
Wishing you a joyful and healthy New Year! As we embark on another exciting year, I'm happy to continue my quarterly blog series, showcasing the latest features and enhancements in SAP Sustainability Footprint Management Management and other exciting updates around the product. In this edition, I’m covering:
We’ve enhanced allocations functionality in SAP Sustainability Footprint Management by adding the ability to allocate emissions from Business Activities and Waste Types (senders) to facilities, process infrastructures, products, and resources (receivers). This functionality allows emissions collected at the plant level (Corporate Carbon Footprints) to be distributed to products, enabling a more detailed analysis of emission breakdowns and the calculation of a full Product Carbon Footprint – cradle-to-grave. This new feature allows you to allocate results from form-based footprint calculations, using both generic (Business Activities) and specialized forms (Waste in Operations).
You can set up those allocations as before in the Manage Allocations app. Simply create a new Allocation Scheme, representing a bundle of rules that are applied during the footprint calculation. The Allocation Rules define the relationships between senders and receivers and specify the allocation ratio for each receiver. For Facility or Manual Emissions senders, only one sender is allowed. In contrast, for Business Activities or Waste Types, multiple senders can be included. These senders are linked to one or more receivers, such as facilities, products, process infrastructures, or resources. The allocation ratio allows you to add a fixed number or percentage value for an item. In the screenshot below, the emissions related to Waste in Operations (GHG Scope 3.5) are distributed 2:1 between the two defined products. To create senders and receivers, it’s also possible to import file templates to upload several entities at once. For more information, see Manage Allocations in SAP Help.
Allocation Rule for Waste in Operations
After releasing the allocation scheme and running the calculation, the respective footprints are displayed in the Manage Footprint Results app. In the Sankey Chart, when for example selecting a product, you can see those allocated emissions as input to the product’s total CO2e. Furthermore, their CO2e contributions are included in the breakdown section, assigned to their respective GHG Scope and Category.
The new plausibility checks feature in SAP Sustainability Footprint Management is a powerful tool designed to verify the validity and consistency of footprint calculations, ensuring data integrity and reliability. This feature decreases the necessity for manual verification, which can be impractical or time-consuming. It ensures that values entered or calculated fall within a specified tolerance, thereby reducing errors. Pre-shipped most common templates support a quick time to value. Through customizing those templates to your specific business needs, you can identify deviations or anomalies in your data and take appropriate corrective actions.
The Manage Plausibility Checks app allows you to set up and manage plausibility checks for calculated footprints, offering a quick overview of deviations from expected results to identify anomalies. After footprint calculations are completed in the Calculate Footprints app, plausibility checks are automatically triggered, and results can be evaluated in the Monitor Plausibility Checks app. Note that plausibility checks on spend-based calculations are currently not supported.
Within the Manage Plausibility Checks app, you can configure checks, customize them, or use SAP-provided ones, assign checks to multiple results or multiple checks to a single item, and edit, delete, or copy custom checks. The process for creating plausibility checks involves setting acceptable deviation thresholds for calculating total CO2e emissions, CO2e emission per unit, or product quantity for various item types. You need to enter an ID and description, and select the check type, either Absolute (with maximum and minimum thresholds) or Relative (based on variation from the previous period). SAP provides default relative checks that can be edited but not deleted or copied. You specify validity dates and details regarding item types, such as footprint inventory scope and plant. Depending on the selected item type, additional fields may appear. For absolute checks, you define maximum and minimum values and units of measure. For relative checks, enter an acceptable percentage variance from the previous period. Once created and released, the plausibility checks are ready for use on calculated footprints. To manage plausibility checks, ensure you have the required roles assigned. For more information, check Manage Plausibility Checks on SAP Help.
Manage Plausibility Checks
In the Calculate Footprints app, the released plausibility checks are automatically triggered during the footprint calculation run. The status Calculated with Warnings indicates that the calculation doesn't adhere to the defined checks. A new micro chart also summarizes the footprint status, representing the number of successful calculations in green, those with warnings in orange, and those with errors in red. To view the details, click on the new Show Plausibility Checks button.
The Monitor Plausibility Checks app allows you to evaluate the results of plausibility checks conducted on footprint inventory calculations. It displays warning messages if any of the defined and released checks are violated, enabling analysis of their nature and extent. The app also lets you add review comments to the results for future reporting or auditing. You can select the appropriate alert that appears if the calculations deviate from the configured checks to see all details. To confirm your review, select the Review action and add any necessary comments, particularly if the values deviate due to critical operational situations. This will mark the check as Reviewed. If you retrigger calculations and the calculated value remains unchanged with the associated check still in place, your previous comments will be retained. To use this app, ensure you have the correct roles assigned. See Monitor Plausibility Checks on SAP Help for more information.
