Steering a course to increased sustainability with a clear view of groupwide data
Consolidating ESG data on the ‘road to zero’
To report accurately under the EU’s new CSRD directive, Mercedes-Benz needed an integrated, cloud-based solution that enabled real-time ESG data collection and analysis. With SAP Sustainability Control Tower, it centralized data, unified reporting, and developed robust KPIs, helping drive the group toward its destination of a carbon-neutral future.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Automotive | Stuttgart, Germany | >175,000 employees |
of EU CSRD data points collected through audit-ready workflows.
compliance-based, auditable KPIs covered.
data points included within these KPIs.
Project Manager Sustainability Performance Management, Mercedes-Benz Group AG
Building a comprehensive data platform for sustainability management
Sustainability is a high priority for the Mercedes-Benz Group. Mercedes-Benz has set ambitious and measurable goals on their path to net carbon neutrality along the entire value chain in its fleet of new vehicles in 2039, as outlined in the Ambition 2039. Within its sustainable business strategy, the Mercedes-Benz Group has identified six sustainability focus areas that are essential for the environment, society, and the corporate governance of the Group. The six focus areas are: decarbonization, resource use and circularity, people (employees), human rights, digital trust, and traffic safety.
When the EU introduced its Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), Mercedes-Benz faced a significant challenge. To efficiently collect, analyze, and report on the new European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS), the group needed a centralized, scalable, and data-driven architecture that teams could use effectively within a 12-month time frame. It also needed to automate the reporting process for more than 50 business stakeholders across multiple divisions, functions, departments, entities, locations, and systems.
Jochen Herold, project manager for sustainability performance management at Mercedes-Benz, led the project to ensure CSRD compliance. He explains, “We had obviously been reporting on sustainability since 2006, but this new regulation brought things to a whole new level in terms of the sheer volume of data required. We had to report in a standardized and auditable way on a huge range of KPIs, for example energy consumption, and break these down into numerous data points, such as the individual energy sources involved.”
Deploying the right solution would not only help Mercedes-Benz meet the immediate challenge of CSRD compliance, but it would also provide a foundation for steering and controlling sustainability initiatives, promoting stakeholder buy-in, and demonstrating the overall value of sustainability to the business.
Project Manager Sustainability Performance Management, Mercedes-Benz Group AG
Tapping into powerful data management and a robust data model
Having evaluated several solutions, Mercedes-Benz decided to implement the SAP Sustainability Control Tower solution and integrate it with the SAP Datasphere solution to create a central hub for sustainability data. SAP Sustainability Control Tower would also integrate smoothly with software including the SAP Analytics Cloud solution and the group’s third-party disclosure management tool.
The large scale of the implementation project presented a significant challenge. The project involved collecting data from different departments and business divisions in nearly 40 countries in one centrally managed process. According to Herold, “We’re a large company with three different divisions across cars, vans, and mobility and a large organizational and master data structure.”
The ESRS contain multiple KPIs companies must report on if relevant, specifying how to calculate them mathematically and what data elements they need. Companies can, of course, generate their own data model based on this information, but SAP Sustainability Control Tower already contains a semantic data model for the directive. This means an organization just has to select what it needs and import the relevant data.
The solution also had the flexibility to help Mercedes-Benz report more broadly on general environmental, social, and governance (ESG) topics. And it reduces IT maintenance costs thanks to its software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.
After a successful proof of concept, Mercedes-Benz rolled out the solution to the global sustainability reporting team over a period of around a year. SAP’s Business Transformation Services group offered invaluable support during the project, including strategy and planning assistance, incident resolution, and advice on best practices and solution functionality.
Enhancing consistency, accuracy, and scalability across ESG reporting
Having built a transparent and standardized ESG reporting process among others based on SAP Sustainability Control Tower, Mercedes-Benz met its compliance deadline for the first CSRD reporting year. Nearly all the data required for that first report was collected through automated workflows that extract data from group consolidation systems, enhancing efficiency, accuracy, and speed.
Diverse business units appreciate the solution’s intuitively presented data and features such as change logging, e-mail notifications, real-time data validation, and preview reporting.
In particular, Herold points out the solution’s strong data management capability. “The fact that you can simply combine the semantic data model with the standard organizational structure of a big company like Mercedes-Benz is tremendous. And we don’t have to manage the model on an ongoing basis, which saves us time and money.”
The SaaS nature of the solution also keeps costs down. According to Herold, “Because it’s an SaaS solution, as opposed to something we’ve had to build or customize in house, our ESG reporting is much more efficient. All that infrastructure and server management work lies with SAP.”
Herold emphasizes that the implementation of SAP Sustainability Control Tower has created awareness that quantitative sustainability data is integral to annual reporting and must satisfy the same quality requirements. He explains, “There is a crystallizing realization that sustainability data must meet the same high standards as financial data. This evolving mindset underscores the critical importance of data quality, completeness, and accuracy and is a key part of our successful deployment of SAP Sustainability Control Tower.”
Moving beyond pure compliance to identifying business value
With the first year of CSRD reporting behind it, Mercedes-Benz is now looking at how SAP Sustainability Control Tower can support other aspects of ESG compliance. It can now explore and implement further features of the solution that will support its road to zero.