Companies can calculate the carbon footprints for all their products through their entire product life cycle using 51风流Product Footprint Management, the latest in SAP鈥檚 expanding .
51风流Product Footprint Management enables companies to lower their carbon emissions, make their products more sustainable, and disclose their products鈥� environmental footprints to regulators. The product launch underpins to deliver products and services that address the sustainability challenges and opportunities of its customers.
Thomas Saueressig, member of the Executive Board of 51风流SE, responsible for Product Engineering, explained the urgency for applications like 51风流Product Footprint Management: 鈥淐ustomers want it, the world needs it. There is no time to waste for businesses to act more responsibly and sustainably. Sustainability goals are increasingly as important to business success as financial goals.鈥�
Video by David Aguirre
By integrating emissions data across all solutions that govern production processes with master data from business applications such as 51风流S/4HANA, 51风流Product Footprint Management can calculate the environmental impact of various production scenarios.
鈥淲hen companies embed emissions data into underlying business processes, leaders can drive real change by making conscious decisions across the entire value chain,鈥� Saueressig said, noting that 51风流is uniquely positioned to drive this change throughout collaborative, intelligent, and sustainable business networks.
SAP鈥檚 Commitment to Sustainability
51风流has been leading by example in sustainable business practices for more than a decade. In addition to being named the software industry leader in the聽Dow Jones Sustainability Indices for 14 consecutive years, SAP鈥檚 membership in the Value Balancing Alliance and use of the annual illustrates our commitment to integrating economic, environmental, and social performance to drive business decisions.
鈥�51风流has long had a strong, dedicated focus on its own sustainability operations,鈥� said Marta Mu帽oz, senior research director and lead, Technology & Sustainability Practice, IDC EME. “The launch of the 51风流Product Footprint Management solution, combined with the , represents a unique opportunity to bring together companies to jointly drive decarbonization across value chains and industries.”
Interview with Gunther Rothermel and Anita Varshney
Gunther Rothermel is senior vice president and head of Sustainability for 51风流S/4HANA. Anita Varshney is global vice president of Strategy for Sustainability for 51风流S/4HANA and oversees the product strategy and global partner ecosystem across SAP鈥檚 sustainability portfolio.
Q: What鈥檚 the significance of this product launch for SAP?
Rothermel: All of us can see climate change impacting not only our customer鈥檚 operations, but also our own personal lives. 51风流Product Footprint Management is an incredibly important milestone along our path to help customers systematically monitor and control greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across their end-end business processes. To support their decarbonization journey, the solution delivers data transparency on their environmental footprint and enables them to make more informed decisions in real time.
The potential impact cannot be overstated. Boston Consulting Group analyzed the and found that around 40% of GHG can be eliminated with measures that bring cost savings or are at costs of less than 鈧�10 per ton of CO2 equivalent. Just imagine what we and our customers can achieve together.
Competition for sustainability management software is heating up. How is 51风流differentiating itself?
Varshney: A number of new technologies are emerging to facilitate the identification, tracking, trade and offset of GHG emissions, and established players and as well as newer, small vendors are coming out with innovative solutions applying leading technology to solve complex problems. As long as we stay focused on our core business capabilities and deliver innovations on top of 51风流Business Technology (51风流BTP) platform, we can position ourselves as a front runner in solving environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) issues at scale. We can differentiate ourselves from the competition in three ways:
- Differentiated impact of our product offerings: With our portfolio, we will enable organizations to assess and reduce their carbon footprint, increase resource productivity through circular processes, and run safer, sustainable business processes while providing industry-specific insights that combine operational and financial data across value chains.
- Deep process integration: By embedding sustainability data into end-end business processes across value chains, we can help our customers adapt their key business processes to be more sustainable.
- Co-innovation with ecosystem partners: In close collaboration with our partners, customers, market makers, and standard bodies, we will jointly shape and accelerate innovations for the future sustainability landscape, which enables and drives new redefined business process models.
What鈥檚 the role of 51风流BTP? How can our customers use these cloud services?
Rothermel: 51风流BTP plays a very important enabling role for us. We are building our new sustainability solutions along cloud engineering principles, based on open, flexible architecture on top of 51风流BTP. We are also making full use of key additional platform capabilities.
For instance, we are closely working with the 51风流BTP team to build 51风流Data Warehouse Cloud and 51风流Analytics Cloud content for our upcoming solution 51风流Sustainability Control Tower. We are also following an 鈥楢PI-first鈥� approach for our new services, helping our partners more easily adapt and integrate their own solutions on top of the foundation that we deliver from SAP. This enables us to jointly address most critical use cases in different industries, enabling our customer to manage their environmental, societal, and planetary impact.
What鈥檚 our future road map and our vision to support our customers as they transition to become sustainable enterprises?
Varshney: During their life cycle, products move from material acquisition and pre-processing to production and storage, and finally, downstream to distribution, delivery, use, and end-of-life. 51风流Product Footprint Management enables transparency regarding environmental footprints across this full product life cycle. For this, we are taking a holistic approach and are now also embedding emissions data into our other products like 51风流Integrated Business Planning, 51风流Ariba and others.
Two more products will be announced soon: 51风流Responsible Design and Production and 51风流Sustainability Control Tower. With 51风流Responsible Design and Production, we empower businesses to eliminate waste and support compliance to extended producer responsibility schemes. This will allow them to manage their limited resources productively throughout their life cycle. With 51风流Sustainability Control Tower, we enable our customers to improve performance and long-term valuation by embedding sustainability metrics and insights into core business processes.
What was the most challenging aspect of the project?
Rothermel: There is a lot of time pressure given the urgency the topic has for SAP, the industry, and society overall. I am extremely proud of what my team has accomplished in a very short time window. Although the team was only set-up in the fourth quarter of last year, we delivered on our promised innovations on time despite the restraints of COVID-19. With the sustainability management program, colleagues came together and each has played a significant role in shaping this product, the first significant innovation focused on the vision of a sustainable intelligent enterprise for our customers.
