Stewarding sustainability

SUSTAINABILITY could boost profitability while protecting the environment. A recent report by SAP and Oxford Economics revealed that 66 percent of businesses in Asia do not think it is difficult to be sustainable and profitable at the same time even as only 8 percent say they receive significant value from their sustainability strategies today.

This reality may have happened due to the disconnect between sustainability plans and actions for many organizations. While 60 percent of businesses have a communicated sustainability plan, with Japan leading at 68 percent while Indonesia scores lowest at 46 percent, only 20 percent have incentivized leaders based on their success. In addition, less than half (44 percent) say their employees are active participants in their sustainability efforts.

A major initiative to improve sustainability outcomes would be the effective use of organizational data to make more informed decisions. For businesses in the Philippines, this remains a challenge as it takes time, especially for organizations like Globe, which has various entities with different processes and reporting formats.

To address this challenge, Globe has been utilizing SAP solutions with 70 percent of the company’s internal systems now being run by SAP. With SAP solutions already in place across its business units globally, the company migrated to SAP S/4HANA to improve fragmented processes, manual workloads, inefficiencies, lack of insights and delayed decision-making.

Meanwhile, SAP Fiori apps helped enhance the user experience and access to insights. Enhanced visibility enables wellinformed decision-making throughout the organization, and automation and fewer reconciliations in finance allow faster financial transaction processing, book closing and error-free reporting.

Finance functions became integrated and efficient, providing real-time business insights, and IT security was strengthened with improved authorization controls and compliance. By facilitating these improvements, SAP S/4HANA has proven to be a catalyst for change, helping the Globe Group adapt to changes easily in its business environment.

SAP has been helping organizations in their sustainability journey enabled by data — from driving transparency for disclosure purposes, incorporating or optimizing their data to make more sustainable business processes and decisions, to scaling sustainable practices across industry business networks and value chains.

SAP also enables organizations to achieve zero waste, zero emissions and zero inequality through a broad range of solutions. Since organizations now demand fast, reliable and compliant standard regulatory reporting, and want to leverage insights for their internal sustainable business transformation, SAP ESG solutions portfolio provides a scalable and integrated reporting platform.

Among its offerings is the most recently updated SAP Sustainability Control Tower (SCT) solution, which could help improve ESG transparency and sustainable business performance. The solution also enables companies to report regulatorycompliant ESG metrics covering common frameworks based on an open and extensible solution with the largest ESG ecosystem, allowing business leaders to act and plan with actionable insights, forecasts and setting targets, track initiatives, and optimize business processes to make an impact.