51��Product Footprint Management Archives - 51��Africa News Center

51��Closes Gap Between Sustainability and Profitability with Solutions for Africa

51��News — Thu, 09 Jun 2022 06:32:03 +0000

On Friday 03 June, 51��introduced its Sustainability Solution Strategy for customers on the African continent at an event in Johannesburg. According to 51��Africa Chief Operating Officer Tracy Bolton, companies can choose to focus on sustainability as a key strategy – creating additional business value, transforming their business by creating new products, services and solutions that reach additional customers, markets and segments.

“In essence, sustainability is a resource management issue, and 51��has specialised in helping companies optimise their resources for more than half a century,” says Bolton. “The challenge is to make sustainability profitable, and to make profitability sustainable. Technology provides companies with the opportunity to leverage technology and bring transparency to their operations through improved measurement of Environmental, Social and Governance KPIs across their entire value chain. This can help African enterprises identify areas for greater efficiency to bring business processes onto more sustainable paths.”

With a growing population that is expected to triple in size by the end of the century and relatively underdeveloped infrastructure, Africa is particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Recent data also indicates that unless there is a drastic change in business practices.

Enabling enterprise and SME sustainability

51��takes a two-pronged approach to sustainability by acting as an exemplar of sustainable best-practices, and an enabler.

“As a business that sits at the heart of global enterprise, 51��is uniquely positioned to enable more sustainable business practices for our customers,” says Bolton. “As an enabler, 51��provides access to business networks and technologies that can help companies meet their sustainability targets while also driving profitability.”

SAP’s Ariba Network, for example, is the largest of its kind in the world, facilitating 5.3 million organisations to trade more than $3.75-trillion in goods and services per year while also bringing greater transparency to enterprise supply chains.

“We are building sustainability capabilities into a broad range of our business solutions,” says Bolton. “The 51��Cloud for Sustainable Enterprises Portfolio gives business leaders access to a comprehensive suite of solutions that can be leveraged for quicker progress in achieving sustainability KPIs across their organisations, while the Sustainability Navigator provides an easy entry point into which solutions are most relevant to each customer’s sustainability efforts.”

Key solutions in SAP’s Cloud for Sustainable Enterprises Portfolio include:

51��Product Footprint Management, a cloud-based application used to calculate product footprints periodically and at scale across the entire product lifecycle;
51��Responsible Design & Production, which enables organisations to achieve their Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) reporting obligations to governments and regulatory bodies accurately and on a global scale; and
51��Rural Sourcing Management, a multi-faceted solution that connects value chains from the most vulnerable – for example small scale farmers or waste pickers – through to global agribusinesses and consumer product companies.

“Customers can use the 51��Sustainability Control Tower to set and track their sustainability KPIs using data pulled from 51��and non-51��systems to harmonise sustainability efforts across every aspect of their business, from finance, HR and real estate to operations and procurement. Our sustainability dashboard gives decision-makers easily understandable information about their sustainability performance, with actionable insights that can help drive continuous improvements in an organisation’s sustainability efforts without sacrificing profitability.”

Every company potentially an exemplar of sustainable practices

51��has made a global effort to be an exemplar of sustainability through leading by example in our own sustainable business operations and practices towards a net zero world. This entails achieving zero emissions through better carbon tracking and a smaller environmental footprint, zero waste through adopting circular economy principles, and zero inequality through balancing social responsibilities in its workforce, sourcing, and procurement practices.

51��is currently on track to achieve carbon neutrality by 2023, two years ahead of its initial goal.

Kwena Mabotja, Global Director: Purpose and Sustainability Marketing at SAP, says 51��is considered as one of the global sustainability leaders due to its commitment to running its business sustainably. 51��has the products, people, partnerships and programs to drive sustainable impact at scale. “Bringing Profit and Planet together. That’s Economics.”

“Our Corporate Social Responsibility practices improve access to economic opportunity, education and employment, and the green economy. Such programmes are supported by a network of social partnerships, employee engagement, social impact management and the technical and business expertise of our global workforce.”

