Manage entities in ESG Management (formerly ESG Management)
Summarize
Summary of Manage entities in ESG Management (formerly ESG Management)
Operational Sustainability Management within ESG Management helps investors and reporting agencies evaluate various entities—such as people, processes, departments, or applications—within an organization for sustainability performance. Entities can represent business units like datacenters or subsidiary companies, where parent entities oversee reporting and measuring greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) for their child entities. ESG Management supports disclosures related to operational sustainability goals, targets, and metrics, enabling investors to assess entity performance effectively.
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Key Concepts
- Entities: Individual units such as departments, processes, or companies that are measured for sustainability.
- Parent and Child Entities: Parent (downstream) entities manage and report on the sustainability of their child (upstream) entities.
- Entity Classes: Conceptual tags used to group similar entities (e.g., office locations) to provide additional context.
- Entity Types: Groups of entities defined by shared attributes and filter conditions, such as Employee or Product, each with specific attributes.
- Entity Relationships: Entities and entity types can have one-to-many relationships, allowing flexible categorization.
Practical Actions
- Create an Entity: Define new entities, assign ownership, and apply ESG Management goals for performance measurement.
- Update an Entity: Modify existing entity details as needed to maintain accurate sustainability data.
- Create and Update Entity Types: Define or adjust entity types by specifying filters, policies, and control objectives to group entities effectively.
- Create and Update Entity Classes: Establish or modify classes to tag entities and associate them with parent classes, root entities, and tiers.
Benefits for ServiceNow Customers
By managing entities effectively in ESG Management, ServiceNow customers can systematically track and report operational sustainability metrics across their organizational units. This structured approach supports comprehensive ESG disclosures, enhances transparency for stakeholders and investors, and facilitates targeted sustainability improvements aligned with corporate goals.
You can learn about how Operational Sustainability Management is used by the investors and reporting agencies to evaluate different entities that they want to invest in, such as different business units in an organization.
Entities can be people, processes, departments, or applications. For example, if your goal is to reduce the carbon emission from the datacenters, then you can consider datacenters as entities.
As another example, assume you’re a company that has subsidiary companies. Your goal is to measure greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) in your subsidiary companies. Both your company and your subsidiary companies are your entities. Your company is the parent entity, while the subsidiary companies are the child entities. Typically, the parent entity handles reporting and measuring the GHG of the child entities.
As part of your ESG Management strategy, you have to provide disclosures to your stakeholders. ESG Management disclosures refer to the disclosure of data that relate to an organization's Operational Sustainability Management performance. These disclosures concern the goals, targets, and metrics that are associated with your entities. By using these disclosures and other metrics, the investors assess and rate the performance of entities based on the operational sustainability parameters.
A parent entity that has the child entities is said to have downstream entities. Any child entity that has the parent entities is said to have upstream entities.
After creating the entities, you can tag similar entities by individually defining an entity class for them or by linking them to an existing entity class.
Entity classes
Entity classes are used to tag an entity or to add the conceptual information about an entity. For example, consider a company that has office branches in three cities. The office space is considered as an entity, while the entity class for these entities is the location of the offices.
Entity types
An entity type is a grouping of entities that is based on filtering attributes. An entity type defines a set of the entities that have the same attributes. An entity type is used to describe and identify an entity that is based on a set of filter conditions.
Consider the following two entity types: Employee and Product. Each entity type has its own attributes.
For Employee, its attributes are employee number, name, department, and designation. In the Employee table of the company database, the sample attributes of an employee are displayed in row E1 as 1001 (employee number), Paul (name), Marketing (department), and PM (designation).
For Product, its attributes are product ID, name, cost, and currency. In the Product table in the company database, the sample attributes of an energy-efficient product are displayed in row P1 as 800 (product ID), Solar Panel (name), 200 (cost), and USD (currency).
Entities and entity types can have a one-to-many relationship. For example, an entity called Hope can have an entity type called Person and an entity type called Organization.