As North America’s largest funeral and death care provider, SCI has a lot on its plate. This publicly listed company owns approximately 2,000 properties, including 1,500 funeral homes and around 500 cemeteries.
Beyond serving its customers, the company is hyper-focused on investor relations. Its sustainability team, in particular, prioritizes complying with investor and leadership requirements for ESG reporting.
Here’s how they leverage Manifest Climate to give leadership teams and investors confidence that the company is complying with industry standards and ready to report on their climate risks and opportunities.
Manifest Climate takes presentation preparation from days to hours
The biggest difference the SCI has noticed since adopting Manifest Climate is the significant time saved researching, analyzing, and presenting compliance readiness and performance to date. “If I was putting together a presentation regarding disclosures, it used to take several days,” says Carolyn Heidelberger, Environmental Sustainability Analyst at SCI. “With Manifest Climate, it now takes a matter of hours.”
For Carolyn, the source data and original research that Manifest Climate provides within its assessments has drastically reduced her time researching and information-gathering when presenting to executives or larger groups. Finding all this information in one spot, without spending hours chasing rabbits on Google, has changed the game. “It’s a one-stop-shop, a whole catalog of information we can access in one area,” says Aasim Shaikh, SCM Manager, Projects & Programs at SCI.
“Manifest Climate gives us more time to interpret and understand, rather than spending our time searching and researching,” Heidelberger explains. “It has provided a way to drill down on research and more easily share the information with my broader team, which has been really fruitful.”
The benefits of all this saved time are obvious — “Manifest Climate saves time, and time is money for every company,” says Shaikh. This saved time also frees up room for more important work. “The work we’re producing is much more focused,” says Shaikh. “I am already seeing the benefits of that.”
Manifest Climate makes keeping track of reporting changes a breeze
Keeping tabs on the ever-evolving landscape of climate disclosure requirements can feel like an impossible task — when you’re doing it manually. This is no small feat for large companies, which are typically complying with multiple different reporting and disclosure frameworks or standards. “We needed to be able to compare multiple frameworks, not just one or two,” says Shaikh. “We needed all the latest requirements for different reporting boards we’re keeping track of, and to make sure those are updated constantly, because things change overnight,” he explains.
“It’s such a fast-moving landscape right now,” says Heidelberger. “It’s alphabet soup, but Manifest Climate helps us understand what is happening in the ESG landscape and stay abreast of changes. If it’s something that’s new and we haven’t heard of it, or we need a little more detail on it, we can go right to the resources and find articles.”
Manifest Climate keeps the entire chain of command up to date
Public companies are under constant pressure to meet investor reporting demands. “As with any public organization, we’re constantly responsible for keeping leadership abreast of all latest developments and reporting,” says Shaikh. “Our investors are constantly asking about it. As a group, we pride ourselves on providing the most up to date and best information.”
The pressure is high, and with limited resources at their disposal, many sustainability teams can’t find enough hours in the day to satisfy leadership and investor demands while also working on high-level strategy tasks and driving the company towards effective climate action.
“If we didn’t have tools like Manifest Climate to help us, we’d constantly lose hours on manual research and analyzing information that can be difficult to understand,” Shaikh explains. “Manifest Climate helps translate legal mumbo jumbo to something easily digestible, and helps us stay ahead of the curve and save time as a team.”
The team is impressed with how quickly new climate disclosure frameworks are added to the platform — often within a matter of days.
Manifest Climate makes it easy to track progress and take action
While disclosure assessments analyze performance retroactively, the right tools can help sustainability teams turn analysis into action. “Manifest Climate helps us establish KPIs,” says Shaikh. “The platform shows us how many action items we’ve met, which helps us create targets.” This forward-looking analysis helps keep the team informed and drives important decision-making.
Manifest Climate makes writing disclosure documents faster
Although Manifest Climate is not designed as a report builder, many customers find the disclosure assessments and source data particularly useful for speeding up the disclosure drafting process.
“One of the major benefits is how the AI can find specific information within sustainability reports, like the language our peers use,” Heidelberger explains. “It helps us decide how we are doing to speak about our own initiatives. For example, we had a recast of our data for our 2022 sustainability report. We weren’t exactly sure the exact words we should use, or what that looked like. So by jumping into the product, it gave us a really good clear idea of the direction to go.”
Interpreting the small print of various climate disclosures can be difficult, so being able to drill down into the specifics, all within a centralized platform, made the reporting process much easier for SCI. “It allowed us to give a well-written, well-versed sustainability recast on our 2022 data,” says Heidelberger.
How would you describe Manifest Climate?
Manifest Climate is a one-stop-shop for your climate disclosure and comparisons with all reporting bodies. It’s a place where you can go, compare the reporting bodies, see where you stand against your selected peers and research. It provides information at your fingertips.
Aasim Shaikh, SCM Manager, Projects & Programs @ SCI
The Manifest Climate platform is ideal for the fast moving ESG space. It answers questions that would take hours or days to find. It’s so rewarding to be able to find it in one centralized place.
Carolyn Heidelberger, Environmental Sustainability Analyst @ SCI
Exceed investor expectations with Manifest Climate
Manifest Climate is the leading Climate Intelligence Software that provides decision-makers with climate-related insights and recommendations to inform decisions, seize opportunities and mitigate risk.
Manifest Climate uses industry-leading AI models to create comparability from qualitative climate information faster, more accurately and more consistently than humans.
Issuers, service providers and financial institutions choose Manifest Climate for ease of use, in-house climate expertise, and depth of qualitative climate data.
With Manifest Climate, teams reduce time spent on manual research by 99%, improving precision and consistency as a result.
