ESG reporting platform developed on IBM’s cloud offered to Ricoh partners.
Ricoh New Zealand is offering to ease the pain of environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting through a new alliance offering CorEST software from local IBM partner CorPlan.
The move also further bolsters the biggest and fastest growing part of Ricoh’s local business – digital services, said Roly Smoldon, the general manager of that business.
ESG and the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs) were at the heart of what Ricoh does as a business, Smoldon told Reseller News. The company is a member of the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index and also rated among the top 100 sustainable businesses worldwide.
“It’s just good business,” Smoldon said. “Doing something more efficiently, it costs you less and you get a good outcome. It’s just good business.”
Government and NZ’s largest corporations were asking Ricoh, as a downstream supplier under Scope 3 of international ESG agreements, not just whether it met these expectations but also whether its own suppliers met them.
“We know the time and effort that is involved in putting that reporting together, but we also know how important it is in terms of your position to market and being able to measure that you are improving and making a difference in your initiatives,” Smoldon said.
Such decarbonisation reporting was increasingly common, especially for top NZX-listed companies and other large organisations, Smoldon said.
“It’s obvious it’s a real thing in terms of not just meeting the commitments, but having to report on those commitments, measure those commitments, show improvement on those commitments,” he said.
But reporting was complex and difficult. People who should have been running sustainability projects were spending too much time inputting data to support their own and their customers’ reporting.
Ricoh NZ went looking for a solution among its ecosystem of partners to help automate the process. IBM was one of those and offered at least two platforms that could potentially do the job.
In terms of meeting local requirements and ease of use, a platform developed by Wellington-based CorPlan on IBM’s cloud was was identified, trialled and found to fit the bill.
Implementation of that platform, CorEST, was also relatively easy, thanks to a template-based approach that enabled customers to start achieving value in a few days.
“It’s built for NZ market, so you can get in, get deployed and get value quickly,” Smoldon said.
Matthew Hill, co-founder and director of CorPlan, CorEST said development of CorEST started in late 2022 after it had already delivered several bespoke solutions catering for specific customer requirements.
“With the New Zealand government’s carbon neutral programme, and other international reporting standards, we identified an opportunity to deliver an ‘off-the-shelf’ product that supported organisations meeting their regulatory requirements,” Hill said.
“We also allowed our customers to integrate their sustainability programmes into financial and operational planning, therefore offering a holistic planning and reporting platform, rather than leaving sustainability activities as a separate business activity and process.”
CorPlan is now taking CorEST to market directly and through its exclusive partnership with Ricoh. The IBM team were also providing a sales channel into their own customer base.
Key IBM personnel including Justin Wright, ccosystem leader for IBM NZ, was also a strong advocate for partnerships and helped foster the relationship from IBM.
Such software is becoming key to understanding whether a business’s ESG and SDG initiatives, such as Ricoh’s own shift to an electric fleet, were optimised, Smoldon said.
Another potential target was to use the platform to help unpack the potentially complex ESG impact and business benefits of hybrid working.
CorPlan and Ricoh are about to launch some joint CorEST campaigns, including attending and hosting a panel at the upcoming CFO Summit.
CorEST is being offered on a monthly, consumption-based licence.
Article Credit: reseller