Plug-In Settings for GTS in SAP S/4HANA
The feeder system and SAP Global Trade Services (SAP GTS) are linked via a plug-in to enable communication between both systems.
SAP Q2 Results Show Cloud Growth and Strong Financials
SAP Q2 results reveal a significant surge in the company’s cloud business, marking a notable milestone in its strategic transformation. The current cloud backlog reached €14.8 billion, reflecting a 28% increase, while cloud revenue grew by 25%, primarily driven by a 33% rise in Cloud ERP Suite revenue. This performance underscores SAP’s robust growth trajectory […]
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An Overview of MRP with SAP S/4HANA
In the earlier releases of SAP ERP, MRP referred to one specific planning tool. In contrast, SAP has already delivered many new features and tools related to MRP since the first logistics-inclusive release of SAP S/4HANA was launched in 2015.
How HORNBACH Provides a Consistent Buying Experience Across Channels
Carsten Mueller, Head of Enterprise Architecture & Security, at HORNBACH explains how SAP Order Management Foundation helps the Do-it-Yourself retailer offer a seamless experience across multiple channels from on-line to in-store.
Learn more: https://news.sap.com/2024/07/hornbach-platform-for-growth/
SAP Recognized by Chartis Research as a Leader in Governance, Risk, and Compliance
SAP is among the solution leaders according to Chartis Research’s “Integrated GRC Solutions, 2024: Market Update and Vendor Landscape” report.
“SAP’s category-leading position in our iGRC quadrants reflects its strong set of solutions across most of the major GRC categories,” said Sid Dash, chief research at Chartis. “Moreover, it combines these with a strong element of integration, as well as links with corporate operations and infrastructure management.”
Governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) has evolved from its historical roots in the scope of audit and organizational control, progressing to incorporate a broader set of concepts and procedures.
In the latest release, SAP is featured in six categories: GRC analytics, internal audit, third-party risk, conduct risk and control, EGRC, and operational risks. These categories are evaluated based on two key offering dimensions: offering completeness and market potential.
GRC Analytics
GRC analytics involves not only the overarching qualification of risk, but also the specific methods, models, and techniques than can be used to analyze risk, including dynamic and ad hoc visualization and statistical methods. In this category, SAP is recognized for its industry-leading capabilities in the tool’s offering completeness, as well as advanced features in coverage, mapping and transformation, data management, and visualization.
Internal Audit
When discussing audit management, automation and data-driven activity come into play. As various tools that enable the industrialization of internal audit become more accessible, SAP possesses industry-leading capabilities, specifically in audit content and workflow automation. In addition, capabilities in data management, case management support, and dashboard and control are rated as advanced.
Third-Party Risk
Following several years of disruptions in the supply chain, third-party risk is now being scrutinized more closely from a regulatory perspective. Value chains and third parties are growing more complex and harder to analyze, so a constant IT and cyber risk monitoring process with multiple profiles is becoming an increasingly crucial element of any system. SAP provides industry-leading capabilities in coverage, risk analytics, and process management in this category.
Conduct Risk and Control
The vendor community providing conduct and controls is highly diverse. Many leading consulting companies have extensive content control libraries and have established large sets of control tools that integrate with their core platforms. In this assessment, SAP has achieved the best-in-class capability in control library coverage.
Enterprise GRC
Enterprise GRC (EGRC) amalgamates elements of workflow management, case management, and intelligent automation. The technology available to address EGRC have experienced significant advancements — a revolution — that improve how these processes are managed and automated. SAP leads in prepackaged content, followed by advanced workflow and automation, data management, and content management.
Operational Risk
As a subset of GRC analytics field, operational risk focuses on regulatory support and dynamics. It also emphasizes purer operational risk, which makes a broader collection of operational analytics increasingly relevant. In this case, SAP advances in data management, tools, and visualization.
Vishal Verma is global vice president and head of GRC Product Marketing at SAP.
Resolving Common Data Replication Errors in SAP Systems
There are some errors that can occur during the replication process in SAP systems that may require manual intervention.
