Manage entities in Operational Sustainability Management (formerly ESG Management)
Summarize
Summary of Manage entities in Operational Sustainability Management
Operational Sustainability Management (formerly ESG Management) allows organizations to manage various entities—such as people, processes, departments, or applications—important for evaluating sustainability efforts. This system is crucial for measuring performance and providing disclosures related to sustainability goals, particularly greenhouse gas emissions, to stakeholders and investors.
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Key Features
- Entity Management: Define and manage entities to assess performance against sustainability goals.
- Entity Classes: Tag entities or add conceptual information to categorize them, such as office locations.
- Entity Types: Group entities based on shared attributes, facilitating easier identification and management.
- Creation and Updates: Create or update entities, entity types, and entity classes to ensure accurate tracking and compliance.
Key Outcomes
By effectively managing entities within Operational Sustainability Management, organizations can:
- Enhance reporting and measurement of operational sustainability performance.
- Provide necessary disclosures to stakeholders, improving transparency and accountability.
- Facilitate investment evaluations by providing detailed metrics related to sustainability efforts.
You can learn about how Operational Sustainability Management is used by the investors and reporting agencies to evaluate different entities that they want to invest in, such as different business units in an organization.
Entities can be people, processes, departments, or applications. For example, if your goal is to reduce the carbon emission from the datacenters, then you can consider datacenters as entities.
As another example, assume you’re a company that has subsidiary companies. Your goal is to measure greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) in your subsidiary companies. Both your company and your subsidiary companies are your entities. Your company is the parent entity, while the subsidiary companies are the child entities. Typically, the parent entity handles reporting and measuring the GHG of the child entities.
As part of your ESG Management strategy, you have to provide disclosures to your stakeholders. ESG Management disclosures refer to the disclosure of data that relate to an organization's Operational Sustainability Management performance. These disclosures concern the goals, targets, and metrics that are associated with your entities. By using these disclosures and other metrics, the investors assess and rate the performance of entities based on the operational sustainability parameters.
A parent entity that has the child entities is said to have downstream entities. Any child entity that has the parent entities is said to have upstream entities.
After creating the entities, you can tag similar entities by individually defining an entity class for them or by linking them to an existing entity class.
Entity classes
Entity classes are used to tag an entity or to add the conceptual information about an entity. For example, consider a company that has office branches in three cities. The office space is considered as an entity, while the entity class for these entities is the location of the offices.
Entity types
An entity type is a grouping of entities that is based on filtering attributes. An entity type defines a set of the entities that have the same attributes. An entity type is used to describe and identify an entity that is based on a set of filter conditions.
Consider the following two entity types: Employee and Product. Each entity type has its own attributes.
For Employee, its attributes are employee number, name, department, and designation. In the Employee table of the company database, the sample attributes of an employee are displayed in row E1 as 1001 (employee number), Paul (name), Marketing (department), and PM (designation).
For Product, its attributes are product ID, name, cost, and currency. In the Product table in the company database, the sample attributes of an energy-efficient product are displayed in row P1 as 800 (product ID), Solar Panel (name), 200 (cost), and USD (currency).
Entities and entity types can have a one-to-many relationship. For example, an entity called Hope can have an entity type called Person and an entity type called Organization.