Are you as a leader on the way to make your company a powerhouse for sustainable change? Businesses are the biggest lever in delivering sustainable development. In the Nordic countries with clear and high-target sustainability policies in place, this means each enterprise, big or small, is scrambling more than ever to prove – and improve – their sustainability impact.
So, if you as a company leader are already embracing NetZero and ESGs in your strategy and operations, and if you as a CFO together with the Sustainability Manager compile metrics and reports on environmental and social impact of your company: congratulations, you’ve come off to a good start!
Monetary evaluation of sustainability is nowadays seen as essential by most enterprises – and investors – to future-proof and, indeed, even carry out a successful business. And of course, enterprises make use of different smart technologies to get insights from sustainability data dispersed across the organization and beyond.
But will impressive charts really change the reality? Unlikely. In any case: not fast enough. Measuring and reporting is the first threshold to conquer, because it serves us to gain insights and awareness on what needs our attention. Now it’s time to set our eyes on action, that is the how. The way we at SAP see it, each company can act both as exemplar and as enabler to speed up overall change to sustainable business.
In 2023 we as SAP leaders commit to conquer the next step, which is integrating sustainability in all our target-setting and decision-making. Sounds easy, but it’s a huge aspiration with great future impact: change of leadership focus and content, assessment of real-life and real-time effects across downstream and upstream value chains and empowerment of people, partners and suppliers to act sustainably.
Because we are using and hence innovating on our own software at the core of this change, we also act as enablers for many companies. As sustainability defines all our business processes and solutions, our customers benefit directly from SAP’s huge transformative step to turn into a real NetZero company, now already by 2030.
In almost every company I know, sustainability action is already happening, but in many cases this is still partly disjointed from the strategy or not yet covering all business processes. Let’s join forces to crack this nut. Challenging and enabling each other is the road to real change and to let every company become a powerhouse of sustainable development.
More inspiration on how to drive sustainability action in SAP Annual Integrated Report 2022
by Helle Dochedahl, Managing Director SAP Nordic & Baltic