Transparency Archives

“At Grundfos, ensuring the complete and accurate provision of sustainability data and its integration into the company’s operational and performance measurement processes is of paramount importance to us. In 2022, we introduced Sphera Cloud, the new corporate sustainability software. This allows us to further enhance the completeness and accuracy of ESG data within a single platform.”
Károly Nyári, Group Vice President FP&A

Company Name:

Grundfos

Implementation Year:

2022 –

Focus Areas:

Transparency, Responsible Corporate Governance, Corporate Strategy

Program Objective:

Accurate measurement and reporting of environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) performance are critically important to Grundfos for various reasons.

External and internal stakeholders, regulatory requirements, monitoring of our strategy, and voluntary commitments increasingly require the collection, recording, and credible reporting of various performance indicators.

We needed a solution that would streamline data collection, storage, and auditability across a complex organizational structure and various maturity levels. Our goal is to ensure that the quality of our sustainability performance data matches that of our financial data.

Program Measures and Commitments:

ESG considerations have been an integral part of our company’s operations since its inception, starting with internal regulations defining the proportion of employees with disabilities and extending to the inclusion of sustainability indexes in our strategy starting in 2020, with total CO2e emissions becoming one of our TOP6 KPIs from 2023.

It’s becoming increasingly evident that the quality expectations for ESG data are catching up with those for financial data.

Considering this, most of the knowledge and experience reside within the financial organization, which also has the longest history of audit processes. Additionally, given the evolving EU regulations and the rise of integrated reporting, it makes sense to integrate and align ESG reporting processes with existing financial reporting.

Improving data quality presents the biggest challenge, and there’s much experience and benchmarking to draw upon within the financial organization.

Within the Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) department of the Financial Directorate, a Sustainability Finance team was established with a central hub in Hungary. Team members bring different expertise and organizational backgrounds, providing significant advantages in shaping complex processes.

Taking into account existing and anticipated requirements, as well as internal ambitions, we initiated development efforts on multiple fronts. Besides introducing technical solutions that meet data collection requirements, we also started building related processes, with a particular focus on control processes and their proper documentation.

An increasing portion of the organization is getting involved in the new processes, so significant attention must be devoted to training and development for participants to better understand and comprehend the data they work with.

Given the size and complexity of the dataset, we need simple technical solutions to visualize performance and make tracking easier for decision-makers.

Program Impact and Results:

We introduced the SPHERA system, which enables unified data collection from all locations. We established a system for key performance indicators (KPIs) and data hierarchy. We also developed a Sustainability Scorecard Power BI report and the related reporting process towards top management and the Sustainability Council.

For our 2022 sustainability report, we achieved a “reasonable” level of assurance for energy consumption, water intake, Scope 1 and Scope 2 CO2e data, and a “limited” level of assurance for the entire report and remaining indicators.

Keywords

Data Collection, Sustainability Performance Measurement

“Sustainable businesses of the future are built in the present. Many of them have to examine their operations from a sustainability perspective. OPTEN helps businesses with its ESG services not only for strategic reasons, but also as a mission statement. Our aim is to help the domestic business community understand sustainability issues, understand their own situation and that of their partners, and then make informed business decisions based on the knowledge and credible data they have acquired.”
Tamás Tóth, Managing Director

Company name:

Opten Informatikai Kft.

Implementation year:

2022-

Focus Areas:

Transparency

Program objective:

In Hungary, the SME sector accounts for a significant share of firms (490 880 firms in 2022, 1 392 668 employees).

We find that:

Sustainability is not yet part of their everyday life,
their capacity is insufficient, and
and they are struggling to keep up on the cost side.

This is where our ESG services can help.

Our aim is to help companies transform their operations and mindset to respond to sustainability-related regulatory requirements in a timely and appropriate manner.

Program measures and commitments:

If a company completes the questionnaire presented above to a satisfactory standard, it can request its own ESG report based on the data.

Although the SME sector will only be affected by regulatory requirements, in particular the CSRD Regulation, years down the line, meeting these requirements is a major task. It is therefore essential to understand the relevance of the topic now.

We have designed our ESG services with these in mind.

ESG Index

The ESG index, published in January 2022, uniquely assesses all well-performing companies in Hungary, in addition to large listed companies.

We show not only an aggregated ESG index, but also E, S and G sub-indexes, which clearly indicate where companies need to improve more.

The index is largely based on publicly available data. Nowadays, many domestic banks monitor these scores, which can help to facilitate financiers’ decision making and their ESG assessment of companies.

Self-assessment ESG platform

This is a questionnaire-based platform that lists 78 questions for respondents to answer on a range of topics. As a result of completion, company-specific data are incorporated into the company index and modify its value.

ESG report

The OPTEN Automated ESG Report is a few-page document that fully follows the structure of the GRI framework. In addition to basic company information, it includes an industry benchmark on the ESG index and CO2e emissions, followed by information on the key topics of the E, S and G legs.

What all companies have to do is to provide the data we require, and the process results in an ESG report covering a wide range of topics, priced according to the resource level of the SMEs. And the content and structure of the service itself has been accredited by the world’s largest and best-known framework provider, GRI, after a six-month audit period, the first in Hungary.

Program Impact and Results

The educational nature of our services has been a clear success since their launch.

Since the launch of the report product, 100% of the questionnaires have been submitted in “report ready” status, which means that a sufficient number of questions have been answered and the output generated is suitable for ESG reporting.

And the digital alternative to reporting provides domestic SMEs with the opportunity to gain a competitive advantage over their international competitors, as up-to-date ESG reporting becomes a prerequisite for an increasing number of tenders.

Keywords:

EU Taxonomy, CSRD regulation

Sustainability (ESG) performance measurement

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Keywords

ESG Services mainly for SMEs

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