Achieve your Environmental, Social and Governance goals with SAP

Are you looking to explore how your SAP digital supply chain landscape can help you achieve your sustainability and ESG goals?

Our latest blog looks at the challenges around achieving supply chain environmental sustainability when running an SAP landscape and shows how you can start to achieve better planet, people and performance outcomes using SAP. 

There are several ways you can incorporate your strategic ESG (Environmental, social and governance) goals into your own SAP implementations and projects and put yourself in a strong position to influence your suppliers, engage stakeholders and gain access to immediate data and compliance insights from within the supply chain. 

If your business is running SAP and you are looking to identify tangible environmental and sustainability (ESG) gains that sit within your supply chain, then you have plenty of tools at your disposal to get underway either with your existing SAP ERP Business Suite (SAP ECC), or when moving to S/4HANA or adding SAP Digital Supply Chain solutions such as SAP Extended Warehouse Management and SAP Transportation Management.

Reduce Paper & Manual Administration with SAP Extended Warehouse Management (EWM)

Why is sustainability in the supply chain so important?

A considerable amount of the environmental impact associated with many sectors is embedded in the supply chain, and as a result, there are numerous opportunities to positively impact sustainability goals. Furthermore, there are rapidly increasing legislative requirements to be met such as Streamlined Energy & Carbon Reporting Regulations (SECR), which include greenhouse gases (GHG), Obligated Packaging Producers and Extended Producer Responsibilities (EPR).

You are not alone in navigating this complexity, many senior c-suite stakeholders are still trying to understand how to:

• Design clear sustainability goals that will move the business towards net zero.
• Socialise these within the business to gain momentum towards implementation of solutions to achieve the goals.
• Measure and report on the progress against targets and ensuring they can fulfil their industries reporting needs as required.

Speaking regularly with senior stakeholders in leading supply chain and product intensive businesses in the UK, it is clear many do not have clarity on their sustainability goals; or how to achieve them.  Many are being forced to adopt specific compliance and reporting needs but have not yet considered the underlying supply chain processes. Organisational readiness or appetite is still lagging in many cases, with sustainability champions working in silos without broader sponsorship or funding.

Even within those businesses that have adopted sustainability led supply chain strategies and are achieving fantastic outcomes, there will be ongoing opportunities to extend the reach into other aspects of the business and tackle emerging challenges and related compliance changes. So, sustainability improvements must be seen as continuous, and a lasting approach used.

What we see is that building momentum is key to moving businesses away from the paralysis of dealing with large theoretical goals that are too far in the future to drive action now; this is exactly where Rocket are helping business to make sustainability REAL.

There are many ways SAP EWM can help you achieve your ESG Goals.

Take 2 examples; large numbers of warehouses still operate paper-based processes at least somewhere in the operation and inventory write-offs have a huge impact on both the planet & business performance alike, especially in consumer e-commerce retail where the scale of waste is horrifying.

Using SAP EWM, you are able to achieve gains by.

• Increasing packing/pallet fill rates
• Improving vehicle utilisation
• Accessing dashboards, measures & insights
• Optimising planning: inventory, transport & production
• Consolidating sites

Reduce Logistics Costs & Environmental Impact with SAP Transportation Management (TM)

Relatable, Educated, Achievable & Lasting.

There are many ways the end-to-end supply chain functions of a business can contribute to ESG goals, the importance of each varying within different industries.

"Common to many businesses supply chains, warehouse and logistics processes is where we recommend starting as a catalyst to sustainability momentum, with many practical people-performance-planet gains for the taking. Furthermore, the gains are typically easy to socialise, gain sponsorship and in most cases self-funding through good financial return on investment.” Lewis Marston Rocket CEO

Getting supply chain sustainability onto the project agenda.

This is much easier when an organisation adopts a shift of perspective to look at the wider benefits of an improvement or transformation project across.

• Design products that are recyclable & sustainable.
  
  
• Plan source ethically, reduce energy use and emissions waste.
  
  
• Manufacture efficiently, reducing waste.
  
  
• Deliver using warehouse and logistics processes that minimise footprint.
  
  
• Operate compliantly with appropriate ESG and performance insights to achieve goals and report. Assets & equipment to remain reliable, safe for people and the planet and energy efficient.

By creating a new perspective that goes beyond the typical cost & performance only measure. You will gain people, performance and planet benefits.

• People – improved and inclusive ways of working, making the most of the workforce.
• Performance – operation efficiencies and cost savings.
• Planet – contribution to reduced environmental impact.