SAP Sustainability

Sustainability for Customer COEs

Why?

Sustainability today is a core business imperative.

With 77% of the world's transactions touching SAP systems and more than 400,000 companies using SAP software, we recognize both the opportunity and responsibility to deliver digital solutions that enable you to manage your – and the planet's – limited resources productively, contribute to an inclusive economy, and shape a sustainable future.

This leads to

  • cost savings and
  • potentially to more revenue due to green products/services.

 

Therefore, sustainability and profitability are inextricably linked.  

The United Nations have defined Sustainable Development Goals – hereunder also one with regards to climate action. Therefore, our goal is Zero Emissions with Climate Actions.

What and How?

Sustainability insights must be embedded into end-to-end processes to ensure

  • efficiency gains,
  • social responsibility,
  • and compliance, while mitigating risk.

 

Transparency will address regulations proactively, ensure full global compliance, and build trust. Based on the end-to-end processes carbon footprint & waste can be reduced and social responsibility can be increased.

Further products, services & business models can be created to approach new markets by integrating sustainability. That way actionable insights across the entire value chain can be created.

Here Data Transparency and Process Action must work together.

Why Customer COEs?

The Customer COE as an expert team has the resources and possibilities to drive sustainability. By integrating business and IT, it allows a detailed overview about business processes – thus driving data transparency. Additionally, the Customer COE ensures an in-depth understanding about the software configuration and pursues the idea of Technology & Innovation in the software market – thus allowing process action.

Business benefits & measurement is being achieved by identifying KPI's – such as greenhouse gas emissions per product for example – hence Customer COE's can improve business processes efficiently. Gain more insights about how the Customer COE can drive efficiency and sustainability here.

How is the situation for businesses?

Climate change will continue to be a key driver for regulation. Since carbon reduction is needed and action must be taken, sustainable energy approaches will be rewarded, and a price will be but on carbon for instance.

Nowadays, consumers are shifting towards more sustainable products & services and even investors are looking for agility & resilience in terms of sustainability. Governments will put pressure on companies to make decisions.

To do so, investment is needed – but at the same time a market opportunity is being created.

Chasing Zero for Sustainability

What is the idea behind it?

  • Zero Emissions with Climate Action generates cost savings
  • Zero Waste World with Circular Economy
  • Zero Inequality with Social Responsibility

Gain more insights about Chasing Zero for Sustainability & join our SAP Community to stay up to date about the topic of Sustainability.

SAP Sustainability Navigator

To get some tailored recommendations and find the right SAP solutions within SAPs portfolio of sustainability solutions, have a look at the SAP Sustainability Navigator feature here. It only takes a few minutes to answer questions regarding your company's industry and challenges in terms of Holistic Steering and Reporting, Climate Action, Circular Economy, and Social Responsibility. Make a first step towards a more sustainable enterprise and let us recommend solutions to make it reality.

Additionally, check out the SAP Sustainability Navigator to better grasp the big picture of how SAP deals with Sustainability.

Understand the context and SAP's value proposition

Explore the different goals for Chasing Zero for Sustainability. For each one of the three goals – Zero Emissions, Zero Waste, and Zero Inequality – challenges are being outlined, the interrelated pain points shown, and the associated SAP solutions & industry innovations presented.

How to navigate within the SAP Sustainability Navigator

Start here:

  • To get more information on Climate Action, click on ‘Climate Action' > ‘Product Emission Management' - explore the appropriate solutions
  • Check the overview of how SAP Product Footprint Management corresponds with companies' need for transparency on the environmental footprint of their products
  • Click onto the Solution to read a short description of how the solution meets the challenges, some benefits it comes with, and a quick demo

Deep dive into that SAP solution – SAP Product Footprint Management. 

SAP Solutions for Sustainability

What is PFM?

More and more companies are looking for a holistic solution to make the right steps towards climate action. You can react on climate change with Product Footprint Management.

This Cloud-native application is built on the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) within the Cloud Foundry environment and allows you to calculate footprints periodically and at a scale across the entire product lifecycle.

