SAP : Capturing carbon

A public airing for a stapleof management reporting.

The Site

SAP, the Germany based business software company, has developed a multi-indicator display to track the size of its carbon footprint.

SAP publishes its annual sustainability report on a standalone microsite. One of its sections, Our Performance, provides narrative and data about the effect and efficiency of the company’s actions in four areas: Environment, People, Economic Impact and Governance. Within Carbon Footprint, the first of Environment’s three sub-sections, this includes a unique ‘carbon dashboard’.

The dashboard shows three data sets: Carbon Footprint, which covers goals and achievements over a time span from 2000 to 2020; Carbon Footprint by Scope (greenhouse gas emissions at three recognised levels); and Detailed View for 2008, which shows various aspects of On-Site Fuel Consumption. Views of the time span chart can be tailored using buttons and dropdown menus for factors such as region, ‘Show % difference’ and total quantity/quantity per employee. ‘Instructions’ and ‘About’ buttons provide guidance on how to use and interpret the dashboard, while elements within charts reveal the underlying number on rollover.

The Takeaway

Since the arrival back in the mid-1990s of ‘balanced scorecards’ in the manager’s toolbox, dashboard-style presentations of sets of key performance indicators have become a familiar sight within organisations. SAP’s carbon dashboard is in that tradition, except that its audience is not senior executives in the company cockpit but any stakeholder or member of the public with access to its annual sustainability report.

The choice of the dashboard format is noteworthy in itself as a way of showing related perspectives on the carbon footprint issue. SAP harnesses this to the dynamic properties of the web to add a new dimension that overlays more detail and puts different parts of the organisation in the same frame, which also enhances comparability. The result reinforces not only a sense of greater transparency in its reporting but also a subtle reinforcement of SAP’s technological credentials.

First published on 23 June, 2009