Product Environmental Footprint

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PRODUCT ENVIRONMENTAL FOOTPRINT

the next step towards fewer emissions

The extensive environmental impact of global value chains has made sustainable transformation a crucial area of focus required to meet social expectations, external stakeholder needs, and realize business potential. However, companies often lack transparency, control, and a holistic approach when introducing sustainability practices along the value chain. Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) addresses this point precisely: PEF supports companies, especially multinational enterprises (MNEs) in their individual journeys of step-by-step transformation towards an end-to-end (E2E) sustainable value chain. By providing a comprehensive software solution that considers all aspects of the value chain, including relevant regulatory, legal, and emission and costs, PEF enables companies to achieve their sustainability goals and ensure future competitiveness.

Today’s businesses must put more efforts in minimizing their impact on the environment. However, measuring the environmental footprint and assessing the implications of potential changes that may help to reduce this is no easy task.

To take a proactive step towards sustainability, these are just a few questions PEF helps to answer:

  • How to obtain a transparent and traceable E2E value chain? 

  • How to provide the underlying data in the required quality and granularity? 

  • Which sourced materials are consumed in a product, in what quantities, and the linked emission footprint? 

  • Which suppliers and which group companies are involved in the production processes and performing activities? 

  • What percentage of the emissions are caused by transportation activities?  

  • How to derive the individual emission factors and values?  

  • How to finally map the emission values to the end product?   

Globalized value chains are highly complex (procurement, production, logistics processes, sales, after-sales, etc.). PEF is designed to help by splitting the E2E value chain into more manageable blocks. In the first step, PEF creates an overview of the relevant processes, activities, products, and instances. This provides a granular data basis for identifying essential emission and cost drivers along the E2E value chain, from sourced materials through to product manufacture and all the way to your end products at the factory gate.

In the next step, all the emission values generated along the E2E value chain are then assigned to their respective “causes” like involved processes, activities, products, and instances, and mapped accordingly. Prior, these emission values need to be identified, collected, and tracked. For the collection of emission data, PEF supports with its integrated workflow option the data gathering process from involved vendors. Optionally, external LCA data can be considered within PEF. By providing total transparency of each process level, PEF now enables companies to have a complete overview of their entire operation from an environmental impact viewpoint. Thus, allowing them to assess and implement customized, resource-efficient transformations to value chains, and finally achieve companywide sustainability goals.

PEF

Features

PEF automatically retrieves data from all connected SAP ERP systems while ensuring that no context information is lost, even in complex processes, such as cross-company sales, drop shipments, tolling, stock in transit, and so on. It also ensures that the value chains for carbon footprints calculated in PEF can be reconciled with the information in the local ERP systems at any time. Thanks to the intelligent integration in PEF, master data breaks between the ERP systems can be easily identified and corrected. 

 

  • One system providing detailed insight on all your value chains 

  • Standard connectors to read relevant finance and logistics information from source systems – from SAP R/3 to SAP S/4HANA 

  • Data harmonization even when facing master data challenges, such as material number breaks, unit of measure breaks, or business partner breaks in IC transactions 

  • Value chains fully in sync with pieces of information in underlying ERP systems 

This covers information on all sourced materials in the enterprise – from the cradle to the enterprise gate. These may be raw materials, semi-finished or finished goods as required by the enterprise for further processing. PEF provides highly detailed information on every single material sourced from external suppliers and keeps track of where, when, and how much was procured. This information is then used to map its emissions. Emissions values are preferably received from the vendors directly. However, in absence of that, they can also be retrieved from LCA databases. 

 

  • Obtain accurate data on sourcing of materials from external suppliers including quantities or unit of measure 

  • Get all the information you need on each supplier 

  • Provide details on procured quantities for mapping emissions to each material 

  • Provide supplier collaboration platform to communicate with suppliers to obtain accurate emission data on materials sourced from them 

  • Allow easy integration with LCA databases if suppliers cannot provide emission information 

This covers all the value additions undertaken within the enterprise. This largely relates to R&D and production within the company’s boundaries. Value addition can occur in many research and production sites involving interplant and intercompany transportation. 

PEF tracks all such activities as maintained in the ERP systems directly associated with production systems. Actual emissions in the enterprise (as part of Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions) can be mathematically allocated to sold products based on the activities undertaken in the manufacture of the products. This provides an accurate method to distribute the Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions to individual products. If the enterprise has already completed this exercise of mapping value-adding activities to emissions, PEF takes that as the basis for calculating the emissions along the value chain. 

The emissions produced by transporting materials are also mapped to each product, thereby providing a holistic picture of the emission footprint of every single product. 

  • Obtain accurate information on various production / value-adding activities within the company 

  • Retrieve all information on the transportation along the value chain that is required to produce the end product 

  • Disclose this information to allow allocation of emissions in the plant / offices to value-adding activities 

  • Provide simple models for calculating emissions generated by transportation 

This section provides easy-to-use analytics for senior management to get a bird’s eye view on the materials, value-adding activities, and transports that are the cause of major carbon emissions and should therefore be treated with higher priority. If an end product needs more attention, you can drill down along the entire value chain and find out exactly which sourced materials of value-adding activities are the source of concern.  

  • Which procured materials cause a larger emission footprint? 

  • Which value-adding activities cause a larger emission footprint? 

  • Which end products consume these high emission footprint materials and / or value-adding activities? 

  • Emissions of an end product together with drill down along the value chain 

  • A global value chain with emission footprints rolled up 

There’s no need to worry about the security of your data. PEF is an SAP Addon, which means that it enjoys the exact same security as your other SAP applications. The same goes for other features, such as single sign-on or SAP roles. 

  • PEF enjoys the same data security as that of underlying SAP systems 

  • Single sign-on with existing SAP users 

  • SAP roles and authorizations in line with your GRC strategy 

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