WISIT, the WifOR Institute Sustainability Impact Tool, is a web application for analyzing the social, environmental, and economic impacts of business activities. It allows for the calculation of impacts along the supply chain up to the final sales product in three steps:
1. Data Input
Purchasing lists outlining all sourcing costs for a specific financial year
2. Calculation
Detailed analyses and forecasts based on WifOR’s own database for the years 2014 to 2030
3. Get your results
Breakdown of the results – e.g. by product groups, purchasing areas, regions or supply chain level
The WifOR database covers 188 countries and 56 sectors and is updated regularly throughout the year to reflect the latest data and inflation rates.
You can use WISIT for:
Reporting and Investor Relations
- Scope-3-Analysis | GHG Protocol
- Integrated Reporting and Impact Accounting
External and internal Communications
- Transparency
- Country & stakeholder perspective
- Global and regional impact narrative
Procurement and Supply Chain Management
- Selection and commissioning of suppliers
- Prioritization of efforts
- Definition of targets
Strategy and Holistic
Steering
- Overview of social, environmental, and economic impacts
- Improved decision-making
How does WISIT work?
Use Case: Impact Analysis with WISIT
With WISIT, the WifOR Institute Sustainability Impact Tool, organizations can independently calculate effects along their global supply chains based on their procurement data, also known as spend. In a first step, the purchasing data is prepared in such a way that it can be optimally used with the tool. After the import, the data can be broken down in different ways. One option is disaggregation, which displays the procurement data according to different individual categories specified in the spend. This means that if, for example, there is a column in the data that shows which product is responsible for which expenditure, WISIT can show the effects broken down by product in the results.
The spend below is an example. It is subdivided into units including “Vendor”, “Function”, and “Product” – these are the possible “Scenarios”. The desired scenarios can be dragged and dropped into the box below, such as “Product” and “Vendor”. Thereby, the impacts can be calculated, disaggregated by product and vendor.
In addition, it is also possible to select whether the tool should calculate indirect, induced, or both as spillover effects along the supply chain. The supply chain level can be freely chosen up to tier 3. For sustainability indicators, a company can choose from social, environmental, and economic indicators and select between physical units (e.g., metric tons of CO₂) and monetary units (societal impacts measured in USD of emitted CO₂).
For monetization, users can use WifOR’s value factors or those of the Value Balancing Alliance (VBA). These are the determined coefficients, which are used to evaluate the societal significance of physical units and convert them into monetary values. In the last step, users can filter the results by country or sector.
With WISIT users can analyse their data using bar charts, sunburst diagrams as well as a world map, to better understand their impacts along the supply chain.
Example: displaying the results in a sunburst diagram
In “Sunburst,” the tool generates a chart for an indicator that can be filtered using the dropdown menu on the left side. Options can be dragged and dropped into the right box. In the example, the chart shows that most greenhouse gas emissions are generated by Product B in tier 1. Thereby, the company in the example has found a hotspot.
The results can be downloaded as an Excel file for further analysis. With the help of these analyses, organizations can make decisions based on the resulting social, environmental, and economic impact. WifOR has been supporting companies, ministries, associations, and industries for over a decade to develop targeted measures to improve their sustainability strategies. If you would like to learn more about our methodology, please get in touch with our experts.
Latest articles from WifOR’s Sustainability Research
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Evidence-based prioritization using Impact Valuation
Materiality Assessment: definition, guidelines, and examples
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Interview with Dr. Richard Scholz
Using Impact Valuation to act responsibly – along the supply chain
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A comparison of German and European supply chain laws
New supply chain laws: What do they mean for companies?
