Last week, Passionfruit teamed up with Meridia and Volcafe for a webinar on EUDR compliance. The event brought together 190 sustainability professionals eager to explore practical solutions for verifying field data and managing internal information. During the session, we ran polls to identify the biggest challenges companies face with compliance requests, and one response stood out: keeping internal information up to date.
While Meridia shared insights on field data verification, Passionfruit discussed how to manage requests from customers, suppliers, and NGOs while ensuring data accuracy. Volcafe shared their approach to managing EUDR compliance across a global supply chain. But why is it so difficult to keep internal information updated, and what can companies do to make this process easier?
During the webinar, we gathered feedback from 190 sustainability leaders. When asked about the most significant challenge in handling customer compliance requests (such as questionnaires, codes of conduct, and supplier assessments), the results revealed key pain points:
At first glance, keeping internal data updated might seem like a simple task—just revise the records and share the correct information. However, the issue is far more complex. The pace of regulatory changes and the sheer volume of data involved make maintaining accuracy a monumental task. Let’s break down the reasons why it’s challenging:
ESG requirements are changing faster than many organizations can keep up with. Governments and regulatory bodies are constantly updating standards and certifications. For example, while the omnibus proposal may help reduce the number of data points required by ESRS, businesses still face the challenge of keeping their data aligned. It’s crucial to stay prepared and proactive, ensuring your systems are adaptable and ready to meet the ongoing changes.
In addition to regulatory changes, customer expectations are also shifting. Customers are increasingly vocal about sustainability and ethical practices, pushing businesses to meet demanding ESG criteria. Companies must not only comply with regulations but also meet customer-driven ESG expectations, which can vary across industries.
ESG data collection is complex, spanning multiple departments, systems, and teams. Gathering and validating this information manually is both time-consuming and error-prone. ESG data is often reviewed by compliance managers who rely on multiple sources like spreadsheets, emails, and shared drives. As data volumes increase, this manual process becomes inefficient.
When ESG data is managed manually, even minor errors can have significant consequences:
Managing ESG compliance and keeping internal information up to date is overwhelming, and it’s not due to a lack of effort. The real challenge lies in the complexity and volume of data that must be tracked, updated, and validated—tasks too vast for humans alone to manage.
Manual methods are inherently prone to errors because they rely on human memory, focus, and judgment, which can be affected by fatigue or information overload. With teams juggling multiple responsibilities and data from various sources, mistakes such as sending outdated information or conflicting responses are inevitable.
In the changing regulatory environment, it’s unrealistic to expect teams to manually track every change and ensure data accuracy. That’s why human effort alone isn’t enough. Automation and ESG compliance systems are essential to maintaining accuracy and efficiency in ESG compliance.
Instead of reacting to compliance requests and scrambling to update internal data, a systems thinking approach focuses on building efficient, sustainable ESG data management processes. This approach can be implemented through three key strategies:
Imagine if all your team members, regardless of their department or location, had access to the same set of standardized ESG answers. That’s the power of an answer library. It’s a centralized hub of pre-approved responses to frequently asked ESG questions, ensuring consistency, accuracy, and up-to-date information.
With an answer library, you eliminate the risk of sending conflicting information and save your team from constantly reinventing the wheel for every compliance request. Your team can spend less time looking for the right data and more time focusing on the strategic decisions that matter.
Passionfruit makes this easy by automating the creation and management of your answer library. It pulls data from across the organization, ensuring that every response is drawn from the most current and reliable source. With Passionfruit, you can even decide which level of the company—be it the entire organization, a specific group, or a department—should provide the answer, giving you flexibility when needed.
When you're updating and sharing sensitive ESG data, you need to know who updated what, when, and why. This is where an internal audit trail comes in. It helps ensure that every change to your ESG data is tracked and that you have a clear record of all updates, approvals, and submissions.
Think of it as your internal “audit assistant”—one that ensures you can easily trace any updates made to the system and verify that the correct information is being shared with the right stakeholders. An audit trail provides peace of mind, not only for your internal team but also for customers, auditors, and other stakeholders who may need to review your data.
Passionfruit automatically tracks and logs every interaction with your ESG data, creating a transparent history that’s easy to access at any time. This built-in audit trail ensures you have full control over your data and allows you to easily demonstrate compliance when needed. Whether it’s an internal review or an external audit, you can trust that Passionfruit’s audit trail will support your transparency efforts.
One of the biggest time-sinks for compliance teams is manually completing and submitting ESG questionnaires in multiple formats. From Excel sheets to online forms, the variations can be overwhelming. But what if all this could be automated?
By embracing automation, you can update internal information in real-time, manage responses across departments, and complete questionnaires in a fraction of the time it would take manually. Automation not only ensures that data remains current, but it also eliminates human errors caused by manual data entry and inconsistencies between different formats.
Passionfruit excels in automating ESG compliance tasks, making the process seamless and efficient. Whether you’re working with an online portal, updating Excel sheets, editing Word documents, or handling PDFs, Passionfruit integrates effortlessly with your systems to ensure that your information is always up-to-date. The platform automatically updates your responses, so you never have to worry about inconsistencies or outdated data. With Passionfruit, you can easily manage and complete forms across any format, ensuring accuracy and reducing the risk of error. Additionally, shared workspaces within Passionfruit allow teams to collaborate efficiently, ensuring that all departments are aligned when answering questionnaires and managing compliance tasks. This streamlined approach saves valuable time and ensures that your ESG data is always ready for review and submission.
Keeping ESG data accurate and up-to-date is no longer a simple task. With the constant evolution of regulations, shifting customer expectations, and the vast amount of data companies need to manage, maintaining consistency across teams can feel overwhelming. As revealed in our webinar, the top challenges sustainability professionals face include ensuring data consistency and handling multiple formats, both of which require time and careful attention.
The good news is that these challenges are solvable with the right approach. By embracing a systems thinking strategy—investing in an answer library, building a clear audit trail, and automating key processes—businesses can streamline their data management efforts and reduce the burden of manual updates.
Passionfruit makes it easier to stay on top of your data by centralizing responses and fostering collaboration across teams. Our platform ensures that your ESG data is always accurate, up-to-date, and ready to meet the demands of the changing landscape.
By adopting a more efficient approach to managing ESG information, you can save time, improve accuracy, and focus on driving the impact that matters. Ready to transform how your business handles ESG data? Let’s talk about how Passionfruit can simplify your process and help you stay ahead.
