How do we execute sustainability at SAP? In summary, we integrate it tightly into the wider SAP strategy and architecture. This ensures accurate and connected data, efficient processes, and low TCO, driving sustainability in line with the elements of the SAP Business Suite, based on applications, data, and AI.
AI has tremendous potential to make sustainability faster, more efficient, and better. However, no matter how advanced AI becomes, it needs trusted data and reliable processes to deliver real value. That’s where SAP stands apart, and that’s why we start with applications that run processes as the basis.
- Applications – Our end-to-end business suite connects every corner of an organization, so each transaction is born out of a single integrated framework. This ensures that processes—like procure-to-pay or record-to-report—are standardized, consistent, and serve as both the source of and the destination for sustainability data, ready for AI-driven improvements.
- Data – By harmonizing information from SAP and non-SAP sources into one unified Business Data Cloud, we give AI agents a 360-degree perspective. That means no wasted time reconciling definitions or data sets—everything is instantly ‘understood’ in its business context. For sustainability, we use the BDC with one sustainability data model to ensure sustainability data can be consumed across the business, driving consistent reporting, deeper insight, and confident decisions across every sustainability process, product, and partner network.
- AI – When you bring the right data to specialized agents orchestrated by Joule, you unlock continuous optimization across lines of business. Instead of isolated automation, you get an interconnected system that learns, adapts, and improves at scale. For sustainability, we infuse AI for automation and smarter decision-making into applications and also provide sustainability data into SAP’s system of agents. Overall, applying AI holistically like that helps reduce effort, cost, and errors and enables sustainability-aware decisions and processes across the business to drive real-world outcomes.
The Business Suite is underpinned by the SAP Business Technology Platform, which enables even the most complex organizations to create a fully integrated, agile foundation for developing data-driven solutions and meaningfully scaling AI.
This synergy—applications, data, and AI—creates a self-reinforcing cycle of innovation. And that’s the driving force behind the SAP Business Suite and, at the same time, behind SAP Sustainability.
Embedded Sustainability
Let’s now dive deeper into each component of the Business Suite.
First, with Applications, we ensure Sustainability is embedded into an organization’s operations, to shift from merely reporting sustainability to running it across your business. This approach enables you to integrate sustainability data and capabilities directly into finance, supply chain, and wider business operations — where decisions are made.
Three key concepts are:
- Standardized processes: Sustainability is complex, and it may be hard to understand where to start and how to do things. So, with SAP Signavio, we build streamlined sustainability processes as part of a wider enterprise architecture for more efficient and sustainable operations, from reporting to carbon accounting to managing all emissions and operational compliance.
- Transactional data: Source sustainability data right out of process transactions and integrate results (such as calculated carbon footprints) back - for faster, accurate, and low TCO data collection, usage, and reporting.
- Collaboration across networks: Engage and exchange data with business partners to create sustainable, resilient supply chains and increase data transparency and quality.
These concepts are brought to life in our modular, SaaS portfolio of sustainability solutions:
- SAP Sustainability Control Tower: Our key solution for regulatory compliance, SCT acts as the central platform that provides visibility into sustainability KPIs across your organization, enabling strategic steering, tracking progress, and ensuring auditable reporting of metrics for the most common regulations and frameworks like CSRD, TCFD, SASB, ISSB, CDP, SBTi, etc. It also connects sustainability into wider SAP by making sustainability data available, as we will see on the next slide.
- SAP Sustainability Footprint Management: Calculates product- and corporate-level carbon footprints using actual business data, helping companies measure, manage, and reduce emissions across their value chains.
- SAP Sustainability Data Exchange: Facilitates secure, standardized, and trusted sharing of sustainability-related data such as Product Carbon Footprints with supply chain partners, adhering to international and industry-specific standards PACT (Partnership for Carbon Transparency, by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development) and Catena-X, bringing transparency into scope 3 emissions.
- SAP Green Ledger: One of our newest innovations, the Green Ledger enables an integrated accounting system for carbon and financial data side by side that brings sustainability into finance and core ERP processes, enabling carbon-level transparency for financial planning, forecasting, modelling, analysis, decision-making, and integrated reporting.
- SAP Green Token: A chain of custody solution for tracking the origin, sustainability, and ethical sourcing of raw materials across complex, multi-tier supply chains, helps to deal with regulations such as ISSC+, EUDR, or CBAM.
- SAP Responsible Design and Production: Supports circular economy initiatives by helping organizations design products for reuse, recycling, and compliance with regulations like Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) and global plastic and packaging tax.
