Streamline Sustainability Reporting with Workday and Pulsora

Let's get started with sustainability reporting with Workday and Pulsora. Today's agenda: we'll begin with welcomes and introductions, and then we'll move on to the trends and challenges of how leveraging Workday ESG data and controls can truly benefit and enhance your single source of the truth. Pulsora will give a high-level demo and introduce a solution for all of the reporting needs. Then we will follow on by showcasing the Kainos-exclusive Workday Adaptive Planning model.

Please ask questions along the way. We like to keep things interactive. There is a Q&A section of the webinar. Please use that, put your questions in, and when we get to the Q&A session at the end, we'll do our best to answer those. We'll also be keeping things interactive as we go through. There are some polls along the way, so please join in and make it as interactive as possible.

Introductions

I'll start with myself. I'm Cain Benham, the ESG subject matter expert for Kainos. Chartered environmentalist, many years in the sustainability industry, helping companies change and adjust to more sustainable methods while still remaining growing and market-leading within their fields and verticals.

Joining me today is Ciaran. Thank you, Cain. Hello, everybody. My name is Ciaran O'Harre. I am Workday Adaptive Planning manager at Kainos. I have been in that role for a number of years now. Prior to that, my background is as a chartered accountant at Finans, working in various group and FP&A roles.

Aaron also joins us from Pulsora. Thank you, Cain. My name is Aaron Silverstein, and I'm from the solutions consulting team at Pulsora. I work closely with our customers to streamline and automate their sustainability reporting processes using the Pulsora platform.

About Pulsora

Pulsora is a purpose-built sustainability software that is AI-powered, and it is the first and only software platform that is approved and on the Workday marketplace for sustainability. Pulsora is built to integrate and pull data from Workday Financial Management and Workday HCM into your sustainability repository, and then push data out to Workday Adaptive Planning for future planning purposes. Pulsora has over 500 companies on the platform, with referenceable companies like Franklin Templeton using the Pulsora platform to calculate their carbon inventory and report on their sustainability practices. Our customers span all verticals including energy, retail, finance, and manufacturing.

About Kainos and the Pulsora partnership

Kainos is one of Workday's most trusted implementation partners, and the only Workday implementation partner trying to deliver Pulsora implementations globally. The ability combined with Kainos and the expertise in change management, digital transformation, the ESG consulting piece, and the adaptive planning means that Kainos is uniquely placed within the Workday ecosystem to support your immediate and long-term sustainability and regulatory requirements. All of those things will help you grow and evolve.

Harnessing the power of Workday as your company's single source of the truth will show you how much of your sustainability data can be, and if not already is, housed within Workday itself. Combining that with the purpose-built Pulsora platform, you can ensure that you are the strongest, most secure sustainability partner and team for all your reporting capabilities.

The relationship and the integration between Pulsora and Workday is so strong that Pulsora's functionality and the diversity that it holds has led to Workday themselves using Pulsora for their own sustainability reporting needs. Workday are trusting Pulsora themselves for using their methods and using the platform and the solution that is available.

Trends and regulatory challenges

What we need to all realize: the increased regulatory scrutiny is becoming quite more arduous for us all. We're certainly in the business climate that it is, and it's constantly changing and evolving. The standardization, when we start to look at the metrics that are now merging together and the frameworks such as TCFD, GRI, merging with CSRD, also the ISSB regulations, they're all evolving and joining forces, merging together. A lot of your data will be spread across multiple frameworks, and you'll need to look at how you can ensure that the least amount of effort with your data goes across those frameworks so that you can integrate it with your business strategy.

The key thing is stakeholder demand for transparency. It starts at the top, so the stakeholders have to be able to see and enjoy the benefits of seeing the results from top down, and then back up. Stakeholders are very key as we go through this.

A lot of these challenges can be minimized by staying within the Workday ecosystem. One, it provides you security, and two, you have Kainos to enable you to remain with all the abilities and trusted implementations, and the partnership relationships we already have. They really understand Workday. So Kainos can be that glue for you, making sure that your partnership with Pulsora is seamless and you keep with that single source of the truth.

The CSRD focus

CSRD is becoming probably the most prominent regulation that is there for us all. Good to see, to be fair, so many of you that are already aware and taking part already in your sustainability journey.

