10.11.2022
Events

Review SAP EHS and Product Compliance Info Days

25th – 27th October 2022

Three days packed with product information and roadmaps, demos and customer insights – the virtual SAP EHS & Product Compliance Info Days 2022 provided a great overview of SAP’s solutions, latest developments and strategy within the sustainability area.

With his keynote speech, Gunther Rothermel (SAP) outlined how SAP supports the industry on its way to “Sustainable Enterprises”. Sustainability, he made clear, has become the fourth major challenge in product development alongside velocity, quality and profitability.

Status of SAP's sustainability portfolio - and where is the journey heading?

Of course, the well-known solutions “SAP Environment, Health, and Safety Management” and “SAP Product Compliance” are part of SAP’s strategic sustainability portfolio. Already in 2016, SAP started the complete rebuild of its existing solutions to align them with the new capabilities under SAP S/4HANA and the cloud (e.g., higher level of automation, improved embedding of regulatory content, tighter integration with business processes, simpler user experience, real-time analytics).

Today, customers on S/4HANA can choose between “new” or “classic functionalities”, whereby “classic” is only available on-premise or as private cloud and supported by SAP until probably 2036. Good to know: SAP has changed and simplified its release strategy and will publish new major on-premise releases only every second year. Some keywords from the Info-Days:

SAP S/4HANA EHS: Mike Censurato (SAP) announced, that SAP will consolidate the EHS products into two packages. In addition to the existing “Environmental Management”, the new “Workplace Safety” will bundle the “EHS Incident Management”, “EHS Health and Safety” and “Management of Change”. However, all product parts will also be available for individual purchase. Another change is that “Compliance Management” can now be licensed for both, “Environmental Management” and “Workplace Safety”.

SAP S/4HANA Product Compliance: Ralf Coenning (SAP) reported, that the new Product Compliance solutions and their out- and inbound process integration have already made good progress, especially for the process industry. Substance Volume Tracking (SVT) and Label Management are still on the roadmap. Good to know: SVT and the compliance functionalities for the discrete industry are now part of the Product Marketability capability. Starting 2024, SAP plans to deliver a secondary data service interface to enable the plug-in of customer’s own rules or rules from other content providers and they will extend the marketability and dangerous goods functionalities for the discrete industry.

New SAP products, only available as SAP S/4HANA Cloud Solutions:

SAP Sustainability Control Tower (SCT) provides the data foundation to record, report and act on sustainability goals. It is linked to business processes like Finance or HR to collect and provide data and also integrates with Non-SAP systems. The “act” part is not ready yet, but will come soon.
SAP Responsible Design and Production (RDP) calculates the extended producer responsibility (EPR) obligations, plastic taxes, and corporate commitments to optimize material choices. Targeting on circular economy business models and waste reduction, SAP started with a focus on packaging and down-stream activities.
With SAP Product Footprint Management (PFM) you can calculate product footprints periodically and at scale across the entire product lifecycle and share it across your business processes and with your network. Today’s focus is Carbon Footprint, but it will cover more aspects of emissions soon.

All solutions support the tight integration with the whole SAP S/4HANA system via the so called “Sustainability integration component”. It’s APIs (ABAP) collect data from relevant components and business objects on S/4HANA-side and also bring information back to the users, e.g. calculations on product footprint for the finance department. Information can also be shared via an open set of API’s to use them within Non-SAP processes.

The further sessions went deeper into the individual solutions, e.g. with a demo on dangerous goods classification and end-to-end process integration or insights on the “supply chain due diligence obligations”, explaining the German “Lieferkettensorgfaltspflichtengesetz” (LkSG) and its implications. See full agenda here.