SAP Spend Connect Live is the industry’s premier spend management event — a reputation that is well earned. And this year will be no exception.

Once again, we are prepared to showcase groundbreaking innovations that will revolutionize the landscape of spend management. As I continue to engage with our customers, their enthusiasm for our latest offerings helps validate our commitment to delivering solutions that streamline processes and empower businesses to achieve their full potential.  

At SAP our focus is on automating tedious, time-consuming tasks, allowing you to concentrate on the strategic decisions that drive your organization forward. SAP continues to invest heavily in innovations across the spend management and business network portfolio, including new artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities and seamless integrations, enabling users to navigate uncertainty, seize optimization opportunities, and simplify processes. Our goal is to give you the freedom to shape your business’s future without the distraction of day-to-day operational noise. 

Betting Big on Your Success with SAP 

During my keynote, I outlined our product strategy for the coming year, emphasizing three key pillars: Data, Intelligence, and Suite. These focus areas are a direct response to the valuable input we’ve received from customers. I am confident that our continuing investments in these areas will provide them with the insights needed to make informed, strategic decisions that propel their organization to new heights.  

Our newest capabilities across our intelligent spend management solutions enable customers to gain visibility across all of their processes, eliminating fragmented touchpoints that hinder progress.

As Mickey North Rizza, group vice-president of Enterprise Software at IDC, recently shared, “SAP continues to dominate the procurement applications space as measured by market share because customers want a seamless user experience with which to conduct the full spectrum of their spend management/procurement activity. When layering in the breadth of SAP’s industry experience, the expansive business network, and direct sourcing capabilities, SAP has clearly earned its place.” 

I couldn’t agree more.  Our commitment to maintaining our position as the industry standard in spend management is unwavering, and we will continue to set the benchmark for providing a smooth, efficient user interface while delivering unparalleled visibility into every aspect of spend.

Now, let’s dive into this year’s announcements.  

Generative AI Transforms the Source-to-Pay Process 

SAP is dedicated to delivering best-in-class solutions infused with AI, empowering you to prioritize strategic initiatives over mundane tasks. We understand and hear the concerns surrounding data security when implementing AI, which is why we have made no compromises in ensuring our AI capabilities set the standard for compliance. From third-party advisory boards to adhering to the UNESCO 10 Guiding Principles for Ethical AI and singing the EU AI Pact, we enable customers to harness the power of AI without sacrificing control over their data.  

SAP’s generative AI copilot Joule will be seamlessly integrated across SAP Ariba, SAP Business Network, and SAP Fieldglass starting in Q4 of 2024. Joule will enable users to manage their most important tasks quickly and accurately across all areas of our spend management portfolio.  

In SAP Ariba, users will be able to use generative AI-infused capabilities to create RFPs and request help with routine inquiries and surface risks. These capabilities will also provide buying recommendations along with comprehensive supplier summaries from different data sources. In addition, sustainability scorecard from SAP Ariba ensures that customers can make informed decisions that align with their organizations’ environmental, social, and governance (ESG) objectives.  

With Joule, SAP Fieldglass users can take advantage of template recommendations to generate job postings and SOWs with pre-filled information, saving precious time. Users can now request assistance and insights in natural language, and immediately receive responses from Joule directly from the SAP Help Portal. It is now possible to ask Joule how to create a job posting and receiving accurate, step-by-step instructions complete with links and resources.  

SAP Business Network will use Joule to help with logistics and asset management tasks. Joule provides SAP Business Network users a natural language interface and navigation for scenarios such as status requests and queries, supporting freight orders, freight bookings, invoice disputes, equipment, notifications, and work orders. It will also provide insights into rejected invoices to reduce manual intervention for errors. Suppliers can dive into potential business opportunities based on keyword matching that selects best-fit profiles for RFIs. 

Streamlining Procurement with SAP Ariba Intake Management  

Most companies have a complex landscape of disparate and siloed solutions for handling procurement needs such as purchase requests, contract processing, or helping onboard a new services provider. Typically, employees don’t know which platform, portal, or system will handle their request because it isn’t a task they perform regularly. Hours of time may be wasted trying to figure out how to make the request in the first place and track down subsequent status updates. 

But no more: SAP Ariba Intake Management, a brand-new solution built on SAP Business Technology Platform, will automate procurement request creation and provide process orchestration, including routing and support across diverse procurement landscapes and complex workflows. By connecting different systems into one central location for procurement inquiries and status updates, employees can adhere to your organization’s policies and comply with necessary regulations without the need for time consuming manual corrections. SAP Ariba Intake Management will offer one pane of glass for status updates and requests, making procurement orchestration simpler and more intuitive. Scheduled to be available in Q1 of 2025, the solution will offer out-of-the-box integration with other SAP solutions and a robust set of connectors for third-party integration.  

