SAP’s recent acquisition of WalkMe is a significant development in the enterprise software landscape.

In a July 1995 e-mail announcing SAP’s International Demonstration and Education System (IDES), a demo system for the SAP R/3 client-server software (release 3.0 and later), project manager Dietmar Pfaehler asked employees not to expect miracles of the new system and acknowledged that it was not yet error-free. “The data is far from perfect,” and “the new help scripts are not yet available,” he wrote. Nevertheless, the project team had “reached its first milestone in terms of providing a system that contained plenty of realistic data.” Adding that there was “enormous demand for a fairly stable 3.0 system that people could work with,” he commented that “many of us will certainly find it helpful to have a well-maintained 3.0 system to play around with and test.”

IDES was initially modeled on an international company with multiple subsidiaries. Complete with a demo guide, it helped users familiarize themselves with SAP R/3 functions and with the organizational and integrated process structures that the SAP R/3 system covered. With data being added all the time, the IDES model companies felt very lifelike, and users had plenty of scope to test the various application areas.

“IDES wasn’t just a system, it was a new philosophy – a revolution in demo and training,” says Marcelo Cura Daball, who joined the team in late 1995 and played a key role in shaping the development of IDES. “The system behaved like a real customer system. It looked like a real customer system. That was new, and the customers loved it,” he recalls.

SAP built IDES to provide its developers with a test environment that would double as a basis for international training systems, customer workshops, and prototyping. “The basic idea,” Cura Daball explains, “was that our salespeople, in presales for example, would give a demo in the same system SAP used for customer training. And that, after a training course, customers could go home and repeat the training exercises with the same data they had used in their course.”

Customers Provide Real-Life Data

Pfaehler was the mastermind behind IDES and is credited with developing the business concept for the new system. A seasoned sales professional, he was an institution at SAP, says Cura Daball, and had connections across the globe. While the content for IDES was developed at company headquarters in Walldorf, Germany, Pfaehler also received support from colleagues all over the world; the system was then translated and made available to the local subsidiaries. Many customers provided real business data – such as BOMs – for the system, and the team worked with genuine, albeit anonymized, addresses.

But getting the system up and running was by no means a walk in the park. Time and again, Pfaehler had to ask for more specialists and more support from SAP’s subsidiaries. He argued that “at the very least” he needed a team of 12 developers, plus another two employees to continuously add and manage data and to update the IDES system. He also needed access to additional employees from SAP subsidiaries on a project basis, as he explained in a September 1995 letter to the Executive Board of SAP SE, in which he put forth the case for getting the staffing he required: “The IDES team could potentially become a training ground for the next generation at SAP, a place for our people to gain specialist business expertise and learn how to model customer scenarios and implement SAP systems as part of our project business. Employees of this kind are few and far between at SAP, but demand for them will grow in the future.”

IDES was shipped to the first customers in the spring of 1996 and was soon able to simulate the more than 1,000 business processes that could be mapped in SAP R/3. Initially, the focus was on finance, materials management, and sales. IDES allowed users to learn about the system in their own familiar working environment, using examples that were specific to their company. The IDES team grew, and it was not long before they were building around 800 customer-specific demos – per week – as Gerhard van der Beck says. During this period, Training, Demo, Consulting (TDC), a dedicated IT team responsible for making system copies and handling the technical maintenance of the IDES systems, was also set up. Having established IDES and seen it through to its initial milestones, Pfaehler left SAP (although he rejoined the company at a later date) and van der Beck, ably supported by Cura Daball, took over as head of the IDES team.

The Internet: A New Opportunity

SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner liked the IDES idea – even more so when Cura Daball and van der Beck suggested putting the system outside the firewall and using it to demonstrate that SAP software could run on the Internet. “To do this, we had to reduce the complexity and radically streamline the system,” van der Beck says. “Hasso was thrilled when we managed to reduce highly complex transactions involving multiple screens and subscreens down to the bare minimum. Now, for the first time, SAP users could create an order by navigating two screens and making just a few clicks,” Cura Daball adds.

“Customers who purchased an SAP license could install an IDES system free of charge,” says Jan Krell, who, with Thomas Habersack, was responsible for delivering the system. However, the team’s main clients remained Sales and Presales, who used IDES to show customers what SAP could do.

