Most people want to keep track of everything in their life — except perhaps drug addicts, who have more or less lost control over it.

Top managers are like pilots in the cockpit of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner. They keep scanning the screens, gauges and indicator lights around them. If something doesn’t seem right, they want to stay informed so that they take the necessary steps before it is too late.

Business people want to be able to see how their business is faring, what their competitors are doing, how their customers are thinking of them, what new opportunities are in the horizon etc. But, the mind has only that much capacity to absorb and analyze such vast amounts of data.

Which is why the idea of a business intelligence dashboard was introduced a few years back, providing managers with a snapshot of their company’s health.

Today, the static, one-way dashboard, non-interactive analytical tools, what-ifs games and tracking are no longer sufficient as more and more external factors have to be taken into account.

Large enterprises nowadays have to pay close attention to things like their carbon footprint, as temperatures on the planet keep rising.

But not nearly enough Indonesian business leaders are thinking about tools to track their company’s sustainability, SAP Asia Pacific and Japan senior vice president Simon Dale said in an exclusive interview recently.

“But it is going to be an important issue,” emphasized Krish Datta, regional managing director for SAP Southeast Asia.

Sustainability was one of the hot topics during SAP’s World Tour, which made a stop in Jakarta recently. SAP provides all the building blocks for a sustainability report that can be implemented in any enterprise.

Practice what you preach, states the age-long adage. And to prove its commitment to the growing importance of sustainability, SAP released its own web-based Sustainability Report for 2010 last May, which includes analytics, a revised sustainability map to show to stakeholders how line managers deliver sustainability, a materiality matrix, and extensive multimedia content to give the readers the highlights of the reports.

It makes sense. Businesses now have more than just profitability to worry about. To survive in this competitive world, they have to make sure their brand will not be tainted due to non-compliant manufacturing practices, for example. If a company comes under fire for contributing significantly to global warming, it will take some time to fix the company’s image. We’ve all heard of countries rejecting imported products because the production process was not eco-friendly.

The web-based, dynamic nature of SAP’s Sustainability Report means it is possible for stakeholders — investors, customers, employees and the public — to see the company’s performance, drill down into more detail, and ask questions. The use of social networking tools such as Twitter and Facebook not only promotes the concept of sustainability but also encourages everybody to participate in discussions, ask questions, express their own opinions and even vote on specific matters.

As mentioned before, one type of information that is likely to become increasingly relevant for companies is their carbon footprint, which indicates the total greenhouse gases a company, a production process or an event produces.

SAP, for example, was able to reduce its carbon footprints by 15 percent in 2009, by reducing the number of business flights by 32 percent, lowering energy consumption, increasing data center efficiency etc.

The data is extracted from SAP’s portfolio of solutions, including the SAP Carbon Impact on-demand solution, the SAP Business Objects Sustainability Performance Management application and SAP Business Objects Explorer, just to mention a few.

The dashboard is built on Xcelsius software, now called SAP Crystal Solutions.

At any rate, it does seem that reporting will be another hot area in the future. A network-based organization called the General Reporting Initiative (GRI) is actively holding international conferences to spread the sustainability reporting idea.

So, yes, contributing to the preservation of our environment for our children, grandchildren and their grandchildren is no longer going to be just one part of the CSR sub-section in the Annual Report.

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