Global pressures are intensifying, regulations are evolving, and value chains are growing more uncertain. In this complex environment, companies are seeking to manage regulatory, market, and environmental externalities with proactive strategies and strategic action. SAP’s answer is a suite of sustainability solutions that can enable reporting, optimize towards sustainable business transformation, and build resilience against evolving global challenges.
Since 2021, SAP Sustainability Footprint Management has been SAP’s key solution for efficient carbon management. We are excited to share major new updates, both delivered and planned, as the solution evolves into a new phase: one where customers rely on SAP Sustainability Footprint Management as their single source for environmental footprints beyond carbon.
SAP Sustainability Footprint Management is an ERP-centric, AI-enabled foundation to help calculate, analyze, and manage your company’s environmental impacts. Read on for details about changes that enable companies to move beyond carbon reporting and turn sustainability into competitive advantage.
A single source for scalable footprint calculations, optimization, and reporting
Companies today face growing pressures: meeting evolving regulations and standards, rising investor expectations, high carbon and emissions-related costs, and data insights that flow back into processes like procurement, finance, or strategic planning.
As companies seek to keep up, they need highly accurate footprint data that is grounded in actual business data. Delivered and upcoming updates to SAP Sustainability Footprint Management extend footprint calculations beyond CO2 emissions to include other impact categories, such as land use, energy, waste, and abiotic resource depletion. With insights into more environmental levers, your company can fulfill the most common reporting standards, manage risk, decrease costs, and control externalities.
SAP Sustainability Footprint Management can turn fragmented data into integrated, actionable insights. By leveraging actual business data from SAP Cloud ERP and enriching it with additional sources such as energy flows and supplier information, it helps automate the calculation of accurate, audit-ready footprints at both corporate and product levels. Embedded into core business processes like procurement and finance, these insights enable companies to move beyond compliance-driven reporting toward strategic sustainability that can drive competitive advantage.
Updates to SAP Sustainability Footprint Management extend the same data governance, auditability, and automation to more impact areas. From the corporate level down to individual products, this enables calculations of actual footprints—not just estimates—for numerous environmental factors. Automation and AI capabilities help reduce manual effort, while high data quality can ensure that reporting is detailed and decision-making is well-informed.
One foundation, many environmental levers and business outcomes
Staying competitive in a changing global environment and driving change make it critical to identify ways to reduce costs and invest in AI-based technology. Because SAP Sustainability Footprint Management is deeply integrated with SAP Business Suite, it can enable customers to gain transparency across their entire supply chain—thereby making sustainability actionable and surfacing sustainability insights where decisions are made across the enterprise.
SAP Sustainability Footprint Management is the single source of truth that can be embedded across your operations, turning reporting into business value.
The new phase of SAP Sustainability Footprint Management moves from compliance-driven reporting to steering and value creation. The updates are part of SAP’s vision to transform sustainability data into a catalyst for long-term business value. Our approach to sustainability treats environmental footprint calculations—now with an expanded scope in SAP Sustainability Footprint Management—as a strategic asset that enables businesses to make business decisions like:
- Innovating products and services to decrease environmental impact and support a more circular economy
- Driving environmentally-sound value chains with better material sourcing and design decisions
- Identifying ways to increase resource efficiency, create new revenue streams, and achieve higher margins
- Budget and optimize for environmental related costs, like anticipated carbon usage
- Building a strategic relationship with suppliers and manufacturers, leveraging sustainability data to drive mutual growth and competitiveness
SAP’s suite of sustainability solutions can enable reporting, insights, and confident decision-making across every process, product, and partner network. Our approach helps bridge the gap between sustainability, finances, and operations. SAP’s portfolio of sustainability solutions is evolving to make sustainability actionable, measurable, and more embedded, powered by AI, trusted data, and deep process integrations.
Listen to the recent Inside SAP S/4HANA Cloud podcast episode to learn how BASF Coatings uses SAP Sustainability Footprint Management to calculate, manage, and reduce environmental impact. Check out other recent SAP Sustainability Footprint Management updates here.
