Collecting sustainability and ESG data can be an overwhelming and daunting proposition. New regulations now demand even more extensive and complex data, like the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, which requires 12 reporting standards, 86 disclosure requirements, over 100 KPIs, and more than 1,000 data points.
Whether you’re a global enterprise requesting data from various subsidiaries, offices, facilities, warehouses, retail locations or a long list of suppliers, or a private equity firm gathering information from portfolio companies, Pulsora provides a powerful platform that simplifies the process for you. Our platform ensures data collection is configurable for your business needs, comprehensive to collect data across your value chain, and fully auditable for internal or external auditors and assurers.
Below, we highlight a few aspects that make Pulsora stand out and help our customers improve their sustainability performance and excel in their ESG reporting cycles.
Sustainability and ESG data collection challenges
Sustainability and ESG data collection challenges span across regulatory, operational and technology areas. For many companies, sustainability processes are some of the most cross functional processes to execute. This variety of stakeholders means a variety of sustainability data to manage. In order to successfully execute data collection for a large set of providers with such a wide range of data types and formats, a configurable and extensible platform is required.
And it’s not just the data types and formats, but also where the data is coming from and its accurate and timely availability. As sustainability teams know all too well, sustainability data comes from everywhere: internal team members, systems extract files, primary data, calculated data, data marts, APIs, not to mention subject matter experts, and external entities like suppliers, or, for private capital firms, portfolio companies. Companies need a data collection platform that is flexible and comprehensive, to seamlessly support data input up and down the value chain.
Data collection processes must also incorporate accuracy and transparency from the get-go. Creating sustainability reports that are built with data transparency helps companies combat greenwashing and positions companies to pass audits, a crucial component to comply with regulations without cumbersome duplication of data. With sustainability data coming from all areas of the value chain and in varying formats, it can be a considerable challenge for companies to control data accuracy, transparency and auditability.
How Pulsora can help
Start with the right metrics or data points
Identify and focus on the most relevant and impactful sustainability metrics. Select them from existing frameworks and disclosures that include CSRD, CDP, GRI, SASB, and EDCI, or create your own based on your business requirements. Also take into account that this list might change over time, depending on new or evolving business needs regarding verticals, geographies, regulations or customer demands.
What does this look like for Pulsora customers? All customers start with sustainability frameworks or their own custom reporting formats and identify specific metrics for data collection based on verticals, geographies and what is material to their business.
Centralize with a master data repository
The Pulsora platform offers configurable data repositories—we call them catalogs. These catalogs can be tailored to meet customers’ specific needs, empowering our customers to gather diverse data and generate various types of sustainability reports, such as those for the CDP or GRI frameworks, the CSRD regulation, or annual ESG reports. Pulsora catalogs can be a blend of any of these, to represent the data that’s needed.
As an example, one of our customers in the EU uses Pulsora to generate a CDP report, a DJSI report, and is actively preparing and collecting data for the CSRD.
Comprehensive data collection across the value chain
With a flexible catalog of metrics defined to store all necessary data across the value chain, the next step is to collect the data and populate the catalog. This process is flexible to best suit the type of data being collected. Data can be added manually, through integrations to automatically input data from existing systems, via file upload, or with automated workflows to engage the entities that make up our customers’ value chains. This flexibility results in comprehensive data collection that can span all types of sustainability and ESG reporting metrics, from DEI metrics to carbon emissions data and more.
What does this look like in practice? One of our customers has transformed their data collection process with automated workflows spanning nearly 400 retail locations, 20 offices, and 12 manufacturing sites around the world. With data collection automated and streamlined, this customer has been able to focus on sustainability strategy and goals, leveraging Pulsora’s analytics dashboards.
Real-time monitoring and automated reminders
The platform allows you to track requests in real-time and you can configure notifications to be sent automatically at specific times, before and after the request due date. This helps to keep you and your team on track during ESG reporting cycles.
One Pulsora customer successfully manages data collection with custom reminder policies for the hundreds of organizations that make up its global value chain, supporting these organizations so they don’t miss data submission deadlines.
Stakeholder engagement
With Pulsora, you can facilitate communication and collaboration with internal or external data providers. Data provided can be reviewed, approved or sent back for revisions based on multi-level approval workflows.
How does this work? Many Pulsora customers must report to external stakeholders, including to LPs for our private equity customers. Not only are private equity firms able to report up to LPs using Pulsora, they are also able to leverage approval workflows when requesting data from their portfolio companies, ensuring their reports are accurate and complete. Our private equity customers review data from their portfolio companies and compare against prior years, identify anomalies, add comments, send back for revisions, and ultimately incorporate the data into reporting once it’s accurate.
Audit-grade data
Data collection with Pulsora is transparent and auditable from start to finish - no extra steps required. For every data point in Pulsora, supporting evidence files can be added and an audit trail is automatically created, logging data updates and identifying which user made changes. With data collected in this manner, our customers confidently create and share reports, knowing that these reports are backed by transparent, auditable data collection processes.
One Pulsora customer, a global private equity firm with hundreds of portfolio companies, invited their auditing partner to log into Pulsora directly - streamlining the process and providing the auditor with full visibility into data collection processes, evidence files, calculations and more.
Analytics and insights
With analytics dashboards, you can identify trends or anomalies to support with strategic planning and ESG reporting. You can also benchmark with internal or external data sources and forecast outcomes based on data trends.
What does this look like for current customers? To facilitate traceability strategy and goal setting, a customer used Pulsora Analytics to create dashboards that showcased the responsible sourcing of raw materials in an unprecedented way.
Use Pulsora to simplify ESG data collection
Achieve your sustainability goals effortlessly with Pulsora’s flexible, comprehensive, and auditable platform that’s built for comprehensive data collection. Our customers don't just meet reporting requirements—they excel and save time so they can focus on what truly matters.
Is collecting sustainability data a challenge for your team? We’d love to hear from you about your top challenges for data collection.
