In order to be truly, quantifiably sustainable as a business, simply investing in corporate social responsibility and reporting about your CSR activities is no longer enough. You need to refine and fit all the efforts undertaken in your CSR strategy into concrete ESG metrics (environmental, social, and governance): data that you can – and increasingly also must – share with the outside world via ESG reports.
The need for this new type of sustainability reporting has grown substantially since January of this year. That’s when the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) came into force. That new piece of legislation created new ESG reporting standards for some 50,000 companies starting in 2025.
IBM Envizi: ESG reporting software
Along with this growing need for ESG reporting, an increasing number of ESG software tools and platforms are also being introduced in the market these days. These can help enterprises to gather the necessary metrics and streamline their new reporting process. We had a quick talk with one of our technology experts, François Gilles, about one such new solution: IBM Envizi.
What kind of a solution is IBM Envizi? What does it do?
“Envizi, in a nutshell, is a tool that simplifies the capture, consolidation, management, analysis, and reporting of your environmental, social, and governance data. I’m calling it a tool now, but in typical IBM fashion, it is actually more of a full-blown ESG suite. As such it is especially suited to the needs of larger organisations that are more and more required – legally forced even in some cases - to consolidate their enterprise ESG data for analysis and reporting purposes.”
What are the main benefits of working with such a solution?
“It allows you to automate a number of processes, which can save you a lot of time and money. It also leaves less room for human error, resulting in more accurate, consistent, and timely data. This ultimately results in more accurate, consistent, and timely reports and analyses.
Here’s the thing to keep in mind when discussing the value of Envizi and similar solutions: before the introduction of these solutions, if you wanted to report on your ESG performance, you practically had no choice but to resort to error-prone Excel sheets, complex macros, and so on. That made it very difficult to collect and consolidate the data needed to do this particular kind of reporting and analysis: data about the energy consumption of your company buildings and other facilities, for instance - simply put: your gas and electricity bills. But also data about your fleet and business travel.
Nowadays, if you already have smart meters and sensors installed, you can gather that data directly from those devices. If you have to work with the invoices provided by your energy providers, however – on PDF or, worse yet, on paper – then you’re almost sure to have a hard time integrating all that data from all those different sources into your reporting.”
What can Sopra Steria bring to the table, when it comes to ESG reporting?
“First of all, we have all the necessary credentials to resell, implement and integrate solutions such as IBM Envizi – and others, I must add since we adopt a vendor-agnostic approach. Carrying out this implementation and integration work is already a challenge in itself for many of our customers.
On top of that, we can also advise our clients on how best to use these new solutions. We can help them define their targets in terms of ESG and bring their level of governance up to the required standards.
In need of ESG reporting? Curious to find out more about IBM Envizi? Feel free to contact me and my colleagues for a no-obligation discussion or appointment.