Creating a connected sustainability program with Workiva

Project overview and objectives

A global water treatment organization’s sustainability team needed to launch a new program to effectively track and report on hundreds of data points. While already using Workiva, the team wanted to:

• Maximize integrations with systems like Workday via Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP).
• Simplify the process of gathering, reviewing, and submitting responses to reporting standards such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).

What we did

• Designed and automated the client’s sustainability reporting process in Workiva.
• Developed framework indices using sustainability program metric IDs aligned with standards like the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) and Global Reporting Initiative (GRI).
• Improved data sharing workflows from Workday to Workiva’s Sustainability Management platform.
• Leveraged pre-mapped European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) framework references to accelerate report drafting.

Impact

• Enhanced data collection across 700 metrics, supporting both voluntary and regulatory reporting needs.
• Established an automated process for ingesting Human Resources data from Workday, enabling efficient querying in Wdata and mapping to sustainability program metrics.
• Prepopulated metrics with ESRS impacts, risks, and opportunities from the client’s Gap Assessment, expediting compliance-ready reporting.

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