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SAP’s approach to sustainability

Written by Felix on December 8th, 2008

Disclaimer: I’m an SAP employee.
Eventually, the two main topics of my professional career get together with SAP’s approach to sustainability. On the one hand the environmental management topics familiar since the study of environmental sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, on the other hand SAP as an employer of choice who encourages personal development, gives a tremendous amount of degrees of freedom to his employees, and offers a flexible workplace. This was about the “What”-dimension of sustainability which seems to be shared by most of the voters on the current SAP Vote on Sustainability (see also the vote results).
Moreover from a knowledge manager’s point of view, I’m glad that SAP encourages the 2.0-kind of interactions with its stakeholders (see the new Sustainability Report collaborative workspace).
Anyway, what do the figures in the report mean? Let’s take one example: the close to 400,000 metric tons of overall global carbon dioxide emissions by SAP employees (incl. business travel and car fleet) in 2007. The absolute number corresponds to the carbon dioxide emissions of the country of Bhutan. If you divide these emissions by the 44,000 employees you get about 9.2 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions per SAP employee. This corresponds to the average emission by a citizen of South Africa. The ratio of GDP (aka revenue) per metric ton of carbon dioxide emission is about 33 for SAP (excellent in comparison with countries).
Thank you, James Farrar (see also SUN’s blog on Corporate Social Responsibility).

 

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2 Comments so far ↓

  1. Mike Balin says:
    8 December 2008 at 23:20

    I look at strategic marketing and sustainability for StreamServe, an enterprise software company based in the Boston area that is an SAP Endorsed Business Solution. This past year alone I traveled about 120,000 km including several trips to Germany in support of my work with SAP. The air portion alone for each of my round trips from Boston to Walldorf came to about 1,600 pounds of carbon put into the atmosphere.
    While videoconferencing technologies continue to improve, face-to-face enables a level of nuance and understanding that are so far only possible by getting on that crowded, polluting airplane!
    Thoughts?

  2. Felix Harling says:
    9 December 2008 at 21:02

    Mike, thanks for your comment.
    Well, I agree of course that face-to-face meetings are important especially in the beginning of a relationship (building trust) and for important meetings in sales, delivery, or review situations where you need the “high touch” context. So, the rule is less to minimize the # of miles but rather to maximize the customer satisfaction.
    It would be a good practice of course to issue a guideline to decide whether or not a face-to-face meeting is appropriate (there are plenty of checklists available – example). The existence of a strong platform to enable virtual meetings is of course a prerequisite for this approach.
    Nevertheless, there is still the option to decide to buy voluntary offsets for the unavoidable emissions. Based on the sustainability report SAP would have to spend about 4 Mio EUR (or 0.04 % of 2007 revenue) for a voluntary carbon offset (based on an average price of 15 USD per tons of CO2 outlined in a study of Tufts University).
    There are some companies which have built up their business model on this offset topic (e.g. a spinoff from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology: myclimate).
    Mike, I would looking forward to seeing you discuss directly on the sustainability report workspace. Sustainability professionals should join forces.