Sustainability with SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2202

[syedtalalhussain]

Author: Syed Talal Hussain, Product Expert for Artificial Intelligence and Sustainability.

Welcome to my first blog post on the Sustainability LoB. I will be taking this opportunity to provide overview of certain new products as well as details into their respective innovations. Watch my SAP S/4HANA Cloud release 2202 highlights video below to get started.

Overview of Sustainability LoB Innovations Delivered with SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2202

Release video: Sustainability, Product Compliance and EHS: Key Innovations with SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2202

*If you are looking for innovations in Product Compliance, please refer to the blog post Product Compliance in SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2202 by christian.vogler2

Table of Contents

This blog post covers the following topics:

SAP Cloud for Sustainable Enterprises - Brief Overview

SAP Sustainability Control Tower
Improve ESG Reporting, Transparency, and Sustainability Performance

SAP Responsible Design and Production

Holistically Manage Packaging and Regulatory Risk Across Global Markets

SAP Product Footprint Management

• Display CO2e-Footprints in Purchase Requisition

• Footprint Analytics Dashboards in SAP Analytics Cloud

SAP E-Mobility

Environment, Health & Safety

• Formatting and Additional Functions for Greenhouse Gas Report Template

SAP Cloud for Sustainable Enterprises - Brief Overview

SAP Sustainability Cloud is a comprehensive cloud offer that integrates data and process to manage carbon footprint, reduce material waste, and achieve social sustainability. Supported with the power and expertise of a global ecosystem.

SAP Cloud for Sustainable Enterprise - Overview

SAP Cloud for Sustainable Enterprises brings together data and business process solutions to address:

• Holistic Steering and Reporting: Gain deep insights into sustainability performance to steer your business

• Zero Emissions with Climate Action: Reduce your carbon footprint and emissions across the value chain

• Zero Waste with Circular Economy: Shift to circular business models by reducing material waste and increasing reuse across your supply chain

• Zero Inequality with Social Responsibility: Drive ethical business across employees, suppliers, and communities

SAP Sustainability Control Tower

SAP Sustainability Control Tower, part of the Holistic Steering and Reporting, with the initial release in Q4-2021, provides you with the platform and capabilities to enable holistic and integrated sustainability performance management. The SAP Sustainability Control Tower comes with prebuilt data models. However, as the SAP Sustainability Control Tower is powered by the SAP Business Technology Platform, the SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, and SAP Analytics Cloud, it is possible to add additional data sources and to derive additional metrics without writing code.

Sustainability Control Tower – Capability Areas

Sustainability Control Tower product is segmented into six capability areas:

1. Data sourcing: Create a single source of truth for sustainability performance management relevant data.
2. Key figure management: Harmonize and enrich the data to create a granular central sustainability key figure ledger.
3. Performance insights: Create actionable insight to drive sustainability performance across the organization.
4. Performance improvement and steering: Initiate abatement projects and drive targeted action embedded into your core business processes.
5. Disclosures and communication: Communicate progress to both internal and external stakeholders.
6. Business Network and external data integration: Leverage sustainability data across company boundaries to drive sustainable improvements across the value chain.

Improve ESG Reporting, Transparency, and Sustainability Performance

Initially the focus is on the World Economic Forum (WEF) Stakeholder Capitalism Core Metrics which got developed based on the contributions from around the globe. We introduced a comprehensive set of capabilities with the initial release of SAP Sustainability Control Tower concerning environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting.

Following is the demo:

Demo: Improve ESG Reporting, Transparency, and Sustainability Performance

Key Takeaways

• Acquire and transform environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data from SAP and third-party sources

• Open data provider interfaces for the WEF Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics reporting standard

• Dashboard for World Economic Forum (WEF) “Stakeholder Capitalism Metrics”

The Four Pillars of Holistic Sustainability Performance Management

The Stakeholder Capitalism Core Metrics leverage existing standards and are focusing on the four pillars:

1. Governance
2. Planet
3. People
4. Prosperity

Topics covered by the 21 Core Metrics include: anti-corruption, greenhouse gas emissions, land use, water consumption, diversity and inclusion, health and safety, economic contribution etc.

Holistic View on Sustainability Performance – Example WEF SCM Framework

For more information, refer to the SAP Help Portal and the blog post Getting ESG Reporting and Performance Management Under Control with the SAP Sustainability Control T... by gunther.rothermel.

