All aspects of business have an environmental impact. Fortunately, many companies are now taking their sustainability responsibility and opportunities seriously. However, SAP project management has so many moving parts, both in-house and outsourced, that sustainability becomes a loftier goal than many companies have been able to achieve. Green recruitment could be the way to support more sustainable SAP projects.
In partnership with SAP, Accenture and 3G, the UN SDG (Sustainability Development Goals) Ambition Guides were released in September 2020. These guides include:
- Ambition Guide: Setting Goals for the Decade of Action
- Integration Guide: Designing Business Systems for the SDGs
- SDG Ambition Benchmark Reference Sheets (for consultation)
The SDG guides were released with the aim of supporting global business leaders in key areas of sustainability. Key focus areas include tracking sustainability performance and enhancing impact in line with SDG benchmarks. Notably, the key focus area is in integrating sustainability solutions into core business strategies, IT landscapes and systems management.
Sustainability Challenges in SAP Project Management
Implementing sustainability practices into SAP projects has been notoriously difficult. This is due to the complex nature of the beast. It can become time consuming and expensive to design and implement entirely new business systems across all project activities.
While an office itself can go paperless and source from sustainable suppliers, layers of suppliers and stakeholders across a project mean duplication of process, but also of consumable business resources – utilities, office equipment, infrastructure, materials, etc.
A lack of control in outsourced processes leads to inefficiencies. It also leads to a decrease in sustainability unless strict scrutiny is applied to each level of outsourcing. Implementing this level of visibility into sustainable outsourcing is, in itself, a time consuming (and therefore expensive) prospect.
These outsourced processes create major hurdles in effectively incorporating meaningful sustainability outcomes into normal business processes. Resourcing SAP talent is one of the major culprits – but it is particularly difficult to negate this impact without applying cost and resources.
Green Recruitment for Sustainable SAP Projects
HR / recruitment / talent / people are a ‘service’ rather than physical ‘product’, so incorporating sustainability is not as simple as with manufacturing, supply chain and other areas of business. However, by leveraging new talent acquisition models, it is possible for your company to create a paperless system that puts sustainability at the forefront of talent acquisition.
This requires a mindset shift from the traditional outsourcing model. To achieve SAP project sustainability goals, your talent resourcing processes must be owned internally. To do so will require several key changes:
- Internal talent teams must be empowered to handle recruitment processes end-to-end
- Recruitment time must be drastically reduced
- Manual processes must be eliminated or automated
- A carbon offset program is essential
- Suppliers must guarantee sustainability or carbon offsets
This change may seem like sustainability requires an impossible shift in the way your internal talent team operates. After all, how can they action their own workflows as well as take on the entire recruitment process, for the sake of sustainability?
By implementing a strong TRP (Talent Resource Planning) system to shift the focus from outsourced recruitment, your internal talent team will own the entire talent acquisition process, end-to-end. Implementing this simple but powerful approach will drive your company’s sustainability while saving time and money.
Carbon Offsets Within Your TRP
Our own TRP platform, InsideSAP Careers, is contactless and paperless. This means you can find and engage resources while you’re on the go, online, anytime, anywhere. This results in a reduction of printing, paperwork and postage, which all contribute to reducing your overall carbon footprint through green recruitment.
But we even go a step further: rather than just being carbon neutral, we actually actively contribute to the growth of natural habitat; planting trees for every person hired, across every project, every month.
This means you can make a massive, tangible difference to the environment, simply by improving the way you find SAP talent. We’ve bought sustainability into the everyday business process of resourcing, to help companies easily grow more than just business and careers.
We use the timesheets of every resource engaged through the platform to account for every month of their contract, and every new perm hire is celebrated with the planting of trees in partnership with the Foundation for National Parks & Wildlife. Trees are planted on protected crown lands, with native species prevalent to that area, which go towards strategic projects like growing habitat corridors as well as regeneration projects like bushfire recovery.
You can create a free account at InsideSAP Careers and take a look at our sustainability program and available talent pool, or email careers@insidesap.com.au for more information.
You don’t need to lift a shovel, just improve the way you source SAP talent, to where it saves you time, money AND the environment.
To read more on how to empower your internal talent team to own an end-to-end talent resourcing process, click here.
