Inside SAP’s Sustainability Push
By Sam Sliman
President, Optimal Solutions Integration, Inc.
If you haven’t noticed already consider this an official heads up: SAP has embraced sustainability in a big way. And while SAP has been very public about its sustainability initiatives, questions persist for many existing and prospective SAP customers – what does sustainability really mean and how can it benefit my organization?
It would be easy to view SAP’s sustainability push as opportunistic, geared toward capitalizing on the flood of green press, green initiatives and green products. But if you drill into SAP’s corporate sustainability practices and current offering of sustainability products, it is pretty clear that SAP takes sustainability very seriously -- both internally and externally, and from the perspectives of both good corporate citizenship and good, bottom-line business value.
Leading by example, in 2009 SAP -- the world’s leading provider of business software -- decreased its worldwide CO2 emissions by 16% over 2008, saving the company approximately 90 million euros. Understanding that SAP customers account for one-sixth of the world’s carbon emission, the company wasted no time in bringing to market a suite of sustainability products that are good for the environment and shareholders alike.
SAP’s sustainability offerings have their roots in a strategy hatched several years ago as SAP plotted enhancements to products based on discussions with customers large and small. According to our sources, those discussions were far ranging in scope. In addition to touching on high-profile sustainability issues such as environmental, social and corporate responsibility, these SAP customer talks delved deeply into the business meat of sustainability -- highlighting challenges in energy management, resource conservation, cap and trade, carbon management and compliance.
Bolstered by positive feedback from the SAP customer base as well as from market research that pegged the value of sustainability solutions at 7.3 billion euros over a 5-year period, SAP quickly kicked its product strategy for sustainability into high gear. It is important to note that all solutions included in SAP’s industry-leading sustainability offering are extensions of core SAP products, making integration with the SAP stack seamless and easy.
SAP’s evolved, full-fledged sustainability offering today features three primary components (in addition to the well known SAP Business Suite products):
- SAP Carbon Impact – Based on SAP’s acquisition of Clear Standards and re-branded, this on-demand application helps corporations track their carbon footprint
- SAP Sustainability Performance Management (SuPM) – An application to support the development, gathering, monitoring and reporting on sustainability objectives such as diversity, energy usage, etc. Gathering data on these objectives typically requires one-off integration with a host of different data sources – through SuPM, SAP brings business process to this strategic process
- SAP Environmental, Health and Safety (EH&S) – Part of the Governance Risk and Compliance umbrella and a well-known set of functionality already deployed at a large number of SAP sites.
The recent appointment of Dr. Peter Graf to the position of Chief Sustainability Officer is a groundbreaking move for a software company and underscores SAP’s near- and long-term commitment to sustainability. SAP has received numerous accolades for its sustainability initiatives, including being named to the 2010 Corporate Knights Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations list.
SAP has previously been recognized for its sustainable business practices by the FTSE4Good index and the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes, where it leads the software sector. SAP has also been named to the Global Challenges Index, which recognizes sustainability performance, and the NASDAQ OMX CRD Global Sustainability 50 Index.
SAP is clearly taking sustainability seriously. Customers are sure to follow.
For more on SAP’s sustainability push, the SAP Sustainability landing page is a great resource: www.sap.com/sustainability.
