Issue

Succinctly describe the issue or problem statement that this Decision addresses. Why is a decision required? What business or technical problem does it address?

Recommendation

Summarise the recommendation being made for the reader, leaving the pro/con evaluation and exact decision-making process to the subsequent sections.

Background & Context

Explain the context in which the decision is being made.

Assumptions

Clearly describe the underlying assumptions which informed or limited the choices available, or impacted the decision: cost, schedule, regulatory requirements, business drivers, country footprint, technology, etc. Include links as necessary. This section is important because a future change in circumstances might invalidate some key assumptions, which then prompts a decision to be revisited. 

• The ERP Rebuild program aims to, where possible, deploy a single, global instance of every enterprise system in scope of the program. Separate instances for specific countries (e.g. China) are not being deployed, because a thorough investigation into the relevant legal, regulatory, strategic, and security aspects determined that adequate security controls could be attained in a single-instance system without physical separations. 
• There are no technical barriers which limit access of Syensqo staff to the jurisdictions being considered for hosting the enterprise systems. Specifically Syensqo users located in mainland China are able to access business systems, including SaaS systems, via Syensqo-managed VPN tunnels regardless of the physical location of these systems. See also Specific architecture for China. 

Constraints

Capture any constraints or limitations inherent to the recommended option. This could be aspects which, if changed or removed in future, could cause the decision to be revisited or invalidated. For example, a constraint might be that a new product has significant gaps in important functionality, which caused an older alternative to be recommended. If those gaps are closed in future, this might cause the decision to be invalidated.

• Due to the incumbency of the European Union as both the physical location for Syensqo's existing enterprise systems and data processing (e.g. by Shared Services staff in Portugal, management staff in Belgium and France), Syensqo do not have a comprehensive internal contractual framework for the export of various data from the EU to other jurisdictions. Scoping and implementing such a framework is a prerequisite for the implementation of enterprise systems outside of the EU. It may not be possible to fully implement the required contracts and processes within the timeline of the ERP Rebuild program. 

Impacts

Describe the impact of the decision on other aspects such as other processes, infrastructure, other SAP modules or systems, data cleansing and migration, developments, automations, interfaces, in-flight projects, etc.

Business Rules

The decision may translate into business rules which enforce the decision and will require configuration. List these business rules here. For example, "An Outline Agreement cannot be created via the RFQ process. An awarded RFQ can only result in a Purchase Order". 

Options considered

List the options (viable options or alternatives) you considered. These often require a longer explanation with diagrams, or references to other documents (links are best, but attachments are also possible). Use enough detail to adequately explain what you considered so that a project or business stakeholder reviewing this decision will not come back and ask "did you think about...?"; this leads to loss of credibility and questioning of other decisions. This section also helps ensure that you considered enough suitable alternatives rather than just copy/pasting SAP's recommendations.

Option A: Option Title

Describe the option in sufficient detail for a reader familiar with the subject matter to understand it properly

Option B: Option Title

Describe the option in sufficient detail for a reader familiar with the subject matter to understand it properly

Option C: Option Title

Describe the option in sufficient detail for a reader familiar with the subject matter to understand it properly

Option D: Option Title

Describe the option in sufficient detail for a reader familiar with the subject matter to understand it properly

Evaluation

Outline why you selected a position. The best format could be a pro/con table (sample below), but is up to you as the author. You must consider complexity, feasibility, cost/effort to implement, but also ongoing operational impact and cost. You must consider the program principles and explain any deviations in detail. This is probably as important as the decision itself.

	Option A Located in USA	Option B Located in EU
Legal/regulatory requirements for data localisation	Pro Con	Pro Pro
Internal legal support, inc. data export and data processing agreements	Pro Con	Con
Availability of SaaS applications	Pro	Con
Depth and breadth of technology platform components
Network latency impact for end users
Carbon footprint		The electricity grid in major European data center locations (e.g. Netherlands) tends to be marginally less CO₂-intensive than in major US locations (e.g. Virginia) when judged on an annual basis. For the year 2023, the CO₂ intensity of the Dutch grid on a consumption basis was 301gCO₂eq/kWh vs. 396gCO₂eq/kWh for Virginia.
	All major IaaS providers purchase electricity via long-term purchase agreements from power utilities, often under direct purchase agreements which favour renewable energy, rather than obtaining power directly from the national grid. They also tend to purchase renewable energy offsets for a large part of their operations (e.g. in 2023, AWS offset 100% of their carbon emissions in 22 Regions). Their actual CO₂ footprint is thus likely to be quite different to that of the national grid.

See also

Insert links and references to other documents which are relevant when trying to understand this decision and its implications. Other decisions are often impacted, so it's good to list them here with links. Attachments are also possible but dangerous as they are static documents and not updated by their authors.

List of SAP Data Centres for SAP Cloud Services

Maps showing the carbon intensity of the electricity grid by geography

Regional coverage of relevant SAP SaaS and PaaS Solutions

A summary of the List of SAP Data Centres for SAP Cloud Services for products and services relevant for Syensqo is represented below. The information for this summary table was retrieved in September 2024, using the then-current version v.9-2024 of the document. 

Available of a product or service in only a single region in a particular geography may limit the Disaster Recovery options available for that service. This is thus represented as a paler shade of green in the table below. 

Change log

Workflow history