Sustainability at SAP
The sustainability, health and well-being, and the corporate sustainability report enables SAP to focus on SAP's mission to help the world run better and improve people's lives. This is the guiding principle to our business strategy. In particular, this applies to our sustainability, health, and corporate social responsibility portfolio. We believe that social, environmental, economic activities, and performance are interrelated, with each one impacting the others. Our efforts focus on creating a sustainable future for SAP, our customers, and society. For us, it's crucial to be a responsible business that intelligently strives to balance people, planet, and profit.
SAP acts as both an enabler and an exemplar to create positive economic, social, and environmental impact within planetary boundaries. As an enabler, SAP provides products and services that meet the purpose and sustainability challenges and opportunities of our customers. As an exemplar, SAP is leading by example in our own sustainable business operations and practices.
SAP's Enabler Strategy for Sustainability
Climate and Natural Capital Accounting
Building true cost values into end-to-end management of enterprises and across business networks.
Resource Efficiency, Tracking, and Reuse
Building resilience and circularity principles into supply chain, material flows, markets and resource consumption.
Protecting People, Communities, and Societies
Ensuring continuous improvement in safe equitable and compliant businesses, within the company and across the value chain.
Next-Gen Sustainability Performance Management
Merging financial and nonfinancial data to understand sustainability impact and enabling holistic sustainability reporting while supporting sustainable business decisions.
SAP Cloud for Sustainable Enterprises
The Design Philosophy
The design philosophy of SAP in the area of EHS is to connect the groups of field operations in the preceding image, EHS practitioners, and the corporate level.
SAP supports these groups within the customers' organizations by providing tools and processes that are highly integrated. The information is accessible in real time from bottom to top and conversely.
EHS Solution Portfolio
Incident Management
To fulfill your EHS requirements on a regional and global scale, use the EHS Incident Management component to report, review, and complete incidents, safety observations, and near misses. This solution provides various methods for reporting the data. After initial reporting, you can collect additional information from the people involved, investigate why an incident (also near miss and safety observation) occurred, and track the financial impact on the organization and its assets. You can also assess risk, report data to internal and external stakeholders to fulfill legal, regulatory, and company reporting responsibilities, and analyze aggregated incident data.
Management of Change
Management of change solution provides a system to execute and monitor change effectively within an organization so it does not lead to unknown or uncontrolled operational risk.
Health and Safety Management
You use the EHS Health and Safety Management component to assess risk within your organization as it relates to the environment or health and safety of people. This enables you to comply with regulations and gain a comprehensive insight into the situations that involve risk. This component supports you in identifying, analyzing, evaluating, and managing risks. You can take the appropriate actions necessary to reduce risk to acceptable levels and prevent any harmful effects to the health and safety of your employees and the environment. You can also perform job hazard analyses to assess risk for a specific job or activity.
To ensure safe handling of chemicals within your company, you can use this component to enter relevant information for chemicals and use the information to assess risk for chemicals. Also, you can create documents, such as safety instructions, that are used to inform employees about all health, safety, and personal protection relevant aspects of the chemicals they use. This ensures regulatory compliance and protects the health and safety of workers that handle chemicals.
This component helps you to reduce the cost of risk management by supporting and automating administrative tasks and processes. This increases the efficiency of the people responsible for health and safety management and the reliability and cost-efficiency of implementing controls.
Occupational Health
The SAP EHS Management for SAP S/4HANA, occupational health application supports general employee occupational healthcare in your enterprise, and supports the planning and execution of special health surveillance protocols.
Special surveillance is required for anyone who may be exposed to chemical, physical, or biological influences in their workplace, or who perform activities that pose a health hazard. Health surveillance protocols can also include vaccinations or–as in the United States–random drug tests.
*The Occupational Health application is delivered as Repeatable Customer Solution (RCS) on SAP S/4HANA.
Environmental Management
The environment management application component helps companies to stay compliant with emissions-related environmental regulations. The solution covers the processes and sub-processes of managing compliance scenario activities to ensure compliance. These processes enable you to create and incorporate a strategy of managing environmentally related data from data collection, sampling, calculation, and aggregation of emissions into the daily operations within your companies.
Solution Portfolio - Value Drivers
Incident Management value drivers
- The recording of actual incident data supports customers in achieving their main goal of reduction of incident rates.
- A proactive safety culture is one that closely tracks, analyzes, and learns from the (theoretically) large number of unsafe conditions and near misses that occur during operation. It uses that insight to take action with the goal of reducing the chances for major incidents.
Health and Safety value drivers
- More efficient chemical data management by controlling chemicals on site and keeping track of them in chemical inventories.
