Simplified ESG Management: Overcoming ESG Challenges with Altru’s Integrated Project Management
ESG project management is riddled with intrinsic challenges, particularly in consolidating data across various silos and departments within an organization. A tumultuous start to the project lifecycle makes it increasingly difficult to meet incremental project goals, with issues related to quality, continuous stakeholder engagement, and alignment of support projects such as IT integrations.
This article explores the challenges present at various stages of the ESG reporting lifecycle and how a platform like Altru can ease the ESG reporting burden.
Challenges with ESG Project Management
Lack of Standardized Metrics & Framework
ESG managers often struggle to define project scopes and fail to establish consistent data collection protocols required for various frameworks. As a result, ESG/Sustainability teams:
- Lastly, if unnoticed, inconsistencies may lead to potential non-compliance
- Lose valuable time with rework to adjust metrics to report on the right frameworks
- Increase personnel costs due to time spent on rework
Issues with Data Collection & Quality
Due to fragmented business verticals, important sustainability data lies in silos, often with inconsistent collection and storage methods. Additionally, business units may run manual data collection processes, and Scope 3 data inconsistencies add complexity due to varied mechanisms used by suppliers. ESG/Sustainability teams face:
ESG/Sustainability teams face challenges with:
- Hurdles in data aggregation across different systems
- Risk of losing credibility with poor collection & aggregation mechanisms
- Risk of failing audits if a clear trail of data is unavailable.
Engagement & Materiality Complexity
ESG managers are stalwart’s of sustainability within their organization. They are responsible for communicating sustainability performance with various stakeholders in the organization. In order to effectively communicate, they will need access to robust underlying data that can support their claims and showcase performance against their material indicators. The primary challenge ESG/Sustainability teams face here:
- The need to derive varied insights to meet stakeholders’ diverse sustainability priorities
IT Integration
Successful ESG system implementation requires strong IT integration capabilities. ESG managers are often responsible for managing both backward and forward integration to ensure seamless data flow from Collection → Reporting → Leadership Insights. This is a major responsibility that typically falls under ESG/Sustainability leaders.
Measuring Impact & Demonstrating Value
ESG teams need to have clear measurable ESG objectives and KPIs. Effective tracking of real-time progress across various parameters is a key attribute that can help measure performance against set goals. This ensures continuous positive impact with customers, investors, suppliers, and other stakeholders. A key challenge ESG/Sustainability teams face here:
- Lack of visibility of near real-time progress across their ESG parameters
- Breadth of metrics and ESG parameters that need to be measured
Benefit From Altru’s Integrated Project Management
Strategic Benefits
Altru is built to address challenges presented above in the following ways:
- Framework Agnostic & Customizations: Altru uses a unified data set mapped to multiple ESG frameworks. This allows automatic data population across frameworks, reducing inconsistencies and saving time.
- Comprehensive Data Management: Altru allows for a wide range of data collection mechanisms – allowing users to collect data manually (that is verified automatically) to full automation eradicating need for human intervention, which is prone to errors.
- Project Planning & Execution: ESG team collaborators can be assigned tasks directly through Altru. The platform’s intelligent project management follows up automatically on missed tasks, ensuring timely delivery.
- Audit Trials: For compliance-driven ESG reporting, Altru logs all changes made to data along with their sources—providing a complete, audit-ready history.
- Technology-focused Partner: Backed by SHI (Formerly Locuz)’s strong technology implementation expertise, ESG teams can delegate complex IT integration tasks without needing to build in-house IT skills.
Technology Benefits
As a technology-first platform, Altru offers benefits in the following areas:
1. Integration and interoperability across various cloud providers and on-premise systems.
2. Dynamic scalability and performance to meet growing business needs.
3. Robust security and compliance measures built into the platform.
4. Use of AI – Artificial Intelligence is strategically applied to enhance user experience:
- Assists in answering qualitative questions.
- Simplifies data collection by extracting data from images, such as pictures of bills.
To learn more about how Altru can streamline your ESG initiatives, get in touch with the experts at SHI (Formerly Locuz) today.