Sun Life Spotlights the Incredible Market Growth Power of Digital Modernization
While Sun Life has been synonymous with traditional insurance, the Canadian-based organization has forged ahead to digitally transform into a fully diversified and modern financial services institution that includes US$1.4 trillion in asset management. In fact, 45% of Sun Life’s revenue comes from asset management with the rest divided across a comprehensive portfolio of health and insurance products for consumers and institutional clients. The modern financial services lineup includes virtual healthcare, personalized financial planning, digital payments, and as-a-service advice.
“Our CEO wants us to think and act like a digital company,” said Dariush Shoja, vice president and corporate CIO at Sun Life. “Using SAP S/4HANA Cloud, we are digitizing the entire business to provide personalized and high-value services throughout the customer lifecycle.”
Shoja spoke during a session at the SAP and SAP Fioneer for Financial Services Forum Americas event in Boston, Massachusetts, where he showcased the company’s digital transformation that modernized the company’s finance platform.
Digital Closes Gap Between Generative AI Promise and Reality
Shoja immediately struck a responsive chord from the audience in the room who chuckled when he jokingly asked if anyone’s nightly dreams during college revolved around a career in finance. Drawing from his company’s experience with digital transformation, he acknowledged the industry’s change management challenges.
“When we’re talking about finance in the context of digitization, it’s not just about automation or systems. It’s a paradigm and culture shift,” he said. “I’ve been an accountant and we are tough to change, partly because for many years we’ve followed generally accepted accounting principles. You need to start at the top with the CEO, CFO, and everyone on down to support the change. Organizations aiming to become digital and adopt state-of-the-art technologies like generative AI should focus on getting buy-in for the journey.”
Modern Financial Services Platforms Are Cloud-Based
Coming from earlier sessions in the day that touted the incredible promise of technology advancements like generative AI, Shoja was also candid about overcoming the reality that professionals in the financial services industry face.
“Although everyone is talking about artificial intelligence and digitization, historically there hasn’t been a significant amount of investment to update systems that are aging or nearing end of life,” said Shoja. “But one of the key enablers of growth is moving to the cloud. Digitization is creating the foundation for our future as we renovate and modernize our platforms.”
Connected Data Drives Informed Decisions
One of the objectives of Sun Life’s finance platform modernization was to connect previously disparate data between geographies and business units. With operations in regions worldwide, including North America, Asia-Pacific, and Europe, along with an expanding product portfolio, managing data was paramount to effective financial management that fuels customer satisfaction and company growth.
“We have to build, evaluate, and run complex actuarial policy models that meet evolving regulatory mandates worldwide and corporate profitability objectives,” said Shoja. “Going to the cloud has provided efficiencies from consistent operations across every geography. Moving from manual spreadsheets to automated dashboards provides finance with faster access to insightful analytics from larger and more complex data sets. People can easily drill down to find the information they need to make the right optimal decisions.”
Out-of-the-Box Digital Thinking
Like every organization that’s managing millions of transactions, data standardization and integration was extremely important to create Sun Life’s modern global platform.
“Even though our systems were only about 15 years old, eliminating technical debt was key to our transformation,” said Shoja. “We replaced traditional ways of thinking with out-of-the-box strategies, using modern native tools in the cloud platform to gain efficiencies. For example, when we want to pay a claim, the system automatically generates all relevant journal entries. We’ve strategically aligned technology with finance and the rest of the business.”
AI Can Save Valuable Time for Financial Services
Shoja saw numerous solid use cases for generative AI, traditional AI, and machine learning in the financial services industry. AI could quickly find data gaps to speed up time-sensitive quarterly accrual management reporting. Sun Life has created a team that’s focused on AI use cases in reconciliation and other areas. However, the company is also relying on partners to bring the full value of AI capabilities into the business.
“Large language models aren’t feasible for organizations to build on our own, AI should be built into digital solutions,” he said. “As SAP is doing, we need companies to provide AI solutions and make it part of their package. SAP is a strong partner in our finance modernization journey.”
