Editor’s note: Compliance Week’s four-part case study, “Reaching into the value chain: How Flex helps drive sustainability beyond its walls,” is available exclusively to CW members.

Flex, ever the quiet intermediary, has been in operation for more than 50 years. It began its sustainability reporting journey more than a decade ago.

The company started disclosing environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data in 2009, according to Kyra Whitten, senior vice president of corporate marketing, communications, and sustainability at Flex.

“The first step was identifying all the Flex facilities in the world we needed to track. The focus in those days was on collecting baseline environmental data such as electricity consumption and volumes of waste generated at each site,” wrote Whitten in a blog post.

Back then, data was collected manually with spreadsheets and emails, said Barjouth Aguilar, head of Flex’s global sustainability program. Aguilar, who reports to Whitten, has been with Flex since 2011 and helped build the current program.

“We had the opportunity to build a lot of things from scratch,” she said. “We tried to understand how data should be calculated and learn about the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. It was a really fascinating time to start on that.”