Danone and SAP Team Up to Analyze and Measure Carbon Footprint Across 35,000 Products

In 2008, Danone set an ambitious goal of a 30 percent global carbon footprint reduction by 2012 across the entire supply chain, including plants and factories, packaging and end-of-cycle disposal, transportation and storage. To meet this challenge, Danone (www.danone.com) and SAP AG (www.sap.com) have brought together their expertise and know-how to build an innovative solution that measures the company’s environmental footprint.

“Existing solutions do not allow carbon footprint measurements to be integrated within IT operations systems across the whole product life cycle, for each and every product,” said Jean-Marc Lagoutte, CIO, IT Systems, Danone. “Danone has designed a unique carbon footprint measurement model and deployed a dedicated SAP platform globally. Since SAP is also strongly committed to sustainability and offers solutions that can serve as a basis for innovation in this area, working together quickly became the natural way to go.”

The solution created by Danone and SAP is fully integrated with Danone’s SAP infrastructure: 80 percent of the detailed data pertaining to its whole product life cycle is automatically collected. The goal is to provide operations managers with actionable information so they can analyze strategic options and take the more environmentally sustainable action, whether it relates to product development, ingredient selection, sourcing and transportation options or even investments. The collected data can be audited and fully traced, and is updated monthly, providing real-time insight.

It's everyone's business

“This solution makes carbon footprint issues everyone’s business. Analyzing product life cycles is a good way to rally all of our employees to our carbon footprint reduction target,” said Myriam Cohen-Welgryn, vice president, Danone Nature. “By making this analysis part of our IT infrastructure, we gain valuable insights for decision-making; it becomes a catalyst for change in the company as a whole. Just as in the past, we made success in achieving carbon reduction targets an integral part of the system used to calculate executive bonuses.”

This new SAP solution was first used by two Danone companies in Spain. It was then successfully tested by two other dairy businesses in Belgium and by Stonyfield Farms in the United States. By the end of the year, the new solution will be present in 40 of Danone’s business units, covering around 70 percent of its revenues and over 35,000 products. Danone aims to deploy the solution for all its businesses globally, encompassing its four areas of business: fresh dairy products, bottled water, baby nutrition and medical nutrition.

“This combined effort with Danone nicely demonstrates how SAP helps businesses run better, both from an environmental and a financial standpoint,” said Peter Graf, chief sustainability officer, SAP. “We are proud of our collaboration with Danone, who--like ourselves--has put forth a strong vision and commitment to sustainability.”

Danone and SAP agree that making the results of this project more widely available will help companies to better manage both financial and environmental performance, and support transformation in a sustainable way. Accordingly, SAP plans to offer the solution to new customers.