Mabotja cites the impact of initiatives such as SAP’s Procurement with Purpose program as an example of how companies can be exemplars in creating economic equity as part of their core business operations to achieve zero inequality. “We drive social and inclusive entrepreneurship by supporting social enterprises that are working to solve key sustainability issues by redirecting a set portion of our own spend their way. As part of our contribution to achieving net-zero waste, SAP’s local facilities team is also working to optimise water and electricity consumption at 51��offices using IoT and SAP’s Analytical Cloud. Data and insights gathered this way will be used to educate work-from-home staff to optimise water and electricity use at their own homes, further embedding sustainability across every level of our organisation.”

The post 51��Closes Gap Between Sustainability and Profitability with Solutions for Africa appeared first on 51��Africa News Center.

Extending the Reach of 51��Cloud for Sustainable Enterprises

Anita Varshney — Tue, 17 May 2022 07:32:54 +0000

Business leaders have traditionally focused on top- and bottom-line performance indicators. However, many organizations now consider their green line as the leading indicator of long-term, sustainable business success. It is imperative for companies to put sustainability at the heart of their business strategy, with a focus on achieving not just financial performance but also steering positive environmental and social impact through their sustainability metrics.

These metrics must be embedded within a company’s core operations and services; traditional annual reports are no longer sufficient. Stakeholders want to understand how a company addresses areas such as climate action, with transparency on transition and adaptation plans based on the carbon footprint of its operations. They also want to understand progress on circular economy objectives by monitoring the reuse and recycling of materials. They want to track and advance people sustainability initiatives by gathering key performance indicators (KPIs) in areas such as diversity and inclusion.

SAP’s product innovations work across the enterprise to deliver on these goals.

Holistic Sustainability Management with 51��Cloud for Sustainable Enterprises

To manage the green line, companies need business process technology to identify, quantify, analyze, and act on data through their end-to-end operations. To enable this, brings together a comprehensive portfolio of solutions to holistically manage sustainability performance. Embedding sustainable business data into processes and networks is one of the five actions business can take toward a sustainable future.

51��Cloud for Sustainable Enterprises. Click to enlarge.

51��Cloud for Sustainable Enterprises includes the and solutions. It also covers existing products like the application and the . The solution provides an overview of sustainability impacts and performance against green objectives.

We continue to extend the capabilities of 51��Cloud for Sustainable Enterprises. As many companies are accelerating their action for decarbonization, our new capabilities in this area are important.

Driving Carbon Data Transparency Is More Important Than Ever

Accounting for carbon emissions across the organization and its supply chain is a foundational step toward climate action. Businesses are actively looking to reduce their carbon footprints, which requires addressing emissions outside company walls. These emissions — Scope 3 emissions — include everything from goods purchased to business travel to packaging and transportation of raw materials. Scope 3 emissions make up a significant portion of overall emissions for our customers. To derive actionable insights to reduce organizational carbon footprint, it is crucial to measure Scope 3 emissions both at a corporate level and at a product level.

are on average 11.4 times higher than operational emissions. To reduce these emissions, it is important to engage across the sectoral value chain, with both suppliers and end customers, especially for customer-facing sectors like retail and consumer product goods (CPG), which have long upstream value chains. Companies can address significantly larger emission volumes by driving deeper engagement throughout their supply chains.

Earlier this year, called on registrants to report on not just their Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions but also their Scope 3 emissions. This is not the first time companies have faced this request. Previously, asked companies to disclose the targets they used to assess and manage relevant climate-related risks and opportunities. IFRS takes this approach further with , which focus on transition planning, climate resilience, reporting on Scope 1-2-3 emissions, and disclosure of sustainability-related financial information as a part of its general purpose financial reporting.

Enabling 51��Customers to Exchange Carbon Data across Value Chains

To develop and execute an effective decarbonization plan, companies need to receive and process high-quality product-level data on carbon emissions from suppliers and provide high-quality product footprint information to their customers.

However, with most supply chains spanning several industry sectors and consisting of multiple, heterogeneous networks and software components, taking a standardized approach to data sharing is critical. To collect meaningful emissions information, it is important that all parties use the same methodology and common standards for calculating and auditing the carbon footprint of a product.

