How Aurubis Designed a Cross-Department Sustainability Reporting Platform Through UX Research

Aurubis is Europe's largest copper recycler and one of the world's leading copper producers. With annual revenues exceeding EUR 16 billion, the company operates smelters, recycling facilities, and production sites across multiple countries. Sustainability isn't a marketing initiative at Aurubis - it's a core business function tied to regulatory compliance, investor reporting, and operational efficiency.

The problem: sustainability data lived in silos. Environmental impact metrics came from one department. Energy consumption data from another. Waste management, water usage, emissions tracking, and compliance documentation - each owned by a different team, stored in different formats, reported through different tools.

When leadership needed a consolidated sustainability report, the process took weeks. Analysts manually pulled data from spreadsheets, internal databases, and PDF exports. They reformatted, cross-referenced, and reconciled discrepancies by hand. A single quarterly report consumed over 200 person-hours of manual data wrangling.

Aurubis needed a platform that could ingest data from all departments, normalize it, generate department-specific and company-wide reports, and export in formats required by different stakeholders - from regulatory bodies to the board of directors.

Aurubis had evaluated enterprise reporting tools. The challenge wasn't finding software that could generate charts - it was finding a partner who would invest time understanding how 6 different departments actually work with data before proposing a solution.

easy.bi's UX-research-first approach resonated with Aurubis leadership. Instead of starting with technology selection, easy.bi proposed starting with workshops and interviews across every department. The goal: understand the real workflows before designing anything. Aurubis recognized this as the approach most likely to produce a solution people would actually use.

The easy.bi team began with a 3-week discovery phase. Each department received dedicated workshops and individual interviews. The goal wasn't just to catalog data sources - it was to understand who needs what data, in what format, at what frequency, and why.

Stakeholder mapping and workflow documentation. The team mapped every data flow: where it originated, who transformed it, what tools they used, and where it ended up. This produced a complete picture of Aurubis's reporting ecosystem - including the informal workarounds that no one had documented but everyone depended on.

Iterative prototyping with real data. Rather than presenting a theoretical architecture, easy.bi built interactive prototypes using actual Aurubis data. Department heads could see their specific reports rendered in the proposed system. Feedback was immediate and specific: "This chart needs weekly granularity, not monthly." "We need to export this table as CSV for the regulatory filing."

Flexible data processing architecture. The designed solution handles multiple input formats - from structured database queries to semi-structured spreadsheet imports. Each department's data flows through normalization layers that preserve department-specific context while enabling cross-department aggregation.

The UI was designed following progressive disclosure principles. A sustainability manager sees a company-wide dashboard. Drilling into any metric reveals department-level detail. Drilling further shows individual data points with full provenance tracking - who entered it, when, from which source.