Cognizant ESG Reporting Services: 12 Weeks Implementation

ESG Reporting is a vital tool for companies to improve their transparency across their operations and measuring ESG risks and opportunities from their value chain. At the same time, companies are facing increasing pressure to adhere to the new legislation - to disclose their ESG performance from their inside and outside Europe. High quality ESG Reporting is a key enabler of the companies’ funding future as investors need to detail how ESG issues determine the value of their asset portfolios. Better data management and governance, leaner processes, better visualization/insight, and more suitable software solutions are often essential components in reducing the effort of reporting and improving the quality of outcome.

Cognizant® ESG Reporting Services leverages the Azure data platform to help companies identify the most suitable strategy and approaches that:

• Verify that necessary ESG compliance and reporting KPIs are identified and addressed in the report.
• Improve the data management and governance for ESG reporting (Scope 1, 2 and 3) especially by leveraging the capabilities of Microsoft cloud for sustainability.
• Reduce the organization overhead of data collection and processing for ESG reporting.
• Increase the data quality of ESG reports.
• Increase traceability of reporting related to scope 1, 2 and 3 and environmental footprint
• Identify opportunities to improve reporting automation.
• Identify best in class solutions and software for Scope 1, 2 and 3 data collection and reporting.
• Identify best strategies in integrating procurement data collection and ESG reporting needs.

How can ESG Reporting reconcile these competing goals? While ESG Reporting provides transparency across the company’s ecosystem it carries complexity in measurement. Poor data quality outdated digital tools and long lead times are creating bottle necks in the ESG Reporting process. Cognizant's Azure data platform experts have developed ESG Reporting Services to elevate the ESG framework into a decision-making tool.

Our solution includes four phases:

• Phase 1: ESG Data Strategy – Craft a data strategy to systematically discover, extract and employ data from the underlying processes to meet ESG and sustainability reporting needs. This data strategy considers the future needs regarding the ESG reporting due to regulations and compliance needs and best practice integration with Microsoft cloud for sustainability and Microsoft Azure.
• Phase 2: ESG processes discovery - Ensure processes are enabled for rapid ESG data discovery with lean/six sigma approaches for easy data query, analysis, processing with appropriate tools.
• Phase 3: ESG Data Analytics - Ensure ESG data is easily queried and analyzed with appropriate data analytics tools and visualized to meet stakeholders needs.
• Phase 4: Automating ESG Reporting - Easier and more agile ESG reporting by automating data ingestion and extraction from multiple sources and legacy systems through APIs/ bots.

Solution Benefits:

• Results in a data driven and agile roadmap which reduces overhead in measuring, disclosing and improving ESG-related issues.
• Equips CSO office with suitable BI and decision support analytics tool to monitor and react in a timely manner.
• Integrates intelligent automation to minimize the manual work & overhead in extracting ESG data from data silos, processes, excel sheets, quality controls, customs, and supply chain reports.

The solution implementation, price and duration a customized statement of work will be created based on client requirements identified during the initial discovery workshop.