Optimizing ESG Reporting Efficiency at a Global Asset Management Firm

Overview

GLP Capital Partners (GCP) is a leading global alternative asset manager that invests primarily through real asset and private equity strategies. They are focused on high conviction and new fast-growing economy sectors such as logistics, data centers, renewable energy and its related technologies.

GCP’s ESG policies reflect their commitment to be responsible investors and incorporate ESG priorities into their decision-making throughout the life cycle of their investments. In fulfilling their ESG commitments, GCP encountered lengthy, localized and manual processes for managing and calculating their ESG data—in particular, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions data—and measuring progress. GCP used Excel, Power BI and SharePoint-linked visualization for data collection and management, all powered within an Azure environment. In 2021, they turned to ERM to help develop contemporary processes and drive digital transformation of the firm’s ESG initiatives.

Challenges

• Difficult to scale reporting using multiple versions of spreadsheets and reporting requirements for a variety of stakeholders.
• Data collection inefficiencies and data quality concerns regional localization from 3,000 operational properties across 17 countries and regional business unit localization issues, including multiple languages.
• Aligning to industry standards such as: GRESB Real Estate Assessment, Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TFCD) and Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR).
• Complexity of calculations needed to determine carbon emissions footprint across all assets.

Solution

GLP Capital Partners engaged ERM to streamline their processes, so they could better collect and measure the impact from their ESG data. This included the development of an ESG strategy and roadmap. With evaluation and assessment guidance from ERM, GCP narrowed the field from 14 potential ESG software providers to three finalists, from which SpheraCloud Corporate Sustainability (SCCS) emerged as the most robust solution.

To meet the key challenges GCP faced, they continued to engage ERM on the implementation of SCCS to help them meet the following objectives:

• Build capacity to scale over 400 users while maintaining data accuracy and integrity, along with a manageable cost of software ownership.
• Optimize the process of collecting and distributing ESG and related performance data to shareholders and other key stakeholders through automation.
• Facilitate integration with vital data sources like Sphera’s LCA (Life Cycle Assessment) For Experts database, which provides emission factors and calculations tools.
• Localization of language and change management training. More than half of GCP’s users speak Chinese and Japanese, and completing implementation and training in local languages was an integral success factor for user adoption.

Results

SpheraCloud’s Corporate Sustainability software along with ERM’s Digital Services and Sustainability teams have enabled GCP to scale the efficiency of their ESG initiatives, optimize data collection and reliability, improve reporting and distribution automation, manage expenses and provide increased transparency. This has helped GCP demonstrate progress toward fulfilling their environmental impact commitment.

• Significant savings in cost and effort with an estimated 30-50% increase in efficiency for both data collection and distribution automation.
• Process enhancements with a centralized platform and unified design that reduced the number of days for data collection and provided the ability to seamlessly leverage SCCS software across varied regional languages such as Japanese and Chinese.
• Improved ability to meet requirements of key ESG frameworks and their 190+ global investors.
• Better data quality and consistency across 400+ users and multiple jurisdictions globally.