Understanding Capabilities of SAP Sustainability Footprint Management

In this lesson, we'll deep dive into the capabilities of SAP Sustainability footprint Management to understand how it's used to calculate, monitor, and analyse carbon footprints on a product, corporate, and value chain level.

You can divide the capabilities of SAP Sustainability Footprint Management into five major steps along the footprint calculation journey:

• Acquire master and transactional data from your connected business system.
• Combine the acquired data with emission factors to evaluate the environmental impact.
• Based on the environmental impact, the application calculates the sustainability footprints.
• Analyze the calculated footprints in detail.
• Re-integrated the footprints into connected business systems.

Let's deep dive into each of the capabilities of SAP Sustainability Footprint Management.

The following figure depicts the business transactional data entities that are replicated from the connected source system (such as SAP S/4HANA) to be leveraged in the footprint calculation in Sustainability Footprint Management.

Follow the links to read more about the entities Master Data Entities | SAP Help Portal and Business Transaction Entities | SAP Help Portal available for import.

After importing business data from your ERP system, SAP Sustainability Footprint Management helps evaluate the environmental impact of this data by importing and managing emission factors. For importing emission factors to calculate footprints at scale across the entire product inventory, you can use the following datasets:

• Lifecycle Assessment (LCA) Data: You can use industry averages from third-party content providers, upload your own data packages, or use preconfigured data packages (for example, EPA, GLEC) for maximum flexibility and consistency status.

• Supplier dataset: You can use primary data by directly importing footprints from suppliers. You can use the primary data either through an integration with SAP Sustainability Data Exchange (PACT V2) or use direct entry, file upload, and push API.

For mapping imported emission factor datasets, you can use Generative AI for mapping those to the replicated ERP data. This automates the mapping process, minimizing manual effort and enhancing the accuracy of result.

The figure depicts the AI mapping results with the respective similarity score, indicating the quality of the mapping.

SAP Sustainability Footprint Management allows hybrid carbon calculation combining averages and actuals, leveraging verified business, primary and secondary data with flexible calculation methods. You can calculate and monitor footprints according to defined inventory scopes, energy flow models and allocation rules. To calculate and investigate carbon footprints, you can use the following functionalities of SAP Sustainability Footprint Management:

• Manage Footprint Inventory Scopes: You can maintain individual inventory scopes in the system for companies, plants, and value chain to define the organizational boundaries for footprint calculation. It involves listing all data sources and using flexible calculation methods for different GHG categories. This ensures that the footprint calculations are comprehensive and tailored to the specific needs of the organization.

• Model Energy Flows and Allocations: You can use the energy flow model for each energy carrier and resource in your production line or facility. You can then use those models or create custom rules to allocate energy consumption and assign emissions to the manufactured products.

• Calculate Product and Carbon Footprints: You can calculate both corporate and product-specific carbon footprints based on the defined scope. To do so, you can use transactional data to scale the calculations and provide detailed results. This helps organizations in tracking their carbon footprint accurately and making informed decisions to reduce their environmental impact.

• Use Sankey Diagrams: You can use a Sankey Diagram, which is the core tool for investigating emission results. It offers transparency on input factors, such as purchased energy. You can explore various levels of detail, including calculation data and formulas, to understand the carbon footprint emissions.

  

You can analyze calculated footprint in various dashboards to gain full transparency and valuable insights across the company, products, and value chain on a granular level. SAP Sustainability Footprint Management provides the following functionalities for analyzing carbon footprints:

• Dashboards and corporate balance: You can gain full transparency through comprehensive dashboards showcasing hotspots via various breakdowns. You can also drill down to emissions across all Greenhouse Gas (GHG) scopes and the C02 equivalent (CO2e) balance for all inflows and outflows.

  

• Transport routes and emissions: You can visualize and analyze all your inbound and outbound transport routes and legs for respective emissions on various charts and on a world map.

• Analytical APIs: You can incorporate calculated footprints into your preferred analytical application, such as SAP Analytics Cloud or non-SAP solutions via the ODATAV4 API.

  

You can build decarbonization directly into the core business processes by integrating the results into supply chain planning, procurement, and SAP Sustainability portfolio. You can integrate results from SAP Sustainability Footprint Management into the following systems:

• SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition and SAP S/4HANA: You can leverage SAP Sustainability Footprint Management’s integration with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition and SAP S/4HANA for embedding footprint information into business processes. This helps display footprints of Purchase Requisition and Purchase Orders along with financial values. You can also gain insights into the environmental impact of the stocks overseen by the inventory manager.

  

• SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP): You can monitor the emissions of your plants to make them visible in the production plan.

• SAP Sustainability Control Tower: You can integrate the calculated corporate footprints into Sustainability Control Tower for holistic Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) reporting.

• SAP Sustainability Data Exchange: You can share the calculated product footprints with your customers in a standardized, scalable, and PACT aligned way.

You can integrate SAP Sustainability Footprint Management with various SAP and third-party business systems and applications to track your organizations carbon footprints.

SAP Sustainability Footprint Management allows organizations to track their carbon footprints at product and corporate level.

The video provides an overview of how SAP Sustainability Footprint Management uses input data from various source systems and supports organizations to account for their carbon footprints.