On Wednesday, September 26, 2007, in a notary’s office on Huérfanos Street in downtown Santiago, the idea that Gonzalo Asencio had nested in his head about a year earlier materialized, when he found himself in front of his computer with an Excel spreadsheet, entering the data that he thought a software made in Chile should handle.

It was a bit of experience in the National Environmental Corporation (CONAMA), derived today in the Ministry of the Environment (MMA). Something of his time in London, where he studied a Master of Science in Environment and Sustainable Development, and his training as an Industrial Civil Engineer, the factors that awakened that spark of who undertakes in Chile. A spark that must be powerful enough not to perish in the dreaded “valley of death”. To be able to persevere when funding is lacking and not get lost in the bureaucracy and resistance to change in a country that has had a hard time with digital transformation.

“I always had high expectations, but I didn’t expect it to be so difficult,” says Gisma’s CEO and founder. “Years of pilgrimage and evangelizing about the importance of effective tracking with world-class software like SIGEA. The need to evangelize still persists, many are still happy with their spreadsheets. I expected the process to be faster,” he explains.

However, the year 2020 undoubtedly provided a propitious scenario to show the benefits of the Gisma platform, which seeks to consolidate the corporate sustainability model through effective compliance, easy implementation and an ever-increasing number of benefits.

If teleworking was a huge challenge and a surprising task for many, for the Gisma team it was the ideal opportunity to seduce the incredulous, demonstrating that internal processes can be strengthened with a tool developed to meet the local reality and versatile enough to be applied in other countries, facilitating remote monitoring and expeditious access to updated data.

-The fact that SIGEA is part of the digital transformation concept and facilitates teleworking has been positive; many users who used to spend their days in the field have had to remain in the office and SIGEA has been more widely used there,” reflects Asencio.

In this same aspect, César Barra, Innovation and Projects Manager at Gisma-sigea, who has been part of the crew since 2013, considers that the change has been slower than expected:

“I think the digital transformation process has nothing to do with the culture of the worker, which is very flexible, but rather with the culture of top management, which is not clear on these guidelines.” However, the challenge can be met thanks to a cohesive and “high-performance” team, as Barra himself explains: “Feeling that all the pieces work in perfect harmony and trust is something that I personally have always longed to build and be a part of, and today we enjoy it. I am convinced that it is not possible to achieve change, at any level, from individualism”.

Milestones and objectives

Although these 13 years have been filled with many remarkable moments, Gonzalo Asencio highlights the importance of its first financing through CORFO, being awarded a seed capital, and the award of the first SNIFA from the SMA in 2011: “In that initiative, in addition to advising the newly created regulatory/inspection body, it allowed us to develop a system for the management of commitments, which, although it was later voluntary, disseminated throughout the industry the matrix of environmental commitments that each regulated party had to generate with its environmental commitments for monitoring and inspection.

This practice continues to this day and we see customers still using these spreadsheets, which are fully compatible with SIGEA”.

Sustainability is the future

What’s next for the future? For the time being, Gisma is working to consolidate its national leadership and strengthen its international presence, but something more ambitious is to introduce and promote the idea of a Corporate SustainabilityThe company will be able to solve the execution of projects not only in a functional way, but also to meet the new challenges of a world that is changing and is seeing the importance of providing reliable, accessible and transparent data. In addition, to develop the SusTech concept, which would be a simile of FinTech, but as an industry of technologies for sustainability.