Tag: demo

Featured Posts, Technology / Software

SAP’s 2010 Sustainability Report demo’d

I had a Skype chat recently with SAP’s Chief Sustainability Officer Peter Graf where he gave me a demo of their new 2010 Sustainability report.

With Peter’s permission, I recorded the demo for publication on YouTube. The video above is the result and the transcription is below.

Some highlights Peter mentioned include:

  1. Sustainability reporting has saved SAP €170 million (!),
  2. SAP are updating their Sustainability report quarterly and are embedding it more and more closely with their financial reporting and,
  3. SAP have deep social media embedding in their report

With this report, SAP have put clear blue water between themselves and any other sustainability report. SAP can still take it up another few notches (productising it, putting an api in front of it, publishing in xbrl, etc) but this is the kind of reporting everyone needs to be moving to, as a baseline. Kudos to SAP for once again setting the bar with this report.

Now here’s the transcription of the demo:

Tom Raftery: Hi, everyone. Welcome to GreekMonk TV. We are talking today to SAP’s Chief Sustainability Officer, Peter Graf, who is going to give us a quick demo of the new 2010 SAP Sustainability Report.

Peter Graf: So, this is SAP’s 2010 Sustainability Report, which people can find online at sapsustainabilityreport.com. The report lays out the three key areas of impact for SAP. In the first place, SAP wants to become a more sustainable company, so we are talking about our own sustainability performance. The second section of the report is about how SAP helps customers to run more profitably and sustainably, so that’s mostly a conversation about our applications and software solutions.

And then finally, there is a section on how people at SAP drive opportunity for others through IT. And then, certainly the last part, as always when we put our report on the line is that encouraging into action and dialog between us and those who come and visit the report. And we call that section Do Your Part and that describes how everyone can contribute.

Tom Raftery: Great. Can you show me some of the details of how SAP have done in the last year? How does it look onscreen, because it’s very different from any other sustainability report that’s out there?

Peter Graf: Exactly. So before we go there, the data that we talk about is all assured by KPMG, and there are two levels of assurance and yes, this report is A+ from GRI perspective. It’s got the best rating that you can get from GRI. It complies with a whole variety of standards, but most importantly, we have not only done limited assurance to our greenhouse gas numbers, we’ve actually gone for reasonable assurance, meaning the assurance company actually assures that this is really our footprint. And we do that because we believe in the future there will be much more scrutiny around how people are reporting greenhouse gas emissions.

And that’s what the greenhouse gas emissions look like. You can see the trend from 2000 to 2007; we’ve always increased our emissions. In 2007, we set ourselves the goal to reduce our emissions step-by-step back to the level of 2000 by the year 2020, so we have an absolute carbon target. That is pretty aggressive considering that in 2000, we had about 24,000 employees and already today in 2011, we have more than 50,000 employees and we want to obviously continue to grow as a company.

You can also see that we have kind of flipped the chart to kind of visually highlight that emissions are seen as a liability to SAP so they show below the line.

Tom Raftery: And clicking on any of those bars redraws the kind of pie chart on the right?

Peter Graf: Exactly, so you can go and drill into the different years and you can see how the emissions change. For example in 2008, we had 31% of our emissions from flights that also tells you that we include Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions in our calculation.

That number dropped dramatically in 2009, given that in the times of economic crisis, we just don’t service as many customers, so you can see that here. And then in 2010, the number continues in absolute terms to be reduced, which is amazing given that we have actually increased our revenues by 17% in 2010 while reducing our emissions. You can see that very nicely when you look at the carbon emissions on a Euro basis. We are now at 33.9 grams per Euro revenue and in 2008, that number was 45.6 grams.

So, in terms of carbon efficiency we have dramatically accelerated and you can drill into different areas. For example, revenue in the Americas, you can actually go and look at different scopes and include or exclude them in the competition. So that’s the benefit of having this kind of interactivity.

Tom Raftery: The obvious question that comes to mind then is, if you are spending all this money on getting carbon out of your system, out of your organization, it must be costing the company a small fortune…

Blogging, Business blogging, IT@Cork, Podcast, Web 2.0

IT@Cork Web 2.0 conference talks podcast

I finally got around to putting up the talks from the IT@Cork Web 2.0 Conference!

Shel Israel led off the talks at the IT@Cork Web 2.0 conference with a great introduction to blogs and social media – drawing very much on his experience co-authoring a book on business blogging called Naked Conversations called Naked Conversations with Robert Scoble. Shel’s talk is here.

Salim Ismail was next up. Salim was a powerhouse of knowledge and ideas. His talk concentrated on uses for Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise and if you ever want to see a room full of jaws drop simultaneously, go to hear Salim give a talk. He is an extremely accomplished communicator, deftly making the most complex of ideas readily accessible. Salim’s talk is here.

Third up was Fergus Burns who spoke knowledgeably on the topic close to everyone’s heart – starting a Web 2.0 business in Ireland! Fergus’ talk is here.

Walter Higgins was the fourth speaker up. Walter has a Web 2.0 application called pxn8. Pxn8 is an online photo editing application. Walter showed how pxn8 has been developed using free development environments. Walter’s talk is here.

Finally Rob Burke from Microsoft Ireland gave us a demo we are not likely to forget for a long time – he live developed a web 2.0 app using Atlas on a laptop running Office 12 beta and Vista beta! And it didn’t crash once. The demo Gods were really smiling on him that day! Rob’s demo is here and is followed by the question and answer session between the panel and the audience.