The Need:
The Berkshire-Hathaway subsidiary Johns Manville (JM) is known around the world for their innovative building and industrial materials. In recent years, they’ve also become known for their industry-leading sustainability initiatives. To meet the goals of these initiatives they needed to compile a sustainability report that complied to Global Reporting Initiative standards. These exacting standards are as thorough as they can be costly, especially for large companies like JM. So they reached out to Domoto Brands, a local leader in sustainability and branding, to help bring their 2014 report to fruition.
The Remedy:
At Domoto Brands, as Digital Strategist, I stretched my usual role a bit to find a new, more efficient way to compile the data required for the sustainability report. To do this, I built a large, customized series of web forms using Adobe Forms that would make collecting the data a nearly automated process. These forms were distributed to the key reporting and data-verification parties at JM. Due to the forms' in-depth nature, employees at JM knew exactly what data to pull, and how they compared to last year.
Sustainability has become an increasingly important priority at JM in recent years.
Now you may be asking: didn’t Adobe shut down their forms program? Well unfortunately they did, and right while we were in the middle of collecting our sustainability data nonetheless. So I did a little digging and ported all of our forms, and collected data, over to JotForms, which enabled us to finish the data collection for 2014 and in years after.
The Results:
Thanks to this new way to collect the reams of data required for report JM staff was able to drastically reduce the required man-hours needed to collect all the data points. Additionally, thanks to built in verification tools we were able to reduce the number of errors submitted as well. Once all the data was collected it was sent over to the awesome design team at Domoto, where they created a compelling, GRI-compliant sustainability report for 2014.
