The journey towards sustainability is fraught with numerous challenges that organizations must navigate. To effectively manage and overcome these challenges, companies need robust tools and systems. One such essential tool is the SAP Sustainability Control Tower, a core component of SAP Cloud for Sustainable Enterprises solutions. This lesson explores the necessity for, and benefits of, the SAP Sustainability Control Tower in addressing sustainability challenges.
Challenges in the Sustainability Journey:
- Data Collection and Quality:
- Challenge: The issue here is the collection of all necessary Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) data. This data is often scattered across various systems, making it difficult to consolidate.
- Current State: The process is primarily manual and can be time-consuming, often leading to issues with the quality of the data.
- Evolving ESG Frameworks:
ESG stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance. This term describes standards that socially conscious investors use to evaluate a company's operations. Investors consider these three factors to assess a company's sustainability and ethical impact.
Challenge: The number of ESG frameworks and standards exceeds 600, and they're constantly changing. Staying compliant requires businesses to keep up with these changes.
- Effort Required: It takes a great deal of effort and resources to stay up to date with these changing requirements.
- Disjointed Sustainability Actions:
- Challenge: Despite initiating sustainability actions, these efforts are often disconnected from the overall strategy and don't cover all business processes within many companies.
- Effort required: It becomes increasingly difficult to track these disjointed initiatives.
SAP's Approach to Sustainability
At SAP, we believe that data and process-enabled technology, which forms the backbone of modern business operations, has the potential to address sustainability challenges at the necessary scope, speed, and scale. Our SAP Cloud for Sustainable Enterprises solutions, particularly the SAP Sustainability Control Tower, are designed to help businesses navigate their sustainability journey effectively.
The Role of SAP Sustainability Control Tower
The SAP Sustainability Control Tower is a comprehensive solution that enables holistic steering and reporting of sustainability efforts. It applies the SAP Business Technology Platform and core applications, integrating with existing systems to provide unique and effective sustainability solutions.
- Automated, Auditable, Compliant Reporting:
- Feature: The SAP Sustainability Control Tower provides automated and auditable reporting with real data and insights that incorporate sustainability into business operations.
- Benefit: This feature allows companies to record actual ESG factors through integration with SAP systems, thereby speeding up the time to value and facilitating granular data visibility based on actual data as opposed to averages.
- Audit-Ready ESG Metrics:
- Feature: The solution offers audit-ready ESG metrics that are compliant with regulatory standards, and covers conventional frameworks. This is achieved by developing an open and extensible solution that encompasses the largest ESG ecosystem.
- Benefit: This feature enables companies to efficiently and accurately report ESG metrics that are compliant with regulatory standards.
- ESG Embedded in Business Processes:
- Feature: The SAP Sustainability Control Tower allows companies to plan their future using insights, forecasts, and target setting. Additionally, it helps in tracking initiatives and optimizing business processes for maximum impact.
- Benefit: This feature ensures that sustainability efforts are embedded into the core business processes, resulting in more effective and impactful sustainability actions.
Conclusion
The SAP Sustainability Control Tower is an essential tool for companies on their sustainability journey. By providing automated, auditable, and compliant reporting, audit-ready ESG metrics, and embedding ESG into business processes, the SAP Sustainability Control Tower helps companies overcome the challenges they face in achieving their sustainability goals. Using SAP's robust technology platform and extensive ecosystem, businesses can drive meaningful change and progress towards their net-zero ambitions.