Video: 10 Minute IT Jams - An update from SNP
Businesses face mounting pressure to improve their environmental and social credentials. Gerald Faust, Managing Director and CEO for Asia Pacific and the Middle East at SNP, believes data is the key to meeting these expectations.
With environmental, social, and governance (ESG) responsibilities looming large over enterprises, companies are seeking practical ways to respond. Faust says his company, which focuses on extracting "more value out of data", is seeing rapidly rising demand from clients across the Asia-Pacific and Middle East regions.
"At the core of what we do as SNP is we help our customers to derive more value out of their data," Faust explained. "That's primarily focused on the SAP ecosystem. Data is the foundation — to not only know where you are in terms of your carbon footprint but also where you're going to go."
SNP supports clients across six major markets in the region: China, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, India, and the Middle East. Although it is a mid-sized enterprise, SNP works closely with leading technology providers and advisers.
"We work with the likes of SAP, the hyperscalers, and all the biggest SIs — whether advisory firms or system integrators," Faust said.
Tackling ESG reporting, Faust insists, is about more than releasing high-level information produced by a small group. Successful companies are moving towards a model in which ESG is everybody's responsibility.
"We know that just doing some reporting on a company level driven by the office of the CFO is not sufficient for the future. So we need to break that down. We need to break that down, not only a single group of people looking at making it the responsibility for everyone within the company," Faust said.
He suggests businesses now need to go beyond old priorities. "As we used to say, everyone is focusing on top line, everyone is focusing on the bottom line. I think now we need to embed the ESG topic into probably some kind of green line thinking and acting."
Faust argues that this shift must extend across the entire value chain and beyond — from suppliers, to internal divisions, to distribution partners and customers.
"Everyone is affected, and again that's why the key role of data is absolutely crucial to get to this next level of granularity in reporting on ESG," he said.
For organisations aiming to meet their ESG obligations, data challenges quickly become evident. Product-level carbon footprint reporting, for example, requires three diverse categories of information: upstream suppliers' emissions, internal production processes and systems, and distribution logistics right to the end customer.
Faust elaborated, "You have raw materials coming from your suppliers — obviously you need to know what's the carbon footprint of all these raw materials you procure. Then you have different production steps within your company. This might go across factories, this might even go across geographies. For our part, it goes across SAP or other IT systems, and that's what we need to bring together. Then there's the third category: how you ship your products to the markets, wholesalers, your end customers — and all of this is relevant."
"In terms of reducing the carbon footprint, and again for this, the data is the glue of everything in that respect," he added.
Sustainable, intelligent enterprises, in Faust's view, share a set of defining characteristics: openness, collaboration, and a commitment to data-driven decision-making.
"Obviously it needs to be open, well, because again carbon footprint reduction does not stop at your company boundaries. It needs to be collaborative because only if you know — and if your suppliers reveal their carbon footprints, or your logistics companies or distribution partners do it, and you do it yourself, I think then we get to a holistic reduction of this critical topic. It needs to be open, it needs to be collaborative, and data needs to sit at the foundation of it. Because again this is what connects all of us in order to make better decisions for the future."
Industry leaders are increasingly alert to the gap between what they want to achieve and what is currently possible. Faust acknowledges this and says SNP tries to bridge that void.
"We know that there's a gap between the aspirations of companies and where they really are today. And this is at the core of what we do — we help companies to transform the data, to manage the data again, and then apply it to business problems like product carbon footprint reduction," he said.
SNP's approach draws on its proprietary software to scan clients' SAP systems and identify strengths, weaknesses and wasted potential.
"We know that 60 percent of the data sitting in many SAP systems is of no value," Faust claimed. "We also know that roughly 70 percent of all the customisations, add-on programs built on top of the SAP solution, are not in use anymore. So there's a lot of things, a lot of waste we can eliminate. But on the other hand, there's at least 40 percent or even more of data which is of value for the future — the same applies to customisations and business applications built on top of that."
Migrating essential data to the cloud and filtering out redundant aspects is vital for advancing into the new era of sustainable business.
"If companies are now moving to the cloud, moving to the next generation of technology, it's absolutely essential that they are able to select this and move it over, in order to apply it to business problems like product carbon footprint emissions," Faust said.
SNP, together with its partners, is helping companies transition from where they are today towards ambitious ESG goals. "We as SNP, together with our partners, are trying to help the SAP ecosystem to get from the execution where they are today to the aspiration of solving some of the big problems of this planet," he explained.
Faust summed up his hopes for the future as he reflected on the discussion: "I'm happy to get in touch with everyone who's interested to drive the discussion a lot... Thank you very much, that was a very interesting discussion."
