Robert Kugel's Analyst Perspectives

ESG reporting is a matter that organizations – and especially publicly held corporations – will be confronting over the next several years. Ventana Research asserts that by 2025, one-half of corporations with 1,000 or more employees will have a formal ESG reporting process in place to address legal mandates or shareholder demand. The roots of ESG investing go back many decades but it has gained significant attention recently as demand in the investment world for non-accounting measures to guide ethical investments has grown. Organizations face three distinct challenges in dealing with ESG. In this analyst perspective, Ventana Research SVP and Research Director Robert Kugel discusses the considerations and benefits of organizing your organization’s ESG reporting.

Several years ago, I noted the importance of gaining resilience in managing supply chains. The world had entered a new era of trade following the financial crisis of 2007, as multilateral relationships were steadily fragmenting. For decades, sourcing and supply chain management was focused almost exclusively on achieving the lowest cost, and the world’s trade environment supported this approach. However, I observed that the new era of trade, supply chain planning and execution, would be more complex, and organizations needed to shift focus to emphasize business continuity and sustainability, accommodating change with the least disruption at the lowest cost. Sourcing decisions, logistics and product design would be crafted with an eye to a far-from-perfect and changeable world. Higher costs would be balanced against necessary resilience and sustainability, supported by the ability to make changes rapidly with assurance and limited risk.

Over the past decade, how organizations manage processes and record data related to transactional events captured by an enterprise resource planning system has undergone a significant evolution. Some of the more recent changes have been the result of a steady migration to the cloud, since these systems are typically updated frequently, require less maintenance, have better performance and are more readily available than those operating on-premises.