Tag: erp

Sustainable SAP

SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott at SapphireNow 2010

I attended SAP’s Sapphire Now conference in Orlando earlier this week along with around 12,000 others.

It was a very interesting few days of talks, meetings, and showcases.

SAP’s commitment to Sustainability was evident throughout the event. The two keynote speakers invited by SAP were Al Gore and Richard Branson, for example – both of whom talked about the importance of sustainability to help mitigate climate change.

For me though, the most impressive statement that SAP considers Sustainability a strategic imperative, not just a sop to marketing, was the fact that both co-Ceo’s addressed Sustainability at length in their keynote addresses.

In my interview with Diversey’s CEO Curt Johnson a few weeks back he made the point that

CO2 is waste, so if you minimise CO2, you minimise waste and you maximise efficiency and increase profits

In his keynote on Tuesday morning, SAP co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe made the same point when he said that saving carbon emissions meant saving money. He concluded his keynote discussing SAP’s carbon reduction targets and how SAP’s sustainability solutions will help SAP’s customers reduce their emissions.

This ties in very strongly with the SAP Sustainability strategy which SAP Chief Sustainability Officer Peter Graf set forth during his presentation. SAP are committing to being an Exemplar and Enabler. By that they mean SAP will be an exemplar organisation in terms of its own sustainability initiatives and through its software solutions, it will enable its client companies to do the same…

SAP’s new Sustainability Performance Management tool could be a real game-changer!

SAP BusinessObjects Sustainability Performance Management

Sustainability reporting is a bit all over the place. Standards, such as they are, are many, not widely agreed on, and are loosely observed.

One of the better sustainability reports to emerge this year was SAP’s. Unlike the staid PDF documents most companies put out, SAP’s is a website which allows reasonably deep linking ( here’s the section on SAP’s 2008 Carbon Footprint, for example – notice how you can change it to see footprint by region, KTon or Kg/employee, and get extra info by rolling the mouse over the charts). SAP also rolled out a discussion area where people can comment on SAP’s materiality and the Sustainability report.

Hugely impressive stuff from SAP and extremely innovative.

SAP regularly in discussions around sustainability make the point that while their carbon footprint of almost 500,000 tonnes per annum is significant, the combined footprint of their clientbase is 10,000 times their own! SAP are taking the line that while it is important for SAP to reduce their own emissions, helping reduce their clients carbon footprint could produce a far better long-term planetary outcome. As long as companies remember that, as I have said before, the correct order is Planet first, then People, and then Profit.

SAP have taken the next logical step with their Sustainability report. They have productised it!

Now the technology to produce a sustainability report similar to SAP’s will be available to all SAP customers. The app will connect into most ERP apps to pull out the data for Sustainability Performance Management reporting so being an SAP customer is not a pre-requisite for getting this to work, as far as I understand it.

The app comes with a library of 100+ sustainability framework reporting KPI’s, it comes with a ton of scorecards and dashboards for reporting, which allows companies to focus on improving sustainability performance as opposed to gathering data and compiling reports.

The product is not finalised yet and won’t be made available for another month or two but if it delivers on half of what it promises, it is a potential game changer in the world of sustainability reporting.

I hope to interview someone from SAP shortly to get more details on SAP’s Sustainability Performance Management tool, and as soon as I do, I will post the interview here.

[Disclosure – SAP talked to me about their Sustainability Performance Management at SAP TechEd 2009. They paid for my travel and accommodation to attend this event]

by-sa