Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) calls for an intensified focus on a long list of global issues, such as climate change, extensive droughts, and safety risks in workplaces. Now, stakeholders like customers, governments, investors, community, and partners are demanding accurate disclosures from companies to assess their impacts. Therefore, operating around the growing watchful eyes means that businesses have to take action and disclose every impact via ESG reporting, but it is never easy when working manually. Instead, you should go for the best environmental compliance management software.
In addition to crafting a good sustainability or ESG implementation plan, everything else narrows down to efficient data gathering, analysis, and report generation. Most companies find managing this data with standard spreadsheet software or platform tough or near impossible. But with a good ESG compliance app, it becomes easy to interweave the entire sustainability strategy and reporting with the core mission of your organisation. In this post, we take a closer look at the four most important things that you should focus on when selecting environmental compliance management software.
Why You Should Use Environmental Compliance Management Software
Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) laws are evolving pretty fast. Environmental compliance management software centralises, consolidates, and streamlines a company’s ESG efforts to help the management comply with the existing laws. The apps make it possible to learn, manage risks and assist companies in avoiding penalties for non-compliance.
The sustainability data is also evolving and calling for new ways to operate sustainably. Like financial reporting, EHS management and ESG disclosure has made quantifying different categories of data a big challenge. Besides, referencing the right methodologies is also central to driving transparency. However, ESG compliance software offers a reliable solution for your team to manage both performance and risks.
When using the right environmental compliance management software, you get regular system updates that help you to understand different categories of data to track and report. Verifiability is also easy because the app helps to point at the journey the company used to achieve its current status, such as net-zero carbon status. This means that every stakeholder has the opportunity to not only check the performance on the ESG report, but to trace the starting time/point and see the trend.
As an organisation, you cannot afford to wait until the end of a fiscal year to determine if all the departments, products, and strategies are ESG compliant. The best approach is installing appropriate environmental compliance management software to help you track progress in real-time. Whether it is cutting down carbon footprint or reducing waste at source, the program will notify you when the efforts are getting off the tracks and need adjustments.
Selecting Environmental Compliance Management App: Things to Consider
Now that you know the main benefits that come from using environmental compliance management software, the next question is, "how do you select the best?" Here are the most important things to consider when selecting a software solution for your company:
- Strength of the Software Provider
You can easily pinpoint good ESG compliance management software by looking at the developer. In the rapidly evolving world of sustainability management, more players have joined to try and help businesses achieve their compliance goals, but you have to be extra careful to select the developer and app that focuses on your industry. So, check the developer’s competitive position, recent performance, and prime market focus.
Go ahead and extend the due diligence to the market by checking what previous clients who used the developer's apps have to say. You can get this information in software reviews. Remember that even when other users give a positive review; it is prudent to check the environmental compliance management software closely and establish its effectiveness for your situation.
- Should Have Good Data Management
As we have highlighted, data is at the heart of any ESG management app. Therefore, you have to dig deeper into the selected app’s mechanics to ensure it will be able to handle all your sustainability data needs. Important attributes to check at this point are:
- Capability to manage multiple data sources.
- Data automation.
- Data quality checks.
- Support for international ESG standards.
- Ability to track progress.
- Ability to Help with Third-Party Risk Management
A good ESG app should not be only limited to your business. In addition, the environmental compliance management software should allow you to closely follow the risks in your company's supply chain. To know this, consider checking things such as pre-built templates for vendor onboarding and third-party data exchange.
- Support for Action
The primary goal of using environmental compliance management software is to avoid getting into conflict with the law, but it should also help with improvement. When the app signals you that a specific key performance indicator or risk has been missed or met, it should also give some options for improvement. This means that at all times; your company will be marching forward in the sustainability journey.
In this post, we have highlighted some crucial things you can use to identify good environmental compliance management software. Make sure also to check customer support and the cost of the app. Some of the programs that meet all the considerations we have highlighted above are diginexESG and diginexCLIMATE. Visit Diginex.com to learn more about their ESG apps, meet their ESG experts, and get solutions to all your sustainability-related management needs.
