| LACO
| LACO

ESG reporting with solid data governance

ESG reporting has entered a new era. With CSRD and ESRS, organisations are now required to treat sustainability information with the same level of rigour, traceability and reliability as financial data. This shift demands more than templates or new reporting tools. It requires a strong data foundation, clear ownership and a governance model that unites people and processes across the organisation.

For many organisations, this exposes long-standing weaknesses. ESG data is often fragmented, inconsistent and managed through spreadsheets or informal processes. Metrics do not align, definitions vary by team and nobody fully owns the quality or the outcome.

ESG reporting only becomes credible when the data behind it is governed, repeatable and trusted. That is where LACO makes the difference.

The challenge

ESG reporting is no longer optional. Under CSRD and ESRS, organisations must report on more than eighty indicators that cover environmental, social and governance themes. Each of these indicators must be reliable, audited and traceable back to its source.

However, most organisations are not ready for this level of scrutiny. ESG data is scattered across HR, finance, procurement, operations and sustainability teams. Each department works with different definitions, different formats and different processes. Key metrics live in silos, ownership is unclear and reporting relies heavily on manual, error-prone Excel files.

Without proper governance, ESG becomes chaotic. Indicators conflict, data lineage is missing, validation does not happen and engagement stays low because teams see ESG as administrative work rather than an essential part of business strategy.

The challenge is not the regulation itself. It is the lack of a stable, governed data foundation that can support consistent and meaningful ESG reporting.

The solution

LACO helps organisations build ESG reporting that is credible, consistent and sustainable by focusing first on governance, ownership and structure. Technology only becomes relevant once these foundations exist.

  • We begin by clarifying scope and responsibility. Together with internal teams, we map the CSRD obligations and define clear ownership for every ESG data domain. This gives structure to input, validation and review.
  • Next, we design a practical ESG data framework based on LACO’s expertise in data strategy. This model brings together existing systems, manual sources and business rules into one logical structure that aligns reporting requirements with organisational goals.
  • Once governance and definitions are in place, we standardise and automate data flows within a modern data architecture. Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft Azure or Databricks can be used as part of this foundation, but it is never the starting point. The structure follows the governance principles, not the other way around.
  • Throughout the process, we work on adoption. Sustainable ESG reporting depends on people who trust the data and understand their role. LACO’s change management practice supports communication, collaboration and the training of data stewards so that the process becomes part of daily operations.
  • Finally, ESG frameworks are refined over time through continuous improvement sessions, ensuring that the organisation evolves with new indicators, regulatory changes and internal expectations.

Results

With governance, ownership and adoption in place, ESG reporting becomes a reliable and repeatable process. The organisation moves from fragmented and manual work to a structured system where data quality is high and reporting is audit ready.

Teams work with aligned definitions and shared responsibility instead of isolated spreadsheets. Manual effort decreases as data flows become standardised and automated.

Most importantly, ESG transforms from a compliance obligation into a strategic capability. Trusted indicators support decision making, non-financial insights gain credibility and leadership can act on clear, consistent and validated information.

The organisation becomes ready for both current and future reporting requirements, with a flexible ESG data system that grows as regulations evolve.

Ready to make ESG reporting a business strength?

LACO helps you build ESG frameworks that are credible today and flexible enough for tomorrow. From first steps to full automation, we make ESG reporting practical, trusted and manageable.

ESG reporting with solid data governance2026-01-08T09:53:22+00:00

Athora Belgium moves SAS platform to cloud in record time

A compelling and urgent move entails all kinds of limitations, but also offers unexpected opportunities. The Belgian branch of insurance and reinsurance group Athora discovered this when it had to migrate an essential part of its local application landscape on a very short notice. With the help of LACO, premier SAS partner and data specialist, they moved their SAS environment to the cloud.

Setting the scene:

What’s up?

In January 2019, Athora Group acquired Generali Belgium, which had been active on the Belgian insurance market for nearly 120 years. Today, this insurance provider offers a broad range of life insurance solutions to some 200,000 individual and corporate customers through its network of more than 500 independent brokers and financial advisors. Athora Belgium currently has 220 employees.

