Oracle EPM a Natural Fit for Sustainability Reporting

Continued

The most significant challenge related to this type of reporting is gathering relevant, accurate data from disparate sources including spreadsheets, reports, and financial systems. This information must be compiled from different departments in a company, such as human resources and IT. The data may also be in different forms—numerical and textual—and units—metric and English. “ Once you start gathering information and consolidating it up the organizational hierarchy, there is a lot of additional complexity,” says John O’Rourke, senior director of product marketing for Oracle’s EPM global business unit.

Oracle’s EPM solution allows enterprises to approach sustainability reporting strategically as an extension of financial reporting. Like financial reporting, sustainability reporting involves hierarchies of accounts, the aggregation and promotion of data, auditing abilities, analysis and scenario planning, and the capability to be published. Oracle’s EPM solution enables all of these capabilities. With EPM, this kind of reporting is embedded into business processes and contributes directly to a company’s value.

The process works similarly to using EPM for financial reporting. Different departments can collect information relevant to sustainability reporting. They can then promote that data to their manager for approval and work on revisions within the software. Managers can create reports, dashboards, and other documents based on that data and present them to senior management to demonstrate progress against goals. The software creates a full audit trail and allows these reports to ultimately be published. Through EPM, the entire sustainability reporting process is streamlined and controlled.

“ Once you can collect and report on information, now you can actually start to manage it with EPM,” says O’Rourke. “ You can set goals for metrics on energy consumption or employee travel or hiring practices, start building it into your plans and budgets, and track and manage it on a regular basis through a dashboard or other reporting tool. EPM supports the process of helping set goals, building your goals into your plans, monitoring how you’re doing against your plans, and reporting that information on a regular basis to both internal and external stakeholders.”

Getting Sustainability Data

Oracle’s Hyperion Financial Management tool is conventionally used for financial reporting. Now, thanks to Oracle partner 2future Oy, formerly known as Proventia Solutions, organizations can use this same tool to do their sustainability reporting. The Finland-based 2future has built a sustainable development management (SDM) application that lives inside Hyperion Financial Management. It’s a specialized chart of accounts that uses industrywide metrics to merge data with sustainability reporting templates. Once companies run the data that resides in the Hyperion Financial Management databases through this SDM application, they can run reports and analyze and modify information. The data is highly usable, and dashboards enable users to see trends and extract data from disparate areas.