GROW with SAP: Expanding the Value of Cloud ERP with SAP Sales Cloud and Concur Expense
Cloud ERP helps companies simplify their everyday work and standardize their business processes. As the primary cloud ERP for fast-growing organizations, GROW with SAP helps companies successfully adopt cloud ERP, including a complete offering of solutions, services, and SAP Community and SAP Learning.
As of today, the premium edition of GROW with SAP will now include access to the SAP Sales Cloud and Concur Expense solutions.
SAP Sales Cloud helps customers improve sales processes, improve forecast accuracy, and increase wins, while Concur Expense helps customers unlock spend insights and optimize performance via a world-class expense management solution.
SAP Sales Cloud Solution for GROW with SAP
With SAP Sales Cloud, organizations will benefit from leading sales automation capabilities that are powered by cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI. The inclusion of SAP Sales Cloud with GROW with SAP provides the opportunity for organizations to maximize revenue generation and improve the buying experience.
With SAP Sales Cloud, sales organizations can optimize B2B sales processes by:
- Delivering effective sales engagements that drive revenue and customer loyalty through a single, connected view of data, processes, and people
- Helping sellers focus on key business priorities through guided sales actions and customer insights
- Adapting to new market opportunities through intelligent, flexible sales processes that use data and AI to inform the next best action
Together with GROW with SAP and Concur Expense, organizations can achieve a complete lead-to cash process delivered on cloud-native and user-centric user experience (UX) at the lowest possible TCO.
Concur Expense Solution for GROW with SAP
With Concur Expense, customers can transform spend management beyond automation with a connected, flexible solution. With its robust open architecture, Concur Expense enables customized workflows that optimize productivity, ensure compliance, and reduce expenses effortlessly.
The package includes proven benefits; for example, the ability to:
- Focus on the most important business tasks through automated and streamlined expense management every step of the way, from receipt capture to report approval
- Get visibility into expenses and reporting needs to better manage spend, wherever and whenever it happens within Concur Expense
- Meet organizational and regulatory compliance needs throughout the expense reporting life cycle
Now, customers can enforce spend management policies, adapt to changing requirements and regulations, and future-proof their organization. Additionally, with the Concur Expense mobile app, employees and supervisors can effectively manage their expenses from any location, on any device.
Grow Your Business with the Best of SAP Sales Cloud and Concur Expense
Through these new entitlements, your business can improve sales processes, improve forecast accuracy, and increase wins with SAP Sales Cloud, and also unlock spend insights and optimize performance with Concur Expense.
Together, organizations have the tools they need to optimize their business and build a connected foundation for future success.
- Learn more about GROW with SAP here
- Discover more about the premium edition of GROW with SAP here
Jonathan Rhodes is senior vice president and head of Product Marketing for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition at SAP.
Support Accreditation Updates Highlight SAP’s AI Support Offerings
The Support Accreditation course serves as a comprehensive resource for customers and partners engaging with SAP’s support channels and services, providing a detailed overview of our support offerings and tools.
In this interview, Dennison John, support center network head and managing director of SAP Labs Latin America, shares insights on the latest advancements in this fundamental training.
Q: Can you provide a recap of the Support Accreditation course and its importance for those who engage with support from SAP?
A: Support Accreditation is a training that covers all the support services and tools offered by SAP. Launched in 2020, the course is continuously updated to align with the evolving nature of our support offerings. It is designed to equip SAP users with all requisite resources they need when engaging with support from SAP. The easy-to-use units can guide you through the material with one-pager snapshots, how-to guides, and interactive quizzes.
Q: What has changed in this updated version of Support Accreditation?
A: In the second release, we have a dedicated unit on AI. This new unit covers advanced topics such as AI-driven support innovations, proactive and predictive support mechanisms, and deep dives into complex support scenarios. These topics are designed to provide those who take the course with cutting-edge knowledge and skills that can enable them to leverage the latest SAP technologies and methodologies to help resolve issues more efficiently and anticipate potential problems before they arise.
