Explaining the Role of Sustainability

SAP Sustainability empowers businesses to embed sustainable practices into their core operations, enabling them to achieve environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals while driving economic growth and resilience. SAP's Sustainability portfolio offers comprehensive solutions for visibility, analytics, carbon footprint management, traceability, transparency, and regulatory compliance. These integrated solutions seamlessly connect with SAP ERP systems, providing real-time data and insights that facilitate proactive decision-making and efficient sustainability performance management. By addressing various facets of sustainability, the portfolio helps organizations streamline processes, reduce costs, and enhance overall operational efficiency, ultimately supporting their sustainability targets and long-term profitability.

The business landscape is evolving, with sustainability at its core—not as a trend but as a global force driving change. Businesses face increasing regulatory requirements, stakeholder demands, and competitive pressures.

Business leaders across all functions are integrating sustainability into their strategies, tackling challenges such as compliance costs, supply chain resilience, and data integration. Under the CSRD framework, key performance indicators like carbon footprint calculation and reduction, supply chain emissions, and energy efficiency are crucial for long-term success. To address these priorities, businesses are transforming processes to cut costs, mitigate risks, and future-proof operations. An ERP-centric solution plays a vital role in unifying efforts, tracking KPIs, and enabling sustainable growth.

SAP Sustainability solutions are built around integrated, ERP-centric capabilities that enable customers to drive four sustainability priorities:

SAP Sustainability solutions are primarily cloud-based, in order to provide integrated capabilities for tracking and mitigating the various sustainability challenges, while supporting opportunities for implementing new sustainable business models, such as circular economy.

In addition, with the fast-paced changes to sustainability legislation in different legal jurisdictions (schemes for extended producer responsibility (EPR), laws about human rights due diligence, emissions reporting requirements, and so on), cloud-based solutions can ensure that the necessary reporting capabilities remain up-to-date.

Integrating sustainability as the best of Business Suite into every SAP cloud ERP solution ensures customers can fully leverage its comprehensive benefits. This approach enhances SAP’s portfolio, including SAP Business Technology Platform technologies like SAP Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud, while accelerating cloud transformation and positioning customers as sustainability leaders. For businesses navigating legal requirements, SAP solutions like SAP Responsible Design and Production enable seamless tracking and reporting of sustainability indicators, such as recycled packaging components, which are critical in jurisdictions with extended producer responsibility (EPR) tax implications.

As global EPR schemes become increasingly prevalent, simplifying tracking, modeling, and legal reporting is essential. SAP Sustainability solutions, such as SAP Sustainability Control Tower, empower customers to meet EU taxonomy requirements and extend to voluntary frameworks, streamlining sustainability reporting through interoperability. By embedding sustainability insights into core ERP processes—supply chain, procurement, finance, and sales—SAP delivers a unique value proposition that goes beyond regulatory compliance. This ERP-centric approach unlocks unparalleled sustainability insights, setting SAP apart from competitors and solidifying its leadership in sustainable business transformation.