Managing Source Data

For organizations, corporate climate steering and reporting is the core of their carbon management strategy, ensuring that all actions and data are aligned and reported accurately.

The organizations measure their carbon footprint using a baseline toolkit that includes carbon calculators, emission factor (EF) library, greenhouse gas (GHG) forms, and ERP business data.

Organizations can calculate both corporate footprints and product footprints. The focus of this training is on calculating corporate carbon footprints for scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions.

The corporate footprint calculation considers an end-to-end setup and flow, including master data and transactional data imports from the ERP systems. It also encompasses the footprint inventory scope, primary and secondary emission factors and mappings, energy flow models, allocations, and more.

As a reporting organization, you begin the process of corporate carbon management by uploading the master data. This involves defining the organizational boundaries, which include all the companies and locations that will be part of the sustainability footprint management process.

Next, you define the scope of the analysis by setting the operational boundaries, which determine the extent of the operations to be included. You also choose the manual business activity form to specify the activities that will be tracked and analyzed.

After defining the scope, you upload the emission factor to calculate the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. You can either upload new packages or reuse existing ones, such as the US United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) emission factor package.

Then, create business activity scopes for all relevant locations. This includes defining specific scopes per the GHG protocol which categorize different types of emissions and activities.

After that decide on the calculation method by using either an activity-based approach or a spend-based approach.

The activity-based approach uses the emission factors based on the fuel combustion source. Choose the base unit of measure (UoM) for the fuel consumed, either mass or volume, to standardize the data.

If you are using the spend-based approach via the fallback spend proxies to estimate fuel consumption, convert the fuel spend rate from your local currency (USD, EURO, and so on) to mass or volume. This step ensures that the fuel consumption data is in a consistent unit of measure for accurate calculations.

Post that, begin the GHG data collection process. Identify and mark the relevant locations for data collection, and note the locations that can be skipped for the period. This ensures a focused data collection.

Then, record the GHG data for each location. Enter the fuel consumption quantities for Scope 1.1 and 1.2, or use the total spend as a fallback to estimate the fuel used for combustion.

Finally, review and release the results of the calculations. Convert the data into CO2 equivalents to standardize the emissions data. This step provides a clear and consistent measure of the organization's carbon footprint.

By following these steps, you can effectively manage and analyze your organization's carbon footprint using SAP Sustainability Footprint Management.

Now that you have seen the overall process the organizations follow to analyze their GHG emissions, let's learn each of the process steps in detail. This lesson focuses on the first three steps of the overall process.

AlmikaSoft is a midsize enterprise based in Berlin. It's renowned for its AI-based software solutions. AlmikaSoft has branches in Miami and Tokyo, and the company generates €450 million in annual revenue and serves clients globally.

The company is committed to sustainability across all facets of its operations, including office space, furniture, business travel, and company vehicles.

In this training, we'll focus on the Miami plant of the company which is at the early stages of its sustainability journey with limited primary data. Therefore, to cover all relevant GHG scope categories, the plant uses business activities capability of the application.

Let's learn how AlmikaSoft’s Miami plant manages its source data using SAP Sustainability Footprint Management.

The master data is the basis for calculating your corporate and product footprints. When you need essential information about your supply chain and production activities, you can import the master data from your source systems. You can use the Import Master Data app to import the master data from an integrated source system into SAP Sustainability Footprint Management.

The Import Master Data app allows you to check the consistency of the imported master data and delete the unreferenced master data records.

SAP Sustainability Footprint Management provides default entries for certain master data entities, such as regions, countries, currencies, units of measure, and waste treatment methods.

The video shows the steps to import master data.

For more details on deleting unreferenced master data records, read Deleting Unreferenced Records | SAP Help Portal.

You can calculate emissions for any GHG category by manually entering the data using the new form-based approach. The new approach enables you to analyze waste emissions at a higher level of granularity, such as by waste type, company, and period.

You can access the forms from the collection in the Manage GHG Data Collections app or from the Record GHG Data app.

Emission factors are an important part of the emission calculation. You can upload the emission factors in the system using the following approaches and databases:

• SAP delivers emission factors data published by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
• Emission factors from external databases such as Ecoinvent. This database must be licensed and can then be imported into the system.
• You can enter the emission factors manually; however, you should create catalogs to use those emission as a reference. This approach allows for easier review of emissions and helps to minimize errors.

You can select the Manage Emission Factors tile to view the emission factor databases that have been uploaded into the system. The EPA databases are available for your reference at no additional cost within the application.

The video shows steps to manage emission factors.

In the next lesson, we'll demonstrate the step-by-step process of calculating an organization's carbon footprint using emissions data. We'll also analyze the results of the calculations to track the highest emissions in the value chain.