On Thursday, March 9th, SAP and Acorel officially kicked off at Shopping Tomorrow. The community, consisting of a huge Dutch e-commerce network, held its annual opening at the theater and congress center Spant! in Bussum. Acorel and SAP debuted as chairman and host of an interesting working group. Together with this working group, they will work in the coming months to find a practical and applicable answer to the question: How can sustainability be a business driver in the growth of B2B e-commerce?

The day started impressively. In front of a full room of various e-commerce experts, Marieke Vink, program manager at Shopping Tomorrow, took the floor and welcomed the network! The goals of the program were clear to everyone: sharing knowledge, networking, gaining inspiration, and above all, exchanging ideas with other professionals about everyday challenges in e-commerce.

After that, SAP and Acorel continued with the first working session. Almost the entire group was present. The introduction round took a lot of time, but it certainly was not less interesting. It was extremely educational to hear from the participants what motivated them to take the next step in terms of sustainability. One of the key points that emerged is that many companies believe they cannot tackle this issue alone. Only when the entire value chain, or a group of companies, can join forces to act more sustainably, will it have a good chance of success. This strengthened the group's sense of collaboration to work together on a result in the form of a practical answer to the main question.

To conclude, the group further brainstormed about the theme. What challenges do companies face in terms of sustainability? What are interesting initiatives? What do we understand by sustainability? And how can we get started with this?

We look forward to the next working session, where we will make an initial draft of a research model to further test in the market.