Monitor Plausibility Checks
Furthermore, the Manage Footprint Results app now displays the warning status for item footprint results. By navigating to the Errors and Warnings tab, you can get more details about the plausibility warnings, ensuring a thorough analysis of any issues. In addition, the Monitor Business Logs app provides traceability by allowing you to trace back who deleted plausibility checks at a specific point in time, ensuring accountability and traceability.
You can now calculate the CO2e emissions associated with Goods Issued to Production and Goods Receipt from Production, even when the production and movement plants are different. We've enhanced the Import Business Transactions app by adding new consistency checks. These checks ensure that any production documents referenced in business transactions exist within the master data and that the associated plant is included in the defined footprint inventory scope. See Import Business Transactions for more information.
As an example, your company utilizes two distinct plants for efficient production processes: Plant A (the movement plant), where goods are sourced, and Plant B (the production plant), where goods are manufactured. When setting up the production workflow in your systems, use the Import Master Data app to link production documents to Plant B, indicating where production occurs. Meanwhile, the Import Business Transactions app is used to document the flow of goods, noting that goods for production originate from Plant A. To ensure seamless data integration and consistency, both plants are included in the Manage Footprint Inventory Scopes app. This setup allows to effectively connect production activities at Plant B with incoming goods from Plant A, streamlining the overall production operations.
With the new Emission Factors OData API, you can retrieve emission factors that were imported through the Manage Emission Factors app. API allows you to export emission factors data for analytics or reporting purposes. For more information, check the API reference SAP Business Accelerator Hub: Emission Factors.
Considering the effect of fiscal periods on the preparation and publication of product footprints for carbon data exchange, the latest update to the Publish Product Footprints app enhances how product quantities and total CO2e emissions are calculated. By calculating weighted values based on the number of overlapping days between the fiscal period and the average footprint periodicity specified in the app, a more precise and accurate footprint calculation is provided. This approach allows for a linear estimation of carbon emissions over the given period. For examples and detailed information, see Preparing and Publishing Product Footprints.
With a UI5 enhancement, SAP Sustainability Footprint Management Fiori applications now allow users to save public variants. This new feature lets you decide if your saved variants are visible just to you or accessible to all users. Note that to leverage UI5 flexibility services as key users, specific roles are required – see Setting Up Roles for more information.
Instead of endless periods, the Manage Purchased Product Footprints app now suggests a three-year validity period when releasing a purchased product footprint or manually mapping emission factors. You can adjust these dates as needed. Furthermore, you can enhance your data processing efficiency by filtering records using the Valid On field across all tabs. For more information, see Using AI to Map Purchased Products and Purchased Product Groups and Manually Map Purchased Products and Product Groups without Footprints.
In December, SAP Green Ledger went general available (Read the press release: SAP Announces General Availability of SAP Green Ledger). This innovative carbon accounting solution is integrated with SAP's financial management system running on SAP S/4HANA Cloud. It’s designed to help businesses seamlessly track, measure, and report their carbon emissions alongside financial data at a transactional level, enabling a holistic view of both environmental and financial performance. SAP Green Ledger is a tool that integrates carbon emissions data with financial accounting, enabling businesses to forecast, budget, and contextualize carbon and financial data together for informed decision-making and strategic planning. It analyzes Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions and aligns them with financial data to account for all sources of emissions. By applying double-entry accounting principles, SAP Green Ledger ensures reliable and auditable carbon data, helping businesses align profitability with sustainability goals. It enables carbon budgeting and benchmarking across business units to drive low-carbon strategies and regulatory compliance.
SAP Green Ledger is also integrated with SAP Sustainability Footprint Management, enhancing the reporting and analysis capabilities and providing a more comprehensive view of carbon data. To import your calculated corporate carbon footprints from SAP Sustainability Footprint Management, you need to make those available via the Manage Footprint Communications app. An internal API provides those footprints at the level of business transaction, period, GHG scope and GHG category. SAP Green Ledger uses this internal API for replicating the corporate footprints. This data is then posted to the journal at the entity level, ensuring accurate and detailed carbon accounting. See Integrating with SAP Green Ledger on SAP Help for all required steps in both systems.
