Personnel, Purpose, Prices and Productivity

"We will add a so-called green ledger to our ERP solution so that companies can use it not only to generate financial reports, but also a CO₂-Balance sheet can create", SAP CEO Christian Klein said in Orlando at Sapphire 2022. "Only SAP can provide reliable environment, social and governance data for enterprises." On the occasion of the SAP Annual General Meeting, Christian Klein once again explained the challenge using the example of a car manufacturer from Stuttgart: "Only a portion of the CO₂-footprint originates with the manufacturer itself, to get a realistic picture you need monitoring of the entire supply chain."

According to Gartner, CEOs name environmental sustainability as one of the ten most important business tasks for the first time. Technology-related topics such as digitization and cybersecurity occupy the top spots in the survey. This is followed by human resources issues, such as employee retention, which are also a high priority for CEOs this year - ahead of financial topics such as profitability and cash flow. "2022 is the year that CEO perceptions fundamentally changed", said Mark Raskino, Distinguished Research Vice President at Gartner. "The pandemic gradually brought to the surface a number of profound social trends. These include the desire to do work differently or in new ways, and the fragility of global supply chains."

Christian Klein emphasized in Orlando that companies only improve if they can also measure. He explained on the Sapphire stage how SAP's existing customers can capture audit-proof data to assess their environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance. Concur solutions capture CO₂-footprint of business travel, while SuccessFactors solutions can be used to monitor diversity and inclusion metrics. Sustainability Control Tower also enables ESG data from SAP and non-SAP systems to be merged. What remains to be determined for each individual SAP customer is the purpose - and when that purpose is found, with whom the digital transformation will take place.

At SAP's AGM this year, Christian Klein had to comment on comparative figures with competitors such as Salesforce and Workday, but his favorite topic was ESG: "We are committed to a sustainable world. Together with our customers and partners, because climate change is here. We need to act. And we need to do it now. That starts with ourselves. We want to become climate neutral in our own operations by the end of 2023. Two years earlier than previously announced. But our leverage is much greater. Our solutions keep the world's most business-critical and energy-intensive processes running. Our customers generate 87 percent of the world's trade volume. For 50 years, we've helped our customers achieve their revenue and profit goals."