The recent SAPPHIRE NOW Converge, one of the three core initiatives of the digital event SAPPHIRE NOW Reimagined, has put the spotlight back on the global existential challenge climate change. Thomas Sausserig, a member of the Executive Board of SAP SE for SAP Product Engineering, gave a solid reminder on SAP’s commitment to delivering innovations that champion customers’ business stability amid the changing environmental and market factors.

“In today’s hyperconnected world, it’s even more important for businesses to quickly react to environmental and market changes. We’re helping to address these challenges with new ways for customers to address sustainability, lead in their industry, and grow their business networks. SAP has the strategy, expertise, solutions, and partner ecosystem to enable customers to run their business as an intelligent enterprise,” he said.

While most governments, consumers, investors, NGOs, and even employees initiate the shift towards sustainable business practices, leveraging technology catapults the intention. To help enterprises and company leaders manage their “green line”, SAP has released its first solution in its Climate 21 program, an initiative to support customers in pursuing their climate-related objectives- the SAP® Product Carbon Footprint Analytics.

Climate 21

The Climate 21 initiative in 2020 acts as a springboard for companies preparing for a change driven by incentive and choice.

“Climate 21 is the embodiment of the intelligent enterprise because it spans the end-to-end business processes across both companies and industries,” shared Saueressig as he addressed participants at SAPPHIRE NOW.

SAP takes the challenge of managing the complex accounting of consumer products, chemicals, and oil and gas carbon footprints, which involves the analysis of multiple production sites and production steps. As a trusted partner of enterprises around the world for nearly 50 years, the German company has been managing resources of partners and customers to drive revenue, reduce cost, optimise asset utilisation, streamline supply chains, and improve customer service. SAP harnesses the large base data needed to determine carbon footprints that are already in SAP systems, like the bill of materials, energy usage, procurement data, and master data. 

In Sauserrig’s article Our Decade of Delivery for Climate, he said:

“It is in our DNA to build software that helps companies measure, account, and take the right action in dynamic and heterogeneous regulatory environments.”

He also explained that the upside of climate change is its convenient measurable performance unit in the form of CO₂ to drive and track performance at a global, national, and industrial levels. 

SAP Product Carbon Footprint Analytics

SAP solutions accounting for CO₂ and other greenhouse gases are integral to the enterprise’s digital core.

SAP Product Carbon Footprint Analytics based on SAP S/4HANA, SAP Analytics Cloud, and SAP Cloud Platform delivers carbon emission insights for a company’s products by plant, profit center, or cost center. The solution offers carbon transparency of a product across the entire value chain, including production, raw materials, energy use, and transport. Producers can also integrate data from product databases and third-party solutions to analyse and understand the emissions breakdowns.

Toby Croucher, head of Solution Management for Climate 21 and Sustainability at SAP said:

“Our goal is to create transparency about carbon emissions all the way through the value chain, across industries, geographies, products, and services.” 

“Creating transparency of the carbon footprint straight through to the consumer will help inform climate-responsible buying and consumption,” he added.

Advocating transparency about the carbon footprint for any good or service applies today more than ever as consumers become more and more conscious of their contribution to the reduction of carbon footprints.

Doehler, a global producer, marketer, and provider of technology-driven natural ingredients, ingredient systems, and integrated solutions for the food and beverage industry, is the first to go live with SAP Product Carbon Footprint Analytics.

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At last week’s SAPPHIRE NOW conference, SAP made the formal introduction of a new suite of applications, SAP C/4HANA, to help businesses serve and retain customers, as well as SAP HANA Data Management Suite, a comprehensive data management solution.

According to SAP, C/4HANA modernises the sales-only focus of legacy CRM solutions by tying together solutions from Hybris, Gigya and CallidusCloud to support all front-office functions, such as consumer data protection, marketing, commerce, sales and customer service. It will be fully integrated with SAP’s business applications portfolio.

“SAP was the last to accept the status quo of CRM and is now the first to change it,” McDermott said. “The legacy CRM systems are all about sales; SAP C/4HANA is all about the consumer. We recognise that every part of a business needs to be focus on a single view of the consumer. When you connect all SAP applications together in an intelligent cloud suite, the demand chain directly fuels the behaviours of the supply chain.”

SAP has also made a new acquisition to improve field service customer experience, buying Switzerland-based Coresystems FSM AG. The company’s platform provides real-time scheduling for customer service requests and uses artificial intelligence-powered crowd service technology to assign the best-qualified technician to each call.

