Every company faces unique opportunities and challenges when it comes to Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) criteria, varying widely depending on factors such as industry, geography, supply chain compliance and internal KPIs. Because of this, out-of-the-box solutions often fall short in addressing these distinct needs, as they lack the flexibility to adapt to the specific context and goals of each business. In this blog, we explore the benefits firms can realize from using customized ESG solutions and explain the variety of customizable features and outputs available in our tailored offering ‘Bespoke myCSO’.
Why are Customized ESG Solutions Needed?
With the growth of the ESG market, companies are no longer confined to pre-configured technological solutions. They can leverage customized ESG solutions that are tailored to their specific circumstances. This tailored approach allows businesses to more effectively integrate ESG principles into their operations, ensuring they meet regulatory requirements, achieve sustainability targets and enhance overall corporate responsibility.
The Benefits of Having a Customized Solution
Choosing a customized ESG solution for your business not only helps you integrate ESG more effectively into business operations, there are a whole host of other benefits, including:
- Addressing pain points specific to your organization: Addressing your organization’s specific pain points with a tailor-made solution.
- Enhanced Tracking and Monitoring: Having a solution that specifically addresses your company’s pain points improves your ability to track and monitor progress on key ESG topics.
- Scalability and Adaptability: With a variety of modules, customizable solutions can scale and adapt as your company grows and evolves.
- Central Data Repository: Having a solution unique to your organization reduces the need to rely on multiple providers. This means ESG data can be centralized in one place.
- Cost Efficiency: Clients only pay for the modules they want and need, ensuring cost efficiency.
Rimm’s Bespoke ESG Solution
In order to address the unique ESG pain points that each organization faces, we’ve developed various modules and features in our flagship platform ‘myCSO’ that can be custom configured into a bespoke account. Using modular IP blocks, myCSO can be fully customized and configured for each client’s specific requirements. We have over 50 features that can be toggled on and off in our platform! Below is a menu of the key features within myCSO that can be leveraged to build a bespoke solution for organizations.
Data Input
- Multi-Year Data Input: include historical performance data to analyze trends and progress.
- Data Manager (internal and external): manage the content and channel of data inputs into the platform to answer assessment questions; the platform offers additional flexibility to answer questions in different formats (e.g. packed questions or multiple-choice) and import answers using different methods.
- Question Distribution and Business Unit Creation: Users can assign questions across business units within their organization.
Platform Modules
- Carbon Calculator: Organizations can get an instant overview of Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions using our carbon calculator, which is aligned to the GHG Protocol.
- Materiality Map: Organizations can see which topics are most material to their business or industry instantly using an auto-generated map using AI. Topics are decided based on peer group relevance, media sentiment and topic materiality.
- Assessment Customization: Our exclusive assessment tool is designed to align with major global frameworks and standards, such as GRI, CSRD, ISSB and the UN SDGs. Powered by our award winning IP, our assessments are rigorously aligned with standards, stock exchange requirements, and specific industry needs, ensuring full compliance. You can complete assessments in three ways: by starting from scratch, importing data from previous assessments, or bringing in data from external sources like Excel spreadsheets or PDFs. Additionally, organizations have the option to create custom assessments using our extensive library of over 7,000 questions, covering all critical environmental, social, and governance topics.
Analytics
- Performance Dashboard: Upon completing an assessment, users gain access to a detailed performance dashboard providing in-depth analytics including ESG scores, benchmarking and topic strategies and recommendations.
- SDG Impact Dashboard: Our platform automatically aligns your organizations’ assessment responses with relevant SDGs, mapping them to specific subtopics to measure your impact on each goal.
- Disclosure Dashboard: Gain clarity on your overall disclosure rate, helping you identify gaps in your organization’s data and improve transparency.
- Aggregated Dashboard: Whether you’re managing a portfolio, multiple business units, or various sites across a value chain, our aggregated dashboard offers a comprehensive view of your sustainability performance. It allows you to oversee overall progress at a glance, with the flexibility to drill down into the performance of specific entities as needed.
Outputs
- One-click Automated Report Generation: Streamline your sustainability reporting process with our AI-powered tool, which allows you to generate comprehensive reports with a single click.
- Sustainability Reports: Create fully customizable sustainability reports that cover every aspect of your myCSO solution, from materiality and impact to benchmarking and strategy. These reports are tailored to reflect how ESG integrates with your business operations and aligns with your core values.
- Compliance Reports: Ensure your reports meet key frameworks and standards, including GRI, SASB, and ISSB, for full compliance.
- Impact/ Green Financing Reports: Generate reports aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to gain insights into your impact performance. These reports offer detailed analysis on critical topics such as energy, emissions, and climate risks.
- Analytics Reports: A snapshot report to help you understand key analytics relating to your sustainability performance.
How Bespoke myCSO has helped organizations: Ideation3X Case Study
Our Bespoke myCSO solution has helped companies of various sizes across multiple industries to collect, manage and report on their ESG data. One of those companies is Ideation3X, a forward-thinking company dedicated to addressing climate issues and environmental concerns through innovative technologies and processes. Their work spans across various critical sectors, including the Circular Economy, Alternative Fuels, Hazard Removal and the reduction of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions.
Ideation3X’s portfolio companies are at the forefront of environmental innovation, but they needed a comprehensive way to assess and demonstrate their impact. With various key performance indicators (KPIs) across different projects, it was challenging for Ideation3X to measure, compare and communicate the effectiveness of their efforts in a cohesive manner.
To address these challenges, we worked with Ideation3X to deliver a tailored impact assessment solution. The approach included:
- Customized Impact Assessments: Rimm developed bespoke assessments for each of Ideation 3X’s portfolio companies. These assessments were aligned with the specific KPIs that they prioritized, ensuring that the performance metrics were relevant and actionable.
- Aggregated Performance Dashboard: To provide a holistic view, we created an aggregated performance dashboard. This tool allowed them to compare the performance of their portfolio companies against each other, offering valuable insights into which initiatives were driving the most impact and where improvements could be made.
Our custom solution for Ideation3X enabled them to clearly demonstrate the value and effectiveness of their projects to potential investors. This clarity and transparency were key factors that led to them securing $10 million in funding.
Our ability to deliver precise, KPI-driven impact assessments and a comprehensive performance dashboard not only helped Ideation3X measure and improve its environmental initiatives but also played a crucial role in unlocking substantial funding. This case exemplifies how targeted assessment tools can empower innovative companies like Ideation3X to achieve their sustainability goals while securing the necessary financial support to scale their impact.