Location: EMEA
The challenge
Like many global manufacturing companies with headquarters and a substantial footprint in Europe, our client faces a significant challenge in navigating the complex requirements of the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).
The company had recently been acquired by a leading private equity firm and much of its legacy sustainability strategy and reporting infrastructure was that of the parent company from which it was divested.
The management team was facing considerable pressure establishing the newly acquired business in its own right across all operational functions, while the sustainability team was lacking necessary internal resources to assist.
The company has a strong sense of purpose, led from the top by the passionate CEO, but needed to bring this purpose to life in a tangible and demonstrable way.
In particular, the client needed our help building CSRD-related capacity in its sustainability and finance teams. They also needed support developing, a pragmatic and practical approach to sustainability strategy setting and implementation.
We knew that senior stakeholder engagement time for the project would be limited so we needed to make every engagement count, paving the way for smooth CSRD implementation with clear ownership for both the project and material sustainability topics throughout the business.
What we did
We were selected to support this client because of our strong relationship with their new private equity backer and our deep understanding of the most material impacts, risks and opportunities in the client’s value chain.
We combined strategic insight gained from numerous CSRD implementation projects in the manufacturing sector with practical hands-on subject matter expertise to help the client identify the risks and commercial opportunities posed by sustainability topics.
The impact
We delivered an end-to-end double materiality assessment – the most comprehensive undertaken in the manufacturing sector to date. Once the material impacts, risks and opportunities were identified, scored and prioritized, we then set to work helping them understand the disclosure requirements and implementation and disclosure roadmap implications.
We invested time building internal stakeholder relationships, ensuring stakeholder buy-in to the wider CSRD implementation programme, and making certain that any resulting roadmaps would drive business value beyond the reporting requirements.
We helped them figure out the right project office RACI structure for CSRD and then trained their newly appointed CSRD programme manager. We then set to work helping her understand their compliance gaps and the workload needed to close them.
While a major driver initially was having an extended team to help rapidly progress with their CSRD journey in a strategic and compliant way, the work continues to unlock commercial value beyond compliance for the client organisation.
We are helping drive genuine transformation internally and across their value chain through renewed collaboration on the ESG topics that really matter to the client organisation and its stakeholders.
