Sustainability – Moving toward a green ledger
Making real progress on sustainability requires real data. We're rising to that challenge at SAP Sapphire by introducing the green ledger: ledger-based accounting for carbon, so companies can manage the carbon entering and leaving their systems and balance their "carbon books" the same way they balance their financial books. Together with other innovations we're announcing at SAP Sapphire, including bringing our unparalleled industry expertise to sustainability solutions, SAP is moving enterprises meaningfully toward a more sustainable world.
1. SAP announces solutions to reinvent carbon accounting and lead companies to a green ledger
Fifty years ago, SAP revolutionized financial accounting with enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. Today, SAP is reinventing the "R" in ERP by extending the definition of resources beyond financial and goods flows and offering a precision approach to sustainability by enabling transactional carbon accounting through a green ledger. This enables combined financial and environmental decision-making at different points across the business process. The green ledger offers deep insights by being embedded into RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud and the GROW with SAP solution, with additional capabilities added with every release.
Regulations and pressure from investors, shareholders, and consumers are driving companies to better account for their greenhouse gas emissions. Many companies currently use outdated tools and disconnected processes to account for the emissions in their operations and across their supply chains. Averaged or estimated values, often calculated inconsistently across industries or geographies, are used widely. Companies also find it very difficult to share emissions data with their supply chain partners. Emissions occurring in a company's supply chain, called Scope 3 emissions, are outside the company's direct control but represent up to 90% of a company's carbon footprint.
Sustainability management solutions from SAP help customers replace estimated or average emissions values with actual, verified data, accelerating the move toward a green ledger where bottom-up, audit-ready sustainability values are managed with the same accounting quality as corporate financial data. This is expected to soon be a legal requirement in various jurisdictions, including the European Union.
Enterprises need an accounting system for their emissions data that is as auditable, transparent, and reliable as their financial data. SAP's green ledger initiative lets companies manage sustainable business data bottom-up with actual data on a transactional level rather than using estimates or averages. The data is vital to seeing holistically across the value chain to understand where emissions are occurring, setting accurate net-zero targets, and identifying specific areas for decarbonization impact. With transactional carbon accounting in the green ledger, companies can make granular, accurate, and timely decisions that are financially and environmentally sound.
As part of its initiative to move customers meaningfully toward a green ledger, SAP announces an update to SAP Sustainability Footprint Management, a single solution to calculate and manage the full range of corporate, value chain, and product-level greenhouse gas emissions. Using the SAP Sustainability Footprint Management solution, companies can reduce their climate risk and make progress toward their climate commitments by better adhering and reporting to rapidly changing standards. They can also achieve operational excellence by dramatically improving the speed, accuracy, and efficiency of emissions calculations and management. The solution offers capabilities for manufacturers and product-centric companies, as well as service businesses such as logistics and retail. This update is planned to be available from June 2023.
SAP also announces the SAP Sustainability Data Exchange application, a new solution enabling enterprises to securely exchange standardized sustainability data with partners and suppliers so they can accelerate the decarbonization of their supply chains. SAP Sustainability Data Exchange uses the carbon data interoperability standards established by the Partnership for Carbon Transparency (PACT), hosted by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD). PACT set the first technical specifications for the standardized exchange of carbon emissions data, allowing for different emissions and accounting technology solutions to connect to and effectively share sustainability information. SAP Sustainability Data Exchange also draws on SAP's experience as a founding member of Catena-X and Cofinity-X, the rapidly developing data networks for the automotive industry. The beta version of SAP Sustainability Data Exchange is available now and is planned to be generally available in the third quarter of 2023.
Learn more here.
2. SAP Business Network provides buyers with vendor sustainability and human rights information
Buyers on SAP Business Network, where about $4.5 trillion of goods and services are transacted yearly, can now choose vendors based not only on price and availability but also on human rights records and sustainability ratings.
Suppliers can upload human rights questionnaires to their profiles on SAP Business Network, where buyers can access them. Buyers are automatically notified any time a supplier they are doing business with updates their questionnaire. This feature will save suppliers time and help buyers easily prepare for due diligence processes. It will also shorten supplier onboarding times since a supplier only has to upload the questionnaire once instead of every time they sell to a new buyer.