For more general product information, check the product page: SAP Green Ledger. For even more insights and a system demo, I also recommend watching the recording of the following webinar:
Another exciting product that was launched last year is SAP Spend Control Tower. This next-generation spend analytics solution is designed to provide comprehensive visibility into enterprise-wide spend data. It integrates payment and supplier data from various sources into a single, unified view. Key features include AI-enabled spend classification, which uses machine learning to optimize spend categories and supplier data, and preconfigured dashboards that offer intuitive views with key performance indicators (KPIs) for spend performance. Additionally, it includes supplier risk management to identify sourcing vulnerabilities and minimize supplier risks, as well as diversity and sustainability tracking to monitor and qualify suppliers based on these goals. Check the product page for more details: SAP Spend Control Tower.
SAP Spend Control Tower integrates with SAP Sustainability Footprint Management, enhancing its capabilities to provide a holistic view of both financial and environmental impacts. This integration allows businesses to track and analyze their carbon footprint alongside spend data, offering insights into the sustainability performance of their procurement activities. By combining spend analytics with sustainability metrics, companies can make more informed decisions that align with their environmental goals. For this integration, the standard Public APIs are leveraged. See Setting Up Connection with SAP Sustainability Footprint Management on SAP Help for all details and required steps.
SAP Spend Control Tower
For 2025, there are a bunch of exciting innovations on which we’re currently working and that we plan to release in SAP Sustainability Footprint Management during this year. In the following, I’ll go into some of the feature highlights planned for release in the first half-year. For a comprehensive overview of all planned innovations and which benefits those will bring to you, have a look into SAP Road Map Explorer, which will be updated regularly.
The emission factor mass update enables an automatic updating of existing emissions factor references in business entities when importing a new emissions factor or lifecycle assessment (LCA) content package. This ensures you have always mapped your business entities with the latest emissions factors, reducing the need for manual updates and efforts.
Through enabling internal energy production with multiple energy carriers, you can model the production of energy in the energy flow model. By enhancing process infrastructure to accommodate multiple energy carriers with a unified unit of measure (UoM) dimension, it ensures precise footprint calculations that account for internal energy productions such as electricity and heat.
We further plan to provide an interface to extract organizational footprint inventories on transactional level, allowing you to retrieve data filtered by inventory scope, item type, and various periods. It includes measures like calculated carbon equivalents and business activity quantities, with dimensions varying according to the footprint item type. This will facilitate custom analytical and reporting applications, enhancing the solution's extensibility.
With the product footprint item fact sheet, we plan to offer a comprehensive, itemized view of all input items contributing to a product's environmental footprint, encompassing energy sources, business activities, purchased products, and transport. By providing specific data points for each line item, it ensures transparency and will help you make informed decisions about the product's sustainability impact.
To improve the accuracy in calculating freight transport emissions for both upstream (Scope 3.4) and downstream (Scope 3.9) activities, we’re enhancing freight calculation by using ERP material flows. It automates route determination and integrates freight calculation results into your organization's footprint inventory, helping you to manage transportation operations and emission data with higher precision and less manual effort. An analytical app is planned for detailed transport calculations, improving overall efficiency in managing and reducing transport footprints.
For ensuring precise and flexible financial tracking over different time periods and for various location types, cost center assignments for energy sources and locations improve the accuracy of carbon accounting and seamless integration with SAP Green Ledger.
Finally, in the first half of this year we also plan to enable the data collection definition via location types. This allows you to define business activities based on various location types, such as plants, facilities, and resources, enabling the generation of specialized GHG data collection forms. By tailoring forms to specific location types and activities, the feature simplifies and streamlines the process of data collection, ensuring more accurate and relevant environmental reporting.
In its pursuit of enhancing the quality of water sources and delivering healthy hydration, BlueTriton Brands Inc., North America's leading branded water company, has embarked on a transformative journey with SAP Sustainability solutions. Recognizing that their business goes beyond just water consumption – spanning from source to sip – BlueTriton is dedicated to conserving resources, stewarding nature, and advancing circular solutions.
To meet robust sustainability targets, BlueTriton integrated SAP solutions to effectively track their environmental impact. These solutions, including SAP Sustainability Control Tower and SAP Sustainability Footprint Management, enable the company to manage greenhouse gas emissions, track ESG goals, and plan sustainable initiatives. The SAP S/4HANA Cloud solution for EHS environment management further bolsters ESG reporting, while SAP Responsible Design and Production aids in designing sustainable products.
