Sustainability Data Management

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Sustainability / Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), also known as corporate responsibility, corporate citizenship, responsible business, sustainable responsible business (SRB), or corporate social performance is on the increase among our clients. This brings with it a need to manage and report on still more data and often to report it regionally, by business unit and corporately. Our MP-5 data management system helps our clients manage their sustainability processes.

Each company clearly has to define their own approach and priorities. Key within this is the need to develop indicators which then become measurable indicators of performance in areas such as economic, social and environmental performance. These are referred to as key performance Indicators (KPI's). Our systems have the flexibility to tie into this process. Raw data from accorss the business can be automatically imports and KPI's produced from user defined calculations.

There are various guidelines as to how KPI's should be developed but among the most widely recognised are those produced by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) (www.globalreporting.org). Some of these are qualitative whereas others are based on clear data generated within the business. Examples in the latter category (taken from the GRI G3 guidelines) include:

Economic	Social	Environment
Revenues Operating costs Employee compensation Charitable donations	Human rights (% of screen suppliers) Employees trained on human rights Number of incidents of discrimination Incidents of use of child / forced labour Number of incidents of violations of rights of inidgenous people Workforce by emplyment type, region, age group, gender, ethnicity Occupational health (injuries / fatalities, training) Employee training Customer satisfaction / complaints Regulatory non-compliance and fines Corruption and fines	Raw material used / recycled Energy used / saved Renewable energy Water use and origin Water recycled / reused Land and biodiversity Habitats protected / restored Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions Emissions of ozone depleters NOx, SOx and other air emissions Water discharge Waste produced / disposed Accidental spills Packaging waste Permit compliance breaches Transport of goods

 

In many cases the indicators developed by companies reflect ratios between impact and productivity and so for GHG reporting a company may produce a Key Performance Indicator of tonnes CO₂ per tonne of product. This may of course be reported as an annual sum at corporate, regional, business unit or sit level.

Whatever the data reported the task of data collection, production of KPI's, and comparison to targets and reporting usually a difficult task. This is where our MP-5 data management system can help.

In medium sized companies we typically find that data for CSR is often generated at local sites in Excel workbooks or within MP-5 installs at local sites. In the former case these can be easily imported into MP-5 and this raw data is then used to calculate KPI's using MP-5's calculation engine and user defined calculations. In the latter case this data can be automatically exported from local sites and imported by a corporate system via LAN/WAN or FTP and used to produce corporate KPI's. Many local systems would usually provide data for the corporate database and so the corporate systems can produce KPIs from right across the business. Using the MP-5 scheduling and e-mail notification systems, warnings can be sent if data is late or incorrect, or if particular KPI's are being breached.

The table below shows an example of how sustainability data can be managed in local and corporate systems.

Local system	Corporate system
Data entered on energy use as diesel (litres/gallons), biofuel (litres/gallons), gasoline (litres/ gallons), gas (m3), electricity (KWh).	Data from each site converted to KWh and CO2 using methods defined by user normally based on national standards. These are aggregated in the system to show totals at site, business unit, geographical and corporate totals.
Data entered on environmental incidents, spills, regulatory breeches, notices served by regulators, local complaints.	Imported and aggregated in the system to show totals at site, business unit, geographical and corporate totals.
Accidents and near misses added into the system.	Imported and aggregated in the system to show totals at site, business unit, geographical and corporate totals.
Charitable donations.	Imported and aggregated in the system to show totals at site, business unit, geographical and corporate totals.
HR data -training undertaken, warnings issued, ethnicity / sexual orientation / disabilities of employees.	Imported and aggregated in the system to show totals at site, business unit, geographical and corporate totals.
Normalisation factors and business metrics such as revenue, tonnes product produced, number of employees, hours worked.	All above data normalised to be expressed as tonnes CO2 per tonne product, $ donated to charity per $ revenue, near misses per hour worked. All of this data again shown at local and aggregated levels.