacts. Granularity is based on what the organization is trying to achieve by pursuing efforts in a certain area. Will the level of detail provide a sharper view of potential risks? Will the data enable decision-making? Will it demonstrate the level of transparency the organization is willing to provide to match disclosure among its peer group? Will it result in greater recognition or even, leadership status? By asking these questions, organizations can determine their priorities and narrow in on data tracking mechanisms to pull, house, and analyze detail. Keep in mind, however, taking inventory always presents surprises. Try not to go down a rabbit hole searching for data that doesn’t exist or isn’t relevant considering the larger footprint. Report on what is available and explain what is being accounted for, what is missing, and why.

3: Pull others along:

Frameworks, data, and the endless requests for disclosure are enough to make anyone question their sanity—let alone the ongoing education that is needed to bring others along the path towards greater sustainability. Up until about five years ago, the role of the sustainability champion was often a lone wolf in the organization who felt committed to the charge. Boards were not involved, and it was because few companies saw sustainability as a strategic imperative. Today, it’s no longer effective to go at this alone. Markets have begun to regulate this space: the fear of shareholder resolutions, and the inability to access capital due to a lack of demonstrated ESG commitments, risk management, and performance disclosure has catapulted the need to activate players across functions. Regardless of standard, framework, or reporting platform, governance is critical to ensuring that sustainability sticks. It’s not enough to simply describe the organizational and leadership structure, but to describe how and where sustainability or ESG risk management sits within and what the role of the Board is. The sustainability coordinator, or Chief Sustainability Officer’s structure the group to facilitate action. Constant education and hand holding is necessary to inform the working group on the rapidly changing landscape and what is needed to maintain a license to operate from the stakeholder perspective.

4: Minimize the reporting burden:

If it’s not clear by this point, all that matters when it comes to reporting is 1) performance data, 2) an explanation of management approach, and 3) a description of your processes undertaken to identify material matters and manage risks. Stories and imagery provide color but not an overview of what the organization is doing to manage impacts. Begin by structuring your website to highlight data. Embedd data from GRI, the SDGs, and/or SASB indexes as companies such as Ball Corporation, BlackRock, and Coca-Cola. All have focused more efforts on tangible reduction and reuse, rather than creating beautiful communication pieces. This allows them to focus time and resources on doing the work that matters.

5: Data collection:

As the saying goes, “what doesn’t get measured doesn’t get managed.” Pulling data from the ESG pillars and across functions often means that the data collection process tends to take shape like a patch work quilt. Utilizing an integrated, configurable system that can extract and consolidate data into a single source of truth allows companies to focus on results, rather than begging for data from sources internal and external to their organization. Where possible, automate the data collection process, and provide decision-making analytics that can be transferred to various disclosure platforms to streamline the process and further minimize the reporting burden.

Hopefully, these points will help reassure you that you’re on the right path. The reality is, there is no easy way. Many of the front movers know this all too well. Their approach has taken years to solidify. In addition to the 5 points listed above, try to remember that it is important to just get started. Improvements can be made over time and lessons aren’t typically learned through perfection.

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About the Author—Nancy Mancilla, ISOS Group

Ms. Mancilla is the CEO and Co-Founder of ISOS Group, a full services sustainability consultancy firm also recognized for its leadership as a GRI and CDP Certified Training Partner in the U.S. Since establishing the company, Nancy has orchestrated 300+ Certified Trainings, co-taught MBA programs, regularly serves as a conference guest speaker and thought leader on the non-financial reporting process. In addition to educational services, ISOS Group provides organizations of all types with sustainability assessments, reporting guidance and external assurance.

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