Enabling ESG Compliance with the KewSustain AI-Powered Sustainability Platform

By Jaslyn See, Partner Account Manager – AWS
By Clevester Teo, Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
By Yew Jie Tan, Program Manager – AWS
By David Ooi, Solution Architect – KewMann

KewMann

Public sector institutions have focused on sustainable business practices, including energy efficiency, waste reduction, efficient water usage, and reaching net-zero carbon emissions, and these efforts have increased significantly over the past several years.

Governments and intergovernmental organizations have established various sustainability frameworks, such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which provide a comprehensive set of targets for sustainable development. Additionally, sustainability reporting standards such as the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) have become more widely used.

Governments globally have increased oversight and established stringent sustainability regulations that public sector organizations must comply with. For example, Singapore has implemented regulations like the Resource Sustainability Act and ambitious sustainability plans such as the Singapore Green Plan 2030 to promote sustainable development.

Private and public sector contractors, suppliers, and partners working with governmental organizations have to invest in compliance programs, training, audits, and other mechanisms to ensure they meet sustainability requirements set by public sector institutions, as failure to comply can result in penalties and reputational damage.

These third-party organizations have to use technology to track and manage environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data and engage in ESG reporting to adhere to the main disclosure frameworks and sustainability standards established by governmental bodies. This includes tools for end-to-end data collection and reporting, energy and waste management, and compliance monitoring.

In this post, we will highlight the existing gaps in ESG compliance that public sector institutions face today. We’ll also introduce KewSustain, a proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) sustainability platform developed by KewMann and built on Amazon Web Services (AWS) analytics and serverless services.

KewSustain enables organizations to efficiently gather data, generate insights, and report on ESG metrics to to enable users to meet their compliance requirements. It helps public sector institutions overcome the challenges of sustainability reporting and compliance with its automated data collection, collaboration features, and real-time dashboards powered by AWS.

KewMann is an AWS Specialization Partner and member of the AWS Public Sector Partner Program that leverages behavioral science and analytics to help organizations measure, monitor, and make improvements related to sustainability.

Gaps in Existing Compliance Solutions

For public sector institutions, several challenges continue to block them from achieving effective and efficient sustainability reporting and compliance:

• Internal communication gaps: Effective ESG management requires strong alignment and collaboration across departments within an organization. However, communication gaps between departments can hinder the flow of information and prevents effective coordination, leading to inconsistencies in data collection, reporting, and decision-making. This creates potential inaccuracies in ESG measurement and reporting metrics.
• Lack of standardization in ESG reporting: Currently, there is no universally accepted standard for ESG reporting, which makes it challenging for investors and other stakeholders to compare the ESG performance of different companies. Lack of standardization results in the ability for analysts to gain deeper insight and value from their data across organizations. Duplication of resources may result and cause inefficiencies.
• Limited resources for ESG management: Implementation of effective ESG strategies require organizations to allocate significant resources towards meeting sustainability-related goals. However, many either do not have these resources to allocate or fail to see the need to address their ESG shortfalls, prioritizing other aspects of their business.
• Resistance to change: ESG management often involves significant changes to a company’s operations, culture, and values. Some employees, shareholders, or other stakeholders may resist these changes, making it challenging to implement sustainable practices or achieve ESG targets. Overcoming resistance to change requires effective communication, leadership, and stakeholder engagement.
• Lack of regulatory enforcement: ESG regulations and standards may not be adequately enforced, leading to a lack of accountability for organizations that don’t comply with ESG requirements. This makes it challenging for organizations that prioritize sustainability to compete with those that prioritize other business objectives. Effective regulatory enforcement is essential for promoting a level playing field and incentivizing organizations to prioritize sustainability.
• Inefficient manual processes: ESG reporting requires the collection, analysis, and reporting of vast amounts of data, which can be a time-consuming and resource-draining process. Manual processes such as data entry, data cleansing, and data validation can be error-prone and increase the risk of inconsistencies in data collection, reporting, and decision-making.
• Inconsistent data collection: Lack of a proper system for centralized data management can result in inconsistent data collection. With no set of consistent processes and systems in place, different departments in the organization would have varying standards for data collection and reporting, leading to inconsistencies and inaccuracies in data. This makes it challenging to consolidate and analyze data effectively and report on ESG performance accurately.
• Limited availability of high-quality ESG data: High-quality ESG data is crucial for effective management and reporting. However, many companies struggle to collect and analyze the required data effectively. This makes it difficult to properly measure and report on ESG performance, and hinders a company’s ability to set realistic performance targets and goals.