How Workday helps

How does Workday help you, and how does leveraging Workday for all your data help you? You have a centralized data repository, so all your data in one place. All of your E and all of your S can be housed inside the Workday data repository.

Real-time reporting and analytics is already taken care of inside the Pulsora and Workday reporting platforms, so you can manage and monitor your ESG performance on an almost real-time basis. It integrates with your financial data seamlessly. All of it is housed within your Workday ecosystem.

You're streamlining your compliance and your reporting, enhancing collaboration with your stakeholders, making sure that all of the questions of your business are answered, all of the challenges that your business is facing for growth are visible, and everyone is collaborating across the business. Customizable dashboards and metrics are there, and everything is fully customizable. All of the data can be used in any way that you'd need it to be used.

To summarize: Workday is your single source of the truth. I keep reverting back to that, but it genuinely is, for your data mapping efficiencies. A lot of the data that you require for sustainability reporting is actually already inside Workday, stored in that environment. If not, it can be brought in. Your diversity metrics, pay parity, supply chain, and invoicing are all included inside the Workday ecosystem.

Data integration beyond Workday

To briefly touch on data integration from other sources: Pulsora has the capabilities to use data from all of your sources, not just Workday. It has a seamless integration. With Workday, the API is already built and free out of the box. We also understand that compliance with sustainability regulations does seem very complex, and it's coming at a difficult trading time for a lot of businesses at the moment. Companies are looking for the most cost-effective, easiest solution, and it may seem like a massive hiring decision.

Ideally, what you need is a platform and a partner that can meet your needs both now and as the regulations evolve. Delivering automation and integration to minimize and maximize your efforts and the risks. It's important that we understand risks are highlighted throughout the whole of the ESG reporting platform. By maximizing your controls, staying within the Workday ecosystem, with a purpose-built platform and an experienced partner such as Kainos, we can only deliver a great seamless result.

Kainos is committed to building a wider offering for all of our customers in this area. The first of these is the exclusive Adaptive Planning bolt-on we have created. That is only available from Kainos, something Kainos has taken the commitment to build, to show, and demonstrate, integrating further with Pulsora and Workday to bring everything to life.

Pulsora platform demo: overview

Today we're going to talk about how the Pulsora platform can support your sustainability reporting journey from data collection. Data collection begins with data definition of your sustainability data repository, how we can collect this data through an integration with Workday, and from entering or collecting data from up and down the business value chain.

We're going to talk about how we can consolidate this data under a preset library of standard metrics and KPIs, or custom metrics that may be bespoke to your sustainability reporting journey or stakeholder reporting requirements. We're going to talk about how we can pull in data from Workday to calculate your emissions on-platform using our comprehensive Scope 1, Scope 2, and all 15 category Scope 3 carbon calculators. And from this calculated and collected data, we're going to talk about how to report or disclose information to stakeholders up and down the value chain, and how to find actionable insights from the analytics module within Pulsora.

Demo: defining catalogs and metrics

I've landed within the Pulsora platform as a sustainability manager for an operating company. My job is to collect data from up and down my business value chain and from third-party systems like Workday, store it within the sustainability data repository that is Pulsora, and then use this data to report out to different stakeholders.

Data collection begins with defining the data model within a Pulsora catalog. Pulsora catalogs can serve as the centralized sustainability data repository for your business. Here, I've created an ESG catalog, which has a multitude of different metrics. Catalogs can be created from a variety of the globe's leading standards or frameworks. Pulsora maintains a standard library of these frameworks and metrics.

You all reported CSRD as being the most pertinent reporting requirement relative to you. Pulsora maintains a standard library of KPIs and metrics organized under their topics and subtopics. Once you run your double materiality assessment, you can select which metrics are material to your business, and store them in your ESG or sustainability data repository.

In addition to these standard metrics and KPIs, you can also create custom metrics that may be bespoke to your business reporting strategy, or might be used to supplement your standards reporting. If at any point you want some additional information about possible metrics to create inside of your sustainability repository, you can access the Pulsora Copilot for suggestions.

