esg consulting case study

Beyond why to how

Sustainability matters. Together we’ll make it real.

Sustainability is a journey with a complex roadmap. To move from plans to progress, and from hype to results—requires ambition, innovation, and transformation experience. We help companies quickly scale what works, fuel growth while cutting carbon, and turn sustainability into a competitive edge and source of resilience. We all know why sustainability is important. It’s time for the how.

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Sustainability drives automotive market cap

How Volkswagen is driving clarity and confidence in their sustainability strategy.

3-Minute read

Call for change

Having a bold Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) strategy matters to investors, employees and the public—but not if they don’t understand it. Despite having launched the most ambitious decarbonization and digitalization initiative in automotive history, the Volkswagen Group (VW), the world’s largest automaker by volume, had a market cap well below that of its rivals. VW realized they needed to better articulate their ESG strategy.

To address this, the auto major wanted to implement a more cohesive sustainability narrative—from environmental to diversity to human rights and resource efficiency—that would resonate with its culture and its individual brands. VW also wanted to sharpen its overall ESG focus, defining the initiatives, responsibilities and KPIs that would make sustainability synonymous with the corporate strategy.

Achieving this would clarify its sustainability strategy—to become an emission-free, digitally-connected leader in mobility—and drive greater awareness among stakeholders, including the investment community.

When tech meets human ingenuity

Accenture broke the project into three phases. Phase one involved determining where VW stood in relation to its peers. Since investors trust S-Ray, a machine learning platform that generates ESG ratings of companies based on millions of data points for over 7,000 listed companies, the team identified the data needed to generate an S-Ray score and ESG rating in line with VW’s industry-leading efforts.

Next, the team conducted C-level workshops to develop support for the company’s ESG vision, emphasizing decarbonization, circular business models, workforce transformation and human rights in supply chain. The third phase saw the team help articulate VW’s ESG narrative, which included key initiatives, responsibilities, KPIs and a plan to communicate all the company’s efforts.

A valuable difference

In six months, the team consolidated VW’s ESG narrative from 18 sustainability topics to just four major topics, with easily understandable ambitions and KPIs for each area so the company can measure its progress more efficiently. Targets were set in areas such as decarbonization, circular economy, human rights in business and workforce transformation.

With ESG objectives woven into its operational and functional processes, there’s now a clear connection between VW’s S-Ray score and the overall corporate strategy, integrating the NEW AUTO plan to pivot VW to a global software-driven mobility provider that powers the future of EVs and fully networked transportation.

Customers are already on board—in December 2020 VW’s electric ID.3 was the second best-selling car in Europe and by 2021, the Volkswagen Group was being seen as the market leader in e-mobility.

With ESG analysis and real-world ESG performance becoming clearer, VW is able to accelerate its sustainability strategy. Its overall growth ambitions are reflected in its market cap rise, which is becoming consistent with that of other global enterprises. VW’s roadmap is set for further growth as investors look to make smarter bets on how we’ll all get where we want to go—together, and for the planet.

Building a Sustainability Business Framework

How a Sustainability Business Framework Aligned the Leadership Team and Accelerated Progress

A Director of Sustainability in a billion + life sciences company was tasked with designing her division’s first sustainability strategic business framework. If successful, the framework would be duplicated and implemented across the enterprise. Key to her success was filtering the vast amounts of materiality data, confirming and prioritizing ongoing sustainability projects around the globe, identifying internal allies, and building a case for change in parallel to the expectations of the senior leadership team.

Having partnered with Brimstone on an Innovation Strategy and Alignment engagement, the client was familiar with Brimstone’s process and outcomes. She knew that by partnering with Brimstone, she would be accelerating and aligning her team and “building the movement” that would cascade across business units to effect change throughout the company.

With such a broad mandate, the leader needed help executing her primary goals:

• identifying the senior leadership team’s understanding of sustainability
• prioritizing her team’s goals for the next 18 months
• capturing and accelerating what was happening under the umbrella of sustainability

Her first task was to understand what the senior leadership team thought about sustainability and collect any information on what types of sustainability initiatives were ongoing. Using diagnostic protocols, Brimstone interviewed various leaders throughout the organization, from plant managers to European sales leaders to the senior leadership team.

The diagnostic protocols identified broad support from the leadership team and rapidly growing support for sustainability internally and externally. However, they also identified that there was wide variability in understanding the term “sustainability,” how it would translate into success for the company, and who would own the process.

After conducting the diagnostic protocols, Brimstone guided the team through a series of meetings to develop a Strategic Business Framework that captured the market realities her company faced and aligned the team with what they would accomplish over the next 18 months. The framework served as the roadmap, clearly identifying key initiatives, ownership, and how they tied into larger company goals.

This process provided the platform for the leader to create an operating model to accelerate the company’s adoption and execution of the sustainability initiatives. This was key to embedding and activating an authentic ESG mindset across the organization.

Within three months, the leader:

• aligned the senior leadership team on key sustainability priorities to execute
• accelerated progress on “quick wins” and short-term priorities
• launched an approach to engaging and involving the broader organization in sustainability strategy execution

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