PwC and SAP: Leading sustainable transformation

Sustainability has become a top priority

Sustainability has evolved into an urgent business imperative. Its value extends far beyond compliance reporting and developing an audit-ready stakeholder response. It can unlock broader financial and operational business benefits – from protecting value at risk and building resilience to capitalising on new commercial opportunities and strengthening competitive advantage. That’s why it’s time for every organisation to embrace sustainability.

What is the CSRD?

“Failure to adapt to the rapidly changing sustainability risks and regulations is a missed opportunity for businesses. By implementing the right data and technology strategy, organisations can start to see the hidden potential for value creation.”

Will Jackson-MoorePwC Global Sustainability Leader

Sustainability isn’t like other business requirements

Sustainability is unlike any challenge encountered before. Its breadth and depth are unprecedented, because it touches every single part of the organisation. It calls for a new breed of subject matter expertise. And it requires you to gather and report on information that you’ve never previously collected, then use that data for compliance reporting and business steering. 

All of this means that sustainability demands a deep transformation of compliance and risk management, while unlocking new ways of doing business. It requires new capabilities, built on digital solutions, which are key to managing the data required to generate insights and gain competitive advantage in this new frontier. 

Putting sustainability at the centre of corporate strategy also revives the classic theme of “measure what you manage”. When strategy moves to execution, backed by a solid business case, this is where sustainability becomes operationalised and where technology becomes an enabler for driving returns.

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PwC and SAP: Sustainability

What sustainability challenges are businesses facing and how is PwC working to solve them? PwC's Sammy Lakshmanan (Principal, ESG) shares his insights on the topic of sustainability and ESG.

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Technology innovation is strengthening data and reporting capabilities 

Today, most businesses are at the start of their journeys in learning to collect, process and disclose sustainability-related information. This means that introducing even relatively straightforward enhancements and standards can have a significant impact on data and process reliability. Further action is urgently needed, as investors are increasingly eager to understand organisations’ impact on the environment and how sustainability impacts their balance sheets. Better data and reporting are essential to generating clearer insights for decision-making.


Why SAP should sit at the heart of your sustainable transformation

At PwC, we believe navigating sustainability-related financial risk and opportunities, starting with climate, will be increasingly important for organizations. Sustainability needs to be embedded into reporting and the wider strategic goals of an organization, which requires equal rigour in data management, systems and process design. Great strategic importance is placed on assurance and materiality (as required by regulations in many jurisdictions). This approach supports compliance and gives confidence in data-driven decision-making, which in turn makes SAP ERP and finance-centricity key success factors in the long run.

Your SAP ERP sits at the heart of your operations, making it the ideal starting point for embedding sustainability into business as usual. We help you leverage insights from any initial data and gap assessments as part of reporting readiness. And we put SAP ERP and finance at the core of your efforts to unlock greater value from sustainability reporting, risk management and product design. Around this, we interweave ready-to-use data models and automated workflows, plus AI, cloud and digital capabilities. Our approach gives you the flexibility to meet all your internal and external sustainability-related demands, while getting the most out of your investment in SAP.

“If you run your business on SAP, the best approach is using your existing and newly available SAP solutions to create a robust, underlying, holistic data model for all sustainability-related information. You can then slice and dice the data in different ways to comply with any regulation you face, to generate management reports and to steer your business.”

Gunther DütschSustainability Services & Climate Change, Partner, PwC Germany

How we support clients

We have a strong partnership with SAP, covering everything from co-innovation and roadmap alignment to joint solution design and go-to-market. Together, we bring you the best of two leading global organisations.

We can support you with SAP technology maturity assessments, architecture design and data quality reviews for all sustainability requirements – whether that’s reporting, steering, helping you on your journey to the Green Ledger or any other use case. We can also help you configure and implement SAP’s core sustainability solutions such as SAP Sustainability Footprint Management (SFM); SAP Sustainability Control Tower (SCT); SAP Responsible Design and Production (RDP), SAP S/4HANA for product compliance, SAP Environment, Health and Safety Management (EHS); and SAP Green Token.

