The Sustaira Sustainability Circle: Going beyond Sustainability reporting.
At Sustaira we believe that sustainability goes beyond reporting and annual check-ins. Sustainability expands into various domains just like it transcends teams in an organization. Sustainability isn’t only local to a sustainability director. It’s often embedded in marketing, finance, operations, management and more. It’s clear that there are more domains than the reporting domain, and all of them are interconnected just like your teams. These domains include everything from goal setting, to data aggregation and monitoring (awareness), to taking action and rewarding, and sharing results.
This interconnected view of sustainability spurred the idea of the Sustaira Sustainability Circle. This circle ultimately represents all the applications and software within and between all the sustainability domains. It shows how everything is linked together to give you a 360 degree view of sustainability. No matter where you are on your journey, the next step is right there, clearly outlined.
Existing sustainability and ESG software focuses strictly on reporting. While important, sustainability and ESG go far beyond reporting. Right now, Sustainability/ESG data is siloed both inside and outside of organizations with no easy way to aggregate and manage that data. The current processes tend to be based in Excel, are manual, and unfortunately error prone. This leads to inefficient, annual reporting that is not very transparent, and doesn’t demonstrate the impact of changes your organization may be making year after year. Thus, these issues combined makes organizations incapable to turn insights into measurable action. What if you had a solution that solved each and every one of those challenges? Well, you’ve come to the right place.
At Sustaira, we apply this to all that we do. In the image here you will see at the top of the circle we have our launchpad. Think of this launchpad like you think of your desktop on your computer. Most people have shortcuts to their most necessary or used items. Our launch pad allows you to do exactly that - It takes that entire sustainability circle that shows all these applications and solutions under the various domains, and lets you customize which items are most important to you. Then, those top items turn into tiles on your launchpad. Giving you a single overview where you click on whatever one you need at that time. Just like the shortcuts on your desktop.
You’ll notice under each domain we’ve listed our application templates or others solutions and frameworks based on where they fall in the circle. These are the tiles you choose from and they can be customized and changed to fit your needs. For example, a journey with Sustaira may look something like this:
First you want to focus solely on awareness. You might implement our Carbon Footprint Calculator to better understand your impact, making that a tile on your dashboard.
Then, you decide you want to add our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion app as well, because sustainability expands to people as well as the environment.
As you become more aware, you want to make some changes so you start to focus on actions. You add on a tile for Carbon Offsetting that engages all of your employees and then you expand on your DEI application and shift your practices around hiring and promotions.
You can see how it all goes hand in hand, and how your launchpad can grow and change with your needs, just our application templates can. If there isn't a template or framework that works for you yet, you can even create a custom tile with our expert development team. With over 30+ years of experience developing on Low-Code solutions, like Siemens platform Mendix, our developers can build a custom solution alongside your team.
Now the logical question here is, “how does the sustainability circle and all of these apps work with what we already have?” This is where we shift to that bottom banner of the graphic. In our experience, most companies have a lot of excel sheets, databases and systems in place and oftentimes they don't speak to each other. One might be other sustainability software, ERP, CRM, PLM or perhaps you have a few legacy and homegrown systems in place. However, having all these different sources and formats, makes awareness difficult because the current systems aren't allowing your data to be transparent. Which makes taking action even harder, and limits the results you're going to see. This expands all the way to reporting. You might report internally and externally, but that process can look like a mess of gathering one automated report from one place, downloading the data from another, and emailing an excel spreadsheet from a single person at X location to another person. It ends up being highly manual, inefficient, and irregular.
Think of the Sustaira Sustainability Circle as a layer on top of all of your other systems, both internally and externally. This does not replace what you already have. Instead it brings everything together, allows you to add on anything you're missing, organizes your launchpad, and allows you to focus on the most important things. Everything in the launchpad can work bi-directionally, so this launchpad is the only place you now need to go to input or export data. Before you know it, you're raising awareness, taking action, seeing results, and even reporting is simple!
In summary, the Sustaira Sustainability Circle outlines everything within and between all of the sustainability domains. It acts as a uniting layer between your current systems and your sustainability needs, bringing everything into one launchpad that accelerates your sustainability journey. I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times. Sustainability starts with Sustaira. Will you join the journey?
Be sure to register now for our upcoming webinars, and check out the recordings of the previous events you might have missed. Stay in the loop on everything we are up to by following us on social media and signing up for our newsletter below. Last but not least, if you’re not sure where to start or have some questions let’s chat! Head over to our contact us page.
