Client€3B Global Speciality Chemicals Company
SprintA 10 week sprint, April to July
FieldworkPublished annual and sustainability reports from twelve companies, read disclosure by disclosure, plus nine process safety standards and two quality standards bodies
Supply chain and sustainability
Externally assured, and still not comparable
The client already reported sustainability against the GRI standards, and the report was externally assured. Assurance answers one question well: are the numbers we publish correct. It does not answer the question the reporting team kept being asked internally, which is whether the company is counting the right things at all.
12
Peer, market leader and customer companies benchmarked
300+
Sustainability, process safety and quality KPIs extracted
6
Sustainability topics reviewed end to end
9
Process safety standards and guidance sources reviewed
A note on sourcing. Every figure here comes from a SprintlyWorks client engagement. Clients are described, never named. Where a figure is identified, modelled or indicative rather than banked, the line says so.
01
Assurance answers a different question
Reporting against the GRI standards and having the result externally assured is a real discipline, and plenty of companies this size still do not have it. It tells a reader that the numbers on the page can be trusted.
It says nothing about the numbers that are not on the page. Are we disclosing something a peer is silent on, or the other way round. When a customer or an investor puts our report next to four others, where do we look thin. Nobody inside the company could answer that, because answering it means reading twelve annual reports line by line and nobody had the weeks free.
That is a benchmarking problem, not an assurance problem, and it is exactly the kind of work that sits on a list for two years because it is important and never urgent.
02
Where the framework runs out
GRI sets mandatory and recommended disclosures for energy, emissions, waste, materials, water, and health and safety. That is a floor and the client was standing on it.
Process safety and quality have no equivalent floor. The Seveso III review states it plainly: no single authority has established a common set of indicators, and adoption differs from organisation to organisation, which makes safety performance difficult to compare between companies.
So the sprint ran as two different jobs. Sustainability was a benchmarking problem against a framework everyone already shares. Process safety and quality were a standards research problem with nothing to benchmark against, where the deliverable had to be built from the guidance itself.
03
Twelve companies, read disclosure by disclosure
Four peers in speciality and industrial chemicals, four market leaders from the wider process industries, and four customer companies from pulp and paper, polymers and municipal water. Public reports only, so the whole exercise is repeatable by the client without help.
Each report was read for three things. Which GRI disclosures the company actually reports, as opposed to listing in its index. Which additional KPIs it has invented for itself. And what targets and narrative it puts around them.
The additional KPIs turned out to matter more than the GRI ones, because GRI compliance clusters. Everybody looks similar on the mandatory disclosures. The differences sit in what companies chose to add.
Exhibit 1
The same energy framework, read very differently
Coverage of four GRI 302 energy disclosures across four peers and three market leaders, taken from their published sustainability reports rather than their GRI index tables.
| GRI 302 disclosure | Peers reporting | Market leaders reporting |
|---|---|---|
| 302-1 Energy consumption within the organisation | 4 of 4, two with no renewable split | 3 of 3, one with no renewable split |
| 302-2 Energy consumption outside the organisation | 2 of 4 | 0 of 3 in the report itself |
| 302-4 Reduction in energy consumption | 1 of 4 ties it to specific initiatives | 1 of 3 ties it to specific initiatives |
| 302-5 Reduction in energy requirements of sold products | 0 of 4 | 0 of 3 |
How to read this → Read down the columns, not across the rows. All seven companies report against the same framework. One of these four disclosures is reported by nobody in the sample, and two more by only two companies out of seven. From inside one company that is invisible. Side by side it tells you which disclosures earn credit with a reader and which earn none, which is a very different question from which ones are mandatory.
SprintlyWorks analysis
04
The differentiation sits in the KPIs nobody made them publish
Where the framework stops, companies improvise, and the improvisations were the useful part of the read.
One peer publishes the money saved by projects tied directly to energy reduction, in euros. Another publishes the number of its sites partially or fully powered by renewable electricity, and breaks its own fossil and residual fuel generation down by natural gas, heating oil, coal and residual fuels. One market leader publishes cumulative energy savings against a stated 500 GWh target running to 2025, and how far along it is.
