Supporting customers in monitoring, analysing, and reducing carbon emissions, SAP Product Footprint Management promises to help organisations meet their climate objectives. The recently launched SAP for sustainability solution integrates emissions data from all platforms that manage production processes with master data from business applications including SAP S/4HANA.
During this year’s SAPPHIRE NOW online conference, the German enterprise software giant unveiled a portfolio of sustainability-specific products designed to promote environmentally conscious initiatives and foster the ability to evaluate sustainability practices. One of these solutions is SAP Product Footprint Management which is now generally available to customers. The tool allows businesses to measure carbon footprints across the value chain and takes into account the entire product lifecycle — enabling companies to declare their environmental footprints to regulators and improve their products’ sustainability.
Moreover, SAP Product Footprint Management is an embedded SAP S/4HANA cloud-native application that helps customers make better business decisions by integrating preconfigured and flexible footprint scores into end-to-end business processes, regularly and at scale, across the entire product life cycle. The solution aims to deliver insights to customers by integrating financial, logistic, and environmental data in analytics, as well as evaluate and derive footprints at scale by utilising SAP S/4HANA Cloud data and capabilities.
Noting that sustainability goals are becoming as crucial as financial goals for business success, Thomas Saueressig, Member of the Executive Board of SAP SE and Responsible for SAP Product Engineering, emphasised the importance of solutions like SAP Product Footprint Management in helping companies act more responsibly and sustainably today. He shared:
“When companies embed emissions data into underlying business processes, leaders can drive real change by making conscious decisions across the entire value chain. That is what scales the transition to low emission pathways, and SAP is uniquely positioned to drive this change throughout collaborative, intelligent, and sustainable business networks.”
SAP Product Footprint Management Strengthens SAP for Sustainability Solutions Portfolio
SAP’s current customer base includes 94% of the world’s 500 largest corporations, demonstrating an immense capacity for real change at scale. Additionally, partnerships also aid in the company’s product innovation. In April, SAP joined the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) as an innovation partner in its Value Chain Carbon Transparency Pathfinder which seeks to improve transparency in corporate carbon emissions and decarbonise supply chains through data management solutions.
According to Marta Muñoz, Senior Research Director and Lead of Technology & Sustainability Practice at IDC EME, SAP has long placed a strong and focused emphasis on its own sustainability operations. She added:
“The launch of the SAP Product Footprint Management solution, combined with the WBCSD’s Pathfinder Project, represents a unique opportunity to bring together companies to jointly drive decarbonisation across value chains and industries.”
Regarding the product launch’s significance for SAP, Gunther Rothermel, Senior Vice President and Head of Sustainability for SAP S/4HANA, stressed that the tech giant has observed how climate change is affecting not only the business operations of customers, but also the personal lives of other people. He explained:
“SAP Product Footprint Management is an incredibly important milestone along our path to help customers systematically monitor and control GHG emissions across their end-end business processes. To support their decarbonisation journey, the solution delivers data transparency on their environmental footprint and enables them to make more informed decisions in real-time.”
SAP said it will deliver SAP Responsible Design and Production, which is already in beta, and SAP Sustainability Control Tower in the coming months. It will also bring innovations through modular embedded SAP S/4HANA Cloud services, which will be built on top of SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). Lastly, the tech giant plans to broaden its portfolio by integrating SAP Business Network and other lines of business to tackle the most crucial use cases in various industries, allowing customers to better manage their environmental and societal impacts.
