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Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been around for decades as a concept, known in different forms such as corporate citizenship or sustainable development. It focuses on key economic, social and environmental outcomes generated by a company’s activities and today CSR management should be part of day-to-day business.

One definition of CSR is “Business behaviour that creates the trust and commitment of stakeholders, both now and in the future”. However, there are many others and the consistent theme across them is that businesses now recognise that the success of their business can be both positively and negatively impacted by a much wider range of stakeholders.

CSR is increasingly moving from being perceived as feelgood corporate PR window dressing to being directly linked to core operational performance. Drivers are various but they include legal compliance (particularly for manufacturing and distribution firms) and organisations are also placing increased importance on environmental programmes to generate customer loyalty and brand affinity.

But it has also been found that organisations that have embarked on implementing CSR performance management have discovered additional benefits that include cost reduction and revenue enhancement opportunities, where, for example:

• The company has a large supply chain and is looking to reduce its logistics/fuel/production costs and carbon footprint;
• It is considering trading carbon credits from the carbon emissions savings it is looking to achieve;
• The business has already implemented enterprise resource planning (ERP) but is looking to implement better performance management, including CSR, across the end-to-end processes of the business.

Integrating CSR

While the rationale and benefits for implementing CSR operational metrics are clear, why do many companies find implementation problematic? One reason might be that at the moment, many organisations’ CSR IT systems will probably be made up of disconnected spreadsheets and databases, and often their ERP solutions and processes are not set up to provide an integrated approach to managing and reporting CSR activity.