None of that is required by anyone. All of it is the sort of number a reader remembers, and much of it is data the client already had sitting in systems. That was the part the reporting team could act on in the same quarter, because adding a KPI you already hold the data for costs almost nothing.
05
Process safety: nine sources, and no way to compare
With no framework to benchmark against, the work went to the standards themselves. Nine sources were reviewed: the European accident database under Seveso, the Seveso III review survey, the Norwegian Petroleum Safety Authority regime, the European gravity scale of industrial accidents, the Centre for Chemical Process Safety, OSHA, the UK Health and Safety Executive, the Plastics and Chemicals Industry Association, and the American Petroleum Institute.
Those sources do not produce one list. They produce hundreds of candidate metrics at wildly different levels, from tonnes of substance released to the average time it takes a manager to acknowledge a hazard a worker reported. They were sorted into eleven categories so that the client could put its own existing metrics against them and see the shape of what was missing.
The gaps were not where anyone expected. The client already measured incidents, near misses, small losses of primary containment, preventive inspection completion, training and emergency exercises against plan, and behaviour based safety observations. What the guidance emphasises and the client did not yet carry was the management side of the system.
Exhibit 2
Eleven categories of process safety metric, and where the client already had one
Process safety KPIs from nine standards and guidance sources, sorted into categories, against the client metric set as it stood at the time of the review.
| Category | Example metric drawn from the standards | Client already had one |
|---|---|---|
| Accidents, leaks and near misses | Reportable incidents, near misses, small losses of primary containment | Yes |
| Inspections, audits and follow up | Share of safety critical equipment inspections completed on time | Yes |
| Employee training and work permits | Trainings and emergency exercises completed against plan | Yes |
| Worker participation | Behaviour based safety observations | Yes |
| Process hazard analysis and risk assessment | Share of risk assessments reviewed to schedule | No |
| Operating and maintenance procedures | Share of operators who believe procedures are current and accurate | No |
| Management of change | Share of changes that actually went through management of change | No |
| Human factors, shifts and fatigue | Share of hazard assessments that address human factors | No |
| Management leadership | Average time between a worker reporting a hazard and management acknowledging it | No |
| Communication and coordination | Audits confirming contractors follow site safety policy | No |
| Programme evaluation and improvement | Lagging indicator rates that improved after acting on a leading indicator | No |
How to read this → The four categories already covered are the ones that count things after they happen, or that count completion against a plan. The seven not covered are the ones that test whether the system meant to prevent incidents is actually working. That is the shape of most process safety metric sets, and it is why the standards bodies keep publishing leading indicator guidance. This is a gap map, not a compliance failure. Every metric in the right hand column is voluntary.
SprintlyWorks analysis
06
Quality had even less to hold on to
Quality was thinner again. Two standards bodies offered anything usable. One frames it as a triangle of cost, quality and time and points at the ISO 9000 characteristics as the place meaningful indicators come from. The other publishes a working glossary of measures such as first pass yield, average outgoing quality and mean time between failures.
What the twelve companies actually publish on quality is almost entirely customer facing. Net promoter score. A delivery efficiency index against a stated target above 95 percent. A third party sustainability rating. Complaint volumes broken down by category, sometimes by cause. Internal quality measurement is largely absent from public reporting.
That is a finding rather than a disappointment. If the client wants to report quality there is no peer practice to copy, which means any choice it makes is a deliberate positioning decision instead of catching up with the field.
07
What the client was left holding
A summary report on each of the twelve companies, so the reporting team can go back to a single benchmark later without rereading an annual report.
More than 200 sustainability KPIs collated under the six topics, and more than 100 process safety and quality KPIs sorted by category and by source, with definitions and thresholds wherever the standards give them.
And a recommendation on which practices to monitor, paired with the thing that usually gets left out: the data the company would have to start collecting before a new KPI could be published at all. The client said it would take the recommendations into account in its subsequent sustainability reports.
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