Your organization wants to become more sustainable. There are many pathways to this important goal: you could reduce the carbon footprint of your products, you could reduce waste and drive social responsibility initiatives. Lastly, you might want to report on these measures holistically to regulators, investors, and your customers.
Illustrating the Need for Sustainable Enterprises
Objectives
After completing this lesson, you will be able to:
- Value the green line.
- Analyze the three zero strategy.
- Identify the sustainability solutions from SAP Cloud for Sustainable Enterprises.
Business Introduction: the Need for Sustainable Enterprises
The Green Line of an Enterprise
Position of Sustainability in the Intelligent, Sustainable Enterprise
In our modern world, sustainability is more important than ever. Investors want to know your risk exposure to climate change. Regulators want you to decarbonize your operations. Employees want to know where you stand on social issues. Customers want products to have a minimal carbon footprint, be ethically sourced, and produced without waste. SAP offers solutions and has a strategy for how our software can help you with your sustainability goals.
However, it is a big challenge to transform an already profitable business into a profitable and, moreover, sustainable business. In particular, a large number of companies are employing SAP software, and most of worldwide transactions are coming into contact with SAP systems. SAP recognizes its role as having the chance and responsibility of aiding in the creation of a sustainable future together with our clients by utilizing its digital solutions and technology. This will allow the companies' and, thereby, the planet's limited resources to be managed in the most productive and sustainable manner.
SAP's goal is to support your sustainability needs with new software solutions and by including sustainability capabilities inside existing products.
You can read an article from Thomas Saueressig that explains SAP's sustainability winning plan here.
The Green Line of an Enterprise
Sustainability is not only about carbon neutrality, it is also about the value of our resources and a respectful and ethical cohabitation in our civilization. SAP's customers can rely on an increasing number of products to help them become more sustainable, for example, concerning climate protection, as the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is a major target in our strategy. This goes along with the recycling of equipment. Many industries also insist on extended manufacturer responsibilities. SAP also provides its customers with any assistance needed to obtain the best results with regard to know-how and resources.
Many businesses must manage the green line (Environmental Responsibility) with no dedicated sustainability experts, minimal IT resources, and without losing business momentum. This drives the need for a systematic solution.
As a result, all business interests like efficiency and growth should be in line and optimally balanced with sustainable interests like environmental responsibility. It is also important to understand that the green line is also taken as an essential input factor which gains even more impact over time. Only once will this have been fully accepted, the correct overall decisions can be taken to make the company sustainable.
The Three Zero Strategy
Climate Action - Chasing Zero Emissions:
If you want to minimize the greenhouse gas (GHG) footprint of your products and operations along your value chain, you can use the embedded analytics and transactional capabilities in SAP enterprise applications. There are a lot of capabilities inside SAP products, and in addition, we offer solutions to support your enterprise along the way. For example, SAP offers the following solutions:
- SAP Product Footprint Management
- Evaluate the performance of your products against a wide variety of environmental footprint categories.
- SAP Environment, Health, and Safety Management
- Identify, analyze, respond, and recover from environment, health, and safety risks before they impact your employees and customers.
- SAP E-Mobility
- Drive sustainable, convenient mobility by enabling scenarios, such as remote charge point operations, e-fleet management, and charge point asset management on one cloud platform.
- TripIt by SAP Concur
- See the carbon emissions for your flights. Track your annual flight emissions.
Circular Economy - Chasing Zero Waste
Optimize the value of your business by building long-term resilience with less waste, creating business and economic opportunities, and improving the environment and people's lives society-wide. You can use a bunch of capabilities already included in products or use standalone solutions like:
- SAP Responsible Design and Production
- This solution will help businesses keep track of public commitments and new regulations.
- SAP Rural Sourcing Management
- Empower your agribusiness company to recycle more by connecting smallholder farmers to your agriculture supply chain.
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud for product compliance
- Safeguard your revenue and brand reputation by innovating and delivering products that give more value than they take.
- SAP Intelligent Returns Management
- Drive carbon-friendly return options and reduce the amount of waste that ends up in landfill.
Social Responsibility - Chasing Zero Inequality
Integrate ethical and environmentally responsible practices into a competitive and successful model with SAP solutions like:
- SAP Business Integrity Screening
- Mitigate fraud risk and safeguard business continuity by identifying anomalous activity quickly.
- SAP Qualtrics Employee Technology Experience
- Accelerate the impact of diversity, equity, and inclusion by gaining real-time insights.
- SAP SuccessFactors Human Experience Management Suite
- Gain insights on compliance and ethics by using aggregated analysis and reporting of HR data.
SAP Cloud for Sustainable Enterprises
To ensure your enterprise acts sustainably, you need to build up the foundation of an intelligent, sustainable enterprise. The underlying components which you should already know from the previous chapters are: SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP Analytics Cloud, and more.
SAP Cloud for Sustainable Enterprises contains software solutions that are integrated and can talk to each other enriched with special capabilities for sustainability topics. It offers functionalities to be more responsible with the resources we use, or by managing the carbon emissions of products and companies.
It is obvious in the field of sustainability that no one company can fix the big problems on their own. Companies need to work in groups to tackle problems – in other words, a network of intelligent, sustainable enterprises which are connected and integrated.
For achieving this, the SAP Cloud for Sustainable Enterprise consists of solutions such as:
- SAP Sustainability Control Tower
- Steer sustainability performance by creating business models that align profitability with sustainability.
- SAP Environment, Health, and Safety Management
Operate safely by proactively identifying, analyzing, and mitigating risks. With the SAP EHS Management application, you can stay compliant and reduce environmental impact.
Learn more about SAP Environment, Health, and Safety Management in our learning journey.
- SAP S/4HANA for product compliance
Enforce compliance at each step of the product lifecycle with our product compliance software. With SAP S/4HANA for product compliance, you can manage regulatory and sustainability requirements, track registrations and substance volumes, classify products, and create compliance documents, as well as package, transport, and store hazardous materials properly with accurate labeling.
Learn more about SAP S/4HANA for product compliance.
To have a good overview about your financial and your sustainability goals, you need to have a transparent holistic steering and reporting.
Move beyond financial measures to evaluate the consequences of business actions on society, the environment, and the wider economy - adding a green and social dimension to finance reporting. You need to extend transparency across financial, operational, compliance, environmental, and social parameters.
Learn More
Learn more about SAP Cloud for Sustainable Enterprises.
Key Takeaways Of This Lesson
The idea is to add a green line for environmental responsibility next to your bottom line for operational efficiency and the top line for growth and adaptability. The goal is to keep these three lines in an optimal balance. SAP offers features inside of already existing SAP solutions that can track or optimize your sustainability goals. On top of that SAP offers the SAP Cloud for Sustainable Enterprises with even more capabilities.
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