Business leaders know they need to take action to run more sustainably, but many aim only for regulatory compliance and avoid the steps to deeper business transformation. Businesses say inadequate technologies explain their lack of progress in their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) strategies. What they need today is increased data transparency and collaboration to scale positive impact.
An SAP Insights study showed that nearly 70% of CEOs find it challenging to measure ESG data across their value chains. This measurement is difficult because data is often managed manually or separately from enterprise planning and management software. Many businesses rely on estimated data, preventing holistic strategic planning and operational decision-making. With this lack of data transparency, it is no surprise that companies are struggling to embed sustainability into their operations.
SAP and its partner ecosystem also know businesses demand fast, reliable, and compliant regulatory reporting. As a pioneer in implementing integrated sustainability and ESG practices in our own business, SAP has developed innovative solutions and established a wide range of partnerships to help customers build trust and transparency in their ESG reporting.
Responding to Urgent Customer Needs
Earlier this year, SAP introduced SAP Sustainability Control Tower, an enterprise-wide ESG data management solution that allows companies to record, report, and act on their ESG data. In a market update available now, the solution offers flexibility and scalability so that a business can easily connect finance, emissions, production, supply chain, human resources (HR), and other data sources to sustainability metrics.
Accurate live data allows companies to move from averages to actuals to report their performance, complying confidently with reporting frameworks and standards. With accurate, transparent, and advanced analytics reporting, companies can identify areas for action, simulate scenarios, and hit their sustainability goals in order to minimize waste, reduce carbon emissions, and improve sustainable supply chain performance.
With urgency and data quality in mind, SAP Sustainability Control Tower offers ready integration with cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) software from SAP, SAP S/4HANA Cloud, to provide a holistic steering and reporting solution. This scalable, integrated data management and reporting platform, combined with partner services for customer-specific data requirements, offers a new level of business insight for executive-level decision-making to help businesses reach their sustainability goals.
Working Together for Sustainable Business
At SAP, we believe collaboration is essential for sustainable business success, which is why we have built an ecosystem of strategic consulting partners and advisory firms to provide their expertise, methodologies, and reporting frameworks to help our customers achieve holistic sustainability transformation.
Sustainability is a core shared goal for SAP and our partner ecosystem. Key dimensions of corporate ESG management — including holistic steering and reporting, carbon accounting, waste management and design for circular economy processes, and responsible and inclusive value chain management — are integral elements of our sustainable business vision.
Our strategic partners offer sustainability consulting, and their analytics and data management teams have the expertise and experience to connect and integrate data sources and metrics. This gives customers a comprehensive view to help them transition from strategy to action in setting and managing sustainability initiatives, internal data management, and external disclosures to various frameworks and regulations.
Additionally, by leveraging SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), our more than 23,000 partners can develop a wide range of complementary solutions for SAP Cloud for Sustainable Enterprises, addressing specific innovation opportunities like industry cloud, content partnerships, or pre-configured packages for regulatory and reporting requirements.
Our deep understanding of global business data and processes, along with our constant drive to deliver customer value combined with an unmatched global partner ecosystem, gives us the unique leverage to make a positive impact at scale. Read on for comments from leaders of some of our global strategic partners and how they work with SAP to deliver positive sustainability impact for our mutual customers.
Accenture
“For companies today, having auditable, decision-ready ESG data isn’t about compliance, it’s about competitiveness. It is about transforming organizations from top to bottom to drive business value and sustainability impact. That is why SAP Sustainability Control Tower is so important: it allows organizations to embed sustainability into their strategy and core digital processes.”
– Peter Lacy, global sustainability services lead
and chief responsibility officer, Accenture
Atos
“At Atos we are committed to climate action: we are constantly working to reduce our own carbon footprint, and we aim to be net zero by 2039. Rated Platinum by EcoVadis since 2020, we work with SAP as a valued partner to help our customers reduce their own emissions on their journey to net zero through our end-to-end sustainability portfolio, including consulting and advisory solutions from EcoAct, an Atos company, as well as comprehensive digital solutions. This enables Atos to accelerate the transition to net zero by leveraging solutions such as SAP Sustainability Control Tower, enabling consistent and auditable ESG reporting, target setting, and monitoring.”
– Diane Galbe, senior executive vice president,
Board CSR sponsor and chairman of EcoAct
Capgemini
“In addition to reducing its own carbon footprint, Capgemini aims to help its clients save at least 10 million tons of CO2 equivalent by 2030. Capgemini’s ‘Green Core with SAP Solutions’ offer unlocks sustainability data from the SAP S/4HANA core system to track environmental data, social statistics, and other ESG KPIs across the value chain. It is a perfect example of our sustainable vision brought to life for supply chain-heavy industries, such as manufacturing, automotive, consumer products, and retail. Implementing SAP Sustainability Control Tower will augment analytics and dashboards that provide actionable, client-specific sustainability insights, tailored to customized industry needs and designed to match outcomes with enterprise-defined sustainability ambitions. SAP Sustainability Control Tower will help us deliver on our promise to co-create a more sustainable tomorrow with our clients globally.”
