Gathering, Collecting, and Reporting on Metrics

Once you've determined your material topics and selected the most appropriate standards or framework, the use case enables you to generate the metrics that matter most to your organization, report on metric performance against thresholds and objectives, and document issues with metrics that don't meet thresholds.

The use case allows you to gather metrics based on the standards that your organization has decided to report on. The ESG Library allows you to import the latest version of the SASB and GRI standards, which you can use as the blueprint for your organization metrics. The library also allows you to import the TCFD framework, which lets you produce your TCFD reporting in the use case.

To report on a standard or framework, you must collect all of its mandatory metrics, and also any optional ones that you want to include.

View swimlane diagram

Metric gathering and reporting process

On this page

SASB: accounting vs. activity metrics

If you are using SASB standards, you have 2 different types of metrics:

  • Accounting metrics are quantitative, or in some cases qualitative, metrics intended to measure performance on each disclosure topic or an aspect of the topic contained within a standard. They can be collected at any level (company, division, business unit, or facility).

  • Activity metrics are collected at the organization level and help quantify the scale of the organization, in order to normalize the data collected from the accounting metrics and allow comparison across organizations.

Before you begin

  1. Populate the ESG Library.

  2. (Optional) Import your Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

  3. Verify that all of your organization's hierarchy is set up.

Task 1: Select your standards and metrics

Users: ESG Administrators

First, you need to select the specific standards and metrics from the ESG Library that your organization wants to measure. These are your organization metrics.

To report on a standard, you must collect all of its mandatory metrics, and also any optional ones that you want to include.

  1. In the Data Gathering Program application, go to the Allocate ESG Metrics tab, and in the Organization Details section, select the standard or standards that apply to your organization. Select your applicable sectors and industries.

  2. In the Topic/Disclosure field, select your disclosure topic or topics.

  3. The Recommended Topic/Disclosure field lists all disclosure topics that were identified as part of your materiality assessment process. You can use these as a starting point, but they are not mandatory.

  4. Click Save.

  5. Depending on your selections in the Organization Details section, the Mandatory Metrics section is populated.

  6. In the Optional ESG Library Metrics section, select for inclusion any of the optional metrics that you want to measure. Click Lookup and select the optional metrics from the list. The list is filtered to only display those optional metrics that match your sector/industry/disclosure topic selections.

  7. Click Save.

    The "ESG - Metrics Management DF1 - Generate ESG Org Metrics" data feed runs and copies the selected library records into the ESG Organization Metrics application, and they are displayed in the ESG Organization Metrics section in the program record. The organization metrics are also associated with their related business units and specific levels of your organizational structure.

Task 2: Set organization metric parameters

Users: ESG Administrators

  1. In the Data Gathering Program application, in the ESG Organization Metrics section, click Display Report, and for each metric in the inline edit grid, set the values in the following fields. These values will apply to every organizational unit that reports on the metric (if it is of the accounting type).

    • Frequency: the collection frequency for this metric information. The metric can be collected monthly, quarterly, biannually or annually. Each metric has a recommended default frequency based on its type, ESG category, and unit of measure, but you can change it if needed. This frequency along with the last Required Submission Date value determines when the next metric result is automatically generated.

    • Measurement Scope: determines whether the metric provider should provide the metric data just applicable to the current reporting period or for the whole year to date (that is, since the start date of the current sustainability report).

    • Note: This field has a recommended default value, which should not be changed for text or percentage metrics.

    • Unit of Measure: you can change this value only for metrics where the unit of measure type is variable and you can only select from a specified list of units of measure.

    • If the unit of measure is TBD, you must set a value.

      If your unit of measure is Reporting Currency, also define your reporting currency. This value is carried down to the ESG Metric and ESG Metric results levels and is available in Engage for a metric provider if they are entering a financial value.

    • Collect By: Select which level of your business hierarchy you want to collect this metric at. For example, if you select Business Unit, an ESG metric will be generated for each of your business units.

    • Note: The Collection Scope field allows you to narrow your Collect By scope to specific organizational units (for example, just particular business units), however it must be set in the organization metric record itself.

    No selection in any of these fields means that the metric status remains Pending Setup and no ESG metrics will be generated for that organization metric.

