It’s no secret that an environmentally compatible approach is good for a company's image and results. Increased interest from financial markets has resulted in companies facing more stringent environmental reporting requirements. This is demonstrated by a recent study in which 90% of the CEOs from 50 different countries stated that eco-friendly development was a definite corporate objective.

Challenges for sustainability reporting

Standard methods using spreadsheets and e-mail are still the main means of collecting data. Such labour-intensive methods require considerable time and effort to create, consolidate, and analyse KPIs.

This form of data gathering presents companies with a host of challenges:

• Data collection is time-consuming, and reports in real-time are virtually impossible
• Data quality is inadequate due to the large volumes of data involved
• Data can be difficult to compare due to changes from one year to another
• Stand-alone solutions for specific applications make it difficult to cut overall system operating costs
• Although data can be used to improve environmental performance, inaccuracy and poor data quality hardly provide a good basis for making a decision
• Reporting cannot cover all levels, as data is not transferred to a central location
• Reporting is not possible at site or plant level, due to a lack of information on the situation as a whole

eSpheres’ Environmental Sustainability reporting solution

This new solution enables energy suppliers to provide all stakeholders - such as authorities, analysts, customers, and staff - with environmental and social reports at the touch of a button. These may cover the quantities of a certain hazardous substance or operating material used at sites abroad in the past month, or the volume of NOx or CO2 gas emitted from particular facilities, plants or even an entire group in the last quarter.

Environmental reporting has now become an integral part of in-house reporting and forms the basis for a company’s Continuous Improvement Process (CIP). So, it’s crucial to aggregate all environment-related data from systems, plants and subsidiaries, right up to group level. This goes a long way towards improving environmental performance and other key processes across the various sites, including branches in different countries. Companies save on vital resources thanks to the improved transparency of environmental data and the greater efficiency of the processes for creating reports.