Practice of sustainability reporting in cooperation with the INSIRE Consulting GmbH and the MAS Management and Software Ltd
Climate change in connection with a growing awareness of sustainability in the population mean that corporations also publish further information on their environmental influences in sustainability reports or in combination with their annual reports (integrated reporting). This information, some of which is mandatory, means that more and more data has to be recorded, stored, processed and prepared in order for the company to ultimately be able to use it in controlling and accounting.
Theme day climate and sustainability in corporate reporting
To the students of the Master's degree in Accounting, Controlling & Finance, the University of Applied Sciences Münster by Prof. Dr. Klaus Schulte, to bring this complex of topics closer, organized the university together with the INSIRE Consulting GmbH and the MAS Management and Software Ltd Two theme days on March 11th and 18th, 2021. Using reports and guest lectures from practice, examples and procedures were explained and demonstrated how sustainability reporting affects companies and their performance. This should prepare the students for various case studies, the results of which were presented and discussed on the 2nd day.
Lecture: Sustainability reporting at Evonik Industries, A practical report by Lothar Demant (Head of Accounting Policy & External Reporting, Evonik Industries)
Lothar Demant from Evonik Industries, presented their efforts and results to date to contribute to sustainable development and how Evonik uses and finally reports on the non-financial key figures for analysis and control purposes. Among other things, he emphasizes four key points that make non-financial reporting a challenge:
- Long processing paths/high error rate and topicality problems
- Various reporting systems with partially manual interfaces
- Checking the data for consistency
- Expectation pressure from investors (due to the EU taxonomy that came into force in 2020, the pressure at this point will be intensified again)
Lecture: Technical possibilities of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) in the context of sustainability reporting by Matthias Winkler Managing Director of MAS and Helmuth Schob Head of Software Engineering at MAS
In order to be able to process non-financial data within a company in an automated and up-to-date manner, the MAS Management and Software GmbH with his manager mr Matthew Winkler Solutions for collecting and processing data directly from production. Thanks to the possibilities of the Industrial Internet of Things, the data from machines and systems in production can be loaded live into the cloud (or on-premises) and made available as virtual models (digital twins) of physical reality. The digital twins can be analyzed with machine learning, results can be displayed on dashboards and actions can be derived based on them. For example, within a compressed air system, even with changing compressed air requirements, a pressure loss due to a leak can be quickly detected by means of sensors, communicated to the cloud and finally corrected. In this way, both the operating costs and the environmental impact due to the reduced energy consumption can be lowered. This means that long-term effects on the income statement and balance sheet can also be clearly highlighted. The control of such analyzes and the monitoring of machines for possible sources of error takes place in the form of business intelligence solutions. At this point, the performance of the INSIRE Consulting GmbH she specializes in digitization solutions for all aspects of group accounting, controlling and analysis and supports customers in a wide range of implementation and maintenance issues. Visit the website for more information www.iiot.de.
Lecture: Sustainability reporting in industry - developments in organization, technology and content - Rainer Wollmann (INSIRE Consulting)
Rainer Wollmann Managing Director of INSIRE Consulting GmbH sees the increasing idea of sustainability as one of the drivers of future reporting. He emphasizes the connection with other changes that are currently changing the management and reporting of corporations. Companies strive to carry out their closing and reporting processes in a more frequent cycle towards "continuous accounting". At the same time, product innovations, digitization and changing markets influence the complexity in the value chains.
The INSIRE Consulting GmbH in cooperation with the MAS Management and Software Ltd. Through this cooperation, a service can be offered that ranges from the collection of data on a machine in production, to analysis tools such as the SAP Analytics Cloud, to the integrated annual report. This makes it possible to use current data within controlling and accounting for control and reporting purposes.
Processing of the case studies and presentation of the results
In order to be able to implement the theoretical knowledge they had learned using concrete examples, the students worked in groups on various case studies on these topics, which were presented in the following week, on the second topic day. One example topic was finding technical options for collecting and structuring relevant data for sustainability reporting. The students impressed with imaginative approaches, with mixtures of IT, sustainability and business. They were able to show that even small optimizations in production, supply chain and sales can have a major impact on the financial performance and sustainability of the company.
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