At the annual SAP user conference, Chairman Hasso Plattner announced a new vision for their enterprise software applications. While most of his keynote addressed the software giant's evolving technology architecture, one declaration resonated with the sustainability executives I talked with: "Information is the key to success."

Plattner provided a freewheeling speech that, while painting a vision of SAP's future, took jabs at the company's past and especially its software user interface. After noting that his colleagues were likely "watching out that I don't step over a line," he demonstrated how devices like the newly released Apple iPad can provide intuitive user interfaces for accessing corporate information anywhere.

Walking out of the session, I met Peter Graf, SAP's Chief Sustainability Officer, who made sure to pull out his iPad to give me a quick overview of some of SAP's sustainability software.

It was impressive. The charting functions within the company's Carbon Impact software is highly configurable, but even the off-the-shelf charts make it easy to drill down. Peter showed me real-time data of the company's carbon footprint. By using their own software, SAP uncovered hot spots they can now develop plans to address.

But the company's bigger impact won't likely be reducing its own footprint, which it has already committed to do. The bigger potential is in helping customers reduce their footprint and to find other opportunities to advance their sustainability efforts.

Reporting and Risk Are Early Drivers

During an early morning panel discussion, representatives from Lockheed Martin, Hitachi Consulting, and Jabil described their initial motivation for investing in carbon accounting software. Across the board, they cited the need to provide "credible reporting" to an ever-increasing range of stakeholders, from the EPA to the Carbon Disclosure Project to the Dow Jones Sustainability Index. The key to delivering this information without adding extra resources to juggle spreadsheets is being able to extract data from the application and put it in the proper context for each of the various requests.

Both Jabil, a contract manufacturer for the electronics industry, and Hitachi Consulting cited an increasing number of customer requests and more formalized RFQs (requests for quotations) seeking detailed information about their respective company's carbon footprint and future reduction plans. The flexibility of the software in collecting and presenting data to their customers to answer these requests was cited as a major benefit of using the software.

The need to capture carbon footprint data was also part of a broader risk-management strategy. As Kelly Witherspoon of Jabil noted, the company's original strategy was based upon getting a better understanding of the company's footprint in order to calculate their exposure to potential legislation in countries where they do business. Going forward, all three panelists talked about their ability to identify energy-efficiency opportunities as a benefit of having all their carbon-related data in one place.