- Eduction of operational risk.
- Minimization of workplace exposures.
- Initiating protocol-driven medical services.
- Integrated corrective and preventive action tracking (CAPA).
Environment management value drivers
- Ensure that the company is compliant.
- Minimize emissions.
Management of change value drivers
- Support in monitoring, implementing, and reporting changes.
- Reduce risks from the planned changes.
Incident Management
The EHS Incident Management solution aims to provide a centralized approach to track all types of incidents, and drive a consistent process for incident entry, investigation, and corrective actions.
The solution provides the following capabilities:
- Multiple options for incident data entry, including mobile and offline entry.
- Record injury/illness log entry log and create an incident from it.
- Direct integration with SAP S/4HANA processes.
- Workflow-driven notifications, investigation steps, and corrective actions.
- Real-time analytical reports and dashboard views.
- Real-time incident rate calculations.
Customers can benefit from:
- Analyzing a central database of all types of events and reduce incident rates and severity.
- Increased visibility and automation of tasks and corrective actions.
- Reduced time for processing incidents and regulatory reporting.
- Valuable process integration within EHS and other SAP applications.
Health and Safety
The EHS Health and Safety solution enables an end-to-end process for identifying and handling all types of hazards to the well-being of the workforce.
The solution provides the following capabilities:
- Manage the entire lifecycle of all identified hazards and risks in the workplace from mobile-enabled hazard identification to multiple types of risk analysis methods.
- System validation between hazards, impacts, and controls.
- Chemical approval process with vendor safety data sheet data management and real-time inventory reporting. For example, SARA 312.
- Real-time analytical reporting and dashboard views.
- Industrial hygiene monitoring by planning and carrying out workplace sample campaigns and related measurements.
Customers can benefit from the following:
- Standardized approach to managing operational risks.
- Reduced workplace exposures and related health impacts.
- Increased visibility and automation of risk mitigation strategy and tasks.
- Valuable process integration within EHS and other SAP applications.
Occupational Health
The EHS Occupational Health solution provides a repository to track the occupational health history of employees, and drive a risk-based occupational health process with integration back to central HR data.
The solution provides the following capabilities:
- Define health surveillance protocols including laboratory and physical tests and questionnaires.
- Assign protocols to individuals, manually or automatically, based on the work area and hazards to which they 're exposed.
- Schedule appointments and send documentation or questionnaires to the patient.
- Enable ad-hoc consultations.
- Capture examination results, diagnoses, follow up events, and work restrictions in the central patient record.
Customers can benefit from the following:
- A central list of health surveillance protocols to drive the scheduling of medical services and testing for the appropriate personnel.
- Visibility to the identified risks that require medical monitoring.
Environment Management
The EHS Environment Management solution establishes a transparent business process that ensures and demonstrates compliance for all EHS requirements within the enterprise.
The solution provides the following capabilities:
- A central repository for all compliance requirements from enterprise level down to specific equipment including regulatory, permit-driven, and internal policies
- The ability to detect and track compliance deviations through a lifecycle of investigation, causal analysis, and corrective actions.
- Task calendar and task monitor applications.
- A calculator for GHG and other air or water emissions to fulfill legal and reporting requirements.
- An interface for specific providers of regulatory content.
Customers can benefit from:
- A reduced risk of noncompliance and penalties.
- A reduced effort to calculate emission totals..
- The continuity of license to operate.
- Improved calculation accuracy and transparency.
Management of Change
The Management of Change solution provides a system to apply and monitor changes effectively within an organization, so that it doesn't lead to unknown or uncontrolled operational risks.
The solution provides the following capabilities:
- Easy-to-use change request screen for field users.
- Highly configurable, process-based on a business rules engine.
- Adaptable to any type of change: PSM, PHA, PSSR, procedural, what-if, and so on.
- Pulling in expert input to evaluate change and drive risk assessments.
- Tracking of all activities and tasks to ensure that the approved change is completed properly.
- Closed-loop integration with core ERP to reduce data entry, ensure accuracy.
Customers can benefit from:
- Implementing operational changes with full confidence that potential risks have been assessed and controlled.
- Rationalizing and automating management-of-change processes to reduce manual effort, wasted time, and errors.
EHS Reporting and Analytics - Solution Scope
SAP provides analytical tools to support the connectivity from the shop floor to the top floor. The SAP EHS Analytics solutions consider the level of detail that the target groups require and supports them in their daily business activities.
SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Digital Boardroom provides the big picture to the corporate team. However, the EHS practitioner is more interested in more detailed reporting capabilities. That’s where the Analysis Path Framework and Smart Business dashboards enable them to do detailed and individual analysis.