You can

  • extract business data from your SAP S/4HANA and SAP S/4HANA Cloud systems,
  • associate these to your emission factors,
  • and run a mass calculation to generate footprints for your purchased products.

To understand the capabilities and features of PFM better, read this blog.

SAP Product Footprint Management is well suited for manufacturing and product-centric companies and companies who need insights regarding the environmental impact of their products.

Thus, you get insights into the environmental impacts of your products based on existing business data compared to environmental factors – allowing you to keep chasing Zero Emissions.

Benefits

  • Business data, structure and logic from SAP S4/HANA and SAP S4/HANA Cloud is being reused due to a live connection to PFM
  • Embedded Product footprint information is extending end-to-end processes and enabling actions to optimize
  • evaluate the cost-estimate bill of material of the manufactured product
  • Identify potential gaps in the calculation due to missing key information
  • easy to understand & simplified effort to trigger footprint calculation
  • Zero Emissions with Climate Action

Why?

We use more resources than our planet can sustainably provide. Because of this gap, the demand for resources is contributing to climate change, nature loss, pollution, and inequality.

Society is increasing the pressure for companies to reduce waste – hereunder are employees, investors, consumers, and regulators.

Therefore, a shift towards a circular economy is needed. Companies should get a feeling of where materials come from and what their impact on people & the planet is with the help of the Customer COE’s knowledge about the company’s business processes and KPIs.

How Customer COE’s should react

Customer COE’s and their businesses need to understand current risks in terms of stricter regulations, investor pressure and downside earnings, which occur across the whole value and supply chain. Here making the issue transparent for the company is key.

At the same time the opportunities must be captured in a circular economy such as innovation & growth and the anticipation of regulation. Thus, the Customer COE also acts as a Technology and Innovation driver.

Circular Economy Strategy

Circular Economy at SAP is part of SAP’s Zero Waste Mission. The goal is to eliminate waste, circulate/re-use materials, and innovate regenerative business models.

Value is being created in terms of sustainability by

Visit our SAP Community to get more information on circular economy.

Solutions

To get more insights into how SAP addresses the issue of Elimination, Circulation, and Regeneration with their solutions, which support the aim for Zero Waste their customers contributing to a circular economy, have a look here. 

The situation
  • Most people are unclear about how potential actions for sustainability would align with their strategy.
  • The underlying data quality & data integration issue causes dissatisfaction
  • and therefore, creates a need for a holistic view for sustainability.

What customers want

In other terms there is a need for more insights, better tools, and approaches to steer sustainability activities of organizations – based on high quality data, auditable data, deep within the enterprise, across the breadth of operations, and on a real time basis.

So, customers demand a solution which provides them hyper transparency on their sustainability ambitions across the entire value chain.

Our solution

We want to meet the needs of stakeholders on holistic and sustained performance reporting of companies and non-biz organizations. Corporate Sustainability Reporting and Steering aims to be the road for this “integrated data value journey”.

SAP provides a holistic solution to consolidate, harmonize, enrich, and integrate Sustainability/ESG data based on SAP solutions as part of Sustainability Management, integrating emissions, and circularity data. Thus, we offer a Key Figure Ledger, a repository of all relevant key figures that you can use to model your ambitions as well as map it to standards.

Have a look at our Product Page of the SAP Sustainability Control Tower for more information.

What?

SAP Sustainability Control Tower solution aims to enable hyper transparency across financial, operational, compliance, environmental, and social parameters through reporting and disclosure to show your impact on the environment, society, and communities.

Because the Customer COEs are already having in-depth knowledge about the company’s processes and the ability to innovate new technologic solutions, they can help turning the results into action. So, the Customer COEs not only help in terms of data management but also can create actionable insights to drive Sustainability Performance across the organization.

Additionally, check out the SAP Transformation Navigator, where SAP SCT is being explained in more detail and its benefits outlined.

How?

SAP Sustainability Control Tower provides

  • focused analysis on the most important data in real time
  • based on underlying end to end business process data,
  • enriched and reported in alignment with established frameworks,
  • and supporting optimization decisions based on trade-offs.

For more insights, have a look at this video.