IDES continued to evolve over the years. As the Internet’s popularity increased, the system’s name changed slightly – from “International Demonstration and Evaluation System” to “Internet Demonstration and Evaluation System” and, starting in 1999, it gave customers, partners, and prospects a way of trying out mySAP.com online. According to SAP’s 1999 Annual Report, IDES was also expected to “reduce sales and marketing costs in the medium term.”

Because the IDES team relied on specialists from other departments and on instructors and students to enter, manage, and update the IDES data and to test the system after each update, it remained relatively small, never numbering more than 30-35 members. “At times, our colleagues were amazed at what we managed to do with so few people,” says Thomas Schulze, who was responsible for IDES documentation. “Being able to say you’d spent six months on the IDES team testing and learning the applications was a real door-opener. You learned so much on that team, and it was a real advantage when applying for positions within SAP. Many of those who worked on IDES in the early days stayed at SAP and built a career here,” he adds. Proof enough that Pfaehler’s wish for IDES to become a “training ground for the next SAP generation” came true.

Growing Complexity

As the 1990s drew to an end, a new level of complexity was emerging, driven largely by the arrival of SAP’s New Dimension products – CRM, SCM, business intelligence, and others. With SAP transforming into a multi-product company, even the IDES team was stretched to its limits. “As a demo team, we had to cover the entire product portfolio, which meant dividing topics between us and specializing,” Krell says. But, as Schulze adds, “There was simply no way that we could maintain that level of complexity in the long term,” .

At the same time, SAP’s new head of marketing Marty Homlish, who joined the company in 2000, was pushing – with Plattner’s backing – for “our demo system to be better and more appealing,” van der Beck says.

And despite efforts to meet customer expectations for a simple and fast way of testing SAP software over the Internet by inviting them to “Test-Drive Your Solution Online,” it became clear that IDES had had its day. “The performance wasn’t good enough; the technology – the Internet Transaction Server – was not as stable as we had hoped,” van der Beck says.

IDES gradually became less and less relevant. Yet the team, now called Solution & Innovation Experience (SIX) DID (Demo Infrastructure Delivery), still exists today – and operates the SAP Demo and Education Cloud environment, which contains systems used by SAP’s presales and sales personnel to demo software for customers. Nowadays, Krell and his colleagues refer customers who want to download a test package to the SAP S/4HANA fully-activated appliance.

While Pfaehler has long since retired, and recently ended an eight-year stint managing Dietmar Hopp’s Anpfiff ins Leben non-profit organization, Cura Daball and van der Beck are still at SAP – having served for 36 and 30 years respectively. They and their colleagues built IDES as an innovative demo system that still has its supporters today, such as SAP University Alliances. van der Beck now contributes his expertise to the Customer Adoption team, and Cura Daball works in the Customer Services & Delivery Board area, where he develops automation tools for demo and training system landscapes. Both still have a great deal to give to the company that means so much to them.

This blog post provides an overview of the reporting capability in the Preference Management functionality of SAP Global Trade Services (SAP GTS).

Discover how Applied Materials leverages Taulia’s dynamic discounting to enhance supply chain efficiency, offering early payment options to suppliers and driving innovation and growth. Learn about the benefits that have led to significant performance improvements and widespread adoption. See how SAP is helping Applied Materials Inc., a supplier of equipment for manufacturing semiconductor chips, grow its business – and the business of its suppliers so that they can grow too.
Rediscover the key moments from this year’s event, including keynotes, exclusive sessions, and more: https://sap.to/60559xuaN
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Capgemini has taken another major step in enhancing its digital transformation services by acquiring Syniti, a global leader in enterprise data management, particularly in SAP data migrations. This move aims to bolster Capgemini’s capabilities in supporting complex data transformation projects for clients transitioning to SAP S/4HANA and other SAP solutions. Syniti has been a key […]

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When you choose any of the SAP BW/4HANA conversion approaches, there are multiple phases.

This year at SAP Sapphire, SAP unveiled its vision for AI: to transform supply chains from digital to adaptive and ultimately toward autonomous, characterized by improved massive data-driven intelligence, system-driven recommendations, predictive insights, and contextualized decisions.

According to the IDC 2024 Supply Chain Survey, 63% of respondents “have an AI strategy linked to business objectives” to improve operational efficiency, business resilience, and increase employee productivity.

Our objective in this digital, adaptive, autonomous supply chain journey is to utilize the breadth of AI technologies to assist customers in achieving their business goals and drive significant value regardless of their current maturity level in business practices and technology.