For example, I know I have to calculate and report on my gender pay ratio, but I'm interested in what methods or metrics could be used to actually calculate it. I can ask Pulsora Copilot for a calculation methodology, and it will suggest the variables needed, which I can create as metrics in my catalog to then collect from Workday and calculate my gender pay ratio.

Demo: pulling data from Workday HCM

Today we're going to talk about collecting an employee breakdown by region from the Workday system and storing that in a metric for use as part of our GRI content index, which we might append to the end of our annual sustainability report, or include as a document on our website.

You can begin by collecting this data from Workday by creating a Pulsora data source. Pulsora data sources are API or SFTP connections or integrations with any third-party system. In this case, we've created a Workday HCM data source that is going to pull in a list of employee records, summarize those records with an input map, and inject the data into our catalog.

The Pulsora integration with Workday is built on top of Workday Query Language. So Pulsora can access any piece of data that is accessible by Workday Query Language within Workday. Once I trigger this data source, Pulsora is going to pull in a subset of about 500 records, summarize those records with our input map, and then insert that data into the catalog.

When I click on a metric that we've updated from the Workday integration, you can see that the audit log has captured that the integration with Workday was the source of this data.

Demo: audit trail and qualitative data

Pulsora was built with auditability from the start, meaning that every piece of data is traceable. Every time it's updated or changed, the user is captured and timestamped, so at any point the comprehensive audit log can be used for assurance purposes when reviewing the data.

In addition to quantitative data we might have pulled in from Workday, we might need to supplement some of this data with qualitative information. At any point, you can assign metrics in the catalog to different users up and down your value chain. When a user gets assigned a metric, they can log into the platform and use on-platform tools to write a response. For example, they can use Write with Pulsora AI to gain a starting point on a qualitative question that asks about the description of our waste policy within our business.

Demo: validations

Pulsora maintains a varied list of validations that can be stored on a metric within the platform. For example, we have a question that asks about our total waste, which we've calculated on-platform, and we expect that this value is within 20% of last year's value. The platform is highlighting that the current value entered for this period is above that 20% threshold that we expected for this metric.

Demo: GHG calculators (Scope 1, 2, 3)

In addition to metrics that we collect and store within our catalogs or ESG data repository, we might need to calculate our carbon emissions. Pulsora maintains a comprehensive list of GHG calculators to calculate your Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3 emissions.

For clarity: Scope 1 are the emissions you create by burning fuel within your business. Scope 2 emissions are emissions you create by consuming energy that created emissions downstream from your operations. And Scope 3 emissions are emissions created from your entire supply chain.

The data to calculate your GHG emissions often resides within supplier invoices that can be stored within Workday Financial Management. You can create a Pulsora data source to pull in GHG transactions or supplier invoices from your Workday Financial Management system to create activities or records within a Pulsora calculator.

I'm going to open up our Scope 2 calculator to show you a list of supplier invoices that we have pulled directly into the platform. You can see these supplier invoices have been assigned by facility, allowing us to calculate our GHG emissions based on the locations of our operations. Here, I have created an actual activity within Pulsora that we can review. You can see that the system has captured the amount of energy pulled in from the supplier invoice, including the start date and end date of when this electricity was consumed. The system has calculated your location-based and market-based emissions using our standard library of emissions factor datasets stored within the platform. Pulsora constantly updates and maintains the most up-to-date datasets of emissions factors so that our customers can focus on their carbon data collection and calculation and stay up to date with the most pertinent information.

Pulsora encourages transparency from the source. The audit log captures every time that data was updated, changed, or calculated using our carbon calculators.

Sometimes data from our Workday system might not show the full picture, and we might need to gap-fill data within the Pulsora platform. You can create estimated activities using intensity factors and calculation methods like your square footage or dollars spent to estimate and create traceable data from the source.

In addition to our Scope 2 calculators, our Scope 3 calculators have a comprehensive list of the entire GHG Protocol calculation methods. For example, you could pull in your GL spend data from Workday into the Scope 3.1 or 3.2 calculators to calculate your spend-based emissions for your capital goods and purchased services.

Demo: decarbonization model

Once you have calculated your emissions on platform, you can use the Pulsora decarbonization model with Pulsora AI to suggest projects for your decarbonization journey. Here, the Pulsora AI will suggest a list of projects and the average return or carbon emissions reduced based on the project cost.

