Dive Brief:
- SAP announced the general availability of the Green Ledger carbon emissions tracking solution Monday. The sustainability tool plugs into existing SAP ERP systems used by thousands of companies, according to the announcement.
- Green Ledger helps companies measure and track greenhouse gas emissions across business units, prepare for sustainability audits and implement carbon budgeting practices in line with the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s pending climate risk disclosure rule.
- SAP developed Green Ledger with input from professional services firms, including Accenture, Deloitte, EY and Tata Consulting Services. Germany-based manufacturer Covestro piloted a supply chain use case with the solution prior to general availability.
Dive Insight:
Enterprises are leaning to IT to tackle sustainability challenges and vendors are rolling out tools to enable the efforts. SAP's announcement comes at the end of a year-long, top-down push to entice customers onto its cloud-based modular S/4HANA ERP solution.
The company added expense tracking and sales tools to the GROW with SAP migration incentive program in July, activated Joule AI agent capabilities in October and partnered with AWS earlier this month to help drive the shift to cloud.
Emissions curtailment and broader environmental harm reduction efforts remain a crucial, if not always central item on the CIO agenda, especially as energy-hungry large language model technologies devour cloud datacenter resources.
But greenhouse gas emission control measures compete with other enterprise IT priorities for budget and attention, according to a Paessler GmbH report published Thursday. The IT monitoring solution provider surveyed more than 1,500 global technology leaders.
Only a tiny segment of respondents — 5% — listed sustainability among their top-three priorities. More than three-quarters of those surveyed identified cybersecurity as their primary challenge over the next several years.
Corporate regulatory concerns and investor interest in green initiatives have nonetheless kept sustainability on the C-suite agenda. More than one-third of respondents said management will drive environmental initiatives forward with IT playing a central role.
“While sustainability may not be a top priority right now, we believe it will soon climb the agenda for IT departments,” Helmut Binder, CEO at Paessler GmbH said in the report.
Accenture research confirms a growing corporate interest in sustainability. More than half of the largest 2,000 global companies have cut carbon emissions since 2016, the consulting firm found in a study published last month.
“A majority of the world's largest companies are now cutting their emissions even as the size of their operations and revenues grow,” Stephanie Jamison, global resources industry practice lead and global sustainability services lead at Accenture, said in the report.
The SAP announcement underscores a move to bring more transparency to emissions reporting standards and process.
“Technology solutions can help generate traceable, bottom-up emissions data,” Veronica Poole, Deloitte Global IFRS and corporate reporting leader, said in SAP's announcement. “Leveraging the robust governance and controls of enterprise systems is needed to help organizations achieve the rigor that enhances corporate accountability and enables a move to reasonable assurance.”
