PRESS RELEASE
The challenges of CSR for companies
January 19, 2021
As Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become a strategic imperative for businesses, the demand for applications is increasing, contributing to the backlog of IT departments. Correct, your translation is accurate: “There are no off-the-shelf solutions available, and specific developments are both too lengthy and too costly.”
There is now a solution: a “Mendix application template” developed by Tocndix and available on its marketplace. This option allows for an immediate start to the CSR initiative, and Mendix’s low-code platform makes enhancement and customization accessible to the business teams responsible for CSR.
The challenges of CSR for companies
Under the umbrella term of CSR, Corporate Social Responsibility, is often associated with the more explicit term ESG, which breaks down corporate responsibility into three categories:
Environment, environmental sustainability, such as carbon emissions management, conservation of natural resources, and the adoption of environmentally friendly practices.
Social: assesses the management of relationships with internal and external stakeholders, including employees, suppliers, customers, local communities, and the promotion of equity, diversity, and inclusion.
Governance: the composition of the board of directors, transparency, business ethics, and responsible decision-making
In all cases, these issues have become performance criteria for companies in their stock market evaluations. In addition to traditional financial indicators (revenue, profitability, growth…), there are now official evaluation indices such as the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices (DJSI), Bloomberg ESG, Sustainalytics Indices, CSA Reports and Databases (S&P Global ESG) to assess ESG performance.
As a result, major international corporations have already taken steps to integrate these issues into their short and medium-term strategies. Gradually, the entire Western industrial fabric is organizing itself, and most companies are embarking on CSR initiatives, implementing tools to professionalize their approach.
The application needs related to CSR
As well understood by Yves Benchimol, in charge of the project at Tocndix, « One of the main challenges for the teams responsible for CSR is to become aware of and centralize the actions already taken, but also to inspire new initiatives from employees. Another aspect is to validate the CSR relevance of these initiatives. »
To facilitate this process, TOCnDix has developed an application on the Mendix platform that enables the establishment of an organization with roles for “declarants” who present their CSR actions and “judges” who validate the quality of CSR in the declared actions.
Another advantage is that it comes with a set of 200 pre-written questions grouped into the 17 most common categories of CSR actions.
The CSR team only needs to send the questionnaire to the company’s employees to inform them about their actions and, more importantly, to inspire them with ideas for further actions.
The application for declarants also operates natively on their mobile devices, allowing them to substantiate their actions by illustrating them with on-site photos.
A validation and rating workflow for each action helps to highlight initiatives internally and promote them at the executive and communication levels.
The benefits of the Mendix platform
The fact that the solution has been developed on Mendix makes its customization particularly simple, both in terms of managing user roles and rights, and in adapting the workflow or managing multilingual aspects.
All these developments are accessible to CSR teams without the need for involvement from the IT department.
However, all the API options will allow the IT department to connect to internal solutions such as SAP to access personnel files or facilitate collaboration between different entities within large corporations.
Please log in now to the Mendix marketplace https://marketplace.mendix.com/link/component/208717 and contact us to schedule a demonstration.
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