CDP Improves Scoring Efficiency with BPO Expertise

The Challenge

CDP is an international non-profit organization that provides a global system for companies and cities to measure, disclose, manage, and share vital environmental information. To mitigate climate change, protect natural resources, and minimize risk, companies must have accountability for what and how they produce their products and offer their services. CDP is the only association that has the ability to create transparency for companies and cities.

CDP must ensure disclosures are scored consistently, timely, and in sync with their methodology. With over 100 information fields being requested as part of the disclosure, the scoring is very resource-intensive, as well as highly seasonal, and a large amount of work has to be completed in a short length of time. With responses due in the span of a few months and scores released publicly across the globe a few months afterwards, the amount of work and the time constraints are a challenge in themselves. Thousands of organizations submit disclosures, with an increased response rate year-over-year. This increase, coupled with the fact that organizations send their disclosures in a variety of formats with varying levels of completeness, requires ongoing process improvements to maximize timeliness and accuracy.

Scoring globally necessitates a wide expanse of specific knowledge. CDP accepts a variety of verification standards from around the world and many scoring agencies will only review one country or region’s disclosures to correspond with their expertise, rather than learning to assess all the different standards.

Our Solution

In 2011, CDP partnered with ADEC Innovations to develop the processes necessary to ensure that together we provided consistency in applying the proper methodology in the quality of the scoring. ADEC Innovations has a large team available, providing economies of scale in training, quality assurance, answering scorer queries, and turnaround time. In 2014 alone, our team scored over 4,000 disclosures in less than four months. Our experienced team is sensitive to ever-changing needs and is dedicated to success, with no gaps in the process.

Our team’s experience with BPO allowed the scoring process to run smoothly and cultivated expertise in-house. We developed a lengthy and detailed process map with 50+ steps, including Phase 1 (pre-scoring preparation), Phase 2 (scoring: Investor, Supply Chain, SME), Phase 3 (Performance Review report generation), and Phase 4 (feedback calls). Partnering with ADEC Innovations helped to identify BPO opportunities that streamlined the process and increased output efficiencies, with a significant increase in the number of scores per hour.

Collaborating with a Scoring Partner was an effective way of analyzing company responses, and meant the scoring was carried out independently of CDP and of any relationships CDP had with reporting organizations. Naming ADEC Innovations their Global Scoring & Sustainability Outsourcing Partner for nearly a decade allowed CDP to gain an experienced ally that learned to assess the variety of global verification standards, enabling them to score for any country or region.

Our team’s support extended beyond facilitating the process of scoring for CDP; our solutions provided support to CDP’s responders as well. As the final step of the ADEC Innovations process, we provided Performance Review Calls for the companies we scored. We created an online system where responders logged in to review their score, download reports, and schedule their feedback calls. The online system turned a highly manual process into an automated yet customized solution, enabling responders to access and evaluate their information whenever they needed or chose.

The ADEC Innovations Advantage

In addition to the practical BPO benefits of efficiently and accurately completing the scoring, CDP found added value in partnering with ADEC Innovations. As a result of understanding the CDP scoring methodology, trained scorers learned from looking at CDP responses about best practices that companies were undertaking and were well placed to spread those best practices to the market.

With ADEC Innovations Performance Review Calls, we helped CDP achieve their mission by providing feedback to help companies improve their performance on climate change, and giving CDP greater engagement with companies. With experience scoring more than 23,000 CDP responses from 2011-2019, ADEC Innovations gave CDP and reporting organizations peace of mind that scoring was thorough and accurate.*

ADEC Innovations offers a variety of services directly aligned with CDP’s disclosure process, including Scoring Assessments, BPO data collection and analysis, and disclosure completion, which are proven to help organizations responsibly grow and operate, improve their environmental and compliance performance, and boost their bottom lines.

Deliverables and Results

• Developed a process map with 50+ detailed steps
• Increased scoring throughput for full responses by 72%
• Increased scoring throughput for SME disclosures by 319%
• Increased accuracy
• Scored over 23,000 disclosures as a Scoring Partner from 2011-2019

*In accordance with CDP’s conflict of interest policy, ADEC Innovations did not provide official scoring services for any of our CDP consulting clients.