While these challenges and barriers related to ESG data capture, reporting and analysis can often impede sustainability goal setting and target tracking, Katrina says this is where having the IBM® Envizi™ ESG Suite on their side makes a big difference. Growthpoint has been using Envizi software products such as Sustainability Data Management, Building Ratings and Benchmarks, and Interval Meter Monitoring since 2017.
And use cases for IBM Envizi have only grown in light of a new sustainability framework Growthpoint announced in 2022. The framework spans four themes—environment, economic, people and governance—with 11 focus areas material to the business and linked to 20 measurable targets. Environment targets, for example, include achieving net zero emissions for office assets and corporate activities by July 2025, maintaining an average 5-star NABERS Energy rating for office assets, disclosing all relevant sources of Scope 3 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and diverting on average 35% of waste from landfills for Growthpoint’s owned office assets by 2025.
Katrina and her team used software from IBM Envizi to address several facets of the challenge—starting with consolidating multiple ESG data types sitting siloed across business operations. “Envizi streamlines data capture from different sources and collates it all into a single platform that we can then easily use for reporting. With approximately 60 properties to track, trying to do this manually would be very challenging, and leave room for error,” says Katrina.
But having a single source of truth for their ESG data is not enough. For Katrina and her team to have confidence in the quality of ESG data—which forms the basis of their sustainability disclosures and reports—it’s vital that the data is complete, accurate and can stand up to internal reviews as well as third-party assurance.
“Envizi helps us immensely with this challenge by identifying data gaps and anomalies. For example, if there are missing invoices and we haven’t captured consumption or cost data for a particular period, the accruals functionality helps us fill these gaps for more accurate reporting,” says Katrina, adding, “Envizi allows us to quickly cut and dice the data in any format, time period, data type so it’s a lot easier to manage multiple reporting requirements.”
With the automation of ESG data capture and management, the sustainability team at Growthpoint—currently comprised of three sustainability experts—can reap significant time- and resource-saving benefits. “It would take us double the time to prepare disclosures if we didn’t have Envizi. And last year [2022] a single person could handle the disclosures, so the resource efficiency is significant. Take for example the GRESB survey, which we can complete in half the time thanks to Envizi’s GRESB API functionality. In the past, it took a significant amount of time inputting data to the GRESB spreadsheet. But now we can send all our data within Envizi directly to the GRESB platform,” says Katrina.
Having all of its ESG data streamlined, structured and audit-ready has also enabled the team to cut back on cumbersome manual work and instead use that time for strategic, data-driven decisions. To this end, Katrina finds the performance dashboards (an interactive data visualization feature within IBM Envizi) to be a powerful tool: “With Envizi dashboards it takes me just a few minutes to get insights into the performance of any building asset, so I can have data-backed discussions with the site teams,” she says. “It helps us understand which assets we should focus on for our solar programs, for instance, as that’s one of our pathways to net zero emissions and improve our resilience against future energy price escalations.”