UK supermarket chain J Sainsbury plc (Sainsbury’s) aims to further its Next Level Sainsbury’s plans and improve its commercial systems through a recently announced SAP collaboration. A new path for the retailer is established by the strategic partnership between SAP and Sainsbury’s, which focuses on modernizing commercial operations and boosting business flexibility. Sainsbury’s current systems […]

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Starting in 2024, SAP is doubling down on its net-zero strategy by expanding its commitment to nature conservation and making financial contributions to climate projects.

The financial contribution will support carbon removal and carbon reduction projects:

• Carbon removal projects: These projects remove carbon emissions from the atmosphere and store them for decades – in an ideal scenario, the storage is permanent. Examples include nature-based and technical solutions such as reforestation, where trees store carbon emissions in their biomass as well as direct air capture and storage technologies.
• Carbon reduction projects: Also known as carbon avoidance projects, these projects prevent additional carbon emissions from entering the atmosphere, reducing the overall amount of carbon emitted. Examples include avoided deforestation or energy efficiency projects.

This doubling down on its net-zero strategy follows SAP’s successful delivery on its pledge to become carbon neutral in its own operations in 2023 by balancing out unavoidable emissions with carefully selected carbon credits. While the company’s use of the statement “carbon-neutrality” will be discontinued, the dedication to reduce its carbon footprint and finance climate action beyond its own value chain remains strong.

SAP Is On Track to Plant 21 Million Trees and Plans More

SAP is on track to meet its 2025 goal of planting 21 million trees and has now raised its reforestation commitment.

By 2030, SAP will support trusted partners and communities to plant and protect a total of 25 million trees helping to conserve diverse forests. Furthermore, SAP will fund the conservation and rewetting of coastal and inland wetlands such as bogs and mangrove swamps. With these conservation initiatives and the increased reforestation pledge, SAP’s goal is to conserve more land than its offices and owned data centers occupy worldwide.

To ensure that selected projects deliver a positive outcome, SAP will continue to apply the rigorous and robust due diligence that has previously informed the selection of successful climate investments such as SAP’s long partnership with Livelihood Carbon Funds (LCF), where SAP has funded the planting of trees in Senegal, Rwanda, India, Indonesia, Guatemala, and Mexico.

SAP’s Climate Finance Contribution on the Path to Net Zero

Bridging the Gap

SAP firmly believes that financing climate projects beyond a company’s value chain should be an item on every corporate sustainability agenda. As long as it does not undermine current corporate decarbonization programs, the financial muscle of corporations can bridge the gap in parts of the world where fiscal finances are not robust enough to restore ecosystems and build resilient low carbon economies and livelihoods.

This financial contribution will provide quantifiable benefits to mitigate the effects of climate change beyond SAP’s own value chain with investments in projects that deliver a positive impact for the climate, for local and global populations, and for biodiversity.

The level of the financial contribution is determined by SAP’s own emissions in a given year and is disclosed in terms of carbon emissions, since costs for carbon projects can be subject to change. 

With this financial contribution and increased commitment to land conservation and reforestation, SAP continues its journey to introduce meaningful measures to achieve net-zero in 2030, 20 years earlier than originally planned.

Financing climate projects at the same time as pursuing its corporate net-zero agenda allows SAP to take responsibility for emissions that cannot be avoided and actively mitigate climate change on a global level. Furthermore, the financial contribution will enable positive climate action on a far greater scale than SAP could achieve alone.

Shifting Perceptions

In the last 15 years, corporate sustainability at SAP has shifted perceptions on how corporations manage their own carbon emissions and how corporate sustainability agendas must be as actionable as they are accountable.

Since 2012, the SAP Integrated Report has shared information on SAP’s annual environmental performance and progress on corporate sustainability targets. SAP has led the way in showing that corporate sustainability is an integral part of business – not just an add-on to strategy or operations.

SAP’s carbon impact is one of the sustainability KPIs that are indicators of future performance and form the basis of compensation elements for members of the Executive Board of SAP SE. Today, sustainability is deeply embedded in SAP’s vision to bring out the best in every business. With its extensive portfolio of sustainability solutions, sustainability is anchored in SAP’s purpose to make the world run better and improve people’s lives.

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With the help of the RISE with SAP program, the City of London Corporation is modernizing its operations through a digital transformation initiative. SAP’s all-inclusive offering for businesses and public sector organizations looking to migrate to the cloud is called RISE with SAP. Organizations can support long-term objectives like sustainability, improve data insights, and increase […]

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SAP NOW Brazil 2024 brought together leading companies and innovators to highlight how generative AI can drive business transformation. At SAP NOW Brazil 2024, SAP organized its first-ever Innovation Tournament in the country, aiming to promote AI-driven solutions to real-world business challenges. The event featured four major Brazilian companies—Vale, Embraer, Natura, and Randoncorp—each tasked with […]

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Having worked with countless CIOs and C-suite executives embarking on large-scale business transformation, I’ve seen what goes into making digital transformation successful.

Whether aiming for agility, resilience, sustainable growth, or efficiency, a successful transformation requires a strategic approach, full leadership commitment, and a clear understanding of challenges and opportunities.

True business transformation goes beyond merely executing a technical “lift and shift” to the cloud. It involves reengineering an organization’s business model, operations, processes, and culture to align with long-term goals, adapt to market demands, and leverage new technologies. The focus must be on creating lasting value and ensuring the organization can thrive in a rapidly changing environment.

