Chasing subcontractor data eats the whole job.
In a delivery model where most of the work sits with subcontractors, sustainability leads spend more time chasing site and supplier data than doing the analysis. One corporate sustainability lead told us exactly that: more time chasing than working.
The NGER due diligence trail is a manual grind.
Chasing a data provider three times, escalation emails at day 7 and day 3, a final email logging refusal for the regulator. All done by hand, all needing to be preserved as an audit trail.
Five materials are 90% of Scope 3, and their factors never sit still.
Steel, concrete, aggregate and a couple of others dominate the footprint. Product-specific EPDs (green steel, low-carbon concrete) turn over constantly and someone has to manually re-key factors from PDF documents into the library.
Assurance is moving from limited to reasonable.
Banks behind sustainability-linked loans and auditors behind AASB S2 now want invoice-level traceability for every disclosed number. Most systems produce a total; almost none can produce the paper trail behind it.
Project quality and conformance records don't survive scrutiny.
On major infrastructure builds, CQA evidence (test results, ITPs, lot conformance, lab reconciliation) lives across contractors, labs and spreadsheets. Assembling a defensible submission for the certifier or the client is weeks of work per package.
Ratings and project reporting stack up.
ISCA ratings, client sustainability manuals, EIS/approval conditions and corporate disclosure all draw on the same project data, each in a different format.