How can a Sustainability Management System help you achieve B Corp Certification?

Every year in March, a growing ecosystem of more than 8,000 companies around the world come together to celebrate everything it means to be a B Corp. But what exactly is a B Corporation, and how can a sustainability management system help you achieve (and maintain) B Corp Certification?

There's no Planet B

B Lab is a non-profit on a mission to harness the power of business, to help companies balance profit with purpose, and transform the global economy to benefit all people, communities, and the planet.

The B Impact Assessment is a B Lab digital tool that helps measure, manage, and improve positive impact performance for the environment, communities, customers, suppliers, employees, and shareholders. Used by more than 150,000 organisations, it serves as a road map for continuous improvement and long-term sustainability.

Receiving a minimum verified score on the B Impact Assessment is also the first step towards achieving B Corp Certification. Benefits of being a certified B Corp include enhanced brand reputation, increased customer loyalty, and improved employee engagement.

Re-certification is required every three years, aligned with evolving B Lab standards. All B Corps need to publish an annual Impact Report, detailing their social and environmental practices, and measuring their impact. Creating this report is a team effort, which means engaging departments across an entire organisation on an ongoing basis to ensure standards continue to be met in the period between certifications.

In terms of continuous monitoring and measuring of your organisation's environmental impact, a sustainability management system is worth its weight in gold.

A sustainability management system simplifies reporting across frameworks

Investing in sustainability management software that supports reporting across a wide range of international protocols, initiatives, and frameworks will pay off in spades. It can even support your financial reporting as environmental and economic impacts are inherently interlinked. For example, energy savings may lead to cost reduction, which can be compellingly presented as both an environmental and economic benefit.

EnergyElephant's cloud-based platform is quick and easy to set up within your workflow. It provides a single access point for users that ensures all team members are operating off the same up-to-date energy and carbon data. Original document of record access also makes internal and external audits across multiple locations so much easier for everyone involved.

Sustainability management software uses intelligent automation to save time

Organisations are increasingly investing in intelligent automation solutions to reduce unnecessary administrative burden, and re-orient employees’ time towards more value-adding tasks. Deloitte’s Global Intelligent Automation survey revealed that over 87% of organisations had accelerated their investment in cloud-hosted automation services in the past year. 

Having access to a single source of truth for all your energy and carbon data enables much faster and better-informed decision-making. The hours, days, and even weeks your team would’ve previously spent collecting and analysing data on enormous, cumbersome spreadsheets are reduced to a few simple clicks.

EnergyElephant’s easy-to-use automated data analytics platform, designed specifically for sustainability monitoring and reporting, reduces energy and carbon data management time by more than 90%.

How does the EnergyElephant platform work?

You can manually upload energy bills, invoices, or spreadsheets to your EnergyElephant account. Or the team can automate the process of importing new bills from your suppliers’ web portals as soon as they are issued. The system supports bills from multiple countries, in multiple currencies.

EnergyElephant’s proprietary bill validation engine instantly validates, adds, cleans, standardises, and stores your data, which is then made visible to you in easy-to-understand energy and carbon dashboards. These dashboards act as a mission control for you to dive into your data quickly. You can drill down into any level of detail, gain insights on performance, and identify any data gaps that need filling. 

The platform also supports access to real-time IoT meters (aka smart meters) and sub-metering systems from multiple country/region data sources, to provide live views and analyses of your energy supply and consumption. This is done through integration of your meters and sensors with the EnergyElephant system via an API.

EnergyElephant provides best-in-class accuracy in carbon footprints

Using numerous methodologies, EnergyElephant provides the most scientifically accurate ways for you to monitor and report on your carbon and GHG emissions for Scope 1, Scope 2, and those notoriously difficult-to-calculate Scope 3 emissions.

The platform provides a five-year budget projection, with year-on-year projections and changes, to help you model carbon price risks and offsets. It brings transparency to all your energy costs and sustainability improvement projects, and allows you to track paybacks.

A sustainability management platform advances continuous improvement

EnergyElephant facilitates comprehensive documentation and reporting, enabling continuous improvement through optimisations in systems, processes, and behaviour. The system allows you to set benchmarks and create your own tracking baselines based on historical organisational data. From there, you can set your science-based energy efficiency, carbon reduction, and sustainability targets, monitor progress, identify areas for improvement, and implement corrective actions.

The system also helps identify and recommend project opportunities that will help improve sustainability with measurable results. It shows which projects should be prioritised in terms of effectiveness and return-on-investment, and then tracks the current status of projects considered, completed, or rejected.

Smarter data insights power more effective decision-making across teams

Being able to focus efforts within your organisation that trigger positive changes in practice and process can have a significant impact on the trajectory of your sustainability journey. 

EnergyElephant allows you to add multiple users to your account, and give each person different access permissions based on their role in your organisation. This helps to decentralise ownership of sustainability improvement projects across various business units. By promoting a culture of shared responsibility, combined with clear accountability for the successful execution of individual projects, you facilitate better decision-making and improved energy and sustainability management practices all round.

Breaking down data silos through interoperable frameworks advance sustainability journeys

If embedding sustainability into your operations and culture is a priority, then developing interoperability frameworks that break down data silos is key.

EnergyElephant's cloud-based sustainability management solution enables better data governance in one central hub, improving efficiency and driving long-term business value. As your data set continues to grow, the platform provides a deep corporate knowledge base to build and learn from, which helps support your organisation’s ongoing sustainability journey.