The Fundamentals of Material Traceability – Sustainability and Carbon Footprint

[ReemaJones]

This is the third of a series of blog posts explaining the fundamentals of SAP Business Network Material Traceability. If you’d first like a brief introduction to our solution, read What is Material Traceability? by Mark Averskog.

In this post, we’ll talk about how Material Traceability allows businesses to meet the public’s growing demand to see a carbon dioxide emission score for each and every item.

In recent years nutrition labelling has become increasingly prominent, valued by consumers, and regulated by governments. Will carbon labelling go the same way? The interest in it is exploding, and this is reflected on supermarket shelves, online shops, and even restaurant menus.

Since April 2022, Material Traceability can be used to track a product’s total carbon footprint. The product carbon footprint, defined as the carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂e) value per unit quantity of a product, is displayed in the material traceability apps along with other product details. CO₂e is recorded with each event in Material Traceability as an optional attribute.

If you don’t already know about events and attributes in Material Traceability, you can learn about them in this video:



Link to second video.

You can use Material Traceability to consolidate the CO₂e value across the supply chain, giving a total product carbon footprint. Accurately measuring this footprint is the first step towards cutting it using data-driven insights. By doing so, a business demonstrates that it’s making quantifiable progress towards achieving its sustainability goals.

In Nico Wottke’s post, you can read about how product carbon footprints from SAP Sustainability Footprint Management have been integrated into other SAP offerings, including Material Traceability, allowing businesses to extend their SAP S/4HANA end-to-end business processes.

Want to know more?

Read our Sustainability page on SAP Help Portal for more information.

You could also check out this page and read our solution brief.

By reading this post and this post, you can get a broader picture of where Material Traceability fits in with other SAP offerings to help organizations achieve a sustainable supply chain. And this one focuses on Material Traceability.

Did you miss the first and second post in this series? Read about events and how they link together or batch-managed and serialized products in Material Traceability.

And… stay tuned for more posts.