Using the Calculate Footprints Application

To calculate footprints, the SAP Product Footprint Management solution provides you with the Calculate Footprints application. You can use this application to:

• Select plants and product groups relevant to the footprint calculation.

• Configure mappings between your replicated business data and the emission factors that you have imported through the Import Emission Factors application.

  Note

  This only applies to purchased products and not to manufactured products.

• Adjust the calculation period and calculation interval to your needs.

  Note

  The available calculation interval you configure depends on the overall calculation period you chose.

  For example, you have set your calculation period for January 2021 to May 2021 and you would like to periodically calculate an average footprint per unit every 2 months. That means that average footprints are calculated for January and February 2021, with the results being posted for February. The calculation shifts by a month and considers February and March, with the results being posted for March, and so on, until all calculations are complete for the calculation period you chose. Please note that for January 2021, there will be no calculations posted for the average footprint per unit with the calculation interval set to 2 months.

• Start with a validation check for your selected products, then perform a test run to check your settings. Perform a calculation run to see the footprint results.

  Note

  • Validation Run: The function to validate the products you selected for footprint calculations allows you to see if there are any unmaintained values for your products before performing a test or calculation run. Any products which don't have existing or valid values will be excluded from a calculation run. If no product contains valid values, both test and calculation runs can't be started. Validating your template before initiating a test or calculation run is mandatory.
  • Test Run: Choose this option if you want to simulate a footprint calculation run and test your configurations, but don't want your results to be exported and stored in SAP S/4HANA Cloud or on your SAP S/4HANA system. This way, you can see the results, but there are no consequences to the completed run. The calculated results expire 7 days after the footprint was calculated.
  • Calculation Run: Choose this option if you want to transfer the calculated footprint results to SAP S/4HANA Cloud or SAP S/4HANA. This type of run is intended for business purposes.

  You can perform the calculation run as a full run or a delta run:

  • Full Run: This type of run recalculates all periods within the selected calculation period. Previous results are overwritten. The last valid period is either the last month in the calculation period or the period prior to the current month.

    For example, you have specified January 2021 to December 2021 as the calculation period. The last valid period can then either be December 2021 or June 2021 if the current month is July 2021.

  • Delta Run: Only periods are calculated that have not been calculated before. A use case for this scenario would be a failed run that occurred within the calculation period. With a delta run, you can then calculate all remaining periods without overwriting existing calculations.

    For example, you have specified January 2021 to December 2021 as the calculation period. The last successful calculation was for March 2021 and the calculation has failed for April 2021. The delta run will then start calculating footprints for April 2021 and will conclude as described for the full run.

• Calculate footprints for purchased products or manufactured products. For the latter, you are not required to configure mappings to emission factors.

• Navigate to the Monitor Footprints application to view your footprint results.

Mapping enables you to associate product activity data with emission factor by following a well-defined search sequence.

Search sequence determines the order of execution of Mapping Rules there by setting the priority of the search.

The prefilled template contains business data you have already uploaded into the solution through other applications or APIs. The solution "reads" this information and populates the mapping template with all the business data combinations for which you need to maintain emission factors based on the scope you selected in the corresponding calculation template. The only thing left for you to do is enter the Package ID, Source ID, and Dataset Version of the emission factor that best suits a product. Once you enter this information, you can upload the .csv file as per usual and continue with your calculations.

You will be notified of any errors or conflicts with the uploaded mappings.

Note

The order in which you upload mappings is of utmost importance. This is because the first mapping for a product (with all other fields for it in the same template) is always considered for footprint calculations. For example, if you have two emission factors for a product called Cocoa Beans 100, ensure that the more granular mapping information comes before the generic information. Once your mappings are uploaded, you can see the order in which they will be used for footprint calculations in the Rank column.

Since the beginning of May, 2022, Product Footprint Management is now able to calculate the footprints for products that have been manufactured within your own company. With the current version, this includes the emissions related to the materials (purchased goods/ GHG Protocol Scope 3.1) that you have acquired from your suppliers or from other plants within your company.

The footprints for manufactured products are calculated by reusing Cost Estimate Results from SAP Product Cost Planning. For each calculated product (finished or intermediate), a quantity structure is extracted, showing all used materials with their needed qty to produce a defined qty/UoM of a manufactured product. This includes the used BOM and Recipes as defined in the cost calculating source system, and it is planned to include Routing, Cost Center & Activity Types and eventually surcharges as well, to calculate Scope 1 and Scope 2 portions on products’ UoM level. To obtain the required cost estimate data, the Import Data from S/4HANA application can be used to extract different costing variants and versions based on cost estimates from your source system. Further, also a new REST API was developed and published to API Business Hub. All details on the data replication can be found in the SAP Help Portal.

To set up the scope and run the footprint calculation for manufactured products, a new Calculation Template was added to the application, in which you define the plants and the (finished and/ or semifinished) manufactured products that you want to include. Like the Calculation Template for Purchased Products, this is based on the master data that was imported from your connected SAP business system like SAP S/4HANA.

When you now run the calculation, the system is using the replicated costing results to acquire information on the material composition of the manufactured product. For example, you are producing a 1 kg box of cookies, during the calculation run the system is leveraging the costing results to derive the raw materials (cocoa beans, wheat flour, butter, and sugar) and the exact product composition (to simplify, packaging is excluded in this example). As you have run the calculation for your raw materials before, the system also knows and reuses their individual footprints:

• Cocoa Beans: 0,1 kg | 12,2 kg CO2e/kg
• Wheat Flour: 0,2 kg | 1,07 kg CO2e/kg
• Butter: 0,3 kg | 9,3 kg CO2e/kg
• Sugar: 0,4 kg | 0,7 kg CO2e/kg

Finally, the footprint of the manufactured cookie box can be calculated:

0,1 kg x 12,2 kg CO2e/kg + 0,2 kg x 1,07 kg CO2e/kg + 0,3 kg x 9,3 kg CO2e/kg + 0,4 kg x 0,7 kg CO2e/kg = 4,5 kg CO2e