With SAP Sustainability solutions, BlueTriton now accurately measures its carbon footprint at a site level, allowing for a detailed comparison of emissions across individual factories against corporate targets. This capability has enabled pinpointing of issues and strategic action to ensure each site meets its carbon reduction goals. With granular insights and precise reporting, BlueTriton not only supports informed decision-making but also fulfills anticipated compliance requirements in California. The increased transparency and accountability in its sustainability efforts allow the company to confidently share its progress with stakeholders. By effectively quantifying and analyzing its environmental performance, BlueTriton aims to build awareness around climate-related risks and opportunities, ultimately reinforcing its reputation as a trusted guardian of water resources and enhancing customer loyalty. Looking forward, BlueTriton plans to leverage AI-driven insights to assess future scenarios, helping refine sustainable strategies in alignment with shifting temperatures, consumer preferences, and economic factors.
Read the full story here BlueTriton: Achieving healthy hydration through water stewardship and have a look into the video: Achieving healthy hydration through water stewardship.
In the last quarter, we introduced new assets and enhanced existing ones, aiming to support you in getting to know and adopting SAP Sustainability Footprint Management. Those assets are all free of charge and specifically designed to guide you in calculating, managing, and reporting your Corporate Carbon Footprint (CCF).
We released the new Learning Journey: Establishing Corporate Carbon Footprint Emissions with Simple Configuration. This two-hour learning targets beginners and provides a great introduction into the Greenhouse Gas Protocol and into the general capabilities and architecture of SAP Sustainability Footprint Management. It shows how you can configure the solution and use business activities for calculating your CCF across GHG Scope 1, 2, and 3. It also covers the integration of calculated footprints into SAP Sustainability Control Tower. After successful completion of the course and passing all quizzes, you receive a Record of Achievement and digital badge. Start your learning now for free: Establishing Corporate Carbon Footprint Emissions with Simple Configuration.
Learning Journey: Establishing Corporate Carbon Footprint Emissions with Simple Configuration
Besides this course for beginners, we’re also working on an intermediate Learning Journey, guiding you through the calculation of selected GHG Scopes by using advanced configuration. You’ll learn how you can best leverage the ERP-centric approach of SAP Sustainability Footprint Management to re-use your business data in calculating emissions related to facilities, products, waste, and more. The release is expected soon, stay tuned!
We’ve also revamped and enhanced the Free Trial access for SAP Sustainability Footprint Management. This free-of-charge 30-day trial offers a hands-on experience with the live system, perfect for testing and exploring its features. The trial already showcased crucial elements for Product Carbon Footprint management, and now we've enriched it by introducing a second model company for Corporate Carbon Footprint calculations. With two model companies – Almika Soft (software) and Almika Foods (bakery) – you can delve into various carbon footprint scenarios seamlessly. Additionally, our revamped start page now makes accessing guided tours easier, organized by topics and three levels of detail, allowing you to select either a quick overview or a more in-depth exploration. Register now for free and receive instant access information via e-mail: SAP Sustainability Footprint Management Trial.
SAP Sustainability Footprint Management Free Trial (Landing Page)
Finally, also the documentation on SAP Help has been enhanced. A new and improved Scenario Guide provides configuration and usage guidance for calculating your corporate carbon footprint, supported by step-by-step processes and examples. Explore the guide: Scenario Guide for SAP Sustainability Footprint Management, note that this is available in English only.
Available for some time already but still worth mentioning again, our Implementation Guide (for Partners) provides a detailed guidance on setting up the solution for calculating corporate carbon footprints. This package includes sample data for a model company and an implementation book to do an end-to-end setup of SAP Sustainability Footprint Management for calculating the CCF of the example company. You can download the material here: Corporate Carbon Footprint (CCF) Implementation Guide. Note that the target audience is consultants and partners, and access is restricted, requiring a login via your SAP account.
For in-depth details on SAP Sustainability Footprint Management, including concepts, setup, and the application help, I recommend you browsing through the SAP Help Portal. For an overview of all new features and functions that have been released, check the What’s New section, which is updated with every new software release.
To stay up to date on SAP Sustainability Footprint Management, follow me here in the SAP Community. In regular cadence, I’ll publish blog posts giving you updates on all the product’s new features and functions as well as deep dives into the product capabilities. I’m also looking forward to engaging with you directly, feel free to leave your feedback in the comment section.
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