Technology is dirty. Obviously not in the muck and grime kind of a sense, but IT has a ‘dirt factor’ that needs cleaning up in terms of its environmental impact. From our hardware unit’s operational life-span to the software juice that our applications are drawing from in the datacenter and the essential energy consumption that that process requires, we have an imperative to clean up our tech and work better towards more sustainable IT services.
SAP is championing this cause and showcasing various initiatives in the sustainability space at its SAP Sapphire user conference this May 2023, with the event itself held in Orlando, Florida.
Sustainability ratings
Buyers on SAP Business Network, where about $4.5 trillion of goods and services are transacted yearly, can now choose vendors based not only on price and availability but also on human rights records and sustainability ratings.
Suppliers can upload human rights questionnaires to their profiles on SAP Business Network, where buyers can access them. Buyers are automatically notified any time a supplier they are doing business with updates their questionnaire. This feature will save suppliers time and help buyers easily prepare for due diligence processes. It will also shorten supplier onboarding times since a supplier only has to upload the questionnaire once instead of every time they sell to a new buyer.
Sustainability ratings from third parties such as EcoVadis SAS can be shared on a supplier profile on SAP Business Network. If a supplier does not already have a rating, it can request to be rated by EcoVadis through the SAP Store site. Buyers can search for suppliers based on these ratings, enabling them to select suppliers that will have a positive impact on the sustainability of their supply chains. By proactively sharing this information, suppliers can increase trust with buyers by providing visibility into their compliance with environmental, sustainability, and governance (ESG) initiatives.
Planon & simple
SAP has also announced a new co-innovation partnership with Planon, a real estate solutions provider supported by Schneider Electric SE. The partnership combines three powerhouses to offer customers an integrated solution for more efficient building management and resource planning by applying data-driven insights to unlock maximum value and increase sustainability across commercial and corporate real estate portfolios.
As a long-time SAP customer, Schneider Electric will provide ongoing industry expertise and practical early adopter influence to deliver enterprise-wide value, including greater compliance and AI-powered business insights and automation. Customers will benefit from smooth data exchange between all departments involved in management, maintenance, and support of real estate facilities, such as finance, purchasing, and accounting. This will help companies operate more sustainably through more efficient procurement and energy use. SAP BTP will serve as the central integration platform for the new solution. SAP BTP simplifies integration of partners’ and customers’ existing solutions with solutions from SAP, SAP partners and non-SAP vendors.
As a first step, Planon Real Estate for SAP will be offered as an app endorsed by SAP, attesting to its added security features, in-depth testing, and measurements against cloud operations best practices. The app is now available on SAP Store.
SAP Intelligent Agriculture
Extending these initiatives even further, SAP has partnered with satellite data company Vista GmbH to help customers make agricultural production more efficient and sustainable using satellite data–driven crop predictions and optimizations. The integrated solution is available now.
The SAP Intelligent Agriculture solution enables agribusinesses to use a broad set of farming and field data to optimize farming processes and services, increase profitability, and support sustainable farming.
The new integration with Vista – a subsidiary of energy, agriculture, and construction conglomerate BayWa AG – means crop predictions informed by Vista’s powerful proprietary crop growth models can be directly managed in SAP Intelligent Agriculture. This helps avoid data silos, improves transparency and data reusability and enables better farming decisions.
SAP also gives discrete manufacturers the power to operate more sustainably. A new process, available now, combines the Encore by SAP solution — a solution used to establish a marketplace for secondary material — with previously released SAP solutions for digital manufacturing. The new process aims to change today’s principle of “produce to waste” into “produce to reuse”.
The portfolio of solutions is now streamlined to provide customers with an end-to-end process for circular manufacturing. The process hinges on the power of SAP S/4HANA – the central repository for manufacturing data. Now companies can proactively decide to either reuse, re-manufacture, or recycle secondary material, rather than throwing it away by default. Adding these options helps manufacturers move toward more sustainable operations and explore new business models along the way.
About Adrian Bridgwater
Adrian Bridgwater is a freelance journalist and corporate content creation specialist focusing on cross platform software application development as well as all related aspects software engineering, project management and technology as a whole. Adrian is a regular writer and blogger with Computer Weekly and others covering the application development landscape to detail the movers, shakers and start-ups that make the industry the vibrant place that it is. His journalistic creed is to bring forward-thinking, impartial, technology editorial to a professional (and hobbyist) software audience around the world. His mission is to objectively inform, educate and challenge - and through this champion better coding capabilities and ultimately better software engineering.