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SAP’s latest Sustainability Report is teh awesome!

May 15, 2010 by Tom Raftery

SAP released its 2009 Sustainability Report during the week and if last years Sustainability Report was good, this one is outta the park!

SAP released their first Sustainability Report in November 08 reporting on the 2007 year. It was a good initial effort (prepared in accordance with the GRI guidelines and achieving a ?C? level certification) delivered in your typical PDF format. The main innovation the first year was that there was a separate site for readers to leave feedback.

Then in May 2009 SAP released their 2008 Sustainability Report. This report achieved a B+ GRI rating and was far more interactive than the previous report (or any Sustainability Report I had previously seen). It allowed readers to interact with the data and showcased the interactive Sustainability Map which categorised core business processes related to sustainability and mapped them into distinct categories. Again SAP solicited feedback from users.

Now the 2009 Sustainability Report takes this to the next level. It:

achieved an A+ GRI rating by reporting on more sustainability GRI indicators and by adding new metrics, including Renewable Energy, Business Health and Culture Index, and Employee Satisfaction
includes the new edition of the Sustainability Map
establishes short- and long-term goals for many of SAPs metrics beyond carbon footprint
contains more embedded interactive dashboards leveraging data sourced from SAP Carbon Impact and SAP Business Objects Sustainability Performance Management
enables readers to comment on SAPs performance and solutions in the context of the report (no longer on a separate site) and
SAP will now produce quarterly updates on their carbon performance

There’s also the Materiality Matrix and the Create Your Own sections where you can try out different scenarios to see how they would affect SAP’s goals.

What do I love about this report?

I love how the two co-CEO’s went beyond simply putting their name to a letter at the start of the report (that’s so 2009!). They took the time out to record videos to introduce the Sustainability Report and talking about SAP’s commitment to sustainability.
I love the ability to leave comments on every page. The comment system allows you to login using your Twitter, LinkedIn, Yahoo, FaceBook, Google, or AOL credentials and uses OAuth for account verification. The geek in me just loves that (hence the screenshot above).
I love how the performance summary presents the data in stunningly simple to digest format. Clicking on the data here drills down into more detail on those numbers. The detail section is often highly interactive. For example in the carbon footprint section of the report you can see the carbon footprint by quantity, or by employee, by region or overall, by emission scope and clicking on a year gives a breakdown for that year specifically. Also, clicking on the printer icon allows you to print, while clicking on the Excel icon lets you download the data! and
I love how this report makes SAP’s sustainability data and their targets so transparent

Scott Bolick, SAP’s VP Sustainability Solutions, informed me that readership of SAP’s Sustainability report went from 3,500 for the 2007 PDF report to approx 30,000 readers for the online 2008 report. On top of that, many of SAP’s customers after looking at it, asked if they could purchase the technology to produce a similar report themselves! That’s a ringing endorsement right there.

It will be interesting to see what the readership of this report will be – you gotta suspect it will blow way past the 30,000 that last year’s report had.

[Disclosure – SAP are GreenMonk clients]

Suddenly the business case for being an ethical, non-polluting business seems all the stronger

May 4, 2010 by Tom Raftery

Photo credit NASA Goddard Photo and Video

Is the massive environment, health and safety (EHS) risks, which fossil fuel companies represent, starting to hurt their businesses?

Reading this morning about the Deepwater Horizon explosion and the continuing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico I note that BP’s market value has fallen from ?122bn last week to ?102.5bn today – a loss of almost ?20bn in a week (or just over 16% of its value).

What has to be really worrying for BP investors is that

Oil from the oil spill reached the Louisiana coast by April 30th
Analysts estimate that the Louisiana fishing industry could sustain $2.5 billion in losses, while Florida could lose $3 billion in tourism income
The oil spill could be leaking at a rate of 25,000 barrels a day, five times the government’s current estimate, industry experts say
No one can say for sure when it will finally stop but estimates are that it will take up to three months and possibly more
President Obama himself has declared “BP is responsible for this leak. BP will be paying the bill.” and he’s just talking about the cleanup operations, not the litigation
Documents have emerged showing BP argued against new, stricter safety rules proposed last year by the U.S. agency that oversees offshore drilling, a whistleblower is accusing BP of failing to keep key documents vital to safe shut-down on its Atlantis rig and
the first of the court cases against BP are already being filed

Things must be pretty grim at present in BP’s plush London HQ but it is not like BP have an exceptionally poor record by fossil fuel producers standards. For example:

Gulf Oil (now Chevron) and Total S.A. were found jointly responsible for the explosion at the Bantry Bay oil terminal which killed 50 people in 1979
ExxonMobil has an appalling environmental record which includes the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, the Booklyn oil spill, the Sakhalin-I oil and gas project in the Russian Far East and accusations that it knowingly assisted human rights violations, including torture, murder and rape
Shell has a similarly poor environmental record being heavily invested in oil extraction from Canadian tar sands, and Shell has been accused of human rights violations in Nigeria, including summary execution, crimes against humanity, torture, inhumane treatment and arbitrary arrest and detention
Chevron’s environmental and human rights record is, frankly, appalling.

And this EHS risk is not limited to oil and gas companies. On the contrary:

Massey Energy, the owner of the Upper Big Branch coal mine which exploded four weeks ago, killing 29 miners, has a terrible record of environmental and health and safety abuses. In fact, so bad are they that the FBI announced recently that they would be investigating Massey for the possible bribery of federal officials overseeing mining industry regulation and for potential criminal negligence.

Massey’s main competitors in the US are little better –

Arch Coal, and CONSOL Energy are heavily involved in Mountaintop Renewal while
Peabody Energy has a long history of of opposing efforts to mitigate the negative environmental effects of coal production and combustion

With the rapidly increasing number of environmental lawsuits taking place companies like the above are going to be spending more and more of their time in the courts with the consequent losses in time, productivity and reputation which that entails.

When you couple that with the growing interest in environmental issues being taken by the SEC, the EPA and investors and suddenly the business case for being an ethical, non-polluting business seems all the stronger.

After all, as many people noted on Twitter in the last few days, spills of air from wind farms or sun from solar plants are not going to have the devastating environmental consequences we have witnessed in the last decades as a result of our addiction to fossil fuels.

You should follow me on twitter here.

SAP’s Environmental Health and Safety Management solution

March 26, 2009 by Tom Raftery

In the third part of my interview with SAP’s Chief Sustainability Officer, Peter Graf, we discuss SAP’s Environmental Health and Safety Management solution.

Why is this important? Several reasons:
– employee health and safety,
– compliance with constantly changing EHS regulations (REACH, and WEEE for example),
– increasing importance of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and from SAP’s perspective,
– annual investment in EHS solutions between 2008 and 2010 is expected to reach $80bn.

Sustainability isn’t just about carbon footprints – it is great to see SAP helping its large customer base be better corporate citizens.

SAP hones sustainability push (news.cnet.com)
SAP’s Peter Graf discusses his role – Chief Sustainability Officer (greenmonk.net)
SAP’s Chief Sustainability Officer on Carbon Reduction (greenmonk.net)
SAP goes green (communities.hp.com)
Tips to Turn Tech Execs into Green Experts (businessweek.com)
Companies thinking, not acting green (vnunet.com)
Poisoning the Poor with eWaste in Ghana (greenchemistry.wordpress.com)

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