Software major SAP Labs India is betting big on sustainability solutions and has invested in dedicated research and development (R&D) teams to build two new software products Product Footprint Management (PFM) and SAP Sustainability Control Tower for enterprises.
“Sustainability presents a unique economic opportunity, this is a key business driver today and in terms of our investment priority, sustainability is on top right now. We are investing a major chunk in sustainability,” said Sindhu Gangadharan, senior vice president and managing director of SAP Labs India.
“From a regulatory point of view, we are seeing many customers want to be aware of their sustainability goals and work around it, that’s where SAP’s solutions play an important role,” Gangadharan said.
The two offerings are presently used by enterprises globally including the US and the UK while SAP Labs is in active discussion with many steel, cement, oil and gas, and pharma industries to adopt the products into their systems.
“The adoption is happening in India but at a slower pace, it is mostly driven by regulatory pressure…however the shift has already happened and it is our responsibility to help out around 0.5 million customers and every enterprise out there,” Gangadharan added.
Product Footprint Management (PFM) lets companies calculate carbon footprints for their products and across the value chain. It considers the entire product lifecycle, helping companies disclose their products’ environmental footprints to regulators and enabling them to make their products more sustainable.
SAP Sustainability Control Tower is a software-as-a-service experience that allows customers to embed sustainability into their business processes with current data and insights and achieve automated, auditable, and compliant reporting. The solution offers 37 sustainability metrics on pre-built data models supporting established reporting frameworks such as the Global Reporting Initiative, and World Economic Forum as well as extensible data models based on SAP and third-party structured and unstructured data.
Enterprise Artificial Intelligence (AI) And Industrial IoT (Internet of Things) startup, Industry.AI through its product Conserve.AI has helped SAP Labs develop sustainability products.
Through its Startup Accelerator, SAP Startup Studio the company has opened a new cohort batch for 2023 and will be helping around 10 startups for 12 months. The cohort helps startups with marketing strategies, and SAP Labs customer network and has previously helped startups get funding from VCs like Lightspeed and Sequoia India Surge.
The acceleration has helped startups like Business-to-Business (B2B) e-commerce unicorn Moglix and AI firm Yellow.AI through their previous cohorts.
“We help companies scale and we co-innovate with many startups in developing the right products. From SAP Labs they get to learn best go-to-market strategies through our system integrators and they get a co-selling opportunity with SAP Labs,” said Justin Paul, Head, of SAP Startup Studio & Product Leadership, SAP Labs India.
Each cohort has a minimum of 10 startups and undergoes the program for 12 months.
“The startups are chosen based on pre-sale reports from SAP experts which points out pertinent pain points a customer enterprise is facing and if there is a product that can synergize with SAP and create meaningful changes, we help those startups in their journey,” Paul added.
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