Friday Anecdote: How SAP Labs’ Sustainability Culture Made Buses More Efficient

Sep 20, 2013 2:30 PM ET

Original article by Nick Aster on TriplePundit

One of the “hard to prove” principals we write about here at TriplePundit is the idea that if a company’s culture can simply be made aware of sustainability then inspiration will follow.  New ideas around sustainability will start to evolve, and some will take root to not only reduce a company’s negative externalities, but bring forth new and profitable business ideas.

SAP Labs is the research and development arm of SAP with about a dozen global locations.  I had a chance to talk to SAP Labs’ Latin America director Stefan Wagner this week in São Paulo about some of the innovation taking place at his organization, and sustainability was very much at the core of what he had to talk about.

SAP Labs Latin America is located in São Lorenzo, near Porto Alegre, Brazil.  Stefan was particularly excited by the imminent opening of a huge expansion to the facility that will roughly double the number of employees to about 1,000 this December.  The new building is LEED Gold certified, and the organization partners with 3 different local universities providing jobs and other opportunities for students who make up about 30 percent of the workforce at any given time (PDF link).  The strongly sustainable attributes of the campus and new building are a constant theme of discussion in both external and internal communication.  So when new projects are suggested by teams it’s not surprising that a theme of sustainability enters the equation.

Continue reading the orginal article on SAP's sustainability on TriplePundit >>

Original source TriplePundit.