SAP Sustainability Platform Helps National Hockey League Reduce Environmental Impact

More than 45% of CO2 emissions, a major cause of global climate change, are due to the production of electricity and heat. Reducing this percentage is one of the most effective ways to fight global warming. The National Hockey League (NHL), the organization that organizes professional ice hockey in the United States and Canada, has partnered with SAP to create a cloud-based platform that helps reduce carbon footprint.

The NHL finds that club operations accounted for approximately 70% of the total carbon footprint of the world’s premier ice hockey league. The NHL commissioned SAP to find a technology solution to reduce the impact and protect the survival of the sport. The result is a data-driven platform available to all clubs and their partner stadiums to transform and ultimately help advance the League’s environmental and sustainability goals.

NHL Value Measures

With ‘NHL Venue Metrics, powered by SAP’, the NHL can measure and analyze the carbon footprint of its clubs and arenas. For example, energy and water consumption, amount of waste and recycling performance are examined. This information allows the NHL to reduce its environmental impact wherever possible while allowing the sport to thrive and preserve it for future generations.

NHL Venue Metrics consists of three main components:

• Data Collection: A platform that serves as an interface between clubs and whereabouts partners allows them to share relevant consumer and environmental data with the League.
• Data calculation and validation: The processing and verification engine allows the League to track data consistency and identify reporting errors and calculation formulas to prepare the League’s emissions inventory.
• Data reporting and insights: A dashboard displays relevant environmental, consumer and financial information at the corporate and club level from the various metrics representing the known environmental impact of the NHL.

Co-innovation

The technology behind “NHL Venue Metrics, powered by SAP” extracts powerful analytics from one of the most advanced databases and marks the latest and most extensive use of the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). Throughout this partnership, SAP BTP has been at the forefront of the League’s co-innovation efforts in several areas of their business.

Club operational data is processed with SAP HANA Cloud and visualized with SAP Analytics Cloud. Information from the platform helps the NHL identify environmental trends, share critical lessons shaped by those trends, and ultimately implement best practices at clubs to reduce the League’s collective environmental impact. .

Sustainable operation

In September 2022, the NHL invited all clubs and stadium administrators to use the platform and enter historical data from 2018 to mid-2022 to establish and analyze an appropriate baseline. With club input, the implementation of “NHL Venue Metrics, powered by SAP” is already underway this season, bringing the League one step closer to more sustainable operation.

“The NHL has been integrating sustainable business practices into the League and its member clubs for years,” said Omar Mitchell, vice president of NHL Sustainable Infrastructure and Growth Initiatives. “The NHL Venue Metrics tool is a truly game-changing innovation that helps us understand our environmental impact and create actionable insights to improve our environmental impact.”

“At SAP, one of our priorities is to provide partners with sustainable technology solutions so they can track and integrate actionable goals for their business,” said Amy Schulz, senior director, Global Sponsorships at SAP. “The NHL has been a long-time co-innovation partner of ours. Using their SAP BTP-based cloud software foundation, we were not only able to develop a custom solution to meet their business objectives, but the solution is also free for It’s a big step forward as the NHL aims to reduce its carbon footprint and improve sustainable efficiency.