Generating AI-based Sustainability Reports

After completing this lesson, you will be able to generate sustainability reports in SAP Sustainability Control Tower supported by AI.

The "Generate ESG Reports with AI" application enables the automated creation of AI-driven sustainability reports, supporting organizations in initiating and advancing their reporting processes. It facilitates more efficient and streamlined reporting of corporate sustainability performance. Integrated within the application, this functionality is designed to automate report generation across selected reporting periods. It leverages ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) data already maintained in SAP Sustainability Control Tower to produce structured reports based on this information. The generated reports are available for download in PDF or DOCX format and adhere to the structure defined by the selected reporting template.

The application provides the following functionality:

• SAP-provided templates: You can reuse out-of-the-box templates to generate your sustainability report. You can preview the report templates to understand the basic structure of the report that will be generated out of your uploaded ESG data. These templates are read-only and cannot be changed.
• Custom templates: Copy the SAP-provided templates and customize them by choosing to only activate individual sections and by rearranging subsections. Additionally, define your own templates by creating custom sections and subsections to which you can add charts and tables available from the SAP-provided templates as well as selecting from a variety of facts to generate textual content for the sections and subsections. This can include adding both quantitative and qualitative metrics to different sections in your report template.
• Period selection: Report on your ESG data by choosing from three different period types: Year, quarter, or month. Only periods for which there is data in the system will be displayed.
• Content editing: Before you download a generated report, you can modify its content using a rich text editor. You can choose any section of your generated report and make changes to its text, tables, or charts. Once you've applied the changes, you can preview them before downloading the report.
• Report generation: Create your report from the chosen template and download in PDF or DOCX format. You can also delete reports that are no longer needed.

The report creation process with AI typically requires the following steps:

• Create a company-specific report template
• Assign metrics to template
• Run and Preview report
• Edit report
• Run final report version

Let us deep dive into each of the step and then watch a demofor creating a report with AI.

Create template

In the ‘Templates’ tab, you can create a new custom report template from scratch, use an SAP-provided template or copy an existing reporting template that you can tailor to your needs. Provide a template name and description.

Edit template

Add or edit sections in the report template. Sections are used to structure the report content into chapters and sub-chapters. You can provide a name for each section and activate or de-activate sections if you would like to generate different versions of the report including different chapters (activation status).

Add texts

Within each section of the reporting template, you can add your own static textual elements to be considered in the report output. Moreover, you can add dynamic content based on the data collected. In section ‘Textual content generated based on associated facts’ you can add metrics from a list of available quantitative and qualitative metrics. The AI-powered reporting assistant will incorporate the collected data for these metrics when generating a report for a specific reporting period based on this template and automatically generate a corresponding narrative output.

Add reference facts

You can also include reference facts in addition to metrics like, for example company net revenue or data from ambitions created in the Our Ambitions app,

Add tables and charts

Finally, in tabs ‘Charts’ and ‘Tables’ you can choose pre-defined charts and tables for selected metrics to be added to the report output.

Run report

After finalizing the report template, you can run a period-specific report. In tab ‘Reports’, click ‘Generate Report from Template’, select the report template, provide a report name and select the reporting period. The generated report instance will be shown in the list of reports.

Preview report

After generation is complete you can choose ‘Preview’ to review the report in PDF. In addition, you can click on the report instance from the list of reports and review the generated content of each report section.

If you want to further edit the report output, you can click on the generated report instance and choose ‘Edit’. This allows you to change and edit any section of the report. You can also re-generate individual sections of the report via the option ‘Revise’ – Make Shorter/Make Longer.

Additionally, you can add period-specific metric values that you may want to reference in the text.

Finally, you can save the final version of the edited report and export/download it both in PDF and Word (DOCX) format.