Design and development of a Corporate Performance Management tool in support of ESG planning activities

The purpose of this thesis is to discuss the conception and development of an application designed to handle the Corporate Performance Management activities of high-level planning, target definition, variance analysis, and budget revision, translating them into the ESG context. The goal is to provide support to business activities and allow the structuring of environmental, social, and governance planning processes, aiding the delivery of actionable plans. The landscape in which firms operate in 2023 focuses on sustainability, an increasingly critical issue for stakeholders' appraisal of business performance, which can impact the ease of access to credit, investors' willingness to invest, the amount of risk exposure, and a company's market value. The existence of numerous and widely diverse ESG reporting standards obliges the exploration of alternative approaches for testifying to stakeholders about the sustainability of business operations and the results obtained. Consequently, companies rely on external rating agencies and independent certification bodies, whose attention is focused not only on final values and results but also on corporate ESG strategies that specify objectives to be reached within specific time ranges and on the plans developed to achieve them. The absence of a tool that enables managers to define an ESG strategy by evaluating data in organized dashboards, gather knowledge to develop a sustainability plan, review the targets identified and analyze variances resulted in the discovery of a market need. This work seeks to fill that need.