    Important: If your organization decides that a mandatory metric is outside the scope of your ESG reporting and you will not collect data for this metric, in the organization metric record you can set the Scope field to Outside Scope and provide a rationale for why you are not collecting the metric (for example, it doesn't apply to your business or you currently don't have the capability to capture the information). However it is important to note that this may not be acceptable for a future ESG audit.

  2. (Optional) You can also set the Respondent Role field in the organization metric records (either individually or in bulk from search results). This field documents the type of user best suited to provide this metric who will be responsible for providing metric results for a metric in Engage.

  3. Click Save Changes.

    The Org Metric Status changes to Pending ESG Generation for all organization metrics that are fully defined.

Task 3: Generate ESG metrics

Users: ESG Administrators

ESG metrics are those that you will actually collect and report on, through periodic collection through the ESG Metric Results application.

Once you finish defining your organization metrics, data feeds automatically generate your ESG metrics. The "ESG - Metrics Management DF2 - Generate ESG Metrics" data feed runs and creates one metric record for each unique combination of organization metric and organizational unit, active respondent (if applicable). Additional data feeds run if you selected to generate ESG metrics for specific organizational units.

For example, say you have a "Total Energy Consumed" organization metric, you have selected to target all business units and you have 2 business units, the system will generate 2 ESG metrics:

  1. Program Code | Org Metric Name | Business Unit 1 Name

  2. Program Code | Org Metric Name | Business Unit 2 Name

Note: The data feed will continue to generate new metrics if you update your business hierarchy. For example, if you add a business unit, the data feed will generate new applicable ESG metrics for that business unit on its next run.

In the program application, the Collect ESG Metrics tab displays all of the ESG metrics that have been created. Respondents assigned to every business unit roll up to the program automatically. The Respondents section displays all Respondents and their associated metrics.

Task 4: Set threshold values

Users: ESG Administrators

After the metric generation data feeds run, the "ESG - Metrics Management DF3 - Generate Thresholds" feed runs and, for every metric that has a value type of numeric or amount, creates a threshold record per threshold type (your targeted organization level and above). For example, for a metric that was generated at the business unit level, 5 threshold records are generated: business unit, division, company, region, and country.

Note: Program-level threshold records are also generated if you have more than one active company.

You must set values for each threshold. On the Metric Thresholds - Decision Useful Overview dashboard, you can use the Thresholds Not Set report to identify thresholds that need to be set and set values inline.

The feed will also continue to run and generate new threshold records based on the frequency set in the metric.

Task 5: Generate metric results and publish to Engage

Users: ESG Administrators

After you generate metrics, a data feed runs and creates metric results records, based on frequency and last generated date.

Metric results records are then ready to be published to Engage so that respondents can provide the necessary information. You can publish records individually or in bulk, using the "ESG - Metrics Management DF5 - Bulk Publish ESG Metric Results for Engage" data feed.

The metric will have a required submission date by which the data must be provided, and reminders will be sent to the metric provider 3 days prior and on the due date.

As users complete metrics in Engage, the Engage Agent checks for results every 15 minutes and enters them in the metric results record.

Note: Engage also allows users to add additional participants to the metric, if other people are better able to provide the metric data. For more information, see the Engage Help.

Task 6: View metric results

Users: All

You can view how many metric results have been returned either on the individual metric record or on the administrator dashboard.

Metrics are aggregated (as applicable) at the company, region, country, division, business unit, and facility levels and evaluated against the thresholds set for each level.

  • Every numeric metric is aggregated separately at the program, region, country, division, business unit, and facility level and evaluated against the threshold set for it at that level.

  • Aggregation for metrics that have a value type of Numeric or Amount is determined by the individual metric's aggregation type in the ESG Library. The aggregation types are average, sum, min and max.

  • For metrics that have a ratio as the unit of measure, the antecedent and consequent are captured separately from Engage in the Metric Results record. At the threshold level, aggregation is performed individually for the antecedent and consequent.

Note: Metrics that have a Value Type of Text cannot be aggregated.

ESG metric reports allow you to quickly identify and focus in on those metrics that are performing badly against their target thresholds. You can drill down from the highest level (topics separated into their ESG category) to the lowest level (target organizational unit).

Reports show performance over time so that you can see whether the metric is converging or diverging from its target threshold. You can use filters to view the data from different angles.

In the ESG Organization Metrics application, you can also use the Status by Associated SDGs report to track your metric performance against your sustainable development goals.