How SAP Is Scaling Sustainability

SAP’s chief sustainability and commercial officer on how the software giant is its own ‘patient zero’ for reducing waste and emissions.

Despite adverse global headwinds, SAP is sticking to its sustainability guns. Over the past few years the company has set store in its ability – thanks to the amount of corporate data that flows through its systems – to help companies clean up their acts. This continues, although there have been a few minor refinements.

One of these is Sophia Mendelsohn’s job title. She is now chief sustainability and commercial officer, the latter section being a recent addition.

“We very purposely put them together,” she told Computing. “Sustainability is only as successful as it's embedded into the business. And what we're doing here is scaling sustainability.”

In developing solutions to enable enterprises to track emissions and waste SAP is its own “patient zero,” she went on. The company’s SAP runs SAP Sustainability program sees it applying its own sustainability solutions to its own operations, refining both iteratively through experience. According to the company’s latest sustainability report, 50 percent of SAP's corporate carbon footprint is now covered and validated via the company’s Sustainability Footprint Management system, with a target of 100 percent coverage (excluding downstream emissions) this year.

In the process, the company has progressed from using estimates to actual data for its carbon emissions, improving accuracy.

“When we started on our net zero goal we were using our best guess,” said Mendelsohn. “Now we're able to take all the places we have emissions, or places we source things from, and swap them out for actuals, line item by line item.”

She continued: “The reason that matters is because you need real data to make carbon reduction investment decisions.”

Real data includes hard-to-calculate scope 3 emissions (those emanating from the supply chain). Mendelsohn insisted that progress over the last 18 months has been “huge” with Sustainability Footprint Management offering granular emissions figures, right down to individual products, such as a carton of milk (dairy company DMK was one of the vendors providing a demo at the recent Sapphire event).

The circular economy is another area of focus for the German software giant, particularly in the light of strict plastics disposal laws that have been introduced in in Europe. The company has solutions to track how many materials are in the country, how much has been disposed of, and what rebate a company might expect. SAP is striving for zero e-waste from its operations by 2030 and current figures suggest 95 percent is already recycled, with the company generating 47 percent less e-waste in 2024 than the previous year.

The current U.S. government may be jettisoning many environmental laws and protections, but that hasn’t made much difference to SAP, many of whose customers are European or global and most of which have long-term plans to reduce emissions and waste.

“Customers are looking at their risks and opportunities,” said Mendelsohn. “So long as they see the ability to produce products where sustainability is a differentiator in the product attribute or understand carbon as a risk that their own clients, customers and suppliers are asking them about, the work keeps going.”

This article originally appeared on our sister site Computing.