Demo: reporting and analytics

Once we have calculated our carbon emissions on-platform and collected all the data from Workday and members of our business value chain, we can report out this data to a variety of data destinations. For example, we can create an integration with Workday Adaptive Planning to push our calculated carbon emissions out to Workday Adaptive Planning. Later on, Ciaran is going to talk about how to use Workday Adaptive Planning with the data pushed from Pulsora for planning your decarbonization spend.

In addition, we've talked about CSRD and GRI as possible reports that you want to generate out of the Pulsora platform. Pulsora maintains a standard library of reporting templates mapped to the metrics in our catalog so that our customers can create standard reports with just one click from the Pulsora platform.

Here, I have created a GRI content index that I can include as part of my annual sustainability report, or include as an appendix to my website, and generate it with one click from the platform. Here is the standard template for the GRI content index, and I have pulled in the values from my catalog that I've collected from the Workday integration.

In addition to reports, we can also use the Pulsora analytics module to review and find actionable insights from the data calculated or collected within the platform. Here, I've created a net zero dashboard. I can use this dashboard to benchmark my emissions against data that I've pulled in based on my industry. I can review my progress towards my net zero by 2050 target, and my actual versus estimated emissions. I can also review my emissions by Scope 3 categories to see what is my biggest category emitter and where I need to spend the most effort to get the greatest reduction. I can use the filters here on the left-hand side to drill in and figure out which facilities are actually creating the most Scope 3 emissions, so I know where to spend my most time and energy.

Workday Adaptive Planning: overview

What is Workday Adaptive Planning? Workday Adaptive Planning is a cloud-based financial planning and analysis tool to help organizations meet their specific business priorities through budgeting, forecasting, reporting, and analytics. We focus on three main areas whenever we think about ESG, because we use it for financial and headcount and HR reporting.

How does it work for ESG and why is it so key in this area? Agility, sustainability, and net zero. Agility: true cloud architecture enables real-time integration like Aaron has spoken about, scenario planning, and dynamic reporting. Sustainability: the ESG forecasting model can track emissions, establish baselines, and adjust targets across Scopes 1, 2, and 3. As Aaron touched on, 15 different categories in Scope 3. Net zero: Workday Adaptive Planning helps customers enhance supply chain sustainability. We're talking about long-term, the 2050 here, centralized emissions reporting across various scopes. We can also use the model to assess various abatement options for your journey to net zero.

Demo: short-term ESG planning

We're going to focus on two models: a short-term model and a long-term model. The short-term model is when we're thinking about in-year, when we're down in the detail of Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3, and how Adaptive can assist with that planning. We'll review the initial baseline, set targets against that baseline, and see how we can bring that baseline back down by applying different initiatives.

What we're looking at here is Adaptive Planning, and this is what we call a dashboard. What I just opened up is what we call a process tracker. A process tracker is essentially a list of tasks. The important thing here is that we can delegate authority throughout your business. It's not just going to be down to the responsibility of one person to do your ESG forecasting.

In this example, we can take the data across from Pulsora for your organization structure. For the purposes of this demo, we call it Fund A. The reason we call it Fund A is because we also have an investor panel I'm not going to show today, but we can set up some time to review it. This is a business made up of various organizations. Each organization would effectively be responsible for generating their baseline.

We can look at the overall baseline: 6.3 thousand tons. We can look at the mix: the majority is coming from Scope 3, then we have 34% coming from Scope 1. We can see which particular businesses are generating more, and what it is they're generating more of. We can look at it against prior-year actuals to generate our plan. As you can see here, we are trending upwards, which is not the direction of travel that we want to be going in. With more details and visualizations, we can see very quickly the areas we need to be focusing on.

For the purposes of this demo and this business, there are direct emissions coming from Scope 1, purchased energy coming from Scope 2, and within Scope 3 there is commuting and home working, business travel, the acquisition of purchased goods, and waste generated in operations. There are more, but for the purposes of the demo we're just going to look at those.

