Envizi- IBM’s new acquisition to efficiently manage ESG and Sustainability

In 1987, the United Nations Brundtland Commission defined sustainability as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

According to this report by McKinsey, companies that effectively manage sustainability are profitable when compared to their less sustainable counterparts. Sustainable companies have been shown to register performance above market standards over a period of three to five years.

With increasing focus by investors on climate and ESG-related investment disclosure, the U.S Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced that the Climate and ESG Task Force will introduce initiatives to proactively identify ESG-related misconduct.

Undoubtedly, factoring in environmental and social issues can help organizations positively impact their workforce and as well as the environment they work and live in. Furthermore, when stakeholders or business leaders have a good knowledge about sustainability, it helps them develop strategies while considering long-term impact of an organization instead of focusing on just the short-term ROI.

Having said that, let’s begin with understanding about what sustainability management means before going into the intricacies.

Sustainability management for businesses refers to how your organization impacts the environment. It is important to note that you may positively contribute towards solving some of the world’s pressing environment-related problems if you manage sustainability effectively.

A few of the global issues that sustainable business may help to address include the following:

Climate change
Income inequality
Depletion of natural resources
Human rights issues
Fair working conditions
Pollution
Racial injustice
Gender inequality

Why Is Sustainability Management Important for Organizations?

Primarily, sustainability management is intended to drive positive social and environmental changes.

The Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics help determine how ethical your organization is. The higher the ESG metric of your organization, the more you can outperform your competitors in the long run. Though sustainability is an investment in the short term, they result in long term benefits.

What Are the Benefits of a Sustainable Business?

Helps improve your branding and mitigate associated risks
Enables your organization to be purpose-driven and earn the competitive advantage
Obtain the upper hand while marketing sustainable goods

Organizations have begun to realize the importance of sustainability as an important social responsibility. Also, companies need to manage the mounting pressure from regulators, investors, and consumers to demonstrate their sustainability commitments in a verifiable manner.

To make sure that the planet, people around, and business profitability are positively impacted, industry leaders are striving to accelerate sustainability initiatives around the following imperatives:

Climate risk management and environmental, social and governance reporting (ESG)
Resilient infrastructure and intelligent operations
Intelligent supply chain management
Emissions and energy management
Sustainability strategy

These areas have become critical for the performance of your company and therefore need tools that extensively identify and track the following:

Implementation of energy efficiency
Emission reduction opportunities
Consolidate ESG-related data
Streamline reporting

How Can We Help in Your Sustainability Management?

IBM Sustainability Software is focused on helping companies harness the power of data, connecting environmental, social, and governance (ESG*) goals with broader business operations and systems by bringing together the right expertise, technology, and partners to create intelligent facilities and physical assets, resilient IT infrastructure and circular supply chains. This builds upon the Envizi acquisition earlier this year and the integrated value it brings when connected with market-leading products like Maximo, TRIRIGA, Sterling Supply Chain, Environmental Intelligence Suite and Turbonomic to help businesses automate feedback between their corporate environmental incentives and operational endpoints.

Envizi is a Sustainability Performance Management platform that helps automate the end-to-end process of collection and consolidation of 500 data types. This platform focuses on offering a comprehensive and modular sustainability software as a service solution to drive ESG and sustainability reporting and performance management.

It also supports internationally recognized ESG reporting frameworks. This platform brings with it powerful visualizations and easily customizable dashboards that help you easily manage environmental goals, seize efficiency opportunities, and evaluate sustainability risks.

Here is a snapshot of what Envizi offers:

The benefits of Envizi are as follows:

1. Enables You to Build a Data Foundation

Equips you to create a single system of record that offers auditable, finance-grade ESG and sustainability data.

2. Allows Hassle-Free, Streamlined Reporting

Offers flexible reporting tools that help you remain on par with internal and external ESG and sustainability reporting requirements.

3. Enables Effective Stakeholder Engagement

Offers integration of internal and external stakeholders, process along with technology. This, in turn, facilitates the seamless introduction of sustainability into daily operations.

4. Allows Accelerated Decarbonization

Provides insights into the fastest and cost-effective ways to decarbonization.

Envizi brings with it the following features:

1. Emission Management that enables the following:

Calculates and reports the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by scope
Sets decarbonization targets
Tracks progress towards emissions-reduction goals

2. ESG Reporting

Builds a data foundation and helps streamline ESG reporting to facilitate internal and external reporting requirements.

3. ESG Performance

Collects and analyses ESG metrics from across your organization’s value chain. Helps identify risks and opportunities for performance improvement, and to drive better outcomes.

4. Energy Management

Enables consolidation of your energy data and allows leveraging advanced analytics, workflow tools to drive improved energy management across the organization.

5. Building Optimization

Facilitates applying advanced analytics to building management system (BMS) and IoT sensor data to obtain insights. This helps accelerate the decarbonization process.

About Quantum Strides

Quantum Strides LLC is an IBM Artificial Intelligence Business Partner specializing in IBM TRIRIGA (Integrated Workforce Management Solution), and IBM Maximo (Enterprise Asset Management) solutions. Quantum Strides also provides Cybersecurity solutions that help with cyber threat management and incidence response.

If you are looking to adopt indoor wayfinding for your workplace or need further information about this solution, feel free to contact us or email us at iwms@quantumstrides.comfor more information.