SAP has made it clear in the SAPPHIRENOW 2021 event that Sustainability will continue to be the focal point of discussion in almost all SAP product strategies. During the event the SAP leadership has mentioned “Sustainability is a key driver to enter the next phase of digital transformation, and SAP is in a unique position to help SAP customers become more sustainable.” And that “Sustainability is not an option now; it has become a necessity”.

In 2020, SAP had announced the Climate 21 program to support customers in pursuing their climate-related objectives. In a multiyear road map, SAP planned to co-innovate to embed sustainability metrics across SAP’s solution portfolio, to help customers analyze and optimize the carbon footprint of their products and operations along the value chain. E.g. SAP Product Carbon Footprint Analytics application uses data from SAP S/4HANA and processes within the SAP Analytics Cloud solution. SAP’s sustainability activities and programs are aimed at creating positive economic, environmental, and social impact. In light of the aggravating climate change impacts and other intensifying global challenges, climate action has been put at the top of SAP’s corporate sustainability agenda.

Sustainable Development Goals by SAP:

• SAP aims to helping clients re-engineer solutions to fuel innovation, foster equality, and spread opportunity across borders and cultures. SAP is positioning to create a lasting positive impact for future generations.
• By integrating sustainability data with business processes across industries and value chains to drive performance, new products, and new markets, customers can have a significant impact in this area.
• SAP’s focus is on climate and natural capital accounting; resource efficiency, tracking, and reuse; protecting and developing people and communities; and next-generation sustainability steering and reporting.

So, let’s have a look at the solutions / offerings introduced:

SAP’s sustainability management solutions help their customers minimize carbon footprints, reduce waste through responsible supply chain management, and enable diversity across all business practices. Embedding sustainability as a new dimension of success into analytical and transactional applications will help optimize resources across value chains. SAP Product Footprint Management delivers carbon emission insights for a company’s products by plant, profit center, or cost center. Based on SAP S/4HANA, SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Cloud Platform, the application delivers transparency on the carbon emissions of a product across the entire value chain, including production, raw materials, energy use, and transport.

With the SAP Responsible Design and Production solution, the company enables compliance reporting for sustainability management for global organizations. As with other compliance reports, sustainability reports are enabled using SAP solutions for advanced compliance reporting. These sustainability reports complement SAP’s existing, ready-to-use legal reports across domains such as taxation, audit, and financial statements for over 51 countries.

Circular Economy: With SAP Responsible Design and Production, planned for availability in the fourth quarter of 2021, SAP aims to further their vision for a plastic-free ocean by 2030. By preventing waste and pollution, using products and materials for longer, and applying circular principles, we can regenerate natural systems and make better use of finite resources. Successful execution on circularity will bring the upstream visibility for sustainable inputs together with downstream visibility, thus enabling reverse logistics and product authentication, promoting reuse across the product’s life cycle.

In 2021, SAP has joined the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) as an innovation partner in WBCSD’s Value Chain Carbon Transparency Pathfinder. The initiative is dedicated to enhancing transparency in corporate carbon emissions with the objective to ultimately decarbonize supply chains. SAP along with Accenture’s Sustainability Services are creating new solutions that can empower companies to fully de-carbonizing their supply chains. Accenture and SAP plan to co-innovate and co-develop SAP’s new solution for responsible production and design, to embed sustainability metrics across their value and supply chains with a focus on product design and manufacturing.

Startups partnerships in this area: SAP.iO Foundries at Berlin and Munich have initiated a Sustainable Accelerator cohort in March 2021 that will focus on supporting B2B technology startups across the world with deep expertise in the areas of carbon tracking and trading, resource efficiency, climate risk tracking and mitigation, and circular economy. SAP Customers are increasingly trying to enable sustainable agendas across their business value chains. Startups like Astraea, Changers.com, Breeze Technologies, Carbon Minds, Circular IQ, Emitwise, Footprint Technologies, Lizee and others have been a part of this sustainable future cohort.

SAP’s vision is to enable their customers to transform their businesses into Intelligent sustainably and in order to achieve that we need to optimize all aspects of the business processes and the value chain. The goal with Circular Economy is to adopt an integrated approach and to successfully reduce emissions across sectors, as it is an essential component to achieving climate neutrality. At the SAP Sustainability Summit in June 2021, SAP launched their suite of solutions called Sustainability management by SAP and with this SAP aims to enable organizations to assess and reduce their carbon footprint, increase resource productivity through circular processes, and run safer, sustainable business processes.

References:

https://news.sap.com/2021/06/sapphire-now-sustainability-management-by-sap/

https://sapvideoa35699dc5.hana.ondemand.com/?entry_id=1_lkxbdrzc

https://www.sap.com/about/company/purpose-and-sustainability/reporting-and-policies.html

https://www.sap.com/india/products/sustainability.html#climate-action

https://sap.io/sustainablefuture/

https://news.sap.com/2021/03/sapio-sustainable-future-cohort-accenture/