“With an acquisition comes integration, transformation and inevitably IT too”, says Nicolas Campodonico, COO of Athora Belgium. And those are precisely the three responsibilities that he was entrusted with after the acquisition: first as Head of Integration and Transformation, then as CITO. “My main assignment was to design the systems to fit into the Athora environment”

The problem: Moving offices

The integration and transformation process that followed the acquisition by Athora included a physical move to a new office at a new location in Brussels. However, it was not intended nor possible to move the existing ICT infrastructure along. “Most of our infrastructure was located in a remote data center. There was no immediate problem there. However, a smaller but nonetheless important part of the same infrastructure was still located in our old office building. So we had to find a solution for that suboptimal situation. And quickly as well, because the move was already planned six months later.”

That ‘smaller part’ of the infrastructure included a limited number of servers running a few critical applications supporting, among other things, risk management and simulations. Those core applications, including a cash flow prediction engine, were developed in-house a long time ago using SAS technology. Over the years they had also grown organically, resulting in a complex and untransparent environment which was difficult to re-engineer – at least not at a reasonable cost. Moreover, both the scalability and the performance of the applications left a lot to be desired. Generali had already managed to cope with that last shortcoming in the past. At the request of LACO’s SAS experts, their application and infrastructure landscape for risk management had already been optimized before.

Extra challenge:

No traditional migration

“LACO had already a good understanding of our SAS platform and the actuarial risk model it contained. LACO therefore was ahead of any other supplier: they were familiar with our IT environment and with our business. In addition, we had only positive memories of our previous collaboration”, explains Nicolas Campodonico. “So when we had to decide on the right SAS migration partner, LACO was the logical choice.”

A physical move also implies a physical migration of the ICT infrastructure, you would think. But in close consultation with the Athora project team, in Belgium and at group level, LACO soon came to the conclusion that such a traditional migration was no longer feasible, if only because of the tight timing. The complexity of the existing environment also played a part in this consideration, in addition to the fact that the infrastructure requirements did not match the standards of Athora Group’s hosting facilities. Migrating to Athora’s corporate data center in Germany was therefore not an option either.

The solution: Privately encrypted public cloud

The only remaining realistic option was to abandon the on-premises concept and migrate the risk management applications to the cloud. Moreover, this option fitted well into the strategic IT vision of the Athora group, Nicolas Campodonico emphasizes. “We use a number of architecture principles for our infrastructure, including Cloud First. We have opted for the hybrid cloud at group level. The only question was: which cloud should we best bring those SAS risk management applications to? To the private cloud in our own data center? Or to the public cloud?”

After analysis, the latter turned out to offer a lot more advantages, both in terms of flexibility and implementation speed and in terms of future hosting options. “Unfortunately, regulatory restrictions in Belgium prevented us from going all the way for the public cloud. Together with LACO, we found a compromise: the privately encrypted public cloud. By adding an extra layer of security to the public cloud, we have expanded and refined our hybrid cloud model in a sense.”

And finally: More flexibility, better performance

The tight deadline didn’t prevent LACO from conducting a thorough assessment before the actual migration to the cloud. Because the performance of the applications should certainly not suffer from this migration, the LACO experts also set up a Proof of Concept (PoC) and carried out tests for about a week. In the end, after identifying the best performing server instances, the applications in the new environment turned out to perform even better.

No matter how complex the project was, it didn’t stop LACO from performing a number of side tracks with extras. One of these was the isolation of the data flows for the non-life insurance activities of Athora Belgium, which were acquired by Baloise Insurance during the migration process.


“We had to migrate anyway”, concludes Nicolas Campodonico. “But we absolutely wanted to migrate to a solution that would give us more flexibility and better performance. A solution that would be better aligned with the corporate IT strategy. We succeeded, within the set time frame. There is still room for growth. More than a year after the completion of the migration, I can only conclude that we have not had the slightest problem up to now with our SAS platform in the cloud. And believe me, I know from experience that this is quite exceptional. But really extraordinary is the willingness of the LACO team to engage on these kinds of complex projects – including the challenges and limitations that come with them – and its ability to bring those projects to a successful conclusion.”

Moving your SAS platform to the cloud?

Athora Belgium moves SAS platform to cloud in record time2026-02-03T11:18:00+00:00

Building a data governance framework for Federale Verzekering-Assurance

To harness the power of data and fortify its position in the market, Federale Verzekering-Assurance called on the data intelligence experts at LACO. “In order to gain the most value from our data assets and manage them efficiently, we needed a structured approach to data management,” says Amandine Rouvroy, Chief Data Officer at Federale Verzekering-Assurance. Using its battle-tested data governance framework, LACO tailored a data governance strategy that provided the insurer with the strong foundation it required for ongoing data governance.