Business Challenges in Integrating AI

Business leaders see significant challenges in integrating AI into business applications and processes, especially when trying to make sense of vast amounts of unstructured data. These challenges specifically stem from:

• Data quality: Data is inconsistent or not reliable nor current.
• Organizational Readiness: Organizations continue to rely on on-premise systems that pose challenges around stale data, integration, and scalability.
• Volatility: Global AI regulations are constantly evolving, for example the EU AI Act. Technologies such as large language models (LLMs) are also rapidly changing in performance and price with new models and providers popping up almost weekly.

These challenges underscore the need for a thoughtful approach to integrating AI into supply chain processes. SAP Business AI delivers a comprehensive set of relevant, reliable, and responsible AI solutions that effectively tackle many of these hurdles and ensure seamless AI adoption throughout your supply chain processes.

• For additional insights into relevant, reliable, and responsible AI, see “Trustworthy AI Can Reinvent Companies and Help Resolve Global Challenges” from SAP CEO Christian Klein.

Our Vision of AI-Enabled Supply Chains

For decades, SAP has led the way in supply chains, empowering its customers to streamline their complex end-to-end supply chain processes for enhanced efficiency, agility, and resilience. The SAP Supply Chain portfolio introduces innovation through various technologies, including AI, to transition your supply chain from digital to adaptive, with the ultimate vision of instituting an autonomous supply chain.

There are three possible maturity levels where you could stand in your business transformation. It is also important to acknowledge that different lines of business are on different maturity levels in an organization – while supply chain planning may already be somewhat adaptive, manufacturing operations may still be at the start of a digital transformation.

• Digital: Digitalization is the starting point. The SAP Supply Chain portfolio automates manual processes, enabling a seamless, digital end-to-end business process and digitalizing paper-based systems. This results in better access to data, greater visibility, and control over the entire supply chain, setting the foundation. Most importantly, SAP provides the tools and systems to get data ready for more advanced stages.
• Adaptive: This step is marked by an integration of cutting-edge technologies into business processes, including the use of predictive analytics and simulation for decision-making and Big Data, as well as the introduction of Joule, SAP’s copilot for every supply chain cloud application. These technologies empower supply chain professionals with intelligent insights and recommendations, enhancing decision-making for greater agility and resilience.
• Autonomous: Next, we envision a path characterized by technological, procedural, and data enhancements that will propel the supply chain into an autonomous era. This transition will happen gradually but ultimately enable supply chains to operate autonomously with minimal human intervention, resulting in even greater efficiency, adaptability, and responsiveness. It empowers supply chain experts to focus on truly value generating activities and spending precious time on only the most critical disruptions and business opportunities.

Technologies that Lead Toward Autonomous Supply Chains

SAP has been developing innovative AI capabilities that are fully integrated across digital supply chain applications, catering to diverse customer technology readiness levels. For example:

• Optimization models, rule-based predictive analytics, and heuristics improve, for instance, transportation plans, production scheduling, supply plans and spare part fulfillment. This allows a powerful way to automate decision-making in balancing conflicts of interests, such as customer service levels versus supply chain cost.
• SAP-owned machine learning is applied across the SAP Supply Chain portfolio; for example, in gradient boosting algorithms for demand forecasting, intelligent lead time predictions and failure curve analysis. SAP also offers customers a “bring-your-own-model” approach to enable extensibility for specific domains such as visual inspection and anomaly detection.
• Generative AI, when embedded in digital supply chain applications and combined with Joule, will allow users to conduct complex business transactions in simple conversational ways. We will augment tasks like conducting what-if scenarios for supply chain planning, assisting in new product ideation, analyzing manufacturing issues to accelerate the onboarding of new equipment, and assessing advanced failure modes of assets with generative AI.

With these technologies, our goal is to support customers wherever they stand in their journey and help them move from a focus on mere digital transformation to highly adaptive processes — and ultimately toward autonomous supply chain systems.

Examples of AI Innovations

Let’s explore specific innovations delivered in the SAP Supply Chain portfolio: These cases are classified according to their primary focus on digital, adaptive, and autonomous as a continuous journey. These innovations will be enriched over time and every business may find themselves at a different stage of maturity in different parts of their supply chain processes.

