After intensive preparation, 24 European national soccer teams will be presenting themselves at the upcoming European Championship. Besides concentrating on training and match practice, they’ll be analyzing their opponents and discussing tactics and game plans. Germany’s coaching team is relying on technology-driven support from the sports management solution SAP Sports One.

Sights Set on the European Championship

“SAP Sports One enables us to efficiently share tactical insights and key information about our next opponents with our players. And by accessing the software on a tablet, we can even give them the latest updates in the changing room shortly before kickoff or at half time,” says Benjamin Glück, assistant coach to the German national A-team.

“SAP’s sports management suite is very important to the national soccer team as a central platform for collecting and analyzing data and for presenting the insights gained from that data to our players,” explains Glück. “We use the video and visualization functions in SAP Sports One to help us illustrate findings about our opponents and their key players. These features make conveying tactics and preparing for specific matches much easier and clearer.” The German team also uses analytical insights to prepare for penalty scenarios. In SAP Penalty Insights, goalkeepers can study the behavior of potential penalty-takers, such as which area of the goal they usually aim for and even how these preferences change under pressure. Conversely, penalty-takers can gain insights into the tactics of their opponents’ goalkeepers.

The coaches and analysts of the German Football Association (Deutscher Fußball-Bund, or DFB) work with data created within SAP Sports One as well as data and analyses from third-party sources. The SAP solution serves as the central platform for consolidating and analyzing all the data.

An SAP App for All Players

Germany’s national players stay in close contact with their coaches and analysts through the SAP Sports One messaging app – SAP Team One – which they have on their phones. Among other things, the mobile app is used to pass on match preparation information, such as opponent analyses, annotated clips, and videos.

The players also use the mobile app to share information about themselves. For example, they complete questionnaires about how intense they perceived the last training session or match, how well they slept, and how they are feeling overall. Their responses are used to generate an RPE (rating of perceived exertion) value. By gauging each player’s general health and well-being in this way, coaches can manage intensity levels according to each individual’s situation. Both the DFB and the player’s home club monitor this RPE value to guard against overtraining and injury. SAP Analytics Cloud can draw on data from SAP Sports One to create player-specific reports that are forwarded to the player’s home club after courses, tournaments, and matches the German team takes part in.

DFB and SAP: An Established Partnership

The DFB is a familiar name around the globe. With almost 7 million members spread across more than 25,000 clubs, it is the world’s largest national sports federation. At the World Cup in Brazil in 2014, which Germany won, the country’s national team was already using SAP Match Insights, a prototype of the solution that is now part of SAP Sports One. This prototype helped the DFB evaluate large volumes of data for match analysis for the first time.

Today, more than 1,000 DFB users – players and the “teams behind the teams” – work with SAP Sports One. “Our successful collaboration with the German national team was a key factor in SAP’s decision to turn the prototype we developed for the DFB into a standard product. Now, clubs and associations in 19 countries are using SAP Sports One,” says Fadi Naoum, senior vice president and head of Development, SAP Sports One. More joint projects followed, including the development of SAP Penalty Insights and SAP Challenger Insights, a mobile app that helps teams prepare for upcoming matches. On the horizon of this co-innovation partnership are plans to leverage the power of AI to make the functions in SAP Sports One even more efficient.

Shaping the Future

In addition to Germany’s national men’s and women’s soccer A-teams, the DFB manages 12 junior and U21 teams, too. “The challenge for us is to keep a close eye on the pool of talented young players we have and to help them reach their full potential,” says Christofer Clemens, the DFB’s head of Scouting, Match Analysis, and Diagnosis. “Our coaching teams watch an average of 1,500 games every season and identify a large number of gifted talents in the process. To qualify these players, the coaching teams compile a huge volume of scouting reports, which we manage in SAP Sports One. These qualitative insights are vital for us. However, at the moment, the task of judging the development of a player or comparing individual players based on that information is time-consuming,” says Clemens. “We’re hoping that AI will make the complex task of analyzing these vast amounts of data much simpler for us.” Alongside scouting reports, the DFB plans to use publicly available data sources and match statistics to complete player profiles.

“Another area where the DFB sees enormous potential for AI is in analyzing opponents before international matches,” says Martin Vogelbein, a member of the DFB’s Scouting, Match Analysis, and Diagnosis team and project lead in managing the SAP Sports One solution. SAP Sports One is already helping the DFB prepare for big games, he explains, but the plan is to go a step further and use AI to automatically analyze insights from opponents’ past matches.

