What are the potential future-sustainability KPIs that should be monitored?

Problem

SustainabilityCo, being a leading company in the chemical industry, recognizes sustainability as an integral part of its strategy. To have its sustainability reporting in line with global standards, it sought to assimilate the best practices in sustainability reporting and benchmark its KPIs against its peers, market leaders and customer companies. This task would enable SustainabilityCo to critically analyze their current sustainability reporting standards and create a robust, transparent and accessible format for sustainability reporting. Additionally, it also sought to benchmark its process safety and quality KPIs with industry and global standards, enabling it to create a dashboard of future KPIs and understand the data needed to monitor these KPIs in the future.

Situation

SustainabilityCo’s sustainability reporting is based on the GRI standards which is externally assured, however, SustainabilityCo sought to improve its sustainability governance model by identifying future sustainability KPIs. Additionally, it also sought to conduct a background study to better understand the KPIs for Quality and Process Safety. After further investigating the sustainability reports of SustainabilityCo’s peers, market leaders, and customer companies, the SprintlyWorks team set out to review the best practices and create a KPIs overview report for SustainabilityCo.

Our approach

SprintlyWorks team carried out an undertaking to produce tangible results that enabled client deeper understanding and good background for selecting new KPIs. The project consisted of 3 phases:

• Understand the GRI Framework
• Conduct benchmarking on SustainabilityCo’s peers, market leaders and customer companies to create reports of each company on their sustainability KPIs and best reporting practices
• Conduct research and review existing standards for benchmarking the process safety and quality KPIs

Methodology

Phase 1: Understand the GRI Framework and SustainabilityCo’s current KPIs

The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) has laid down international Sustainability Reporting Guidelines and standards that aim to improve the transparency, and accountability of companies. SprintlyWorks team’s first step was to review and understand the framework and its scope:

• Understand the basics and the scope of the GRI framework.
• Review the GRI framework for the sustainability topics chosen for the research: Energy Emissions, Waste, Materials, Water and Health & Safety.
• Extract the mandatory and recommended sustainability KPIs with their definitions under the different topics and review SustainabilityCo’s current KPIs.

Phase 2: Conduct benchmarking for sustainability KPIs and best practices

SprintlyWorks team was then set to benchmark SustainabilityCo’s KPIs with its peers, market leaders and customer companies, for which the tasks were to:

• Read and analyze the companies’ annual and sustainability reports to extract their reported sustainability KPIs under each topic, as well as the health and safety topic
• Read sustainability initiatives undertaken by the companies to extract their main narrative pointers and goals
• Summarise the findings of the sustainability KPIs and health and safety KPIs and narrative pointers and create a summary report for each of the reviewed companies

Phase 3: Conduct standards research for process safety and quality

Due to a lack of the existence of a common international standard for process safety and quality, SustainabilityCo sought to review and analyze the different standards available on the widely used KPIs in process safety and quality. Hence, SprintlyWorks team set out to:

• Review the existing standards on process safety KPIs and recommendations for monitoring and reporting of process safety incidents and leading KPIs in process safety
• Review the available standards for quality KPIs and also benchmarked against the 12 companies reviewed for sustainability KPIs previously
• Summarise the results to create a recommendation report for SustainabilityCo outlining the best practices for process safety and quality.

Results

SprintlyWorks team successfully helped SustainabilityCo understand and improve its KPI options by benchmarking the best practices in sustainability reporting. SprintlyWorks team was able to extract and collate more than 200 sustainability KPIs under the six sustainability topics and more than a 100 process safety and quality KPIs, outlining the best practices and initiatives undertaken by the 12 peers, market leaders and customer companies of SustainabilityCo. By creating a summary report on each of the reviewed companies for sustainability and also recommending practices for monitoring leading process safety and quality KPIs, SprintlyWorks team assisted the management of SustainabilityCo in getting background information to make better decisions and improve its overall sustainability KPIs. SustainabilityCo is taking these recommendations into account for its subsequent sustainability reports.