Collaboration to deliver carbon accounting solution

EDS and SAP Australia and New Zealand have announced an initiative that will provide a new carbon accounting solution to make it easier for Australian companies to comply with new federal government emissions guidelines.

The SAP Environmental Compliance (EC) solution is an enterprise-wide software platform that allows corporations to define regulatory scenarios with key performance indicators. EDS will provide its deep SAP systems integration expertise to incorporate the solution into companies’ existing systems to calculate, record and analyse the carbon emissions across entire organisations. The solution then generates data to allow regulatory reporting.

“Businesses in Australia and New Zealand can now more quickly meet regulatory requirements on carbon emissions for business processes as well as assess the financial impact across their organisations,” said David Caspari, Vice-President of EDS Australia and New Zealand.

“By combining EDS’s systems integration expertise and SAP’s world-class EC solution, EDS will extend its current Carbon Emissions Management Service beyond purely IT assets to whole-of-business operations.”

“By providing businesses with a single, standalone platform that allows access to critical emissions data and information, we are reducing the workload and operational costs associated with the new federal legislation and enabling appropriate cost allocation,” said Karen Zwissler, Sustainability Lead, SAP Australia and New Zealand.

“Following the introduction of the Australian emissions trading scheme in 2011, companies will need either a standalone hosted solution or a solution integrated into the existing financial system to provide information needed to manage their carbon exposures. The SAP EC solution combined with the global software integration capabilities of EDS will give organisations the flexibility to choose between these two options.”

The launch of SAP’s EC solution in May 2008 coincided with the Australian government's introduction of the new National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting (NGER) Act 2007, which established a national framework for Australian corporations to report on greenhouse gas emissions, reductions, removals and offsets, energy consumption and production. The NGER scheme applies to 700 medium and large companies.

EDS and SAP are respondents to the Carbon Disclosure Project, an initiative that collects data on greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, EDS has set a carbon emission reduction target of 25% by 2010 based on 2007 levels for its operations at all facilities across Australia and New Zealand.