Streamlining sustainability reporting with Workiva

The challenge 

A Fortune 10 health organization faced increasing complexity in sustainability reporting as data volumes, reporting requirements, and assurance expectations expanded. Key challenges included:

• Sustainability data manually collected from multiple sources, systems, and subsidiaries, resulting in inefficiencies and inconsistencies across topics and metrics
• Data assurance managed through emails and spreadsheets, limiting transparency and confidence in reported data
• Lack of automated status reporting for data collection and assurance, preventing consolidation by metric, topic, or stakeholder
• Manual substantiation processes restricting the organization’s ability to achieve higher levels of assurance in sustainability reporting

Clearsulting approach

Clearsulting partnered with the client to design and implement a scalable, automated sustainability reporting and assurance solution within Workiva. The engagement focused on simplifying data flows, improving governance, and embedding assurance into reporting processes:

• Led an in-depth discovery and design phase to develop a system proof of concept and define solution architecture
• Aligned Tableau data structures to leverage existing structured datasets and eliminate manual data collection
• Configured a customized Workiva solution and provided hands-on support throughout the full reporting lifecycle
• Implemented automated CSV data refreshes from the Tableau repository using Workiva’s Data Management Suite (Wdata)
• Integrated assurance workflows directly into Workiva to improve traceability, documentation, and control

The solution

The implemented solution streamlined sustainability reporting and substantiation while improving efficiency, scalability, and confidence in reported data:

• Reduced data collection time by 50% for more than 70% of reported metrics
• Embedded assurance checklists directly in Workiva, increasing assurance coverage from ~40% to nearly 100% of metrics
• Automated key workflows, including:
  • Status reporting
  • Assurance analysis
  • Tie-out to final sustainability reporting
• Projected to save teams hundreds of hours per reporting cycle
• Enabled progression toward reasonable assurance by strengthening data governance and audit readiness