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The current reporting process is a mess ........................................

Many companies borrow from templates, such as the Global Reporting
Initiative. Yet standards vary and reports are often lean and labor intensive.
In the EIU survey, only 22 percent of executives said their companies had
formal procedures for triple bottom line reporting (although 40 percent
planned to adopt them within the next five years).

Common problems with sustainability reporting include

Information flows sequentially, and there are technical obstacles for

each step.

The whole process relies on manual operations. Information is typically

exchanged by e-mail. Data is stored in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.

Validation and consolidation require considerable effort and time. The

whole process is prone to errors.

Whole teams spend weeks or months gathering the data, making sure

that it’s correct and consolidating it. Because this whole process is

based on manual operations, many companies invest in third party

assurance by hiring expensive auditing companies. Costs can reach

two million euros per an annual report.

Sustainability solutions often aren’t integrated into other existing systems.

According to a survey of 150 companies in the U.S. and Europe by AMR

Research, less than one-third use their ERP systems to help manage CSR

issues. Yet these enterprise-wide systems should be the very foundation

of balancing environmental, social, and business objectives.

New tactics are required ...................................................................

Companies must move from reactive, uncoordinated tacticsto proactive strat-
egy. In other words, you must embed sustainability into your key business
processes. Sustainable development then becomes a natural part of business
development.

The benefits of such a shift include

Competitive advantage. Sustainability monitoring can be cumbersome

and time consuming. By doing it efficiently, you gain competitive advan-

tage over rivals

Long-term success. This depends not only on financial performance, but

also on performance of non-financials, for instance, energy efficiency,

carbon footprint, toxic substances in products, etc.

Improved internal and external benchmarking. You gain more insight into

your sustainability performance. This allows you to feed back information

Chapter 13: Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility 259