Empowering Suppliers with SAP Business Network, Promote Subscription  

We announced a new promote subscription for the SAP Business Network, designed to deliver immediate value to suppliers, helping them to find new business, improve match potential, and build relationships with buyers using the network catalog. Through the promote subscription, suppliers will receive recommendations to improve discoverability, advanced search results, supplier profile verification, and network catalog APIs. With the help of generative AI tools, suppliers can now load their full suite of offerings into the network catalog faster and with enhanced product descriptions and summaries. The new promote subscription will also help suppliers identify sales opportunities based on regional search data and use advanced insights to track business growth on the network.  

Elevating External Workforce Management with SAP Fieldglass Analytics Add-On 

SAP Fieldglass delivers a new, enhanced analytics capability with next-level insights into your external workforce. The analytics add-on with AI capabilities will help businesses meet sustainability and human rights goals, acquire talent quickly, and implement multi-channel talent acquisition strategies. Users can benchmark and predict external talent scenarios, review performance against KPIs, track trends against industry averages, and monitor sustainability and compliance initiatives.  

As we continue to listen to our customers and invest in our spend management and business network solution offerings, our commitment to setting the standard for spend management software remains steadfast. We are committed to providing innovative solutions that help our customers collaborate strategically with their business partners, enhance productivity, and improve compliance.  

To learn more about these new innovations, read “Innovations in Spend Management from SAP Help Customers Improve Productivity, Gain Insights and Boost Growth.”

If you couldn’t attend SAP Spend Connect Live in Las Vegas, sign up here for the virtual experience on October 24 to access live and on-demand content from across content tracks. Join us as we continue to shape the future of spend management together. 

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

Many organizations still using SAP ERP or the on-premise version of SAP S/4HANA are planning to migrate to the cloud. The new edition of the “Mapping Your Journey to SAP S/4HANA” guide provides the perfect orientation, with valuable insights, step-by-step instructions, best practices, and comprehensive background information.

The digital landscape is changing rapidly, and companies must constantly adapt to new circumstances. Failure to keep pace can lead to significant challenges, as the automotive industry and its supply chains are currently experiencing. To help companies navigate this dynamic environment, SAP introduced a guide in 2018 that quickly became a standard reference. A completely revised edition is now available.

Dozens of SAP experts from across the company have contributed to this comprehensive guide, which addresses all issues related to the transition to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition. By focusing on the essential technology, IT decision-makers can confidently plan their road map to cloud ERP, avoid pitfalls, and accelerate the time it takes to go live.

At the heart of the guide is the consolidated experience of thousands of successful transformation projects, presented in text and images. It also includes numerous links to additional resources, making the guide a single point of reference for all transformation issues at every project stage. The concept has been well received by customers, with more than 180,000 downloads since the first edition.

“The paper offers a comprehensive and detailed overview of the success factors and essential activities for your journey toward the latest SAP product portfolio.”

– Geoff Scott, CEO, ASUG

Updating an Essential Reference

Why a new edition now? “We have regularly updated the guide because it was always intended to be a living document,” said co-authors Bjoern Braemer, head of Adoption Execution & Enablement for SAP Customer Evolution, and Niclas Weidner, senior project consultant. “However, the SAP world has changed dramatically in the last six years with the emergence of many innovative tools and methodologies. In addition, the RISE with SAP offering, which we use to help customers move to cloud ERP, has grown significantly. As a result, we have completely revised and reissued the guide, incorporating valuable feedback from our customers and partners.”

“Why invest effort in forging your own path when you can follow the well-traveled paths of fellow community members?”

– Geoff Scott, CEO, ASUG

The goal remains the same: to provide IT managers with all the information they need to successfully implement SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition in one place. The guide is divided into three sections:

1. Strategic Choices

The first section provides guidance on making informed decisions about various aspects of transitioning to SAP S/4HANA, including choosing between public and private cloud options, understanding the benefits and features of the GROW with SAP and RISE with SAP offerings, and the implications of changes to cloud operations.

2. Ingredients for Project Success

The second section focuses on the critical factors for project success. These include change and knowledge management, customer and supplier master data integration, the partner ecosystem, and more.

3. Essential Tools from SAP

The final part describes the 15 most important tools that companies can use to assess their system’s current state, plan and implement the migration, and monitor the project’s progress. These tools include SAP Data Services, SAP Readiness Check, ABAP development tools, and the SAP S/4HANA migration cockpit.

