SAP Product Footprint Management: New Experience with Mappings

If you use the SAP Product Footprint Management solution (henceforth referred to as “the solution” in this blog), you may have worked with Mappings and mapping templates. This feature allows you to map your purchased products with emission factors.

We have recently modified the Mappings feature to simplify this often complex process. Here are the highlights.

A Single “Unified” Mapping Template

We have removed the table with five mapping templates and have provided one template called Map Purchased Products with Emission Factors. By using this template, you can upload all your mappings, regardless of what granularity you have them at. Whether you only have product information at a general commodity code level or at a very specific supplier level, you can upload your data by using this single template. To do this, we have provided you with three download options, which brings us to our next highlight…

Mapping Template with Prefilled Business Data

We have now provided you with three download options for the mapping template:

• Empty template with no data
• Template with prefilled business data
• Template with maintained mappings (available if you have already mapped your emission factors before)

The Mappings screen with the Template with Prefilled Business Data highlighted

The prefilled template contains business data you have already uploaded into the solution through other applications or APIs. The solution “reads” this information and already populates the mapping template with all the business data combinations for which you need to maintain emission factors based on the scope you selected in the corresponding calculation template. The only thing left for you to do is enter the Package ID, Source ID, and Dataset Version of the emission factor that best suits a product. Once you enter this information, you can upload the CSV file as per usual and continue with your calculations.

As before, you will be notified of any errors or conflicts with the uploaded mappings.

Note: The order in which you upload mappings is of utmost importance. This is because the first mapping for a product (with all other fields for it in the template being the same) is always considered for footprint calculations. For example, if you have two emission factors for a product called Cocoa Beans 100, ensure that the more granular mapping information comes before the generic information.

Once your mappings are uploaded, you can see the order in which they will be used for footprint calculations in the Rank column.

Empty Field Support

When you upload your mappings through the templates, any information that you have at hand can be filled in and anything you don’t know can be left blank. The Package ID, Source ID, and Dataset Version are mandatory parameters, as is the validity period (a default value for this field is also provided). However, if you have no supplier or supplier country/region information or if you’re not sure about the receiving plant country/region, or if you don’t have the plant information, you can leave all those fields blank. When your mappings are uploaded, these fields are automatically populated with the word “Any” in the resulting table on the app. This means that the mapping you have will be supported for any value applicable to the field that you left blank. For instance, if you left the supplier field blank, the solution would interpret that to mean the specific mapping for that product can be applied to any supplier.

The Mappings screen with the entries with the word Any highlighted

We hope that these new changes will ease some steps within the Mappings process and that your footprint calculations will go smoothly.