Sustainability ratings from third parties such as EcoVadis SAS can be shared on a supplier profile on SAP Business Network. If a supplier does not already have a rating, it can request to be rated by EcoVadis through the SAP Store site. Buyers can search for suppliers based on these ratings, enabling them to select suppliers that will have a positive impact on the sustainability of their supply chains. By proactively sharing this information, suppliers can increase trust with buyers by providing visibility into their compliance with environmental, sustainability, and governance (ESG) initiatives.
Learn more here.
3. SAP partners with Planon to deliver sustainable real estate and workplace management solutions
SAP announces a new co-innovation partnership with Planon, a real estate solutions provider supported by Schneider Electric SE. The partnership combines three powerhouses to offer customers an integrated solution for more efficient building management and resource planning by applying data-driven insights to unlock maximum value and increase sustainability across commercial and corporate real estate portfolios.
As a long-time SAP customer, Schneider Electric will provide ongoing industry expertise and practical early adopter influence to deliver enterprise-wide value, including greater compliance and AI-powered business insights and automation. Customers will benefit from smooth data exchange between all departments involved in management, maintenance, and support of real estate facilities, such as finance, purchasing, and accounting. This will help companies operate more sustainably through more efficient procurement and energy use. SAP BTP will serve as the central integration platform for the new solution. SAP BTP simplifies integration of partners' and customers' existing solutions with solutions from SAP, SAP partners and non-SAP vendors.
As a first step, Planon Real Estate for SAP will be offered as an app endorsed by SAP, attesting to its added security features, in-depth testing, and measurements against cloud operations best practices. The app is now available on SAP Store.
Learn more here.
4. SAP Intelligent Agriculture integrates with BayWa's Vista to enable better farming decisions with satellite data
SAP has partnered with satellite data company Vista GmbH to help customers make agricultural production more efficient and sustainable using satellite data–driven crop predictions and optimizations. The integrated solution is available now.
The SAP Intelligent Agriculture solution enables agribusinesses to use a broad set of farming and field data to optimize farming processes and services, increase profitability, and support sustainable farming.
The new integration with Vista – a subsidiary of energy, agriculture, and construction conglomerate BayWa AG – means crop predictions informed by Vista’s powerful proprietary crop growth models can be directly managed in SAP Intelligent Agriculture. This helps avoid data silos, improves transparency and data reusability, and enables better farming decisions.
Learn more here.
5. SAP gives manufacturing customers the power to contribute to the circular economy
SAP gives discrete manufacturers the power to operate more sustainably. A new process, available now, combines Encore by SAP — a solution used to establish a marketplace for secondary material — with previously released SAP solutions for digital manufacturing. The new process aims to change today’s principle of "produce to waste" into "produce to reuse."
The portfolio of solutions is now streamlined to provide customers with an end-to-end process for circular manufacturing. The process hinges on the power of SAP S/4HANA – the central repository for manufacturing data. Now companies can proactively decide to either reuse, re-manufacture, or recycle secondary material, rather than throwing it away by default. Adding these options helps manufacturers move toward more sustainable operations and explore new business models along the way.
Learn more here.
6. SAP Recommerce from SAP Commerce Cloud helps customers fuel business and improve sustainability
Feather by SAP, a solution incubated in SAP.iO Venture Studios, has been integrated with the SAP Commerce Cloud portfolio to provide more sustainable customer experiences across all channels. With the new scaled and integrated solution, now called the SAP Recommerce solution, retailers now can introduce excess, restored, returned, and used products back into the market, creating a circular revenue stream to drive additional growth. It is planned to be generally available in the fourth quarter.
SAP.iO Venture Studio is SAP's incubation program, a startup accelerator for entrepreneurial teams inside SAP. It's designed to turn innovative ideas into profitable businesses and invests in employee-led ventures that are focused on solving some of the biggest problems in enterprise business processes.
Learn more here.