Issues impacting people and the planet continue to dominate consumer, investor and regulatory interests around the world.
With growing pressure for businesses to understand and improve environmental, social and governance performance, as a leading supply chain software provider, we wanted to use our expertise to develop a standardised, digital ESG maturity assessment to help.
Launched in November 2021, more than 1,000 companies from 51 countries across all continents completed the free 60 question assessment in the first 12 months as a result of customer requests, or independently as a basic member of the Authenticate supplier network platform.
All businesses have been able to access a confidential scorecard and comparison report benchmarking individual performance to all the other organisations’ anonymised results following completion of the assessment.
Here we explain why understanding ESG performance is becoming increasingly important, share initial results to date from the first 1,000 assessments, and outline other Authenticate solutions available to businesses for mitigating ESG risk.
Why is understanding ESG performance important?
From modern slavery and deforestation, to waste and emissions businesses are being required by regulations, legislation or consumers to disclose and publicly share targets and progress in non-financial areas.
Without awareness and insight regarding internal company and supply chain performance, it can seem impossible to make improvements. But leveraging supply chain software such as Authenticate can help companies to collaborate with suppliers and gather valuable data.
Read our ‘How to gather and analyse supplier ESG data’ blog for more tips.
What are the findings from the first 1,000 ESG assessments?
The ESG assessment, provides an overall score, and three individual pillar scores (Environmental, Social and Governance) based on responses to a range of questions covering key ESG topics. It also assigns one of three maturity levels (Foundational, Transitional or Transformational, based on the attributed score for the overall and pillar results.
The average maturity level results from the first 1,000 assessments are:
- Overall : Transitional
- Environmental : Foundational
- Social : Transitional
- Governance : Foundational
The findings indicate that the majority of responding organisations performed stronger against areas covered by the social pillar (questions concerning diversity, human rights, modern slavery) than the environmental and governance pillars. This highlights the complexity faced by businesses seeking to tackle critical issues including emissions, waste, biodiversity and high-risk commodities.
Only 5% of companies were rated with a transformational maturity level overall, (and just 1% for the environmental pillar). This highlights how challenging it can be to accelerate improvements across all areas of ESG.
Discover how leading catering company, CH&CO utilised the ESG assessment to get 38% of total supplier spend represented in ESG data reading this case study.
How can the Authenticate platform help to mitigate ESG risk?
With a range a scalable supply chain software solutions, in addition to the ESG maturity assessment, Authenticate is already used by 45,000 companies from 150 countries to encourage supplier collaboration, gather data, ensure compliance and drive performance improvements.
Some of the other tools available to help businesses excel in ESG are:
- Supply Chain Mapping – Visualise all tiers of a supply chain, structured by product or category to build a map of supplier networks, with the ability to filter by tier, country and more
- Audits & Assessments – Analyse supplier performance using bespoke assessment templates to ensure compliance and understand potential risk concerning ESG matters
- Document Management – Request, share and store sustainability policies, modern slavery statements and more in one central environment
- KPIs – Track inputs and performance at defined intervals for the metrics that matter to your business – from plastic reduction targets to worker welfare breaches
- Dashboards & Data Overlays – Transform static data sets into actionable insight and integrate trusted third party sources with the platform
Want to find out how Authenticate can help your organisation to accelerate ESG performance? With new module releases on the horizon, contact us now to arrange a demo.