Standex Case Study

Founded in 1955, Standex is a publicly traded global industrials company providing advancements to vital industries, including electric vehicles, human health products, refrigeration, space innovation and solar technology. Specifically, this includes cold storage for medicines and vaccines, space shuttle components, engravings for footwear, prosthetics, automobiles, and more, and parts to many home appliances.

While the company name may not be a familiar one in every household, Standex produces many critical components to products we rely on and boasts how “they make cool stuff that makes other cool stuff.”

Recognizing that sustainability was rapidly becoming a key issue with stakeholders, in 2021 Standex formed an ESG council, established an environmental baseline, and performed a materiality assessment to evaluate Standex’s relationship with sustainability indicators. As a well-performing public company, Standex had a strong corporate governance base and a history of governance disclosures; therefore, the council decided to direct focus on environmental tracking and performance as the next pillar to address.

But it wasn’t easy. With 62 locations spread across the globe and nearly 100 collaborators, it was difficult to get consistent and reliable data at regular intervals, and the team in the General Counsel’s office didn’t feel confident in the environmental data they were tasked to manage. Even with the help of a third party, the information was still housed on spreadsheets that were inconsistent, error-prone, and ultimately un-auditable.

Without a reliable emissions baseline, setting goals felt futile. The last straw was an audit that went particularly poorly. Audit findings showed data inconsistency and lack of supporting evidence. Standex’s ESG Council decided they needed to do better.

Esther Zolotova, Standex’s Associate General Counsel and ESG Council member, took up the initiative to identify potential software vendors that could simplify emissions-related data collection, centralize and safeguard the data, support stronger auditability, automate calculations, and improve reporting. From an initial software vendor list that climbed near 20, Esther and the ESG Council narrowed their selection down to three that could meet their requirements.

“We had a sense of costs having used a third party before and knew the key areas where we wanted software to help improve our processes,” shared Esther.

The ESG Council presented its software budget proposal to the CEO and selected IsoMetrix as its sustainability reporting software solution of choice.

“IsoMetrix was able to check our boxes and also offered dedicated support to help ensure we could get our environmental report ready before proxy season and take our time with some of the other priorities.”

– Associate General Counsel

It didn’t take long for the Standex team to start seeing the benefits of IsoMetrix Lumina. “We have much better data visibility, and key stakeholders from our company attorneys to our business unit leaders to the ESG Council members can easily pull reports and get the same insights,” stated Senior Paralegal Kristine Ouimet. “With less time spent coordinating data collection, we can dedicate more time reading our data, asking better questions, and planning improvements,” she added.

A situation that stood out was when the team was tracking electricity usage and discovered that one facility was reporting nearly as much energy as all the other sites combined. Upon investigation, the team found this anomaly was not an error but was a result of a facility that hadn’t received renovation in some time and was in need of an insolation upgrade. With this knowledge, steps were taken to address the issue, which may have taken a lot more time to uncover without IsoMetrix.

Accountability has also improved. Data owners from across Standex are being more proactive to complete their reports on time to avoid being the bottleneck or gap in the corporate reporting.

The IsoMetrix implementation and customer success teams have also delivered on their level of support. “Reinhardt made implementation very easy, and Marcelo will hop on a call anytime to help validate our data,” Kristine commented, “it’s nice to have the peace of mind that we have a team to help us when things come up, big or small.”

Standex recently began rolling out a universal HR system, which will make managing workforce-related data much easier and will help when disclosing social metrics in reports via Lumina. The Standex team is also looking forward to aligning disclosures to more sustainability standards and facilitating compliance with major regulations like CSRD and the California Climate Disclosures.

IsoMetrix provides an integrated suite of enterprise cloud solutions and expert guidance for customers to proactively manage EHS risks, ensure compliance, and drive ESG and climate initiatives. With over 25 years of experience helping clients in the most complex, dangerous, and regulated industries, IsoMetrix has earned the trust of businesses across the globe for its dedication to customer success and developing products to address and standardize solutions to unique challenges.