I'm going to jump directly into direct emissions. They all follow a similar approach for how you're generating the baseline. That approach is that we use a table that gives us some input capability. For stationary combustion in this example, we enter the fuel type, the fuel unit, the emissions factor, and the volume of units and when they are going to occur. Calculations in the background work to generate the effective tCO2 emissions as a result of this activity. They're all assumption-based models. In this case, the fuel unit is kilowatt hours, the emissions factor source is the EPA Table 1, so it will be dependent upon your location or what you're actually generating in terms of the fuel units as to what calculation is running in the background. Fully customizable, active dashboard, immediately see the impact.

We have a similar approach for purchased energy. There's commuting and home working, business travel, purchased goods, and waste generated. They follow the same approach. Essentially you are entering variables and then quantities associated with them. The end result is that you have a greenhouse gas emissions baseline for your business overall of 6.3 kilotons.

Demo: setting and revising targets

This is when, in our timeline of events for budget, that goes off to the leadership team. The leadership team reviews it, they go to a different dashboard and a different process. On this process, we have to implement the directive of the business. In this scenario, the business has committed to being less than 5,000 kilotons of CO2 in the current year, so we need to change something.

We are going to look at what targets we are applying to the business. This business has been set global targets, but it doesn't have to be global targets. Realistically, it would more likely be individual organizational targets. We're going to increase the reduction in business travel to 25% from 20%, and we're going to increase the reduction in waste generated from operations from 30 to 35%. Active dashboard, we should be able to see this visualization straight away.

The next stage is when we are actually going in and reviewing and revising the ESG baseline to target. This is when the active dashboard sort of comes alive. Our ESG baseline is 6.3K, but we want to target where our biggest hitters are. Stationary combustion, purchased energy, most likely a common set for both for lots of businesses. We're also going to look at some business travel initiatives, waste generated in operations, and purchased goods.

For direct emissions: instead of using coke coal, we're going to use a different fuel source, which is coal industrial. So anywhere where there is coke coal, we're going to replace that with coal industrial, which will likely have a financial impact but is a cleaner fuel source for the environment and less CO2 emissions. As a result of doing so, we have immediately had a considerable impact on our CO2 emissions. We haven't adjusted the volumes, we've adjusted the fuel source.

For purchased energy, by looking at this visualization, this is where Adaptive and dashboards come to life. I could quickly look at this and say, "You know what? There's something that just does not look right about May 2024." If I scroll down to May 2024, it looks like for the Atlanta branch there's an extra zero unnecessarily. Let's fix that and see what that does. Again, real time. That looks much more realistic. Brings us down further within our overall emissions target, and critically brings us on the correct side in terms of our target that has been set by the business.

Commuting and home working isn't one we're going to focus on straight away, but there are always initiatives we could use. For business travel, business travel is one that has been identified where we can make considerable changes via various directives. The first directive: for any flight, the number of passengers is going to be limited to four. That means if we have three, we'll leave it at three, but anything that's at four, we need to keep four people traveling on any one journey. The next initiative: private jet is no longer an option. Change the private jet to commercial, international, business class. The final thing we're going to do is that any first class is going to be effectively disabled as an option. We're just going to take it from first class to business class. The effect of doing that should have a marked impact on our ESG emissions.

Purchased goods is quite straightforward. We're going to change from Li-ion batteries to alkaline batteries. We're going to change from PET plastic to PVC plastic. Both will have a financial impact, but they will also have a favorable emissions impact. These are directives from the top of the business that impact the business. Once this goes out and you have delegated that authority, each of the businesses has their own capability to change what they want themselves. For waste generated in operations, we're going to change from a combustion model to a composting model.

Considerably favorable. We have met the 5K target and we are slightly under as well, so we have a little bit of leeway. That's how you can go and generate your plan. As you go throughout the year, this can be reviewed against your actual activity against the plan activity, and all of those analytical questions come out of it.

Demo: long-term net zero planning

The next is the net zero model. Another hypothetical business: we know that in FY23, 841,000 tons of CO2. There's a commitment to get to net zero by 2050. How are we going to do it? We know what our CO2 emissions are made up of because of the information we get from Pulsora, and we're going to say "Look, this is our target." High-level targets. We're going to target our reduction across each one of these scopes to bring us to 100% reduction overall by FY50.