Based on the latest versions of the SAP HANA business data platform, SAP Data Hub solution, SAP Cloud Platform Big Data Services and SAP Enterprise Architecture Designer Web Application, the SAP HANA Data Management Suite will enable enterprises to bring together highly distributed structured and unstructured data into a single logic data set.

“Integration fuels intelligence. It’s time to reimagine end-to-end mega processes in a new suite experience for the enterprise,” McDermott said. “By connecting demand chain to supply chain, we help every part of the business serve and retain the customer.”

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The solutions, which will leverage SAP Leonardo, IBM Watson technologies and SAP Ariba, will bring intelligence from procurement data together with predictive insights from unstructured information to enable improved decision-making across supplier management, contracts and sourcing activities.

IBM Global Business Services will provide consulting and services to build, implement and operate the new offerings using tailored roadmaps, and working with SAP Ariba to bring new and existing IBM customers to the platform.

The companies also plan to launch a Cognitive Procurement hub to further the development of intelligent procurement solutions and services, working together to explore applications of emerging technologies, including blockchain.

“We’ve built a cognitive procurement platform trained specifically to understand procurement transactions and unstructured data such as weather, non-standard part numbers in contracts and complex pricing structures,” said Jesus Mantas, general manager, Cognitive Process Transformation, IBM Global Business Services.

SAP Ariba and IBM hope to together use data insights to impact the entire procurement process, from improving spend visibility to assisting buyers and enriching content management. For example, a digital assistant combined with IBM Watson services, will transform sourcing events by helping with tasks such as defining the correct Request for Proposal type, identifying appropriate suppliers to participate based on commodity category, region or industry and delivering intelligence on market signals and pricing pressures to optimise results.

“Today marks a major milestone for procurement,” said Alex Atzberger, president, SAP Ariba. “With the deep horizontal integration capabilities native within SAP Ariba’s mature platform and the innovative capabilities of SAP Leonardo and IBM Watson delivered by the industry’s most experienced and trusted providers, companies can realise an even more intelligent source-to-settle process for managing all categories of spend that creates value across the entire business.”

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“With our expanded definition of SAP Leonardo, we now have all the ingredients to not only explore innovations in IoT, blockchain, machine learning, and analytics, but also to scale our ideas with design thinking and new innovation services that enable real digital business transformation,” said Dr Tanja Rueckert, president of IoT and Digital Supply Chain, SAP.

“The expanded SAP Leonardo portfolio enables companies to analyse and take real-time action from the massive volumes of data that are created by IoT and innovate with new technologies.”

SAP will enable customers to access Leonardo by either industry accelerators, aligned to specific use cases with fixed prices and timelines, or a flexible approach. Its capabilities will be integrated into its existing applications, and will offer services for developers and partners to build custom applications supported by SAP Leonardo Centres, to be based initially in New York, Paris, São Leopoldo and Bangalore.

Other new developments include the establishment of the SAP Leonardo Machine Learning Foundation; a set of new machine learning-enabled applications from invoicing to customer service and retention; and an SAP Cloud Platform Blockchain service for building application extensions and solutions using distributed ledger technology.

Under the Leonardo banner, SAP launched its new digital twin solution and new services to optimise asset management with the IoT, as well as a new collaboration with Deloitte to deliver digital solutions for finance, supply chain and software-as-a-service for industry.

New certifications on Google Cloud Platform

SAP and Google have expanded their co-innovation partnership announced earlier this year, to include additional certification of SAP technology and applications on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and global availability of SAP Cloud Platform on GCP.

The SAP NetWeaver technology platform is now certified on GCP, as is the SAP HANA database on GCP for larger instances, and a data connector for the SAP Analytics Cloud solution for Google Big Query.

Google and SAP also plan to accelerate digital transformation through innovations such as conversational apps which combine SAP business process expertise with Google’s machine learning services and open source library, to guide users through complex workflows and transactions.

SAP Cloud Platform options extended

Customers can now run apps with a choice for infrastructure providers for the SAP Cloud Platform, including multicloud support through SAP, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, managed via a new cockpit. The SAP App Centre now also offers online discovery so users can try, purchase and use partner apps directly from the centre, while hundreds of new APIs for SAP S/4HANA, SAP Hybris solutions, and SAP Ariba solutions have been added to the SAP API Business Hub.

According to SAP, other new value-added services for SAP Cloud Platform such as the IoT service general availability and big data services to support apps powered by SAP Leonardo, as well as new mobile services and SAP Fiori Cloud app development and deployment services will provide customers with a digital edge.

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