SAP and Accenture have announced an extension of their decades-long partnership to strengthen their commitment to making customers’ sustainability ambitions a reality. The latest joint venture aims to develop new solutions that will help businesses accelerate sustainability in supply chain management across their operations.
The United Nations Global Compact — in association with SAP, Accenture, and 3M — published the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Ambition Guides in September 2020 to mobilise industry around SDG Ambition and scale impact for the 17 SDGs. Collaboration is key to achieving the SDGs and with “Partnerships for the Goals” one of SAP’s key focus areas, its expanded collaboration with Accenture is the latest in a series of initiatives aimed at helping businesses capture value from sustainability.
Christian Klein, Chief Executive Officer at SAP, recognises the need for collaborations at every level of business and society today. He shared:
“Building on our long-standing and trusted partnership, SAP and Accenture are joining forces to help our customers realise long-term growth in a sustainable way. We’re creating visibility into the environmental impact across the entire value chain, providing enterprises with the insights they need to take the right action and accelerate their transition to the circular economy.”
Meanwhile, Bjoern Stengel, Senior Research Analyst, Worldwide Business Consulting and ESG Business Services at IDC, has emphasised that implementing sustainable supply chain management and circular economy principles is a challenging task for companies, given the multiple stakeholders and diverse set of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues involved. He further explained:
“This new offering from Accenture and SAP allows clients to generate critical, data-driven end-to-end insights that take into consideration non-financial metrics that are needed to build sustainable supply chains and help companies create shared value.”
New Solutions to Help Companies Embed Sustainability in Supply Chain Management
By integrating Accenture’s Sustainability Services and broad industry knowledge with SAP’s intelligent technologies, the two tech giants will create new solutions that will enable enterprises to further advance their progress in fully decarbonising their supply chains and capture their share of economic growth that a circular economy could bring.
Additionally, SAP and Accenture plan to accelerate the development and delivery of the SAP Responsible Design and Production solution aimed at helping businesses embed sustainability metrics across their supply chains with a focus on manufacturing and product design. By utilising integrated data from across operations, the new solutions will also allow companies to:
- Produce and design products with less waste.
- Improve recyclability by adding more recycled content into processes.
- Reduce the growing cost of compliance due to new regulations for packaging and extended producer responsibility (EPR).
Commenting on the recent expanded partnership, Julie Sweet, Chief Executive Officer at Accenture, remarked:
“Our work together will enable SAP’s customers, which include 92{8bf2b29f36318f0ac46ab1cc03d7035abce669a1cea16c9ed62389a818fa22fd} of the Forbes Global 2000, to use their core systems to help drive their sustainability agenda, optimise their ESG performance and achieve their goals.”
Accenture Supports Climate 21 Initiative and SAP.iO’s ‘Sustainability Future’ Program
Moreover, Accenture also expressed its support for SAP’s Climate 21 Initiative to help businesses gain an integrated view of environmental savings and cost impacts — further optimising their operations with sustainability metrics added across the end-to-end supply chain. This initiative also allows companies in any industry to utilise analytics in measuring and minimising carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions as well as reducing the carbon footprint across the entire product life cycle.
Advancing their efforts towards accelerating sustainable transformation, SAP and Accenture also launched the Sustainable Future program last month in association with SAP.iO Foundries Berlin and Munich. The global sustainability-focused accelerator program aims to nurture and engage corporate start-ups through initiatives driving innovation and digital transformation in four target areas including climate risk tracking and mitigation, circular economy, carbon tracking and trading, and resource efficiency.
Furthermore, InsideSAP is also gearing towards green recruitment to pave the way for more sustainable SAP projects. The implementation of a simple yet powerful TRP (Talent Resource Planning) system will drive sustainability in a company all while saving time and money.
