Hisham AlhussainThe problem
Every month, NEOM's contractors report their environmental and waste data, and that reporting has a fixed deadline and a regulator behind it. It used to arrive as spreadsheets that analysts exported, consolidated and reconciled by hand in Excel. It took weeks, errors crept in, and different meetings sometimes saw different numbers.
The approach
ESRA (Environmental & Social Responsibility Application) moved reporting from a people-driven process to a system-driven one:
- Contractors submit their monthly sheets through online forms that write straight into structured data objects.
- Those objects feed a standardized environmental data model, so every KPI has one definition across all submissions.
- Automated pipelines validate, transform and propagate the data, and validation checks stop bad data before it reaches leadership.
- The output is a set of executive-ready dashboards that serve as the authoritative view.
My role
Architecture, end-to-end pipelines, KPI definition and standardization, and alignment with compliance and operations stakeholders so the system met regulatory expectations.
Outcome
- Compliance reporting went from ~4 weeks to ~1 hour
- Adopted as the standard reporting procedure by all 800 contractors
- Analyst effort dropped by ~90%, with far fewer errors and inconsistencies
- Leadership trusted the numbers, and the process became auditable
- It became a dependency for other dashboards and a template adopted by other sectors
Details are kept high-level because this is internal NEOM work.