It may be that this generates too much of an aggressive uplift initially, in which case you have to smooth it out, but we can do that to use the calculations in the background to make sure that you get to 100%. If we think in a more short-term basis, going from FY23 to FY24, we're looking at roughly about a 44.6 reduction in our target.

Demo: marginal abatement cost curves

How do we get to that 44.6? What initiatives do we apply and how do we assess them? This is when we look at our marginal abatement options. We are assessing the potential abatement options of each of the different initiatives using marginal abatement cost curves. The abatement impact of each one of those initiatives in the year and the payback period for each one of those initiatives.

For anyone who is familiar with marginal abatement, anything greater than zero is not a viable option, because the cost of doing nothing is less than the cost of implementing the project. Automatically, we're not interested in wood burners and waste recovery. For anyone not initiated with marginal abatement cost curves, the most favorable option here is the LED lights. It's the biggest bang for your buck. We can also see that for waste recovery on wood burners, we're falling outside the directive that anything over five years is not considered in terms of a payback period.

How do we generate these numbers? We look at all of our abatement options. We look at input capital outlay, the discount rate, the project life in years, the expected annual saving, operating costs on the abatement, CO2 per year you're saving as a result of that. From that, we can generate net present value, marginal abatement, and payback period. Then we can decide: we don't want to do the wood burners, we don't want to do the waste recovery, and realistically biomass co-firing doesn't really have much of an impact, so we're going to forget about that too.

This is an interactive system. You can automatically play about with it and see the impact of whatever different initiatives you're going to have. At the very bottom there's the abatement in the year. The abatement from the building retrofits is excellent and has the biggest impact, and over the life of it has a really big impact.

However, if we look at the year and say "Okay, let's just go ahead with everything," remember that 44.6 figure we have set as a target. To get to that, we needed to remove 15.3 thousand tons of CO2 from Scope 1, 15.5 from Scope 2, and 13.8 from Scope 3. The above abatement options when associated with a scope give us 41,000 reduction in Scope 1, 19,000 in Scope 2, but only 6,000 in Scope 3. Hence you have to go back to the drawing board and think, "What other initiatives could I apply so that I can get to my target for Scope 3 initiatives?"

Q&A: Can we collect data from suppliers that don't use Workday?

Pulsora is set up to represent or create an organizational or business hierarchy that is representative of whatever structure or visualization you want for your business. You can create suppliers as a node in this business hierarchy, and you can engage with suppliers directly in the platform by creating tasks for them to log into the platform and provide this data. If you want further information about this process, which we didn't touch on 100% today because we were focused on the Workday integration, we're happy to give a more in-depth demo of the Pulsora platform that includes the supplier engagement module by reaching out at pulsora.com.

Q&A: How does Kainos enhance sustainability reporting on Workday?

Kainos enhances sustainability reporting and your Workday experience. Kainos is dedicated to Workday solutions, a leading partner across all of the global markets, ranks very highly, and knows Workday inside and out. They're dedicated to building solutions to work with it, such as the Adaptive Planning piece that Ciaran has just shown you today. They really do know the ecosystem of Workday. They're the only fully-trained Pulsora implementation partner, so they can really help everything come to life.

Q&A: How quickly can we implement the carbon reduction model?

We would be targeting, dependent upon the number of categories that you would be requiring, anywhere between four to eight weeks for an implementation of the emissions reduction models.

Closing

There are a lot more questions we can continue going through, but we'll get back to you all individually. Thank you all for joining. If you're interested in continuing the conversations, please get in touch. We're now going to share some links for you that will also help you interact with us.

If you are attending Rising, I look forward to seeing you. I'll be there myself. Please book a one-to-one workshop with Kainos, Pulsora, and myself so we can ensure that you get all the information that you need and spend some quality time with you. If you're a new customer to Kainos or Pulsora, reach out and let me start exploring with you. Let's start mapping out the opportunities that you have and start building up that process. If you are a Kainos customer and you're interested in Pulsora or the Adaptive piece, please contact your client director to schedule a meeting.

By utilizing Kainos, Workday, Pulsora, and the exclusive Adaptive piece, the single source of the truth is yours. It's all there, it's all held, and it's all kept up.

‍