On Thursday, May 13, 2010 SAP released its new sustainability report. The report achieved an A+ GRI rating versus the B+ for the previous 2008 one. It uses videos and interactive elements to tell a carefully orchestrated story about SAP’s sustainability performance and provide a baseline for continuous improvement. You will find a few new KPIs, such as business health, culture index and employee satisfaction, and also interesting data about carbon footprint reductions, energy consumption, financial performance, and customer satisfaction.

The SAP report is nicely orchestrated and illustrated. But at least as interesting as the performance data is the message about the company’s strong commitment to the sustainability concept. We defined business sustainability as an underlying approach to business strategy, which optimizes the firm’s business processes and resources. SAP uses the concept as a natural go-to-market strategy and an opportunity to repackage existing and new software offerings into a new and more consistent solutions framework. Known as the SAP Sustainability Library, this framework is an excellent source of insights, best practices, and case studies, including SAP’s own sustainability report.

SAP’s Sustainability Library is a basic tutorial for business process executives seeking to understand and get a grip on sustainability. Even if you are not an SAP customer, you should seize SAP’s breakthrough work as an opportunity to learn and extract new ideas, best practices, and solutions that have the potential to increase the profitability and long-term health of your organization.