CINCINNATI--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Benchmark Digital, the leading cloud-based Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) software solutions provider, today announced the launch of the new Benchmark ESG Director™, a digital platform empowering organizations around the world to meet ESG and sustainability reporting and disclosure obligations; to help cross-functional teams drive ESG performance; and to motivate those teams to sustain improvements year over year.
ESG Director is seamlessly integrated with Benchmark’s award-winning operational solutions for risk, compliance, sustainability and stewardship program management—making Benchmark ESG the industry’s first holistic digital ESG management platform. The result of an organic six-month agile development effort, ESG Director received significant input from a cross-subscriber innovation workgroup.
“ESG Director arose from a critical need that exists in the marketplace today,” said Benchmark Founder & CEO R Mukund. “Businesses are bombarded with requests for investment-grade ESG data, and they’re feeling intense pressure to demonstrate and sustain meaningful progress. To satisfy these demands, companies must fully embed ESG in their culture and operations. ESG Director facilitates this transformation by unifying people, data and processes across the enterprise.”
Benchmark built ESG Director in response to the pressure companies face as they attempt to meet countless stakeholder demands for ESG performance information. Benchmark understood that companies struggle to align processes and teams, identify opportunities and risks, and track and validate progress across the enterprise. ESG Director, the latest Benchmark ESG innovation and offering, is designed to meet these challenges. The platform will serve as a hub of ESG activity and data, standardizing and automating ESG data management across functional areas and greatly simplifying KPI tracking, goal monitoring, disclosure and stakeholder communication.
“ESG Director does more than report ESG metrics,” said Vijay Alluru, Product Design & Management Officer at Benchmark. “ESG success requires new technology and a digital ESG ecosystem that goes beyond reporting to include cross-functional workflows, process management, and system interoperability where data compilation and management can be automated and simplified.”
ESG Director offers unrivaled comprehensiveness in capability. Organizations can align reporting objectives with common frameworks (GRI, TCFD, SASB, and more) and a library of common KPIs, with integrated materiality assessments and tracking as well as options for benchmarking by industry sector. It also facilitates cross-functional and cross-system data management with best-practice user workflows and data-sharing APIs. Cross-functional teams can track performance improvement year over year and facilitate key stakeholder communication and reporting on progress towards internal and external commitments.
ESG Director will also undergo continuous improvement. “We continue to develop ESG Director with input from our 14 pilot members, all current Benchmark subscribers,” said Amanda Petzinger, Associate Vice President, Product Management & Marketing at Benchmark. “These companies represent a diverse range of industries, and all are at different points in their ESG journey. Their varying perspectives have been invaluable to us in our efforts to build a solution that meets users where they are, grows with them, and helps them achieve higher levels of ESG performance.”
Finally, ESG Director empowers companies to build an ESG culture that continually advances corporate goals. “‘What happens in year 2, in year 3? How are we going to sustain this?’ These are the questions we’re hearing from our customers,” says Donavan Hornsby, Corporate Development & Strategy Officer at Benchmark. “This was the impetus for ESG Director. We’re collaborating with them to bridge the gap between reporting of ESG metrics and a truly sustained effort where the organization has operationalized these commitments and is nurturing a culture for ESG.”
About Benchmark ESG™
Benchmark ESG™ (the next generation of Gensuite®) enables companies to implement robust cross-functional Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Solutions – locally, globally and across diverse operating profiles. Our comprehensive cloud-based software suite features intuitive, best-practice process functionality, flexible configurations and powerful extensions. For over two decades, we’ve helped companies manage safe & sustainable operations worldwide, with a focus on fast return on investment (ROI), service excellence and continuous innovation. Join over 1,500,000 users that trust Benchmark ESG™ with their software system needs for operational risk and compliance, EHS, sustainability, product stewardship and responsible sourcing.