Demystifying Sustainability Reporting
What is sustainability reporting?
In a fairly recent trend, many organizations put equal importance on producing non-financial reports as part of annual disclosures. Sustainability report is the foremost of them and is mostly done voluntarily to show a company's commitment towards accountability and transparency.
Sustainability reporting is defined by GRI as the practice of measuring, disclosing, and being accountable to internal and external stakeholders for organizational performance towards the goal of sustainable development.
In simpler terms, a sustainability report is an organizational report that gives information about economic, environmental, social and governance performance.
Capabilities required in a Sustainability Reporting Platform?
A true sustainability reporting platform should focus on both functional and technological capabilities.
Key performance areas monitored by a sustainability platform include Environmental (materials, energy, water, emissions, biodiversity etc.), Social (labor practices training and development, occupational safety, diversity, human rights, local community, corruption etc.) and Economic (economic performance, economic impact, compliance, product responsibility etc.)
The platform needs to technically capable to bring out business intelligence reports from captured Enterprise Data. The dashboards should support internationalization and data level security due to the sensitive nature of the data and processes.
GRI Reporting framework:
The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) is a non-profit organization that promotes economic, environmental and social sustainability. It provides all companies and organizations with a comprehensive sustainability reporting framework.
GRI guidelines focus on two major areas:
Reporting Principles and guidance: How to define report content, what to put in a report, how to ensure report quality, how to define range or boundary of the report and finally how to derive the key indicators to report.
Standard Disclosures: Economic, environmental and social KPIs, the Management Approach to arrive at these performance areas and measures, finally organizational strategy for creating a sustainable future.
Latest is the G3.1 release.
Sustainability reporting and Hyperion
Oracle has launched Sustainability Reporting Kit for HFM last year at Oracle Open World. It ensures both financial and sustainability reporting from a single application. This starter kit is a GRI certified prebuilt application that collects, consolidates and reports sustainability data from multiple source systems. It has predefined CoA and task lists compliant to GRI, direct integration to Oracle, built-in web data entry forms and a calculation engine to convert measures as per GRI standards.
Sustainable Reporting at Infosys
To quote S.D. Shibulal, "For Infosys, sustainability means that while we add value for our stakeholders - customers, employees, investors, and the society - we also need to be conscious of building a tomorrow that is sustainable". Our sustainability report adopts GRI's 2011 sustainability reporting guidelines (3.1). Infosys sustainability initiative involves around 'Social contract', 'Resource intensity 'and 'Green innovation'. The report can be downloaded at http://www.infosys.com/sustainability/Documents/infosys-sustainability-report-2011-12.pdf.
Reference sites: www.globalreporting.org; www.wikipedia.com; www.infosys.com
