Welcome to my 3rd blog as promised .This blog post is on SAP Product Footprint Management. In today’s rapidly changing world, organizations are increasingly recognizing the importance of integrating sustainability into their operations

In this series I will publish blog on following products,

• SAP Responsible Design and Production ( Link :https://blogs.sap.com/2023/08/03/advancing-sustainable-business-practices-through-sap-responsible-design-and-production/)
• SAP Sustainability Control Tower (Link :https://blogs.sap.com/2023/09/27/holistic-reporting-of-sustainability-performance-using-sap-sustainability-control-tower/ )
• SAP Product Footprint Management/ Sustainable Footprint Management.
• SAP Sustainable Data Exchange
• SAP Green Ledger

SAP Product Footprint Management is a new portfolio of sustainability-specific business applications that deliver transparency and measurement capability across the supply chain, allowing companies to move toward lower carbon emissions and more sustainable operations

Here I will be discussing how to implement SAP PFM for your organization based on the

• Procurement of Product from Supplier (Part 1)
• Overall Organization Product footprint including the Production and Storing of the Final Product ( Part 2)

To Begin with there are few pre-requisites which need to be checked Prior to implementation of the SAP Product Footprint Management with integration to SAP S/4HANA On Premise

• Scenario: Organization is involved in the procurement of Product A from multiple Supplier X and Y . Using the Procured Product Organization produces final Product B while producing it utilizes Resource 1 for 120 Minutes . After producing the final Product it is stored in High rack Storage facility inside a Warehouse

Process Flow to Calculate Product Footprint

Figure: Process Flow

Import Master Data :

Company’s master data is the basis for calculating your corporate and product footprints. It contains the essential information about your company such as plants, products, and suppliers.

Below is the sequence is which the master data need to be imported

• Company
• Valuation Area
• Plant
• Product Group
• Product Type
• Product
• Supplier
• WorkCentre
• Resource
• Production Document.

Reason for the sequence is the without that the configuration import would fails for example without Valuation area plant import would fail as the configuration of Plant is depended on it . Another example would be dependency of the Product group on the Product type .

Figure: Import of Master data

Manage Inventory Footprint Scope :

This actually define the boundary of the footprint Calculation and also limits the scope of the transactional business data import from SAP S/4HANA system.

Figure: Defining the boundary of Carbon Footprint Calculation

Import Business Transaction :

Source system data such as goods receipts, goods issues, transfers, and returns these becomes the basis of carbon footprint calculation which are imported for a specified timeframe.

This imported data are verified automatically against the master data imported in the previous step .

Figure: Importing Transactional Data

Manage Emission Factor :

Based on this Emission factor the carbon footprint of the product is calculated as this would contribute to the product which we have procured from supplier . Important thing is 1 Product can be procured form multiple country in such case the emission factor may differ.

Step to Import the Emission Factor:

• Create Data Package using the template or Connect to LCA Data subscribed through SAP Store
• Import Emission Factor
• Release the Data Package

Figure: Emission Factor import

Manage Mapping :

Here we map the Emission factors imported in the previous step to the individual product here the mapping can be based on

1. Commodity code
2. Supplier
3. Country

As the emission factor could be supplier specific or Generic where the commodity code could be used to map

Figure: Map Emission factors to Product

Manage Purchased Product Footprint :

This allow to check if we have emission factor for all the purchased product

Figure: Purchased Product Co2e

Calculate Footprint

Lastly we have the Calculation where we utilizes all the below , to calculate

1. Emission Factors
2. Mapping of factors to Purchased Product
3. Production Document ( Goods Receipt, Purchase Orders)

Step to calculation :

• Import Transaction Data — Excel Template is used to import the transaction data

Figure: Excel Template

• Click on Calculate

Figure: Calculation for Carbon Footprint

If anyone opts to use the excel template for the data upload here is the sequence and the template to be used

Figure: Manual Upload Matrix

Error Handling:

At each and every Step of the Process error are clearly stated if any .

Some common errors

• During the Emission factor import UoM error
• Missing Total Co2e calculation in Map Purchased Product Footprint App
• Missing Emission Factor in Manage Emission Factor App
• Missing UoM in the Manage Unit of Measure App