Overview
This global transportation company is committed to operational excellence and responsible business practices. Sustainability has long been embedded in the company’s culture, with a long history of voluntary sustainability reporting and ambitious climate objectives as part of its long-term strategy.
To support this vision, the company adopted Datamaran’s AI-powered governance solution to enhance the objectivity and credibility of its decision-making and inform strategic sustainability priorities across the organization.
Challenges
As the company sought to confirm and prioritize material topics with greater confidence, it faced three key challenges:
- Manual analysis limitations: Traditional, human-led approaches introduced bias and limited visibility across the broader landscape and stakeholder expectations.
- Data-driven decision-making: The team sought an evidence-based approach to prioritize ESG matters in their own operations and across their value chain.
- Scalability and governance: A growing need for cross-functional input and leadership confidence required a structured and auditable process.
Solution
The organization implemented Datamaran to automate and strengthen its double materiality process beyond what manual analysis could achieve.
Using Datamaran’s Double Materiality Assessment (DMA) module, the ESG team identifies and prioritizes material topics and benchmarks against industry peers to compare disclosures and priorities.
The previous DMA was uploaded into the platform, creating a single, centralized source of ESG-related information that supports consistency, transparency, and traceability.
While the ESG function leads the platform’s use, subject matter experts are directly involved in evaluating impacts, risks, and opportunities within Datamaran. The team also plans to use the platform to monitor ESG-related regulations.
The team are also active Harbor community members, where they stay informed through its weekly regulatory updates and broader research insights.
Platform Users
Primary Users:
- ESG Team: Leads the materiality assessment process and ensures disclosures accurately represent the organization’s strategies, activities, and goals.
- Subject Matter Experts: Provide input to evaluate and score impacts, risks, and opportunities (IROs).
Key Beneficiaries:
- Executive Leadership and Board: Gain confidence in strategic priorities grounded in data-driven evidence.
- Corporate Strategy and Planning: Use material insights to guide business strategy and environmental, social, and governance integration.
- Compliance and Reporting Teams: Benefit from a traceable and auditable system aligned with CSRD requirements.
Impact
Since adopting Datamaran, the company has focused on optimizing its DMA and compliance process, while Datamaran manages the heavy lifting of research and ensuring traceability.
Datamaran’s logic, equations, and scoring mechanisms have introduced a new level of rigor and transparency to the prioritization process, helping the team make informed, data-driven decisions.
Using Datamaran to analyze a broad range of 100+ topics that go beyond the typical ESRS starting points has helped the company to identify material, entity-specific issues.
Results
- Enhanced confidence in decision-making through evidence-based insights.
- Rationalized material topics and IRO statements by half, using objective data and scoring, enabling better prioritization.
- Strengthened audit readiness with transparent, traceable methodologies.
- Increased efficiency and scalability through automation and centralized data management.
Testimonial
“The amount of information and evidence that the tool can bring into the double materiality assessment is far beyond what our team could accomplish even with support. People say double materiality is an art, not a science – but I’m trying to make it a science, and Datamaran is helping me.
On top of that, the team is incredibly quick to take feedback and make adjustments. Their review process feels lightning fast, which gives me real confidence as we move forward together, knowing it’s always going to be the best it can be.
Datamaran also makes it a fun and collaborative process… One [reviewer] started and finished in 2h 45 minutes with no issues. The score aggregation is so intuitive.”
– Principal, Global Transportation Company
Looking Ahead
The company continues to deepen its use of Datamaran to strengthen governance, engage leadership, and maintain confidence in ESG strategy. By providing a constant, Datamaran allows the organization to focus on continuous improvements beyond each DMA assessment. The partnership with Datamaran’s Client Success and Product teams, whose responsiveness and ongoing enhancements make ESG work more efficient, further amplifies the impact of these efforts.
For this global transportation company, Datamaran is a strategic enabler – delivering clarity, credibility, and confidence to ESG management and ensuring that priorities are evidence-based, future-focused, and aligned with long-term sustainability ambitions.