Solution Overview

To address the evolving needs of sustainability compliance, KewMann developed its proprietary solution, KewSustain, a proprietary analytics solution built on AWS-native services. This multi-tenant platform enables customers to gather data, discover insights, and monitor sustainability metrics.

The following description provides an overview of KewSustain’s functionalities:

Data Points Gathering and Discovery

KewSustain simplifies the data collection process by leveraging multiple sources, including systems (such as ERP, CRM, SCM), Excel spreadsheets, and sensors that support MQTT protocol. KewSustain’s data ingestion module, powered by AWS Transfer Family and AWS IoT Core, enables organizations to gather various types of data like direct emissions, employee information, indirect emissions, and supplier details.

With a user-friendly data upload module and collaboration features, the solution facilitates seamless data gathering from human collaborators, ensuring comprehensive data coverage. To enhance data quality, the gathered information undergoes rigorous validation using proven data analysis techniques.

KewSustain applies guided formulas and calculations to extract actionable insights from the collected data. While these capabilities aim to support accuracy and reliability, organizations are still responsible for ensuring compliance through appropriate due diligence. KewSustain focuses on providing robust data gathering, processing, and analytical tools to inform sustainability programs.

The outcome is the generation of sustainability and ESG reports with globally-recognized standards such as SASB, GRI, TCFD, and stock exchanges (Bursa Malaysia and SGX) listing requirements. Organizations can choose the frequency of reporting based on their requirements, allowing for more frequent updates when necessary.

Figure 1 – Data points gathering and discovery.

Recommendation, Monitoring, and Tracking

KewSustain goes beyond data analysis and reporting by providing actionable recommendations. For example, the data collected from real-time sensors feature provide up-to-the-minute data sync on energy usage, waste management, and more. This enables organizations to better manage the ESG related activities, and assists in setting targets related to cost and budget, offering supplier recommendations, simulations, and analysis.

By incorporating governance, risk management, metrics, and target selection, the solution offers comprehensive and effective recommendations. Continuous monitoring and tracking capabilities empower organizations to assess their progress in relation to the defined targets. By comparing current performance against the set targets, organizations can gauge their level of reduction in ESG factors.

The execution of recommendations directly impacts the ESG report, reflecting the efforts made towards achieving sustainability goals.

Factors Contributing to Recommendations

To provide organizations with comprehensive recommendations, KewSustain considers various factors including peer analysis, scenario analysis, supply chain analysis, policy and legal risk, technology risk, market risk, reputation risk, physical risk, resource efficiency opportunities, energy source opportunities, product/services opportunities, market opportunities, and resilience opportunities.

This holistic approach ensures organizations can identify and address potential areas for improvement.

Figure 2 – Factors contributing to recommendations.

Automated or Manual Data Collection

KewSustain offers the flexibility to collect data through automated means, leveraging existing systems or sensors. It enables seamless integration with the required data fields, ensuring accurate and efficient data collection.

Additionally, organizations can leverage the collaborative workflow feature, allowing assigned human collaborators to capture and upload data manually for instances where automation is not feasible.

Sustainability Report Generation

Generating sustainability reports is a vital part of the reporting process. KewSustain enables organizations to generate sustainability reports that incorporate the latest data points ingested from various sources like ERP systems, sensors, and manual data uploads.

