SAP Sustainability Control Tower: Calculating a Corporate Carbon Footprint

[severinhussmann]

Disclaimer: This blog post reflects the state of the SAP Sustainability Control Tower (SCT) as of March 10th, 2025.

In today's business world, sustainability has become a critical focus, not just due to regulatory demands but also from genuine corporate accountability and environmental stewardship. With both intrinsic motivations to reduce carbon emissions and regulatory requirements such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS E1-6) mandating the disclosure of Scope 1, 2, and 3 total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, companies face an urgent call to action. SAP Sustainability Control Tower (SCT) offers a comprehensive solution to support businesses in this dual pursuit, providing a robust tool for calculating and managing their corporate carbon footprint (CCF). By leveraging SCT, organizations can align their sustainability strategies with both their own environmental goals and compliance needs. This article explores a simple example on how SCT empowers businesses to seamlessly integrate sustainability into their core operations, meeting regulatory standards while advancing their intrinsic commitment to a sustainable future.

Before you start with the CCF calculation you need to have completed the technical setup and have the appropriate user roles. For details, see:

• Enabling Corporate Carbon Footprint Calculation
• User Roles

This CCF process can be divided into 4 subtasks:

1. Set-up relevant Master Data

Manage Master Data: SCT allows you to set-up your company hierarchy by means of the Legal Entity (ID_COMPANY_CODE), Reporting Line (ID_ORG_UNIT) and Business Location (ID_BUSINESS_LOC). It is important to note that CCF is based on Business Locations. Therefore, you need to ensure that Business Locations are maintained. In this example we will focus on two Business Locations, Munich and Berlin:

Besides Business Locations it is important to note that SAP relies on the Emissions DPI to store the GHG information. All relevant dimensions such as Allocation Method, Scope, Scope Category, Scope Subcategory are already maintained by SAP.

Manage Emission Factors: In the Manage Emissions Factors app you can see that SCT comes pre-delivered with Emission Factor (EF) data packages by the US government Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Beyond that it is possible to provide own EF data package. Therefore, an LCA Template or a Simple Template can be filled out. For calculating the CCF, the Simple Template is recommended.

Mandatory fields in the template are highlighted with *. In this simplified example you can find for instance the data package entry 1003 “Train Travel” with the UNIT_OF_MEASURE in KM, where 100KM in DE (Germany) result in 0.56 kgCO2e.

Once you have set-up the data package, you can release it.

2. Periodic Configuration

Manage Business Activities: A Business Activity can be any activity in your company that you want to calculate emissions for. One activity is Business Location specific. If you want to calculate your Scope 3.6 Business Travel emissions across your company, you will need to create the respective Business Activities for each Business Location.

In our simplified example we want to calculate the emissions from the following Business Activities from Berlin and Munich. You can therefore create the Business Activities directly in SCT or download a template and upload it, which will make sense for bigger organizations.

Let’s add another Business Activity for Train Travel for Munich. For the name of the Business Activity, it makes sense to include the location ID. You can select your GHG Category, Description, Location, Validity Period and the Emission Factor Periods.

Once you have updated the General Information part, you can maintain the Emission Factor Period.  

As we have provided the Emission Factor for Train Travel in our CUSTOMER_SPECIFIC data package, we can select it and relevant fields such as the Quantity, Quantity UoM and Total CO2e are prefilled automatically from the data package.

You can then select the Preferred Footprint Type from Quantity-Based, Spend-Based or Manual Emission Footprint. In this case we only maintain the Quantity-Based Footprint. If you have provided also the Spend-Based Footprint in your Emission Factor data package, you can maintain both Footprint Details the Business Activity.

Manage GHG Data Collections: Before you can finally start with the data collection and calculation itself you need to set-up the GHG Data Collection(s). With that you define the period and the Business Activities you want to collect data for every Business Location. In this case, The Footprint Inventory Scope has been created for Periods January, February and March whereas the first two months of 2024 have already been completed with the data collection.

When clicking into the newly created Footprint Inventory Scope, SCT sets up the GHG Data Forms for every Business Location. In our case Los Angeles, Mexico City and New York are not relevant, so we can easily scope them out by setting them to not applicable.

Furthermore, you can notice that after clicking on the Footprint Inventory Scope you have actually changed the App and are now in the GHG Data Collection. You can now click on any Business Location where you want to start your data collection for.

3. Collection and Calculation

Record GHG Data: If you want to collect your GHG Data, you have two options to get there. 1) as described above via the Manage GHG Data Collections App and then clicking on the respective Footprint Inventory Scope, in this case March 2024 or 2) via Record GHG Data Data App:

When clicking into one Business Location, you can then edit the entry and collect the data.

After entering the data, SCT might give a notification. In this case it notifies the user that the entered quantity differs by more than 30% compared to the previous period. In this case March 2024 is compared to February 2024 for the Business Location Berlin.

When you have provided both options to maintain the data Quantity-Based and Spend-Based, you can decide how you want to collect your data. In this case for Scope 3.6 long haul travel you can decide whether you want to enter the data via the flown kilometers, or the Euros spent. Once you have maintained one option, you cannot maintain the other one anymore.

  At the end you can save your data collection. After collecting all the relevant data and saving it you can see that the progress is now at 100% and you can set the data collection to complete.

Finally, in the Manage GHG Data Collections App you can review the data a final time and confirm the review. Once confirmed, the data collection is completed and reviewed and can then be visualized in SCT.

4. Reporting and Analytics

You can see that the data collection has been successfully completed in the following Apps: Manage ESG Data, Analyze ESG Data, Our Ambitions and in View Emission Dashboard: