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Nature of Business Radio

Yoram Bernet: Taming the corporate data monster

<p>Scope 5 CEO explains how his company untangles sustainability data.</p>

My conversation this week is with Yoram Bernet, co-founder and CEO of Seattle-based Scope 5, a two-year-old company that creates customer-friendly sustainability data management software tools to help organizations reduce costs, increase revenue and manage risks. We talked about what sets his company apart from the other players in the field, why businesses and municipalities are jumping on board, challenges that lie ahead, as well as what the future looks like for sustainability data management and reporting.

Scope 5 must be doing something right. In its short two years it has garnered users in 64 countries. This is in great part because, as Bernet explains, the current landscape is riddled with thousands of static, laborious and error-prone spreadsheets completed, often at the last minute, by companies.

One contributor to the plethora of scorecards and spreadsheets is Walmart and its initiative to require its tens of thousands of suppliers to report their sustainability data. Other large companies followed suit, and now thousands of entities are out there trying to make sense of it all. Many are scrambling or simply trying to keep up.

Enter Scope 5, with its cloud-based software that organizes data neatly and timely. The result? Organizations can now take control of their sustainability data. Before, the only options were big software vendors that were expensive to license — and to maintain.

I asked Bernet if he was optimistic about the future of sustainability reporting and he answered with an unequivocal yes. With pressures from regulators and investors, a desire to attract and retain employees and increased customer demand for environmentally responsible products and companies, the writing is on the wall. If Scope 5 can take the anxiety out of it by loading and streamlining data and reporting, it’s a win-win.

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