The Value Proposition of SAP for SAP Sustainability Management
SAP's value proposition for Sustainability Management is as follows:
- A suite of holistic sustainability solutions helping organizations in their journey towards becoming a sustainable enterprise.
- Sustainability Management enables organizations to assess and reduce their carbon footprint, increase resource productivity through circular processes, and run safer, sustainable business processes.
- Sustainability Management provides industry-specific insights that combine operational and financial data across value chains, embedded in core business processes.
The Value Proposition of the SAP EHS Solution Suite
Chances are, that companies consider environment, health and safety processes a cost driver or simply run these processes on outdated systems, with small budgets, and a lot of manual processes. Often, EHS is separated from the main enterprise processes and isn’t part of the digital transformation that’s sweeping through most companies today. In addition, the institutional knowledge of the management system and how the processes run isn't codified and maintained in any way within the systems being used.
In contrast, the modular but unified platform provided by SAP makes the EHS process more present within an enterprise while reducing risk and driving intelligent processes. This way, it can be at the forefront of digital transformation instead of being left behind on a nonintegrated island.
The Journey Towards Business Value with SAP EHS
Looking at the first level, it’s about managing EHS on an island. Processes are managed, but the standard business processes live isolated from EHS on its own and often. Usually, the value of EHS to the company obviously isn't that high.
The next step is to bring the EHS processes into context. The context could be personnel data, but also other enterprise information merging it with data that is already available. That enriches the value that EHS brings to the company.
And the next step isn’t just looking at the EHS data and embedding it in the data from other sources, but having a deep dive into the processes. Already having safety and environmental aspects as part of the ongoing day-to-day operations and contributing to them is key.
The next step is to generate this data. To understand what's happening, we can then use data from the people on the shop floor by using sensors as an information source. From this understanding, we can do simulations, modeling, predict what can happen, and even go into what-ifs and other simulations.
So, if any kind of parameter in the safety operations changes, how could the final performance be affected?
The final target is creating an awareness of having an embedded application, which supports companies in learning continuously, getting automated insights, analyzing those insights, and feeding it back into the processes.
There are three aspects that are key here:
- Establishing situational awareness for the workforce.
- Having autonomy of the system, of the processes where possible.
- Having EHS as a kind of ubiquitous dimension in all kinds of the operations, the processes, and in the company.
Stakeholder Benefits
Corporate focuses on:
- Real-time situational awareness at all levels within the enterprise.
- Reduced risk of non-compliance.
- Visibility and quicker reaction to employee-related issues.
- Empowerment to drive a proactive safety culture across the top levels of the enterprise.
- Improved ability to drive decisions and actions through the enterprise based on insights gained from the system.
EHS Practitioner requires:
- Reduced effort and cost related to OSHA reporting, chemical inventory reporting, compliance assurance, emissions calculations, and so on.
- Real-time analytical reporting across all processes.
- Direct integration to the sources of truth for equipment, locations, people, and chemicals.
- An easier way to track all compliance, corrective, and preventative actions at both the site and enterprise levels.
Operations seek:
- A safer workplace where all risks, hazards, and exposures are known and addressed.
- Safety information always up to date and received automatically.
- Empowerment to drive a proactive safety culture at the shop floor.
- Empowerment to initiate processes such as incident tracking and management of change based on role-based authorizations.
- Consistent workflow and task tracking functionality from all processes - operators only need to learn one system.
The Value of True Integration
Process
- Handoffs and triggers that occur in your real-life business processes can be driven by the system with no drops in communication or responsibility.
- Process improvement is not only enabled by the system, but the system becomes a source of new ideas and innovation.
Data
- Provides context not achievable by point solutions.
- Data entry at all levels is quicker and less error-prone.
- Processes run on a consistent source of truth.
- EHS department does not need to deal with maintaining enterprise data.
Reporting
- Consistent user-interfaces across multiple parts of SAP.
- No need to maintain separate interfaces to other reporting tools.
- Leverage central SAP data hierarchies as a source of truth like Plant, Functional Locations, Cost Centers, and Org Structure to enable both roll-up and drill-down reporting in real time.
- Consistent security paradigm between process data and reporting logic.
- Gain additional insight with ability to pull data from disparate processes within the SAP landscape.
Key Takeaways
SAP supports your EHS management system, so you can take a holistic approach to managing safe operations. The end-to-end process supports key business processes that create an effective safety culture by engaging all employees in safety and by providing risk-based safety information. With the proactive approach of identifying and controlling risks, you can reduce the likelihood and severity of incidents. Visibility into risks from top floor to shop floor reduces risks and enable continuous improvement in safety performance.