Setting the stage:

Becoming data-driven

Established in 1911, Federale Verzekering-Assurance is a mid-sized group that employs more than 600 people and had a consolidated balance sheet of €4.1 billion in 2022. The long-standing insurer is well accustomed to adapting to changing market needs. And in today’s business climate, this means transforming into a data-driven organization.

In September 2021, Federale Verzekering-Assurance launched Shape25, an ambitious and strategic program that includes a large-scale digitalization effort. The insurer’s corporate strategy rests on three pillars: “Eliminate complexity,” “From transaction to relation,” and “Build mutual trust.” In other words, by the end of 2025, it aims to simplify its customer relationships, offer more contact options, and create more mutual trust.

The problem: Data quality issues and increasing regulatory pressure

For the insurer’s customer-oriented and data-driven corporate strategy to succeed, reliable data is essential. But ensuring this reliability hasn’t always been easy for the sizeable company: “If you’re working in a silo and only using data from one department, it’s not that hard to ensure data quality,” explains Amandine. “But in a large company, we work with transversal data across multiple departments, such as when preparing marketing campaigns. This makes maintaining data quality more difficult. For example, we’ve had an issue with customer email addresses. They’re used by almost all our services but stored in separate databases. And those databases don’t always communicate seamlessly with one another.”

Along with data reliability, the insurer must also contend with increasing regulatory pressure. “Not only does the National Bank of Belgium impose data quality requirements, but the EU has also introduced new regulations such as DORA, as well as mandatory sustainability reporting in the form of ESG disclosure,” continues Amandine. “Without proper data management and governance, it would be very difficult to meet these requirements.”

The result: A tailored data governance framework

To design a tailored data governance framework, LACO first creates some basic building blocks, such as strategy, organization, directives, measurement, technology, communication, and change management. These are the stepping stones that lead to success, and it’s important to put as many of them in place as possible within the first few months.

At Federale Verzekering-Assurance, this approach resulted in concrete deliverables for each building block, including:

  • a data governance charter (strategy) with an associated operating model (organization);

  • an example of a data quality policy (directives);

  • a measurement dashboard metrics definition (measurement);

  • a business glossary and data dictionary (technology);

  • a communication plan and training plan (communication);

  • a change plan (change management).

The data governance working groups at the company were also able to immediately put many of these deliverables into practice through real use cases.

With these foundational data governance capabilities well and truly established, Federale Verzekering-Assurance has hit the ground running. “LACO gave us a solid foundation for data governance and a customized data governance strategy,” concludes Amandine. “With this, we’ve been able to further develop our capability catalog and create a multi-year roadmap for its delivery—an achievement that wouldn’t have been possible without the foundational work performed by LACO.”

Building a tailored data governance framework?

Building a data governance framework for Federale Verzekering-Assurance2026-02-03T11:14:56+00:00

EuroChem Antwerp lays the foundation for a data-driven organization

The Antwerp branch of fertilizer manufacturer EuroChem knew it was sitting on a goldmine of data. It decided to call on the services of data intelligence specialist LACO to mine this resource. The result is operational excellence that’s now also easily measurable and reportable. Now EuroChem is well on its way to becoming a more data-driven organization.

Setting the scene:
a key production plant

EuroChem Antwerp is a manufacturing facility with good logistics infrastructure within the EuroChem Group with its headquarters in Switzerland. “Our end product is fertilizer granules for use in agriculture and horticulture,” explains Bernard De Vriese, the company’s IT Manager. “We produce about 2.2 million tons of these mineral fertilizers here every year.”

EuroChem Antwerp is also an important logistics hub for the group, thanks to its strategic location in the Port of Antwerp. From there, EuroChem serves the international market. The facility employs 400 people and has an annual turnover of €1 billion.

The problem:

getting the data right

“We are purely a manufacturing company,” emphasizes Continuous Improvement Specialist Pieter Callens. This is evidenced by how the company employs data. Like any industrial manufacturing company, EuroChem generates a huge amount of data. In addition to the usual ERP data from finance and HR, there’s also lots of supply chain and warehouse data and even data about energy consumption — crucial for a chemical company seeking to optimize its cost structure.