We can also help you configure core SAP modules which are critical across functions within your organization, which include Material Master, Ariba, Success Factors and Management of Change.

Our proven rapid implementation approach, powered by AI and global delivery models, is designed to accelerate projects of all sizes and scopes: proof of concept, minimum viable product or full technical go-live. We can also support at any stage of your transformation, whether you’re working on an ongoing SAP S/4HANA migration, following up on a sustainability gap and materiality analysis, or just getting started with data modelling and management.

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2:31

How are PwC supporting clients with their sustainability challenges? Hear the thoughts Michael Rasch and Neil Morton who talk to PwC's innovation in this space, a recent award win and collaboration with SAP.

Sustainability I think, is going to become one of the most important areas that every customer is going to look into, right? I think that statement is out there and everyone’s beginning to understand that.

Now, some of these things are going to be a quick fix, and others are going to be a long-term approach to create sustainability within the organization and processes.

So what we’re doing with PwC’s assets and expertise is guiding the clients as to where do you have to do things quickly to meet regulatory requirements, but where is there an opportunity to remodel your business processes so that they incorporate sustainability or even ESG as a broader topic into what they are doing with technology.

But equally also ensuring that they can drive business on sustainability aspects that come along. That’s our approach. The technologies that we provide to our clients, of course, are the broadness of these vendors that are residing within the framework of our clients.

So it’s very important for us also moving forward with transformational projects with clients to identify where is maybe a hot spot in terms of what can be done with technologies that drive sustainability?

And that’s where our SAP relationship has come in quite well. Because on the one hand, we’re able to help the clients understand what’s in the portfolio of SAP. But on the other hand, and I think that’s important also for what we represent as PwC.

We help SAP understand what clients are going to need in the future. So that’s where we are, right?

And I think that’s what’s going to happen in the next years around sustainability.

Sustainability is not just the reporting angle. It’s also really to think about how your procurement, how your supply is working. Yeah. So it’s not necessary to deliver French water to the US. You have nice wonderful water here. Why not using this one? Yeah. And it’s also independent of all the things which are coming and happening around, if I had to look at the Ukraine, and other challenges we get because of the wider engagement.

So clients need to be more agile. And if you set it up in a sustainable way, this gives you not only the climate-friendly footprint, it also gives you more flexibility to act on your customer’s need as a client.

Plus, we offer specific solutions to help you comply with regulations in the countries where you operate. These include:

  • PwC’s award-winning CSRD reporting tool helps you comply with the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) and International Sustainability Standard Board (ISSB).
  • PwC Germany’s award-winning “Check your value chain” solution helps you comply with the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), the EU Regulation on Deforestation-free Products (EUDR) and Germany’s Supply Chain Due Diligence Act (SCDDA).
  • PwC Germany’s EU Taxonomy solution enables you to analyse your economic activities, support eligible alignment processes and calculate KPIs for revenue, CapEx and OpEx.
  • PwC Germany’s Climate Excellence tool gives you the insights you need to manage climate-related financial risk.
  • PwC US’s Leading with Insights enables you to start harnessing the power of the latest SAP analytics solutions – including SAP Analytics Cloud – in real time, even before your SAP S/4HANA go-live.

You can start using our solutions even if you haven’t yet moved to the cloud, RISE with SAP or GROW with SAP. No matter your requirements or technology stack, we’re here to help you every step of the way.

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Contact us

Gunther Dütsch

Gunther Dütsch

Sustainability Services & Climate Risk, Partner, PwC Germany

Tel: +49 (0)40 63780

Sammy Lakshmanan

Sammy Lakshmanan

Sustainability and ESG, Principal, PwC US

Robert Pedler

Robert Pedler

Asia Pacific Sustainability, Digital, Managing Director, PwC Australia

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