Oracle EPM a Natural Fit for Sustainability Reporting
by Monica Mehta, March 2008
More than ever before, companies are striving to demonstrate their commitment to creating a positive impact on the environment and their community. But the pressure to demonstrate good corporate citizenship is not only coming from investors, customers, and employees. Governments across Europe and Asia already mandate environmental restrictions and reporting—as in the case of carbon emissions—and the U.S. is moving toward such regulations as well.
As a result, a strong Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) strategy has numerous advantages for a company: It can contribute to an enhanced brand value, improve the company’s reputation among stakeholders, attract capital from environmentally conscious investors, and help avoid lawsuits and regulatory fines.
Traditionally, devoting part of a company’s mission to CSR was seen as taking away from the bottom line of profit. New thinking in the field, however, has introduced a more progressive approach – that of a “triple bottom line” of people, planet and profit. Critical to this approach is the idea that if companies are able to embed CSR into the core of their operations and approach it strategically, CSR could become part of a company’s competitive advantage and actually help to create business value.
“CSR and business performance are not opposites of each other, if you manage CSR as a competitive advantage strategy,” says Frank Buytendijk, Oracle’s Vice President of Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) strategy. “That means CSR is an integral part of our performance management practices. If you use a balanced scorecard, it is part of that as well.”
While the concept of triple bottom line reporting and the emergence of sustainable business practices may be fairly recent phenomena, tools already exist to help IT managers address the trends. Many of Oracle’s products—including EPM and Financials—have already been deployed to help organizations meet the demands of this new wave of investment and reporting.
Telling Your CSR Story
The most visible process companies can use to demonstrate commitment to strategic CSR is sustainability reporting (SR). SR is the method of providing information about an organization’s social, economic and environmental impact based on its policies and practices. The definition of what is included in sustainability reporting is extremely broad. Examples of positive impacts that might be reported include implementing progressive hiring policies for women and under-represented minorities; including locally-grown food items in the corporate cafeteria menu; donating money to under-funded community schools; reducing a facility’s carbon emissions; and promoting sustainable forestry in different parts of the world. SR can also showcase how a company is strengthening its social and environmental efforts, such as including the amount of growing miles employees travel by rail vs. those traveled by air.
