Is your SAP system green enough?
Sustainability is rapidly rising to the top of the corporate agenda. Just about everyone — from company leaders to employees and from customers to investors and governments — expects business to play its part in helping the world get to net zero.
The hidden carbon cost of your ERP platform
How can an organization’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and software support this ambition? The connection between a company’s ERP system and its sustainability objectives may not be immediately obvious. But, in fact, it’s fundamental.
Why? Because the data centers in which companies run their software can be some of the largest consumers of energy in a business. And the cumulative impact is huge. In fact, data centers across the globe are thought to be responsible for around 2 percent of all electricity consumption (2020 figures). By 2030, this could quadruple to 8 percent.[i]
When you take this into account, the link between software and sustainability is obvious. Indeed, it’s been estimated the information and communications technology industry as a whole accounted for 4 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions in 2021. The same research suggests that, if left unchecked, this could balloon to 14 percent by 2040.[ii]
The green beneath the cloud
The good news? Migrating enterprise workloads — including SAP system workloads — to the cloud can have a real and lasting impact on sustainability.
All the major cloud hyperscalers are ploughing investment into new energy-efficient data centers and low-emission cloud solutions — on a scale that individual companies would find it nearly impossible to match.
Consider the size of some of the numbers involved. Accenture’s Green Cloud research has found that migrating on-prem workloads to a public cloud could reduce global CO2 emissions by nearly 60 million tons every year. That’s the same as taking 22 million gasoline-powered cars off the road.
Navigate your way to a lower-carbon ERP system
One of the big challenges here is measuring and quantifying the carbon impact of migrating to cloud. To put it simply: you can’t prove what you can’t measure.
It’s why Accenture has developed tools like the myNav Green Cloud Advisor. This does two really important things. First, it establishes a baseline of as-is data center energy consumption. That’s critical for understanding the sustainability performance of the existing business.
Then, using clever data science, the Advisor considers the organization’s computing requirements and environmental goals and quantifies the sustainability of a range of different cloud migration options.
Our experience suggests that by following this approach, a company going through a typical on-prem to cloud migration can expect to see its related energy consumption drop by 65 percent — and its carbon emissions fall by over 80 percent.[iii]
Rise to new heights of sustainability
So companies running SAP software have a huge opportunity to reduce their carbon footprints by moving to the cloud. And in RISE with SAP, they have a ready-made pathway for adopting the next-generation of ERP software with SAP S/4HANA Cloud at the core.
Complemented with SOAR with Accenture, RISE is designed to help organizations achieve a “clean” ERP core in the cloud, which can then be extended, integrated and used to drive innovation with SAP and other cloud native solutions.
This idea of a clean ERP core is important. By minimizing customizations in your core S/4HANA implementation, you not only increase your organizational flexibility and agility, you can also innovate faster with sustainability in mind.
Why? Because when you’re using standard SAP software in your core ERP, you know it’s been optimized for efficiency. Every time you add custom development to that core, you’re generating an additional environmental footprint. A clean core is therefore a more sustainable core.
And when you do need to extend that core with new capabilities, you can use SAP Business Technology Platform, combined with green software development principles, to do so in a more efficient and sustainable way.
This is another area where Accenture can help. For example, we have a range of tools (including our Green IT Index) which can audit code, analyze infrastructure and processes, recommend optimizations, and benchmark performance.
Think bigger, aim higher
In this blog post I’ve outlined some of the ways organizations can run SAP solutions in a more sustainable way — all centered around shifting ERP workloads to the cloud. It means taking a greener approach to the organization’s IT infrastructure, platforms and applications. In other words, it’s about sustainability in technology.
But, there’s another, potentially much bigger, side to this. What if you used the power of technology for sustainability to create a far more sustainable business overall?
In my next post, I’ll dive into this question, explaining some of the ways SAP and Accenture are helping companies do more and aim higher in their sustainability goals.
In the meantime, please get in touch if you want to discuss how we can help create a greener enterprise IT landscape.
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[i] Sustainable Business Practices, How Green is Your Software?, Harvard Business Review, September 18, 2020.
[ii] Assessing ICT global emissions footprint: Trends to 2040 & recommendations, 10 March 2018.