SAP Responsible Design and Production

As sustainable business regulations, such as plastic taxes, are put in place, the SAP Responsible Design and Production solution, as part of "Zero Waste with Circular Economy", enables brands to accelerate their transition to circular-economy business practices. The new solution helps companies gain better visibility of material flows through their processes including tracking and complying with rapidly changing regulations, especially those concerning product packaging and plastics. As businesses increasingly develop sustainable products, managing materials and regulatory data is becoming one of the most complex challenges across the consumer industry today.

Holistically Manage Packaging and Regulatory Risk Across Global Markets

More and more countries are moving towards one or another form of extended producers responsibility (EPR) based regulations and has become a global phenomenon. Below is a snapshot of the current state:

Global Regulations, EPR Schemes and Plastic Taxes Continue to Increase Worldwide

All EPR schemes may have different standards and fees which adds tremendous complexity. In addition there are also complications with data being distributed across multiple systems. Stakeholders like, government bodies, investors and NGOs also require insights to the data.

The EPR Dashboard

We will start with looking at the EPR Dashboard which helps to keep the cost in check, comply with regulations, deliver on commitments, empower and engage consumers and integrate with existing SAP systems.

EPR Dashboard for SAP Responsible Design and Production

 

Following is a system demo with an example scenario:

Demo: Holistically Manage Packaging and Regulatory Risk Across Global Markets

What it means for different personas!

Below are the personas, along with their goals, most affected by this solution and they all have slightly different needs.

• Sustainability Managers: Understand performance and areas of focus against voluntary commitments and corporate goals

• Brand Manager and Packaging Engineers: Optimize product and packaging design based on downstream impact of material choices using analysis and scenario modelling

• Compliance/EPR Managers: Accurately calculate and pay Extended Producer Responsibility obligations

• Tax Managers: Accurately calculate and pay material tax requirements

• Data and Reporting Manager: Automate collection and preparation of key data inputs needed to serve business stakeholders

SAP Product Footprint Management

SAP Product Footprint Management, part of "Zero Emissions with Climate Change Solutions", enables you to calculate product footprints periodically and at scale along the entire product lifecycle. You can extract business data (such as master data and material movements information) from your SAP S/4HANA or SAP S/4HANA Cloud systems and associate these to your emission factors. You can then run a mass calculation to generate footprints for your products. It runs on SAP Business Technology Platform within the Cloud Foundry environment.

More details about SAP Product Footprint can be found in the blog post "Product Deep Dive: Welcome to Product Footprint Management from SAP" by nicowottke.

HY1 Outlook for SAP Product Footprint Management

Footprint Calculation for Manufactured Products (Q1-22)

• New calculation template

• Calculations based on Bill of Material (BoM)

Footprint Calculation for Production Activities (Q2-22)

• Step 1: Allocation of the location-based footprint (kg CO2e per plant) to the manufactured products in that plant

• Step 2: Consider activities from product costing (quantity structure from the cost estimate) and then roll up the emissions with the product

Display CO2e-Footprints in Purchase Requisition

With this feature of SAP Product Footprint Management, user can calculate product footprints and publish the results to SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

Demo: Display CO2e-Footprints in Purchase Requisition | SAP Product Footprint Management

Key Takeaways 

• API included in scope item 5IM

• Product footprints are calculated with SAP Product Footprint Management

• Calculated footprints are published to SAP S/4HANA Cloud

• Business feature as part of 5IM best practice content needs to be activated to display footprints in SAP S/4HANA Cloud

Footprint Analytics Dashboards in SAP Analytics Cloud

Pre-delivered content is coming to SAP Analytics cloud for SAP Product Footprint. in this SAC content there will be a possibility to have various analytical dashboards to analyze footprints of purchased material and also the footprint of the current inventory.

Demo: Footprint Analytics Dashboards in SAP Analytics Cloud

Key Takeaways

Pre-delivered content on SAP Analytics Cloud:

• Footprint analytics for purchased materials

• Supplier inflow analytics

• Supplier inflow heatmap

• Inventory analysis

• Inventory heatmap

• Inventory table view

For more information on SAP Product Footprint, visit the SAP Help Portal.

