Babilou Family

Babilou Family: a global early years education provider driving sustainability excellence

Founded in 2003, Babilou Family is one of the leading global early years education providers. Its network includes nearly 1,200 nurseries and schools around the world, run by a network of more than 12,000 professionals in 10 countries. They are on a mission to build a better world for the children who will shape tomorrow.

Babilou Family is a Mission-driven company, in application of the French PACTE law, which allows companies to make social and environmental commitments in their articles of association and to be legally audited on the execution of these commitments. Since 2020 they have to meet their investor’s reporting requirements which includes the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) and the ESG Data Convergence Initiative (EDCI); and from 2022, they also have to report on their Mission execution.

The challenge: sustainability reporting for a global organisation with multiple stakeholders and complex reporting requirements

Vanessa Zerbib, Head of Quality and Sustainability at Babilou Family, identified that the existing data collection and reporting process was unfit for purpose and was not enabling the business to achieve its ambitious sustainability goals as it scaled. As well as the ~200 sustainability metrics required by their investors, Antin Infrastructure Partners, Babilou Family also reported on over 30 additional metrics specific to their business for internal reporting and improvement purposes. All the data collection was carried out by a group of employees across 10 different countries using Excel sheets. The entire data collection, validation and reporting process used to take Vanessa 8 months.

The solution: KEY ESG’s intuitive, flexible and automated platform reduces time spent on reporting by 50%

Vanessa Zerbib, Head of Quality and Sustainability at Babilou Family explains how:

“KEY ESG has changed my life! It is now possible to achieve the full reporting process (preparation, data collection, reporting) within 4 months and move forward with strategic improvement projects.”

This represents a 50% reduction in the time spent on reporting, which can now be used to drive sustainability performance improvement. Babilou Family used to struggle with the quantity and breadth of data across 10 different countries but now the platform provides a centralised location for everyone to work concurrently on the data collection process. Vanessa likes how intuitive the platform is to use, and data gatherers across the business can leave notes and comments to explain their processes. This makes the validation and auditing process much more effective.

There are two elements in particular that Vanessa said have been transformative for the businesses’ sustainability processes: the first is the ability to create an entity setup in the platform that enables granular reporting by country (and even down to the site level). The second is the ability to build their own company specific metrics which are relevant for their sector and enable them to maintain their French government commitments all from the same platform.

Vanessa said: “With KEY ESG we can collect sustainability data and build country-level reports within a few months – this process used to take more than six months. We can now move past sustainability reporting to improvement projects.”

Babilou Family uses the time saved on reporting to drive sustainability improvements across the group

Vanessa Zerbib, Head of Quality and Sustainability at Bailou Family is looking forward to pursuing improvement projects which she can now prioritise given the time saved on reporting, and the granularity of data provided by KEY ESG’s platform. Country-by-Country analysis of the data makes it easy to pin-point improvement opportunities and set action plans and targets to achieve their sustainability goals.

Vanessa finished by emphasising the success of the KEY ESG platform has ultimately been around its flexibility in handling their bespoke reporting requirements:

“KEY ESG provides the flexibility we need and caters to our very specific reporting requirements – the platform is able to handle all our custom metrics, across each of the different countries, and the support team were even willing to onboard us ahead of time to allow for our upcoming reporting deadlines. I can’t fault the software and the support – I recommend them 10 out of 10.”