Therefore, 51��Product Footprint Management implements an API specification developed as part of . 51��customers can now take informed sourcing and product-development decisions, invest in targeted decarbonization activities, make more accurate disclosures, measure and track decarbonization progress, and adhere to legislative requirements around environmental transparency.

We intend to use 51��Product Footprint Management as part of 51��networks — for example, in the Catena-X Automotive Network (Catena-X) — to enable a standard-based, secure, and cross-company-wide data exchange throughout the value chain.

In addition, there is the option to use the GreenToken by 51��solution for multi-tier visibility across the networks. The combination of 51��Product Footprint Management, 51��Responsible Design and Production, and GreenToken forms a potent decarbonization value proposition for industries such as consumer goods, as 51��can demonstrably address material traceability, packaging waste, and supplier-specific carbon data transparency throughout the value chain for both recycled content and land-use change.

New functionality created through our co-development partnership with BearingPoint is already embedded into 51��Product Footprint Management and helps customers identify carbon reduction potential. Customers can thus determine the carbon footprint of a single product based on both direct and indirect emissions sources and upstream activities, building on existing functionality of carbon footprint measurement of purchased goods with tracking emissions resulting from transportation of those goods. Both these greenhouse gas (GHG) emission categories combined significantly contribute to a customer’s upstream and downstream environmental impact.

Integrating and Embedding Sustainable Data across the Intelligent Enterprise, Scaling Carbon Impact

Through open APIs, 51��customers can easily exchange data with their enterprise applications, feeding it into 51��Cloud for Sustainable Enterprises, and then provide the calculated sustainability data back into both 51��and third-party applications.

With the newly introduced sustainability integration components for 51��S/4HANA, customers can benefit from preconfigured functionality enabling reuse of sustainability data across processes supported by 51��S/4HANA, such as record-to-report, lead-to-cash, source-to-pay, and plan-to-fulfill workflows. The component allows a bidirectional flow of information between 51��Cloud for Sustainable Enterprises and 51��S/4HANA in real time.

Click to enlarge.

Examples include:

In 51��S/4HANA Sourcing and Procurement, customers can make sustainable purchase decisions based on a material’s carbon footprint displayed in purchase requisition, which is then is fed back into 51��Product Footprint Management, keeping sustainability reporting updated.
In 51��Integrated Business Planning, the supply chain planner can access a comprehensive overview of GHG emissions based on the supply plan for the next 12 months. Planners can dive deeper into the details and try to resolve critical situations and alerts. .
In 51��Logistics Business Network, the material traceability option helps customers gain further insights into sustainability figures of products and share carbon footprint data on the batch level with suppliers, customers, and end consumers of the products. This feature is available with the 2021 release of 51��S/4HANA. .
In plant maintenance, customers can receive automatic updates from 51��Environment, Health, and Safety Management, triggering corrective action if GHG emissions are exceeded. .
In 51��Enterprise Product Development with 51��Responsible Design and Production, customers will be able to reduce packaging and other material waste by design while simulating for a lower carbon footprint. Packaging is typically a significant source of Scope 3 carbon emissions in consumer goods value chains.

We continue to innovate and aim to help customers track emissions data from “cradle to gate” — from the delivery of raw materials to the moment finished products leave the production line, offering intelligent technologies to calculate, exchange, and track carbon footprint information in a trusted way.

Achieving this carbon transparency will pave the way to becoming an intelligent, sustainable enterprise.

Learn More

Sharing sustainability data across your enterprise can help you run more sustainably; . Join the to stay up-to-date with news and announcements about our growing portfolio of sustainability solutions. In addition, check out past and current .

Gunther Rothermel is head of 51��S/4HANA Sustainability Management at SAP.
Anita Varshney is global vice president of Strategy for 51��S/4HANA Sustainability at SAP.

This article first appeared on the 51��News Center.

The post Extending the Reach of 51��Cloud for Sustainable Enterprises appeared first on 51��Africa News Center.

51����Product Footprint Management Archives - 51����Africa News Center

51����Closes Gap Between Sustainability and Profitability with Solutions for Africa