Sustainability remains one of the most critical topics of our time. It changes the world, including how business is done, and companies face a number of pressures related to these changes, mainly driven by:
- An increasing and evolving number of global regulation and standards
- Climate change related supply chain risks and disruptions, resource constraints and rising costs for materials, energy or carbon
- Consumer demands for greater sustainability transparency and proof of sustainability claims
- Technology acceleration such as AI driving operational efficiencies and innovations that need to be harnessed
If companies do not act, they face rising compliance cost, risks of reputational damage, severe impacts on their operations and their ability to control cost and generate revenue, risk of missing out on opportunities or even a lack of attracting and retaining talent.
If, in turn, companies respond well to these challenges, they can turn sustainability into an advantage, outplay competition and transform into a compliant, sustainable and resilient business that creates positive environmental and social impact while ensuring sustainable growth.
Managing sustainability effectively, including overseeing the myriad of related processes, systems, and data, is a challenging, time-consuming, and intricate task. SAP, however, is uniquely equipped to address these complexities. By integrating SAP ERP, sustainability tools, and AI technology, SAP provides a comprehensive solution to streamline and enhance sustainability management.
SAP’s value proposition is an ERP-centric, AI-enabled and cloud-based approach to sustainability management. Our customer's first and most pressing need is to comply with sustainability regulation, and to do that efficiently and accurately. Their success in the long term depends on the ability to transform into a truly sustainable business based on continuous digital transformation that delivers resilient operations within an agile operating model. This can only be achieved when sustainability is anchored in RISE with SAP and GROW with SAP value delivery –bringing the continued growth of our customers and SAP into alignment.
That is why hero sustainability products such as the Sustainability Control Tower (SCT) and Sustainability Footprint Management (SFM) are integral parts of SAP's cloud-first strategy, designed to enhance the value proposition for customers who choose to migrate to the cloud. These tools are only available to customers who are or to decide to become part of the RISE with SAP and GROW with SAP program.
This strategic decision aligns with SAP's broader goal of encouraging customers to adopt cloud solutions, which offer greater agility, cost-effectiveness, and the ability to leverage the latest technological innovations.
Not only SAP SCT and SFM, but all SAP Sustainability Solutions are designed to help businesses navigate the complexities of sustainability, compliance, and resilience in today's rapidly evolving regulatory and environmental landscape.
Companies trust that SAP will help them with regulatory compliance today while building the capability for end-to-end sustainability management to competitively disrupt their competitors in the long term.
Therefore, the first category of capabilities builds around ESG Reporting, supporting customers to comply with regulatory reporting and compliance.
Second category addresses the need for Carbon Management, including the calculation of carbon footprints as required by regulations such as CSRD and gaining to identify and drive decarbonization.
Third category is around Material Transition, enabling to build a sustainable value chain through eco-design, extended producer responsibility and material traceability.
And fourth is around Operational Compliance, ensuring safety, compliance, and risk management for sustainable operations.
Ensuring safety, compliance, and risk management for sustainable operations.
These capabilities are underpinned with Foundational Capabilities that enable SAP to build an integrated suite of products, leveraging the richness of data from across the ERP and sustainability solutions, ensuring auditability and enabling exchange of data along the value chain.
The set-up of SAP's portfolio and the tight integration into the wider SAP landscape enables continuous product innovation addressing customer needs.
To streamline end-to-end carbon emissions management for businesses, for example, SAP is developing a comprehensive portfolio that seamlessly integrates sustainability data with financial information around a key SAP innovation: SAP Green Ledger. SAP Green Ledger will feature key innovations from SAP Sustainability solutions and SAP S/4HANA Cloud and let customers connect existing financial with sustainability data, creating transparency to all decision-makers and the ability to steer the business through decisions balancing cost-carbon trade-offs. The Green Ledger can optimally be used in combination with the
- Sustainability Control Tower (SCT) for sustainability reporting
- Sustainability Footprint Management (SFM) which calculates corporate and carbon footprints with the financial precision required to leverage them next to financial data
- The Sustainability Data Exchange which lets customers increase the granularity of their scope 3 emissions further