Innovation and collaboration were dominant themes at this year’s SAP Sapphire & ASUG Annual Conference, as SAP leaders unveiled new products for sustainability reporting and business networks.
As companies worldwide react to the needs of a changing regulatory landscape around environmental impact, leveraging sustainability-related data has become an executive priority. Through SAP’s new green ledger, announced at the Orlando event, companies can capture and manage carbon emissions data with a carbon accounting system that parallels their financial accounting system.
“In addition to the top and the bottom line, consumers, your employees, investors, and auditors all want to support enterprises that care about the planet. Today, CFOs and chief sustainability officers need to ensure compliance with 20 times more climate regulations than in the past.”
- SAP CEO Christian Klein
The Future of Sustainability at SAP
SAP’s vision for transactional carbon accounting will encompass three solutions billed by the company as “future-proof capabilities” to empower the intelligent enterprise while enabling monitoring and compliance:
- SAP Sustainability Footprint Management, a single solution for customers to track and manage carbon flows at the process and product levels across Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions, calculating emissions throughout the organization and value chain.
- SAP Sustainability Data Exchange, a new application that enables the secure exchange of standardized sustainability data, such as product footprints, along the value chain, to decarbonize supply chains more efficiently.
- The new green ledger system for carbon accounting, which will be included in RISE with SAP and GROW with SAP later in 2023; new capabilities will periodically enhance the impact of the green ledger’s combined financial and environmental data, which will integrate with SAP’s cloud ERP to provide natively integrated financial and environmental decision-making.
The Key to Driving Sustainability
In announcing new sustainability innovations at SAP Sapphire & ASUG Annual Conference, leaders also introduced John Kerry, U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, who expressed confidence in SAP’s environmental commitments. He thanked SAP for being one of the first 10 companies to commit to the White House’s Action Plan to guide the implementation of the President’s Emergency Plan for Adaptation and Resilience (PREPARE) last fall.
Kerry called on the private sector to act on climate change and limit global warming. He also stressed the importance of carbon accounting, employing the adage, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.”
“Rigorous accounting and transparency are absolutely essential,” Kerry said. “We need trust in the system. And we need to ensure that all of our actions have the highest environmental integrity. Rigorous accounting and strong environmental integrity will be the key to the success of the energy transition accelerator that we’re creating with our partners.”
SAP Partners with Accenture
SAP additionally announced a partnership with consulting firm Accenture in order to enhance SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), giving customers the ability to simulate and explore business scenarios in immersive digital environments, thereby gaining a competitive edge before encountering such experiences or business models in the real world.
Through the expansion of their partnership, SAP and Accenture will also work to drive supply chain excellence by collaborating to bolster SAP Business Network, developing a sustainable trading partner network that will prioritize increased transparency, resilience, and visibility for customers across assets and inventory. This approach will include new capabilities, assets, and accelerators for logistics, procurement, supply chain, and asset management.