Summary
Procter & Gamble (P&G) has enhanced its approach to water stewardship project management and reporting through a robust, technology-driven process. In partnership with Waterplan, the Company has implemented a system that ensures project data is accurate, updated, reviewed, traceable, and securely documented, providing a clear record of every piece of information for each water restoration project they support as part of their Water Positive Future strategy. This collaboration has enabled P&G to manage multiple projects efficiently, collaborate with internal and external stakeholders more effectively, track progress against targets accurately, and maintain transparency throughout the reporting process.
Introduction
P&G, one of the biggest consumer packaged goods companies in the world, is working to help build a water positive future where water can sustain people and nature. As part of its comprehensive strategy, the company is working to restore water in 18 water-stressed areas around the world where they operate, while reducing water usage across its operations. P&G supports multiple water restoration projects simultaneously as it progresses against the targets outlined in its strategy. Managing a growing number of projects across regions poses challenges:
Gathering and consolidating high-quality project data: Gathering and standardizing data for each project and ensuring it is backed by evidence can be highly time-consuming and complex. Each project is unique and requires various types of data to measure and report impact including information such as a project plan, timeline, stakeholders involved, project cost, progress made, benefits and co-benefits with the associated supporting evidence.
Collaborating with multiple stakeholders: Managing a water stewardship program requires effective and timely coordination with diverse global and local internal teams and external organizations. This coordination is crucial to ensure successful project implementation but can also be challenging and intricate.
Tracking performance against global targets: Aligning the outcomes of local projects with broader sustainability goals is crucial to ensure and demonstrate the success of a water strategy. However, this can be challenging when there isn’t a standardized and streamlined process for tracking progress across many projects.
Managing reporting requirements: Demonstrating and reporting the impact of each local project requires reviews and approvals from multiple organizations and individuals simultaneously, making reporting cycles difficult to manage.
Using a SaaS platform to manage and report water restoration project portfolio progress
Consolidating and Centralizing Project Information
P&G and Waterplan created a system that allows the documentation, standardization, and centralization of all water restoration project evidence across multiple geographies. Information can be visualized at a local, regional, and global level. The platform consolidates data across projects, including project description, location and size area, type of activity, timelines, stakeholders involved and their roles and responsibilities (e.g., implementation and funding partners), impact monitoring methodology, estimated and actual volumetric water benefits, co-benefits, and reporting dates. Importantly, documentation that supports the reported volumetric benefits and other co-benefits of each project is also linked to each project profile. By centralizing this information, P&G can instantly access all relevant project documentation for use in reporting, communication, or program planning.
Facilitating Collaboration Between Internal and External Stakeholders
Each stakeholder involved in a water project is assigned a specific role within the platform, ensuring clear accountability throughout the process. Depending on the role, they can perform different activities within the platform, such as visualizing, updating, or commenting on project information for a specific location. Additionally, there is a reviewer and approver workflow, which streamlines collaboration for annual reporting. Stakeholders can be assigned information to be reviewed or approved with a corresponding deadline. This structure simplifies coordination between P&G’s teams and partners, making data review and project documentation more organized.
Enhancing Transparency in Reporting
Waterplan’s platform maintains a clear and standardized record of all project activities, data, and supporting evidence, ensuring comprehensive documentation for internal and external reviews. A key feature of the platform is its user authorizations, which allow the user to select which stakeholders can update, review, and approve information. Additionally, it is possible to track who edited each field, when and what changes were made. This allows P&G to have visibility over the status of each data point of a project at any given time.
Tracking Progress Toward Water Targets
Waterplan’s platform provides P&G with the ability to monitor the progress and impact of its water stewardship projects. The platform shows target progress at multiple levels to help track against local, regional and global levels, allowing P&G to align local project outcomes with broader corporate sustainability goals.
Takeaways
This collaboration showcases the role of technology and evidence-backed data in enabling transparency and efficiency in water stewardship project management and reporting. P&G has set a new standard in corporate water stewardship reporting, serving as an example for other companies in the space. As water stress becomes more challenging, the number of water-related projects that businesses will need to manage will only increase, making solutions like the one implemented by P&G crucial for efficiently achieving long-term water sustainability goals transparently.