All of these are built on the SAP Business Technology Platform, ensuring extensibility and flexibility.
This innovative portfolio is complemented by our two long-standing solutions for EHS management and product stewardship:
- SAP Environment, Health, and Safety Management: Streamlines and automates EHS processes, helping organizations ensure regulatory compliance, manage risks, and foster a safe and sustainable workplace.
- SAP S/4HANA for product compliance: Enables companies to manage product safety, chemical compliance, and labeling requirements globally—ensuring compliant and sustainable products throughout their lifecycle.
To illustrate the "Embedded Sustainability", let’s look at the three examples at the bottom of the slide, examples of processes and how sustainability is taken out and embedded back into them:
- SCT automatically sources Sustainability data out of different applications, including via SAP Analytics Cloud, emissions from EHS, SFM, or in the future, employee data from SuccessFactors. This data is then used to report on sustainability according to, e.g., CSRD.
- Carbon data provided by suppliers via SDX or S/4 Procurement is used to calculate footprints and to embed back into purchase requisitions to choose low-carbon suppliers.
- Material data such as on plastic, recyclability, or chemicals of concern is used to analyze and design and bring to market low-impact, sustainable products.
SAP sells these in packages such as the SCM Premium Package integrating sustainability directly into supply chain execution through SAP S/4HANA Cloud for EHS Environment Management, Sustainability Data Exchange, and SAP Responsible Design and Production. EHS Environment Management supports environmental compliance and emissions monitoring within operations. Sustainability Data Exchange enables structured, scalable sharing of sustainability data with suppliers and partners, addressing transparency and regulatory demands across value chains. SAP Responsible Design and Production focuses on sustainable product and packaging design, helping organizations meet extended producer responsibility and circularity requirements. Together, these solutions ensure sustainability is addressed at design, execution, and collaboration stages of the supply chain. For learners, the key insight is that sustainability is not treated as an afterthought—it is embedded where supply chain decisions are made, enabling risk reduction, regulatory compliance, and long-term resilience.
Streamlining Sustainability Reporting with SAP Business Data Cloud
Now let’s get to how we ensure a consistent, harmonized flow of sustainability data across all applications.
This is enabled via our one sustainability data model, intelligent applications and data products, powered by the SAP Business Data Cloud.
Through that we can ensure a number of benefits:
- Connecting the data ecosystem: The one sustainability data model allows you to integrate internal and external sustainability data in a harmonized way across all SAP Sustainability solutions, breaking down data silos and establishing a clean core.
- Audit-ready data foundation: Through SAP Business Data Cloud building on top of the one sustainability data model, you receive an audit-ready data foundation that preserves data lineage and business context for full traceability of your cross-enterprise sustainability data. This boosts your reporting completeness while reducing data redundancies and TCO.
How does this work in practice? As you can see below, data Products on SAP Business Data Cloud centralize sustainability-relevant data across the SAP ecosystem that can then be consumed by SAP Sustainability Control Tower.
Data products are designed for a specific business-driven use case, such as compiling a comprehensive CSRD report. Through data products, data integration content is provided with consistent data structures across applications.
Moreover, powered by BDC, SCT will be able to consume data products as a means to simplify data integration from various data sources for ESG relevant data with SAP managed content, for example:
- SAP SuccessFactors integration for social metrics like "own workforce" from Employee Central
- EHS integration for Energy data
Cross-domain insights: Moreover, Business Data Cloud together with the one sustainability data model will also drive cross-domain insights by fusing sustainability with operations and finance data for more informed decisions, advanced insights, and intelligent AI-enabled scenarios and agents.
To do that, SAP Sustainability solutions will be offering data products on BDC as means to re-use ESG relevant KPIs in own and other analytical scenarios
SAP Business Data Cloud provides a harmonized, trusted foundation by integrating internal and external sustainability data through one consistent data model, breaking down silos and supporting a clean core. It preserves data lineage and business context, ensuring traceability and auditability across complex reporting and regulatory requirements. By fusing sustainability data with financial and operational data, it enables more informed decisions, advanced analytics, and AI-driven scenarios. This foundation reduces duplication, lowers total cost of ownership, and increases confidence in reported outcomes. Importantly, it supports scalability: as regulations evolve and partner ecosystems expand, organizations can extend sustainability coverage without rebuilding their data architecture. Credible sustainability depends on trusted, connected data—not isolated datasets.