– Benjamin Alleau, executive vice president; group lead,
Sustainability Business Services; and group offer leader, Sustainability, Capgemini
Cognizant
“The call for sustainable action grows louder from the investor community and the consumer at large. Enterprises have massive environmental footprints and will require a comprehensive understanding of how material flows through the production process, into the market, and into their end-of-life. Any meaningful approach to reducing environmental impact will require implementation of circular product models, sustainable supplier development, and design of carbon-reduced logistics models. Currently, supply chain visibility tools rarely provide comprehensive sustainability information for assessing viability or risks in the supply chain. SAP Sustainability Control Tower is critical to provide make/buy/move decisions, which favor sustainable outcomes with a sound commercial basis.”
– Manoj Mathew, vice president,
Sustainability, Cognizant
Deloitte
“Building on Deloitte and SAP’s decades-long global alliance, new products like SAP Sustainability Control Tower provide the platform for innovation and development of solutions to address our clients’ complex sustainability challenges. As an extension of our Sustainability Operations collaboration and innovation with SAP, we are proud to deliver next-generation business capabilities and insights, developed with SAP S/4HANA, to support enterprise-wide transformation across a wide range of industries.”
– Joe Lucca, managing director, U.S. SAP
Sustainability, Climate, and Equity lead, Deloitte Consulting LLP
Ernst & Young (EY)
“Sustainability is the most pressing issue of our time, representing serious and urgent challenges for our planet that everyone — business, government, society, and individuals — must help to solve. Together, EY and SAP are helping to create meaningful change for clients and communities by building solutions to help meet carbon, circularity, operational ESG, and socioeconomic equity goals. Solutions like SAP Sustainability Control Tower enable organizations to set targets, monitor progress, capture, and report ESG data, providing actionable insights to help drive positive change.”
– Marsha Reppy, EY Americas Sustainability Technology leader, EY
IBM
“Sustainability is at the heart of IBM’s strategy as we invest in the future of the planet. Today, we have solutions powered by SAP and IBM technologies that operationalize sustainability into everything our customers do. These solutions help manufacturing companies build products that capture the carbon footprint and drive shop-floor operations that do not just reduce emissions, but also natural resource usage. We also provide solutions that support companies in driving ethical sourcing in the supply chain, as well as selling products that align to the buying behaviors of today’s ever-increasing ethical consumer. We are excited to see the next revision of SAP Sustainability Control Tower. This is a foundational solution in our sustainability solution portfolio. We recognized the need for its evolution, and we see this now as a truly enterprise-class offering, integrating data from SAP and external sources to enable the necessary capabilities for ESG data management and reporting.”
– Allan Coulter, distinguished engineer and global
CTO for FSCT, SAP & Sustainability, IBM
PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC)
“PwC is working with SAP to provide transparent and auditable data leveraging the deep industry, accounting and ESG expertise of PwC coupled with SAP’s leading technology. This cooperation is focused on helping organizations report ESG performance with trust to a growing number of stakeholders; driving optimized decarbonization pathways and supply chain resilience through advanced analytics; and driving top-line growth using sustainability. Leveraging SAP S/4HANA as a foundation, we aim to help our joint customers achieve their sustainability ambitions and initiatives through the creation of industry-relevant extensions built on SAP Business Technology Platform, such as our award-winning Climate Excellence solution, and leveraging SAP Sustainability Control Tower to provide the real-time insights and visibility to drive ESG performance.”
– Gunther Duetsch, partner, PwC Germany
TCS
“At TATA, we believe that businesses exist to serve communities. This belief has guided our commitment to create a positive impact and respond to the changing needs of the communities we serve. At TCS, we believe innovation and adoption of digital technologies are key to building a sustainable future. The growing imperative to understand how to harness disparate streams of data to effectively create an impactful ESG strategy is a core driver of our approach for creating innovative industry-driven sustainability solutions. TCS works closely with SAP, leveraging contextual knowledge, domain expertise, technology, and innovations to help some of the world’s leading enterprises address their sustainability challenges. With over 200 sustainability-related solutions and offerings in our portfolio, we are committed to empowering enterprises to create a positive impact and respond to the changing needs of the communities they serve.”
– Prashant Shirgur, global head of
Enterprise Application Services, TCS
T-Systems
“At T-Systems, we ‘Rethink the System’ to provide innovative integrated solutions such as SAP Sustainability Control Tower. Through the solution, we can enable our customers to successfully drive digital growth while investing in more sustainable supply chains.”
– Christian Till Roga, managing director, T-Systems International
Wipro
“When it comes to ESG reporting, immutability and transparency of data are the most critical first steps for any business. The SAP Sustainability Control Tower solution offers a greater degree of granularity in reporting and a higher level of transparency around ESG performance. Core ERP processes of procurement and manufacturing, environment management and compliance, and talent building and succession have sustainability, circularity, and social responsibility now embedded into the solution as its key pillars. Enhanced integration of critical SAP S/4HANA and other SAP line of business solutions with SAP Sustainability Control Tower supports a customer’s ESG reporting with validated, auditable, and real-time data. Given the seamless integration of SAP Sustainability Control Tower with SAP S/4HANA, it can be positioned as an essential plug-and-play solution offering for all customers that want to be a sustainable enterprise.”
– Srinivas Sai Nidadhavolu, VP and global head, SAP Practice, Wipro
For more information on how SAP helps companies record, report, and act on their sustainability goals, visit www.sap.com/sustainability.
Bernd Schmalzridt manages Business Development of Global Sustainability Ecosystem at SAP.
Estelle Lagorce is part of Strategic Ecosystem Marketing at SAP.