Digital

Intelligent Lead-Time Prediction for More Accurate Integrated Business Planning
This machine learning extension enables the extraction of historical lead times from goods movement data in SAP S/4HANA and analyses outliers and key influential factors for lead time changes to predict future lead times. The results are then uploaded as input for planning runs within SAP Integrated Business Planning, thus facilitating better decisions, and enhances plan adherence by considering the dynamic nature of actual lead times and future trends.

• Learn more here.

Everstream Powered Risk-Aware Supply Chains for SAP Integrated Business Planning
Critical data for decision-making can sit outside of the four walls of a company. Using external network data is imperative for better decisions based on supply chain risks in a digital transformation. This capability integrates external incident data — for example from Everstream Analytics — into SAP Integrated Business Planning and enables companies to proactively anticipate and manage external risks in their supply chain planning process. This integration allows supply chain planners to perform risk-aware planning by actively reflecting external risks affecting their supply chain, such as geopolitical shifts, material shortages, global regulations, extreme weather events, and more. Figure 1 illustrates this innovation:

• Learn more in this interactive value journey.

Adaptive

Product Design and Formulation

SAP Product Lifecycle Management (SAP PLM): Generative AI for Recipe Formulation
In the process industry, technology plays a crucial role in recipe creation and formulation to meet consumer demands. A fast time-to-market of launching a new recipe, in compliance with local regulation and sustainability targets, can be paramount to the competitiveness of a company. Generative AI integrated into SAP PLM assists in developing, enhancing, and customizing recipes, thus expediting product innovations, enhancing productivity, and supporting product compliance and sustainability for manufacturers of formulated products. Figure 2 illustrates this innovation:

• Get more insights via this interactive value journey.

Logistics

SAP S/4HANA Transportation Management: Intelligent Goods Receipt Analysis
In high-volume logistics industries, the manual tasks involved in inbound goods receipt can be time-consuming and error-prone. By leveraging AI-based document extraction, this use case automates data extraction from freight documents, seamlessly integrating them into SAP S/4HANA, enhancing efficiency, accuracy, and time savings.

• Learn more in this interactive value journey.

Asset Operations

SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Asset Management: Intelligent Maintenance Order Recommendation
LLMs optimize maintenance planning, promote agility, and improve asset performance and reliability in SAP S/4HANA enterprise asset management. In this innovation, generative AI supports users in the assessment of maintenance requests by recommending appropriate tasks and spare parts, thus enhancing operational efficiency. Figure 3 illustrates this innovation:

• Explore this interactive value journey for additional insights.

Autonomous

Supply Chain Planning

SAP Integrated Business Planning: Interactive Planning Assistant
Demand, supply, and inventory planners often use complex machine learning algorithms. By using generative AI and conversing with Joule in natural language, planners can gain insights into the models’ variables, constraints, and decision processes, leading to much more informed decisions and proactive planning. SAP helps customers boost explainability but also enable what-if scenario simulations for complex planning decisions. Figure 4 illustrates this innovation:

• Learn more via this interactive value journey.
• To try out a use case, register in the Early Adopter Care Program.

Manufacturing / Industry 4.0

SAP Digital Manufacturing: AI-Driven Visual Inspection
In industrial manufacturing, human-led visual inspection can lead to potential quality issues and is synonymous with a higher degree of manual labor. This capability applies computer vision AI into the production process to automatically identify defects and allocate non-conformance for production decisions, thus supporting a consistent and objective quality analysis that contributes to cost savings associated with reworks and recalls. Figure 5 illustrates this innovation:

• See this interactive value journey for additional insights.

Join the evolution and embrace AI, whether you are in a digital transformation or already driving toward adaptability or are taking your first steps toward autonomous supply chains or functions.

More Details

Ready to revolutionize your supply chain using artificial intelligence? Here’s how to get started:

• Register in the Early Adopter Care Program to explore Joule in SAP Integrated Business Planning for conversational search
• Dive into the IDC report “The Importance of AI in Supply Chain and Operations” for insights into AI’s pivotal role and its use cases in supply chain and operations

And stay tuned for more Early Adopter Care programs and updates on future innovations.

Dominik Metzger is head of SAP Digital Supply Chain for SAP Product Engineering.

SAP has been recognized as a leader in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Recurring Billing Applications, with SAP Subscription Billing contributing significantly to this achievement. The recognition reflects the company’s dedication to delivering an agile and efficient cloud-based solution that caters to the complex needs of rapidly growing businesses. Gartner evaluated 17 vendors, positioning […]

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