The Sustainability Data Management solution addresses two major demands presented to companies complying with environmental, social and governance (ESG) requirements by enabling customers to:
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Establish a sustainability profile, which summarizes the goals and values the organization wants to represent. This profile serves as the core of any company’s sustainability initiative.
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Enable sustainability compliance officers to manage the company’s sustainability data as they would any other master data. The solution supports acquisition, management, and publication of sustainability data through pre-configured workflows and business rules.
Sustainability Profile
Creating a sustainability profile requires companies to define the assessments, both internal and external, that the business will be measured against. Assessments measure a Sustainability data card-linked object’s (or objects’) compliance, both quantitative and qualitative, with one or more criteria. Criteria, which are the most granular level of detail in an assessment, are evaluated using attribute values, references, or other MDM (Master Data Management) constructs.
Sustainability Master Data Management
To measure an organization’s sustainability compliance, the assessments must be applied to a Sustainability data card, which is a representation of product, supplier, or location objects.
The outcome of the assessment for the specific data card is a summary of the criteria results which may be in the form of a binary ‘Pass/fail’ or ’True/false’ result, value, value percentage, text, etc.
The criteria associated with each of these compliance objects determine whether these objects ‘Pass’ an evaluation, or ‘Fail’ it. In some sustainability scenarios, if all associated (and required) criteria are evaluated and determined to fall within the configured parameters, the compliance object passes. If even one of the associated (and required) criteria falls outside those parameters, however, the compliance object fails. In other, more complex scenarios, assessments can be nested together to create a compliance result based on evaluations of multiple criteria linked to multiple assessments.
In short, the Sustainability Data Management solution is comprised of objects that enable a highly flexible configuration that can be designed to fit the user’s requirements, however straightforward or complex.
Criteria
The 'criteria' of the Sustainability Data Management solution are arguably the most important elements of the solution. Modeled in STEP using the ‘criteria’ product object type, criteria are configurable measurements that help determine whether an evaluated object (a product, supplier, or location) is compliant with a given sustainability requirement. Data associated with criteria could be an attribute value, reference, or other STEP object.
A criterion could be configured to determine an object’s compliance using one of the following methods:
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Comparing the object to a predefined string (a text value)
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Comparing the object to a predefined numeric value
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Determining whether a configured value is ‘null’
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Determining whether another assessment is in a ‘Pass’ state
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Evaluation of a result generated by a business function
Assessment Metadata
An assessment’s metadata attributes work in concert with criteria to manage sustainability data and model real-world compliance scenarios. Assessment metadata include:
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Criteria-level compliance result
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Last Criteria Update date
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Assessment Validity period (months)
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Number of Active Criteria
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Number of Archived Criteria
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Number of Inactive Criteria
These metadata attributes can be used to trigger alerts around assessment updates, expiration dates, and performance metrics.