NEW YORK – While it itself has been on a sustainability mission for some time, enterprise software vendor
SAP sees a growing “sense of urgency” around the environmental sustainability of organizations, the company’s sustainability chief said.
Dr. Peter Graf, chief sustainability officer of SAP, likened the current sustainability situation to the 1996 era of the Internet in terms of the potential innovation and upheaval the drive towards sustainability will bring.
“It’s going to last, and there are going to be new business models and very different behaviours in how [customers] embrace sustainability,” Graf said. “We see ourselves as an enabler. We’re in a formidable position for a number of reasons, largely because it’s a supply chain issue. You cannot be sustainable if your supply chain isn’t.”
The company’s own solution is a hosted “on-demand” application suite called
Carbon Impact, which Graf said allows customers to connect “throughout the supply chain in terms of maximizing supply and the environmental and social impact of it.”
Perhaps the biggest driver of this urgency is a new rule on mandatory reporting of green house gasses passed last month by the US
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA.) The rule requires that all suppliers of fossil fuels, vehicle makers and engines, and facilities that emit 25,000 metric tons or more of green house gasses begin monitoring their total emissions starting January 1, 2010 and making annual reports starting in March of 2011. The EPA says the requirements will cover between 10,000 and 13,000 US-based companies, and some 85 per cent of the country’s green house gas emissions. And the legislation carries with it the kinds of fines ($30,000 to $40,000 per day a company required to monitor does not do so, according to Graf) that tends to make senior executives pay attention.