“We are hoping that SAP’s AI copilot, Joule, will bring enormous benefits in terms of consolidating match reports. That would minimize the manual tasks our match analysts need to complete and reduce the time it takes to get answers to a range of key questions we have when preparing for games,” says Vogelbein. Typical questions are: What patterns are visible in the opposing team in different phases of the match? What does this tell us about the team’s strengths, weaknesses, and about the options we have? “We already have a huge amount of information – particularly qualitative data – available to us before games. SAP Challenger Insights, a component of SAP Sports One, allows us to visualize insights from that information and discuss them with the team. But, looking ahead, AI-driven analyses could help us prepare key background information for our players even more easily,” says Vogelbein.

Clemens and Vogelbein are very pleased with the results so far. “We see enormous potential in our work with SAP on the AI-driven evaluation of information that is relevant for scouting and match analysis. The prototypes SAP has presented to the DFB look very promising, and we are looking forward to using them live soon.”

Top image courtesy of Thomas Böcker

BARCELONA — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced Otto Group’s Bonprix, a leading international fashion company, has successfully completed its implementation of the SAP BW/4HANA and SAP Datasphere solutions.

One of Germany’s top four online fashion shops, Bonprix now operates a dynamic multi-cloud data landscape that enables it to integrate both on-premise and cloud data sources in one single platform.

Based in Hamburg, Germany, Bonprix has over 16 million active customers in more than 25 countries. The company looked to SAP solutions for a simplified IT architecture, a faster time-to-market in business decision-making process and a self-service-enabled semantic layer to respond to market changes and ensure customers have access to the latest catwalk trends.

Supported by SAP services and partners, including Beratungscontor, Bonprix implemented its analytics stack on SAP Datasphere and the SAP Business Warehouse application. By deploying SAP Datasphere as a cloud-based data platform to SAP BW4/HANA, Bonprix gains access to a powerful analytical platform that  bridges data across finance, sales, logistics and customer relationship management between transactional SAP data and end users.

“The Bonprix business intelligence data based on SAP solutions is adeptly designed for the future, leveraging the robust capabilities of SAP BW/4HANA at its core to manage and efficiently process vast volumes of data,” said Sergio Lopez Nunez, Bonprix senior BI engineer. “When paired with SAP Datasphere, which offers extensive multi-cloud access, it enables the seamless integration of data from diverse sources. In essence, the Bonprix BI data platform is not only a cornerstone in daily operations but also a strategic asset in the relentless pace of technological change, ensuring that Bonprix is well-equipped to continue promoting responsible trade that inspires, now and into the future.”

Having already implemented SAP Business AI solutions – specifically, the Document Information Extraction business service – Bonprix already has experienced significant efficiency gains by automatically extracting relevant data from incoming invoices, reducing manual data entry errors and accelerating the overall invoice processing workflow.

“As one of Germany’s top online fashion shops, Bonprix’s digital transformation journey is impressive as they continue to make millions of customers happy,” said Sven Mulder, managing director of SAP Germany. “The adoption of SAP Datasphere and SAP BW/4HANA marks the beginning of Bonprix’s successful cloud journey. They’re now empowered to make real-time, data-driven decisions, positioning the brand to expand into new markets with style.”

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To increase visibility for organizations and enable more accurate data and insights, we introduced updates to our procurement, business network, and external workforce platforms at SAP Sapphire Orlando last week.

With new integrations for SAP Ariba solutions, SAP Business Network, and SAP Fieldglass solutions, as well as the incorporation of new generative AI features, we aim to automate and streamline procurement, supply chain, and external workforce management processes. These innovations will help empower organizations to access real-time spend data and focus on proactive decision-making, ultimately increasing their visibility and effectiveness.

As businesses continue to embrace advanced technologies, the integration of responsible, relevant, and reliable business AI and Joule, SAP’s natural language, generative AI copilot, into the SAP suite of solutions represents a significant leap forward in optimizing business processes and accelerating strategic initiatives. By harnessing the power of supply chain data alongside business AI and generative AI, we are setting the stage for practical procurement and workforce scenarios to thrive.