Q: What specific aspects of AI-guided support are covered?
A: The new unit on AI-guided support covers a range of topics, including the fundamentals of AI in support, how AI algorithms are used to predict and prevent issues, and the practical application of AI tools like Incident Solution Matching and predictive analytics. It also explores the integration of AI with existing support channels and how AI can enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of support operations. The course provides hands-on training and real-world examples of how these AI tools can be used to streamline support processes, reduce response times, and improve overall support quality.
Participants can leverage AI-guided support tools to improve their operations by using AI-driven insights to predict potential issues before they occur, automate routine support tasks, and provide faster, more accurate solutions to common problems. The course teaches one how to integrate these tools into their daily workflows, enabling them to reduce response times, increase the accuracy of issue resolution, and enhance the overall customer support experience.
Q: Are there any additional lessons in the second release of Support Accreditation?
A: Yes, we have several new lessons, including support for our SAP Ariba, SAP Fieldglass, and SAP Concur solutions. As a result, we can confidently assert that the Support Accreditation course can now provide comprehensive learning material for our full suite.
Q: How does Support Accreditation help in utilizing Real-Time Support more effectively?
A: The training provides detailed modules on Real-Time Support channels, such as Expert Chat, Schedule an Expert, Schedule a Manager, and Ask an Expert Peer. These lessons help in understanding how to access and use these channels efficiently. By familiarizing one with the functionalities and best practices of these tools, the course helps ensure they can quickly and effectively resolve support issues as they arise.
Q: What feedback have you received regarding the first release, and how has it influenced the second release?
A: The feedback from the first release has been overwhelmingly positive, with many appreciating the comprehensive nature of the course and the clarity of the content. However, some suggested deeper dives into specific advanced topics. Additionally, we are continuously refining the course content based on ongoing feedback to ensure it meets the evolving needs of our customers and partners.
Q: How does SAP measure the effectiveness of the training in improving customer and partner interactions with SAP support?
A: We measure the effectiveness through several key metrics, including feedback, course completion rates, and the impact on support case resolution times. We are delighted by the significant number of customers and partners who have completed the accreditation. Within the initial six months, we have surpassed 3,500 customers and partners who have successfully completed the course and obtained a record of achievement. This certification demonstrates their comprehensive understanding of the course material.
We encourage all to provide feedback on the content and their overall learning experience after completing the course. Additionally, we analyze data on support case resolution times to assess if there has been an improvement in efficiency and effectiveness as a result of the training. This comprehensive evaluation helps us continuously refine the course to better meet the needs of our customers and partners.
Q: How does the course address self-service and case prevention strategies?
A: Support Accreditation includes comprehensive units on self-service and case prevention strategies. These units provide participants with tools and techniques to help proactively address potential issues before they escalate to support cases. Topics covered include using SAP Knowledge Base Articles, leveraging automated tools for common problem resolution, and implementing best practices for maintaining system health. By focusing on these strategies, the course can empower all to minimize downtime and improve system performance, leading to more efficient operations.
Q: How does the training contribute to the long-term success of SAP customers and partners?
A: The course contributes to the long-term success of SAP customers and partners by providing them with the skills and knowledge needed to help optimize their use of SAP support services. This can lead to more efficient issue resolution, reduced system downtime, and better overall performance. For partners, the course can help them deliver superior service, build stronger client relationships, and achieve better project outcomes. For customers, the course helps foster self-sufficiency and confidence in managing their SAP systems, ultimately driving business growth and success.
Leonardo Mauhs is part of Customer Support at SAP.
ElringKlinger Implements SAP Cloud-Based ERP Solutions
ElringKlinger AG, a leading global automotive supplier, has partnered with SAP to migrate its corporate IT systems to the cloud, utilizing SAP cloud-based ERP solutions to bolster its competitive edge in the dynamic automotive industry. ElringKlinger’s extensive product portfolio features innovative solutions for a range of vehicles, including those with electric motors, hybrid technology, and […]
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