Sustainability and SAP

Many utilities are well aware of the importance of walking the talk when it comes to being good environmental citizens. With so many green initiatives either in the works or already completed, it stands to reason that organizing, tracking, and reporting progress is as imperative as the actions going on to make a business green.

SAP has addressed this with three key products:

1. Carbon Impact


2. Sustainability Performance Management (SuPM)


3. Environmental, Health and Safety (EH&S)

Carbon Impact is all about tracking and reducing a business' carbon footprint. Utilities that want to set an example for their customers to encourage energy conservation and purchases from renewable sources need to show how they themselves are "being green." They can do this by deliberately tracking their progress on environmental issues. The old saying holds true, "You can't change what you don't measure." SAP Carbon Impact is designed with this goal in mind. SAP acquired a company called Clear Standards Inc. to serve as a Web framework for businesses to organize their progress and report it to internal and external stakeholders. At HPC America, we're looking into greater integration between this solution and SAP ERP and SAP Business Objects, to facilitate updates through better automation.

SAP Sustainability Performance Management (SuPM) is an application for the gathering of data from a variety of sources within an organization. This is a business system designed for middle managers tasked with the execution of their company's policies and objectives to cut CO2 emissions and reduce energy consumption overall, in order to set an example for other businesses as well as the end utility consumer. The application is intended to help measure sustainability-related data and make it actionable, such that managers can transition from analysis to execution more easily.

SAP Environmental, Health and Safety (EH&S) is already part of the Governance Risk and Compliance GRC solution. For many SAP customers, EH&S may be configured and running—but utilities can look to it with renewed interest in pushing the functionality deeper into the organization for more comprehensive coverage.

Within these three solutions, we're anticipating that SuPM will take the spotlight as SAP customers look for a comprehensive tracking and reporting system for sustainability objectives.