To maintain quality and accuracy, KewSustain allows an organization’s management, such as its executive team or board of directors, the opportunity to review and approve a draft report before it’s finalized via an approval workflow.

Figure 3 – Sustainability report generation.

Real-Time Dashboard

To provide organizations with up-to-date insights, KewSustain offers a real-time dashboard which showcases the collected ESG data, highlighting key metrics, goals vs. targets, trending performance, and potential risk areas. It serves as a central hub for monitoring sustainability progress and facilitating informed decision-making.

Virtual Coaching

To further assist users in navigating sustainability reporting, KewSustain leverages Amazon Kendra and Amazon Bedrock to provide an intelligent virtual assistant called ChatESG. This chatbot acts as a virtual coach, with a semantic knowledge base ingested from sustainability frameworks, standards, and regulations.

Powered by Amazon Kendra for natural language understanding (NLU) and Amazon Bedrock for immediate, relevant information and advice, users can ask ChatESG questions to get guidance on sustainability reporting requirements, indicators, and data needs.

For example, if a user needs help understanding the specific carbon emission metrics required for TCFD reporting, they can simply ask ChatESG. The chatbot provides an overview of the relevant TCFD metrics and data requirements.

Solution Architecture

The solution architecture on AWS is as follows:

Figure 4 – KewSustain solution architecture.

• File-based transfer is one way to ingest data into platform. AWS Transfer Family provides an SFTP endpoint, allowing users to push files into the pipeline. To ensure secure and reliable authentication, AWS Lambda functions act as a custom identity provider within AWS Transfer Family, authenticating against Amazon Cognito. Once the files are uploaded, it undergoes a series of pre-configured processing steps powered by Lambda functions. In case of any exceptions in the workflow, users are immediately alerted via email.
• The second data ingestion approach leverages AWS IoT Core to receive data using the MQTT protocol. To maintain the highest level of security, traffic encryption is implemented using TLS 1.2 or 1.3. Next, AWS IoT Rule actions are used to store the received messages in an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket, ensuring the data is safely stored for further processing.
• After the data is received, it’s stored in a dedicated landing zone bucket. This layer serves as the initial point of data ingestion. Amazon S3 event notifications are configured to trigger an AWS Glue job, which performs essential tasks such as data validation and transformation, ensuring the data is in a consumption-ready format. Once transformed, the file is placed into an encrypted S3 bucket in the stage layer.
• To help meet sustainability requirements and enable advanced analytics, another AWS Glue job is employed. This job aggregates the data based on specific criteria and places it into another S3 bucket in the analytics layer. To cater to unique organizational needs, access to AWS Glue DataBrew is provided and offers a user-friendly, point-and-click visual interface with 250 built-in transformations, enabling quick analysis and transformation of the data.
• To derive insights from ingested data, KewSustain leverages Amazon Bedrock. This service, coupled with knowledge on sustainability frameworks and regulations, serves as a virtual coach. Bedrock’s prescriptive insights can assist organizations in exploring targeted opportunities to make progress on their ESG goals.
• The analytics layer is the hub for deriving valuable insights from the data. Using Amazon Athena, a serverless query service, the platform can easily query and visualize the data. KewSustain hosts static resources for the frontend in S3, and Amazon CloudFront ensures efficient content delivery. Once users are authenticated by Amazon Cognito, they gain access to a real-time dashboard and reports for recommendations, monitoring, and tracking.

Conclusion

By implementing KewSustain, organizations can streamline their sustainability reporting processes, enabling efficient data gathering, insightful analysis, and informed decision-making, without having to worry about complex backend abstraction.

With automated data collection, collaboration features, and real-time dashboards from KewSustain, organizations can take proactive steps towards achieving their sustainability goals and drive positive change.

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KewMann – AWS Partner Spotlight

KewMann is an AWS Specialization Partner that leverages behavioral science and analytics to help organizations measure, monitor, and make improvements related to sustainability.

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