Salesforce extends Sustainability Cloud into a complete ESG reporting tool

Salesforce has always been designed to be a socially responsible company, and that includes working toward our goal of net zero carbon emissions. In fact, in 2019 the Sustainability Cloud was launched, a product to monitor customers’ zero net goals. This year they are going a step further with a new product, integrating not only environmental aspects, but also social and governance objectives, all under the umbrella of ESG.

Ari Alexander, general manager of Salesforce Net Zero Cloud and Net Zero Marketplace, says the idea is to use Mulesoft’s Salesforce tool suite to connect data sources with Tableau for data visualization, so companies can track your progress and better understand performance . of ESG goals.

“ESG is a very important and widespread trend for which our clients are seeking help, guidance and solutions, and we are increasingly hearing that they need help with voluntary and regulatory reporting,” he said.

The amount of information required to create such reports can be a daunting task for reporting employees. “The solution had to reach the entire organization to pull data from many different sources and streamline reporting. So we decided it was time to harness the full power of Salesforce to address this issue and extend our Net Zero cloud into a complete ESG solution.”

ESG reporting in its current form is challenging, especially since there is no common regulatory framework for reporting all of this data, apart from reporting on greenhouse gases. “Although ESG Part E is guided by the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, which is a fairly well-coordinated global standard, for ESG reporting it is still an alphabetical soup of voluntary frameworks,” said Alexander.

In addition, existing regulators regularly change their requirements and requirements are expected to be introduced in the country in the not-too-distant future.

“So the specific types of data we’re talking about, whether it’s emissions data, diversity, equity and inclusion data, supplier data, and whether there’s a flag or human rights violation somewhere deep in your offering. Chain, the kind of data companies collect or try to put in one place and a source of truth and reporting. There is still no clean and easy way to determine whether data is good or bad in an unstructured dataset. [like this],” he said.

It does state that the data can be reported to external auditors and that the tool is set up accordingly. “Companies are under increasing pressure to take the data they report more seriously and to offer some types of audit trails so that the big four accounting firms can look at the company’s data and make judgments about the data they report. meet a certain standard in terms of workflows and processes, transparency and the ability to explain how the nature of the reported figures is obtained,” he said.

The full ESG reporting product is expected to be available to the public in the coming months.