I attended the SAP Sapphire conference a few months ago representing my sustainable fashion startup In The Loop. This year’s conference was focused on intelligent, resilient, and sustainable business and I walked away with quite a few takeaways.

What is SAP?

If you aren’t familiar, SAP is an enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. SAP has solutions for a ton of business areas – human resources, customer experience, supply chain, etc. You may not have heard of SAP before, but 99 of the 100 largest companies in the world use it. The two footwear companies I worked for in college used SAP for inventory management and I even took an ERP class in grad school where we played an SAP simulation game!

I don’t use SAP in my day-to-day, and don’t foresee In The Loop scaling so quickly that we’d be using it any time soon, but I was excited to learn more about the latest innovations on the software and what role SAP could play in the future of sustainable enterprises.

Here are some of my biggest sustainable business takeaways from the conference:

There’s a BIG data gap

You can’t manage what you can’t measure. One of the most shocking statistics I heard at a breakout session was that according to a white paper and survey conducted by OCEG and Diligent, only 9% of companies actively use software that collects, analyzes, and reports ESG data.

While ESG criteria and reporting is of the utmost importance for public companies and large corporations, it is becoming increasingly important for companies of all sizes to have good data about their environmental and social impact.

Sustainable solutions are here

Technology plays a central role in sustainable business. Companies need technology to collect and analyze data so they can report accurate information, set meaningful goals and track their progress, and make better business decisions

Especially when thinking about established corporations who are ready to begin transitioning to more sustainable methods of business, sustainability can’t be an afterthought. Sustainability information must be integrated into every business process.

One of the most interesting solutions I learned about at SAP Sapphire was a new SAP feature that compares supplier options based on price as well as carbon emissions called product footprint management. This tool can be integrated into different business applications so carbon data is shown alongside other important decision factors – like cost and location. This makes it easy for decision makers to see the most cost effective solution, the least carbon intensive solution, and make a decision from there.

Learn more about some of the solutions I learned about on the show floor at SAP Sapphire.

We can learn from companies at all stages in their sustainable business journeys

As someone who has exclusively attended sustainability-focused conferences in the past, I was surprised at how much I took away from conversations with leaders from brands with some sustainability initiatives. I would not consider Adidas or Fabletics sustainable brands, as I do have pretty big expectations especially when it comes to apparel brands, but their conversations with Dax Shepherd of the podcast Armchair Expert were good reminders for me that larger companies need much larger transformations to become more sustainable.

It isn’t easy to switch to a different manufacturing schedule, change out primary materials, or create a reverse logistics circularity program!