Oracle Promises to Revolutionise Sustainability Reporting

Oracle has unveiled its latest offering in business-oriented software. Its new application, named Oracle Fusion Cloud Sustainability (OFCS), is designed to simplify the complex task of environmental reporting for companies.

OFCS – announced at Oracle CloudWorld in Las Vegas on September 11th 2024 – is being offered to existing customers at no additional cost as part of the Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite.

All around the world, businesses are grappling with increasingly stringent environmental regulations, not to mention growing pressure from stakeholders who want to see tangible progress on sustainability goals.

The problem… and Oracle’s solution

In short, there is a growing urgency amidst large companies, all of which are expected to deliver transparent and comprehensive sustainability reports. 

Troublingly, though, many organisations find themselves hindered by the sheer complexity of collecting, analysing, and reporting on the vast amounts of data required to accurately measure their environmental impact. 

Steve Miranda, Executive Vice President of Applications Development at Oracle, highlighted this challenge, saying: 

"Customers consistently tell us that the greatest barrier to understanding their environmental impact is the time and complexity required to chase down, organise, and analyse the necessary data."

Oracle aims to address all of these pain points with OFCS, making sustainability reporting a simpler, more streamlined activity.

The key features of Oracle’s new sustainability reporting platform

As with all of Oracle’s applications, OFCS is completely integrated with their other cloud services. It might sound rather simple, but this feature allows users to contextualise their data, making projects that bit easier.

For example, if a data analyst using Oracle’s Fusion Cloud Applications Suite wants to view data on their company’s supply chain, they can also measure how their sustainability data interacts with their supply chain. With the click of a button, they could understand how – for instance – freighting goods through the supply chain impacts their Scope 1-3 emissions.

Essentially, Oracle’s cloud services can provide companies with a more holistic view of their performance, allowing them to better visualise how well their sustainability strategies and broader business objectives align.

OFCS is also designed to be used in conjunction with AI. This feature automatically creates activity records and adds transactions to a digital sustainability ledger, potentially saving countless hours of manual data entry and reducing the risk of human error.

The game-changing benefits of smart sustainability reporting

It’s no secret – greenwashing allegations can severely damage corporate reputations. By digitising the sustainability reporting process, however, Oracle hopes to allow companies to report with confidence. 

OFCS provides financial-grade audit traceability and tamper-proof ledger entries, delivering a full record of the sustainability impact of all activities and events.

For many organisations, the most exciting feature of OFCS will be its sophisticated emission factor mapping. This feature allows businesses to calculate their carbon footprint automatically. 

This could significantly streamline the process of carbon accounting, which has traditionally been a time-consuming and error-prone task for many companies.

What makes Oracle’s offering so appealing

As regulatory bodies worldwide continue to tighten requirements for corporate sustainability disclosures, tools like OFCS will likely become increasingly essential for businesses.

However, Oracle's offering stands out from the crowd in several ways: 

• Firstly, it's being provided at no additional cost to existing Oracle customers, which removes a significant barrier to adoption for many organisations. 
• Secondly, its deep integration with other Oracle cloud services could provide a more seamless experience for users, eliminating the need to juggle multiple disparate systems.
• Thirdly, OFCS offers streamlined data collection from third-party applications, meaning that organisations with complex supply chains or pre-existing databases with other software providers can benefit from Oracle’s new programme.

Oracle Fusion Cloud Sustainability is still in its nascent stages, so its effectiveness has not yet been measured in practice, but on paper, its potential is crystal clear. 

Oracle’s Steve Miranda, understands this, saying: "With Oracle Fusion Cloud Sustainability, customers can eliminate these challenges, efficiently align data with the latest regional guidelines, automate sustainability reporting processes, improve decision-making, and accelerate progress on their sustainability goals."

Likewise, Jon Chorley, CSO at Oracle, is a staunch believer in delivering sustainable solutions to customers. In fact, he values Oracle's external efforts to deliver sustainability just as much as the company's internal efforts.

In a 2021 interview, he explained the impact that an outward facing approach to sustainability can have:

"We see enabling customers as the key component of our sustainability efforts. Sure, there’s a lot we can do internally. But if we can make even a fraction of that difference across our customer base, that’s a massive multiplier to anything we can do within our organisation alone."

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