Crucial Business Transformation Levers

While there is no precise formula, all transformations have four crucial levers in common:

• Activating people: Collaboration is at the heart of any successful transformation. Through partnership and clear accountabilities, we break down barriers, and that’s the basis for any change. Software is ultimately a people business.​
• Optimizing systems: Efficient systems are the backbone of any transformation. We ensure that the underlying enterprise architecture of applications is robust, secure, and scalable. This also means leveraging the latest innovations like artificial intelligence (AI), enhancing performance of existing systems, and ensuring that all components work seamlessly together to support the business objectives.
• Reinventing businesses processes: We don’t take existing processes and merely create fancy new interfaces; no “new wine in old bottles.” Companies need to reinvent business processes to ensure agility, future-readiness, reliability, and scalable business operations to drive their business strategy. SaaS/PaaS help to streamline processes based on best practices while preserving company differentiation, but with clean extensibility on the platform.
• Leveraging data: Business data is the lifeblood of modern enterprises, fueling insights and innovation. At SAP, we harness this data to power SAP Business AI, driving intelligent automation, predictive analytics, and personalized experiences. Our focus is on turning raw data into actionable intelligence that supports and accelerates our customers’ transformation journeys. Let’s not forget that the real value of the data lies in the semantics, which is our key differentiator to help our customers.

By focusing on these four elements, business can take a holistic approach to identifying which of their business processes and systems need analysis, revision, or complete redesign.

Navigating Digital Transformation: The Essential Role of Enterprise Architecture

To fully capitalize on these transformation levers and manage the complexities, organizations are increasingly turning to RISE with SAP, our holistic offering designed to accelerate their journey to the cloud and speed innovation adoption. RISE with SAP simplifies the move to SAP cloud ERP, offering flexibility and reduced complexity, and most importantly, provides a seamless experience across our modular (but tightly integrated) architecture.

Nevertheless, for many organizations the challenges remain significant: systems complexity, scattered systems, and diverse business models that may not be keeping pace with industry and consumer changes. Many organizations also underestimate the complexity of their transformation, leading to unrealistic timelines and budget overspending.

Enterprise architecture tools are crucial for overcoming these challenges because we need a structured and system-based approach to cope with and manage the complexities at scale, and to maintain a continuous innovation cycle.

The enterprise architecture provides a framework for aligning IT strategy with business objectives and improve the agility and efficiency of an organization. Imagine a ship navigating without a compass: this is how businesses operate without solid enterprise architecture. Just as sailors rely on navigational tools, modern organizations depend on enterprise architecture to navigate today’s digital complexities.

In addition, the enterprise architecture provides a blueprint for cloud adoption, ensuring that cloud services — like those offered by RISE with SAP — integrate seamlessly with existing systems, business processes, and applications.

However, it’s not just the tools that matter; it’s the people behind them. Our recent efforts to further elevate the RISE with SAP experience include making many changes in how we engage with customers, particularly by strengthening the role of the enterprise architect and introducing the RISE with SAP Methodology. The enterprise architect not only helps customers utilize these tools, but also harmonizes all elements and guides the customer throughout their cloud journey, ensuring a cohesive and effective transformation. As a result, the enterprise architect will evolve into a real trusted advisor for the customer.

We have learned that customers can realize the true power of our business transformation tools when they work seamlessly together. It’s why we have been working hard at integrating SAP Signavio, SAP LeanIX, SAP Cloud ALM, and SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), including SAP Build, to provide a holistic transformation experience.

Taken together, this is  how our integrated toolchain benefits business transformation:

• SAP Cloud ALM orchestrates the entire process of transforming systems to meet evolving business needs. From fit-to-standard analysis and capturing requirements to project management, test automation, and final deployment, this cloud-based tool for application lifecycle management (ALM) enables organizations to effectively translate strategy into execution, ensuring the solution is optimized for the specific IT environment and business objectives. In today’s dynamic digital landscape, this comprehensive approach is crucial for staying competitive.
• SAP LeanIX not only helps businesses capture the as-is systems landscape, it enables organizations to visualize, assess, and manage the transition toward their target IT architecture. The integration with SAP Cloud ALM streamlines project management by reducing manual duplication and syncing project-related activities in real time. This enhances visibility into project progress and reduces administrative overhead.
• SAP Signavio enables deep understanding and optimization of business processes, ensuring they are both efficient and compliant. The business leaders that I speak to are keenly aware that to succeed, they must focus on business processes transformation to help them adapt, stay resilient, and transform continuously and at scale. It’s simply what today’s pace of change demands. SAP Signavio enables holistic, data-driven business transformation across organizations. Starting in Q4 2024, we will bridge the gap between business and IT teams by providing consistent process structures and synchronized data between SAP Signavio and SAP Cloud ALM.
• SAP Build helps developers, without deep coding skills, quickly extend applications on SAP BTP. That means they can innovate without changing core functionality — essential to keeping the core clean.

Customers want access to all relevant data across solutions, they want to derive better insight across solutions and access relevant the best-practices that are most relevant to them. That’s the seamless end-to-end experience we are striving for. This strategic approach leads to significant competitive advantages, allowing organizations to focus more on business improvements and explore new growth areas with confidence.

Embracing the Future

Unlocking value throughout your business transformation journey involves a strategic blend of people, processes, and solutions. As you focus on these elements and leverage SAP’s comprehensive toolchain, remember that the essence of true transformation doesn’t lie in holding onto the old, but in embracing and building the new.

Thomas Saueressig is a member of the Executive Board of SAP SE leading Customer Services & Delivery.