SAP E-Mobility

With SAP E-Mobility, as part of "Zero Emissions with Climate Change Solutions", manage your charge point infrastructure and interact along the mobility value chain in the cloud to support collaborative, end-to-end business models and processes.

Architecture Overview

From an architectural perspective, SAP E-Mobility, as an industry cloud solution, builds on SAP Business Technology Platform. Meaning the product is a pure cloud deployment and can run on vast deployment options including SAP datacenter or a hyperscaler. In the first phase, Charge@home scenario is being released which allows billing to be performed by SAP Concur.

 

Architecture Overview: SAP E-Mobility and Connection to the SAP Intelligent Suite

Major Scenarios

SAP E-Mobility enables all major charging scenarios. Namely:

• Charge@home: Integration to SAP Concur for accurate reimbursement for employees charging at home.

• Charge@public*: Integration to SAP Subscription Billing & SAP S/4HANA Cloud for invoicing and billing of subscription customers. Integration to SAP digital payment add-on for pay-as-you-go customers.

• Charge@work*: Integration to SAP S/4HANA Cloud for cost accounting of charging at the workplace. Smart charging for EV fleets incorporating prosumers to provide charging prioritization and meet grid retrains

* Expected in Q2/Q3 of 2022 (subject to development constraints)

Demo: Overview of SAP E-Mobility and Charge@home Scenario

For more information, visit the SAP Help Portal.

Environment, Health and Safety (EHS)

Environment, Health, and Safety, as part of "Zero Emissions with Climate Change Solutions", supports the organization in managing business processes related to the environment, health, and safety. This solution provides functionality to support you in the following scenarios and their corresponding processes: Incident Management and Environment Management.

Before we go into details of this innovation, lets first have a look at the related releases that came with theSAP S/4HANA Cloud 2111 release. regarding 1) Management of Environmental Reports and 2) Management of Greenhouse Gas Reports

Background:

Management of Environmental Reports

With management of environmental reports, user can create environmental reports and get a summary of the available environmental data in the system. The app provides a framework for creating summary reports that can serve as guidance on how to create environmental summary reports. You can use the reports to fulfil legal and internal reporting requirements. In addition to reports containing current environmental data, you can also make up a snapshot of projected environmental data based on the setup of compliance activities for a future period.

Management of Greenhouse Gas Reports

With this feature, user can prepare and generate greenhouse gas report files for emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, dinitrogen oxide, and carbon dioxide equivalents. Based on the greenhouse gas report form, you can select the specific criteria that you need (plant, type of equipment) and generate the report file.

Key Features:

• Specify report details, such as main location and reporting period.

• Generate a green house gas report file.

• Download the report file.

More information can be found in the blog post "Environment, Health, and Safety (EHS) in SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2111" by christian.vogler2.

Formatting and Additional Functions for Greenhouse Gas Report Template

With this latest SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2202 release, additional functions for greenhouse gas template are released. With this feature, user can specify the location and data classifiers that apply to a greenhouse gas report before generating the report file. User can also edit the unit of measures used for the report or convert values of different units to the selected unit of measure to respond to specific requirements. The system supports the conversion and helps to convert the data automatically.

The following demo provides a step-by-step walkthrough.

Demo: Formatting and Additional Functions for Greenhouse Gas Report Template

Key Improvements to the Greenhouse Gas Report

With this app, you can prepare and generate greenhouse gas report files for emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, dinitrogen oxide, and carbon dioxide equivalents. Based on the greenhouse gas report form, user can select the specific criteria needed (plant, type of equipment) and generate the report file.

• Improved report file look and feel

• Additional filtering and refinement for the data selection for the report

• Unit conversions (in the same dimension) within the report for less calculation based conversions and simplification

For more information on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, check out the following links:

• SAP S/4HANA Cloud release info here

• Sven Denecken’s SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2202 Release Blog

• Latest SAP S/4HANA Cloud Release Blogs here and previous release highlights here

• Product videos on our SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA YouTube playlist

• SAP S/4HANA PSCC Digital Enablement Wheel here

• Early Release Webinar Series here

• Inside SAP S/4HANA Podcast here

• Best practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud here

• SAP S/4HANA Cloud Community: here

• Feature Scope Description here

• What’s New here

• Help Portal Product Page here

• Implementation Portal here

Follow us via @SAP, #SAPCommunity and #S4HANA, or myself via LinkedIn and twitter @STalalHussain