21
Jul
2020

Lifehack for Sustainable Acquisition: Creating CSR report in a flash

Sustainability in product acquisition has become an important issue for the fashion industry, especially after the publication of a CSR report for companies with more than 500 employees in 2017. Medium-sized companies seeking to create such a report, not out of obligation or for cosmetic reasons, will have it much easier by using an ERP-based system.

Who is supposed to publish a CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) report? This applies to companies with

  1. more than 500 employees,
  2. sales revenue of more than 40 million euros on average in one fiscal year,
  3. and a balance sheet total of more than 20 million euros.

Since preparing a CSR report can be very complex process, it is often done only once a year. By doing that, companies are missing the opportunity for permanent sustainability monitoring from which operational or strategic decisions could then be derived.

The Challenge

Most companies have the necessary data for a CSR report at hand. Without an integrated ERP solution, however, these data must first be gathered from different sources. This process usually takes a lot of time, is prone to errors, and cannot be automated.

And one last thing. For a CSR report it is not enough to list a lot of raw data. These data must be put and interpreted within a context . That’s the only way to gain insight from a current CSR report about possible future action scenarios.

The ERP System Solution

Companies working with an integrated ERP solution have already consolidated their products, customers, and suppliers pools into a common software solution. It doesn’t require a lot of effort to add any relevant CSR key figures to these data. The data are available in real time and a tool like Microsoft PowerBI, for instance, can be used to analyze it graphically. Thus, the entire CSR report could be created in PowerBI at the push of a button or even published on the Internet or sent regularly by e-mail.

In Conclusion
It is good for a company of any size to produce a CSR report because it not only furthers efforts towards more sustainability, but it can show where there’s potential for financial optimization. ERP systems provide the necessary technological basis to this end.