Joule Combined with SAP Ariba and SAP Analytics Cloud Can Improve Procurement Processes and Supply Chain Planning

Digital transformation has brought on endless potential for procurement teams, as embedded generative AI and increased access to data across the supply chain can lead to better visibility into spend. That is why we’re announcing further integration of Joule into our procurement solutions.

Later this year, Joule will be generally available in SAP Ariba solutions. Through this update, sourcing managers can utilize intelligent product and supplier recommendations to develop proposal requests. The combined platform will consider cost-effectiveness, sustainability ramifications, compliance regulations, and previous transactions.

Another new generative AI-based feature in SAP Ariba solutions will migrate data from SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition to help provide customers with a 360-degree buying user experience to enable a simple, agile, and collaborative process to identify products and skills in the same purchase order, otherwise known as spend bundling. Buyers can describe their purchasing needs with natural language prompts, and the system will deliver intelligent and personalized recommendations. This will help increase flexibility for buying materials and services, creating a collaborative and straightforward process from searching for products and services through order fulfillment.

To this end, we revealed a version of our generative AI-powered SAP Spend Control Tower during a session with Blackstone at SAP Sapphire. The command center, which can provide a single location for enterprise-wide spend analytics, can identify tail spend, improve compliance, and constantly identify rapidly increasing costs. This will help create meaningful value for organizations by increasing end-to-end visibility to drive efficient spend performance. Find out how to take advantage of the solution’s native connections to other SAP applications and improved insight to action here in this video.

Optimizing SAP Fieldglass with Generative AI to Mitigate Risk

HR departments and procurement teams often struggle to collaborate, creating silos that limit the ability to identify proper external candidates who can fill skills gaps in organizations. The latest update to SAP Fieldglass solutions will introduce embedded AI to help reduce risk and increase the value of the external workforce.

We are leveraging generative AI to produce scope of work (SOW) descriptions, job descriptions, and job description translations for external workers, automatically identifying the required skills and qualifications for each organization. This will help remove data silos to enable total workforce management, an organizational strategy to provide visibility into all temporary and permanent employees.

Additionally, SAP Fieldglass solutions enhanced with generative AI can rank candidates based on salary preference, skills, and experience. Procurement teams can then identify the best candidates in an unbiased manner to reduce the time to hire, ultimately accelerating strategic decision-making. These added facets will help enhance planning and preparation for all external talent scenarios.

Introducing New Enhancements to SAP Business Network

One of the highest priorities for any supply chain professional is to ensure their people, processes, and technology are resilient. Supply chain resilience extends beyond being able to withstand disruptions – it includes visibility into all activity and agility to react quickly to find and secure alternative sources of supply.

In fact, SAP was recognized as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Multi-Enterprise Supply Chain Commerce Network 2023 Vendor Assessment* and by TrustRadius as a top supply chain software for visibility.

Our latest modernization of SAP Business Network helps enhance customers’ communication channels with trading partners for increased visibility and agility. Improved integrations between SAP Business Network Supply Chain Collaboration and SAP Business Network Material Traceability can allow suppliers to share product genealogy data to help ensure full traceability and compliance across the supply chain. Additional links between SAP Business Network Supply Chain Collaboration and SAP Business Network Freight Collaboration will help automate updates for inbound deliveries, simplifying management of carrier appointments and shipments.

Enhancements to the SAP Business Network Asset Collaboration solution will help increase access to millions of supplier profiles from whom alternative products can be found. These new features across SAP Business Network solutions will work to reduce silos between and within organizations, resulting in significant time and cost savings with fewer manual steps in processing work orders.

Strategic Investment Across the SAP Suite of Solutions

SAP has augmented integrations across its entire portfolio of spend management and business network solutions, aiming to improve efficiency. By investing in technology that provides catered and end-to-end solutions, customers can have all-encompassing visibility to all business processes, from procurement of raw materials to delivery of the final product.

What we shared at SAP Sapphire will only improve relationships between buyers, suppliers, logistics providers, and service providers across the supply chain, developing a larger view of all functions and employees. This will lead to better decision-making, increased productivity, and improved agility.

Manoj Swaminathan is chief product and technology officer for Intelligent Spend and Business Network at SAP.

*Source: “IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Multi-Enterprise Supply Chain Commerce Network 2023 Vendor Assessment,” #US49948423, December 2023.