And then of course there is all data generated by the production facility itself where IoT technology allows data from production processes to be automatically recorded, from standard process parameters over minor disruptions to major interventions. This production data is used intensively, although mainly for operational purposes. “Our production line simply wouldn’t run without all that information,” says De Vriese. Not only was this data used tactically rather than strategically, but all too often it was processed in a manual, non-automated, and time-consuming manner. In addition, there was a significant risk of human error and unreliable, compromised data.

Having one version of the truth is a very attractive prospect for management. But if everyone is working on their own Excel file, discrepancies can arise, creating the danger that before long, everyone is talking about a different thing.

Extra challenge:
sharing the data

What didn’t help, of course, was that the data was spread across different islands or silos within the company, stored using different technologies, from Access databases to Excel and XML files. “Our way of working has changed so much since the takeover of the Antwerp factory by EuroChem,” says Callens. Until April 2012, EuroChem Antwerp was part of the chemical giant BASF, and the two companies still share a site and a number of central services and logistics activities.

However, the change meant that EuroChem Antwerp had to establish most of the support services that BASF used to provide, from finance to HR. “We didn’t always have the necessary experience in-house,” Callens admits. This has made reporting difficult. Not only was the data not integrated, it was also not automatically shared between the different data silos. The reporting that did take place was quite static and required a lot of repetitive manual work. An additional driver for the data project was the planned migration from Oracle to SAP, another consequence of the carve-out of EuroChem from BASF. Because some data was in danger of being lost during the migration, the company wanted to first secure all its data on a separate platform, which would be connected to the new ERP environment via loose coupling.

The solution:

a data platform based on Microsoft Power BI

“To get rid of all those islands, we needed a central data platform with a central reporting mechanism,” says Callens. In his additional role of Data Management Specialist, Callens is also the main point of contact for the creation and use of reports at EuroChem Antwerp. “Concepts such as BI and data warehousing could provide a solution to the problems we’d been struggling with for some time. One of them was to arrive at a consensus on how to calculate important Key Performance Indicators based on the now centralized and controlled data. That process is now fully underway, thanks to LACO.”

Data intelligence specialist LACO advised and supported EuroChem Antwerp as they implemented an integrated platform that groups all their data and unlocks it for reporting and analytics. “I had previously worked successfully with LACO,” says De Vriese, explaining why he chose the local supplier. To achieve the necessary internal buy-in for the ambitious project, they decided to move forward in steps. “We first did a Data Strategy study with LACO. After we had done a thorough analysis with the stakeholders from the various departments, we took our assessment to the local Board of Directors to ask for the green light. And we got that quickly.”

And finally: data-driven business success through operational efficiency

In addition to an architectural blueprint, a concrete implementation roadmap, aimed at rapid value creation has been delivered as part of the Data Strategy study. EuroChem and LACO drew up a priority list to identify the most important benefits. “We started by creating a value map,” Callens remembers. “One of the priority decisions that has resulted from this is to allow the business to work more with reports.”

At LACO’s suggestion, EuroChem opted for a highly iterative approach to the implementation of the new Microsoft data platform. This was carried out by a fixed team, involving the end users from the outset. Callens has nothing but praise for LACO’s functional analyst: “He was very professional and customer-oriented. And that was never a given, because he had to dig into our context again and again and then respond very flexibly.”

Soon the results were clear. Staff now have to do less manual work in Excel. This increases operational efficiency and reduces human error. And because EuroChem now has a source of high-quality reference data, the much sought-after single version of the truth is also gradually becoming a reality and the delivery of the strategic KPI’s is on its way.

To make this possible, a number of standard reports were also developed. “A striking example is the report for the various capital expenditure initiatives within our branch.” Reporting on capital expenditure turned out to be not only very complex but also something that quite a few departments struggled with. This included the finance department and general management, who must be able to identify any overspend. But it also included engineering departments with project managers, up to and including asset managers, who are responsible for the maintenance of the installations. “In the past, all those colleagues had to use complex Excel files that we feared would have only a limited lifespan. Today, most of those reports have been replaced by a BI report that’s simple and fast to create, as well as flexible to use and always up to date.”

“The most important work has been done,” concludes De Vriese. “The foundation is there.” This foundation provides EuroChem with a solid launch pad for the future as it grows into a true data-driven organization.

Ready to become a data-driven powerhouse?

EuroChem Antwerp lays the foundation for a data-driven organization2026-02-03T11:18:05+00:00
| LACO

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