When you’re building confidence in ESG data, the phrase you don’t want to hear is ad hoc. In the highly regulated arena of environmental, social, and governance reporting, you need tools that collect, track, aggregate, and memorialize all pertinent data on centrally. At the same time, you need the flexibility and nimbleness to handle evolving ESG requirements.
That’s the beauty of Unqork’s no-code platform. Users can quickly adapt and evolve applications as products, client needs, regulations, or internal policies change—without writing a single line of code. Unqork’s modern user interface and workflow management capability bridges the gaps among data sources and makes reporting more transparent and auditable.
Case in point: the work we did recently with a U.S. energy company.
The company operates many sites for wells, production, and processing across multiple states. It creates a vast amount of data that needs to be tracked for ESG compliance, such as waste emissions and air pollution impact. Data is fragmented and segmented across geographies, users, and business lines. If the data isn’t accurate, the company faces not only disciplinary action and fines from the SEC but also the potential loss of shareholder support. The company manually reports environmental metrics on an annual basis with a long collection period but wanted to reduce the time to report to under 25 days on a repeatable cycle.
Working with Unqork, we built a workflow-management tool to automate communications to data providers, digitize data collection using dedicated portals for each provider and workflow and live dashboarding that centrally tracks progress and approval status. Every person required to submit a piece of data for monthly reports logs into this platform and receives assigned tasks tied to relevant data points. Everyone also must verify that their data is located where it’s supposed to be so that it can be used for reporting.
Data providers are automatically notified when it’s time to log into the system, when they’re late to do so, and when an issue has been escalated to supervisors. Once data providers certify that the information is accurate, reviewers are notified to go into the system and check the reports.
Not only are data providers and reviewers alike linked into the system, so is the company’s regulatory group, which gets a real-time snapshot of the data collection process.
In just over 12 weeks, KPMG and Unqork delivered a solution to help address the company’s challenges and enabled seamless integration with existing applications, a modern user interface, and workflows to guide the process and connect various actors. Most importantly, it significantly reduced operational risk, errors and time to report.
As ESG becomes increasingly essential to corporate reporting, let KPMG and Unqork help you rapidly digitize your ESG operations with flexibility and accuracy so you can maintain data integrity and confidence in your internal and external reporting.