The Only Book You Need to Read About SAP S/4HANA

“Mapping Your Journey to SAP S/4HANA” is designed to help IT leaders navigate the transformation journey with confidence. It provides the right combination of theoretical knowledge and practical tips to help keep organizations digitally fit beyond 2027. You can read it from cover to cover for a complete understanding or keep it handy for quick, targeted advice on specific stages or challenges. Download it now for free.

Thomas Bamberger is president of SAP Customer Evolution.

Innovations at TechEd 2024 Showcase SAP’s Vast Collection of Business AI Game-Changers, from Collaborative Agents to Knowledge Graph Capabilities and Generative AI Developer Features in SAP Build

WALLDORF — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today unveiled groundbreaking AI innovations across a technology foundation that drives 87% of global commerce, putting its generative AI copilot Joule at the center of a new way of doing business.

At its annual SAP TechEd conference, SAP announced powerful new capabilities that complement and extend Joule, including collaborative AI agents imbued with custom skills to complete complex cross-disciplinary tasks. Other innovations include the SAP Knowledge Graph, a next-generation solution poised to help developers unlock the full value of SAP data by connecting it with rich business context, and new tools to ensure developers can continue driving Business AI innovation.

“SAP’s innovation drives real business outcomes, and today’s advancements help customers harness the power of AI, data and new development solutions to catalyze growth,” said Muhammad Alam, member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, SAP Product Engineering. “Drawing on SAP’s unmatched business and technology expertise, the AI innovations we’re announcing at TechEd forge a new human-AI partnership to transform the landscape of modern business.”

Supercharging Joule

On the eve of its first birthday, Joule marks a watershed in how business gets done. SAP introduces collaborative AI agents to a copilot that truly speaks the language of business, expands Joule’s capabilities to support 80% of SAP’s most-used business tasks and embeds Joule more deeply within the company’s portfolio.

Collaborative multi-agent systems deploy specialized AI agents to tackle specific tasks and enable them to collaborate on intricate business workflows, adapting their strategies to meet shared objectives. SAP is infusing Joule with multiple collaborative AI agents that will combine their unique expertise across business functions to collaboratively accomplish complex workflows. These AI agents enhance productivity by breaking down silos and freeing workers to concentrate on areas where human ingenuity thrives. 

Two use cases debuted at TechEd showcase the agents’ transformative power:

• A dispute management use case employs autonomous AI agents to analyze and resolve dispute resolution scenarios including incorrect and missing invoices, unapplied credits and denied or duplicate payments.
• A financial accounting use case employs autonomous AI agents to streamline key financial processes by automating bill payments, invoice processing, and ledger updates while quickly addressing inconsistencies or errors.

Harnessing the Power of Data

SAP’s AI innovations also draw on the company’s unmatched business data expertise. The new SAP Knowledge Graph solution, accessible through SAP Datasphere and Joule in Q1 2025, will give users a deeper layer of business understanding by seamlessly mapping relationships and context across SAP’s vast data landscape, empowering organizations to make better decisions with their data. By offering ready-to-use relationships between business entities like purchase orders, invoices, and customers, the solution can significantly reduce the complexity of manual data modeling. SAP Knowledge Graph grounds AI in SAP-specific business semantics, which reduces the risk of inaccurate or irrelevant results and makes it easier for organizations to build intelligent applications and leverage generative AI more effectively.

Empowering Developers

SAP also launched a swathe of innovations for developers to continue driving Business AI innovation. New generative AI developer capabilities such as code explanation and documentation search in SAP Build, the company’s platform for extending its solutions, will reduce development time for Java and JavaScript developers. SAP Build is also adding an Extensibility Wizard feature that will let developers access SAP Build directly from SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, simplifying the extension process. Meanwhile, ABAP developers and fusion teams will get seamless access to ABAP Cloud development tools from SAP Build.

Finally, SAP announced that it has already fulfilled its pledge to upskill 2 million people worldwide by 2025. Through its learning opportunities, the company has lowered the world’s digital skills gap through role-based certifications, free training materials, hands-on opportunities for developers, and more. SAP continues to expand its growing portfolio of AI-related learning opportunities, including courses on generative AI, AI ethics and SAP’s advanced AI tools and platforms.

Visit the SAP News Center. Follow SAP at @SAPNews.

About SAP

As a global leader in enterprise applications and business AI, SAP (NYSE: SAP) stands at the nexus of business and technology. For over 50 years, organizations have trusted SAP to bring out their best by uniting business-critical operations spanning finance, procurement, HR, supply chain, and customer experience. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

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