E-invoicing 2025: What you need to know
The post E-invoicing 2025: What you need to know appeared first on SAP Business One Cloud.
Customers Accelerate HR Journeys to Gain Edge on Efficiency and Skills
With 2025 just around the corner, HR leaders are looking for ways to drive results using powerful technologies like business AI to advance skills in the workforce, improve productivity, and deliver greater efficiency. Some organizations are accelerating outcomes from HR transformations by implementing AI-based capabilities in SAP SuccessFactors HCM to gain an edge over the competition.
“We are on the brink of a revolution in HR technology,” SuccessFactors Chief Revenue Officer Maryann Abbajay said, speaking to customers recently at SuccessConnect. “AI and other new intelligent technologies are transforming the way we work. Organizations are acutely aware that having the right skills today and cultivating these skills for the future is crucial to stay ahead. So, we must focus on our people – and the technologies that enable them to bring out the best in themselves.”
SAP research found that the top three reasons why HR leaders want to use skills data across their people practices are to match people to opportunities, develop members of their organizations, and have workforce planning that makes sense based on skills. Additionally, a sample of more than 4,000 employees revealed that time savings, quality, and efficiency are the top three most desired outcomes when it comes to AI at work.
Speaking at SuccessConnect, HR leaders from five forward-thinking organizations – L’Oréal, Eurobank, BT Group, American Honda, and SAP – shared insights from their HR journeys and how new advancements in HR tech are putting people at the center of business.
L’Oréal Creates a Future-Fit Organization with Skills and Learning
Global beauty brand L’Oréal keeps its people strategy as forward-thinking as its brand. “This People Vision is to be the most inclusive, innovative, and inspiring people company,” said L’Oréal Deputy Chief Human Relations Officer Isabelle Minneci. “To remain forward-thinking, we leverage this unique people culture, which cares for each individual, and we embed diversity, equity, and inclusion as part of our HR fundamentals.”
L’Oreal’s HR community drives three actions to advance a challenger mindset within the workforce. It builds a skills-driven organization to foster people and business growth. It invents new ways of working and harnesses the best of tech to deliver inspiring people experiences. And it leads transformation for HR and rest of the organization to remain agile.
L’Oréal uses cloud-based solutions from SAP SuccessFactors – including SAP SuccessFactors Learning – to inspire amazing people experiences. For a future-fit workforce, L’Oréal invests €120 million each year in learning as it continually reskills its employees to boost agility and innovation. “Thanks to SAP SuccessFactors,” Minneci said, “we have linked the skills with the jobs and with our learning program, which enables us to really offer personalized learning journeys for our employees and to make sure that we prepare the future.”
Eurobank Ensures Compliance and Empowers the Workforce
Eurobank is one of Greece’s largest employers, with about 6,500 employees and €81.5 billion in total assets under management. It uses cloud-based solutions from SAP SuccessFactors HCM to help ensure compliance with local labor legislation, support more strategic decision-making, and deliver on its promise of a great employee experience.
Eurobank began its journey with SAP SuccessFactors over six years ago, said Maria Tachataki, head of People Technology and Internal Communications, Eurobank SA. “We have increased efficiency and eliminated paper usage,” she said. “Most of all, we have enhanced our people empowerment by providing more accountability, responsibility, and work mobility. SAP SuccessFactors has been our ally and our companion in an ongoing journey of growth and transformation.”
In April 2022, a new Greek labor law required local banks to implement a digital work card that integrated with the Ministry of Labor’s platform for real-time monitoring of work schedules, shift planning, and overtime. Effectively, it meant Eurobank’s employees needed to clock in and out at their specific work times – or the bank would incur steep penalties. The company needed a digital solution that was accurate, reliable, efficient, and scalable. It had to have seamless integration with the SAP SuccessFactors platform, payroll, and the Ministry of Labor’s platform. And it needed to have very detailed monitoring and audit trails. Eurobank chose SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking and leveraged SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) for flexibility and connectivity. As a result, it now reports 99% performance (an improvement of 75%) and 45% reduction in instances when employees forget to clock out. Read more here.
“For us the next move is AI and skills, in terms of more strategic workforce planning,” Tachataki said. “We aim to transition from merely filling positions with people to focusing on talent and strategic workforce planning based on upskilling, and skills taxonomy. This is our next big challenge.”
BT Group Builds the Digital Colleague Experience
Global telecommunications company BT Group is accelerating its HR transformation with the infusion of AI to build its Digital Colleague Experience. Recently, the organization unified core HR by moving its UK payroll of 80,000 colleagues to SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll, using SAP BTP for extensibility and innovation. The launch of the AI copilot Joule and generative AI early adopt program is another highlight in what the company’s HR Technology Director Nick Hawkes described as an “incredibly busy 12 months.” As he noted, “This is an exciting phase for us. Those digital foundations within HR were really important. We’ve gone from four HR systems, three payroll systems, down to one, which was an important milestone.”
“We’ve been on the AI journey a little while now,” he continued, underscoring BT’s commitment to security through the establishment of a responsible AI team and guardrails to evaluate and implement acceptable AI use cases. Working collaboratively with BT’s legal teams, data governance, and SAP has given the company’s HR team an edge for advancing AI use cases that elevate the employee experience. “Having those levers to pull really allowed us to achieve a quick rollout,” he said, referencing SAP Business AI.
In the shift to becoming a skills-based organization, BT aims to implement the talent intelligence hub, which can provide organizations a centralized system for skills for SAP SuccessFactors solutions, to help drive better planning and strategic workforce planning across the organization. Hawkes is optimistic about how AI will enhance the BT’s Digital Colleague Experience: “We can see in the data a 40% increase in efficiency in terms of what Joule brings to the organization, so we’ll double down on that.”
American Honda Charts Digital Journey with People-Centric Focus
American Honda is on a journey to become a carbon-zero company by 2050 – in effect, evolving from a hardware-defined company to a software-defined company. “It’s a transformation we view internally as the second founding of Honda. That means digital experience is very important,” said Rich Richardson, senior vice president, Human Resources, American Honda, describing how the new strategic direction is leading to increased focus on the employee experience. “We have developed a plan to engage our associates on a digital journey that has a number of tenets critical to making sure our associates are at the center.”
In January 2023, American Honda went live with SAP SuccessFactors HCM to provide seamless access to HR information and opportunities for upskilling. To ensure the best outcomes for its AI journey, American Honda established a Responsible AI Council to govern AI usage, evaluate use cases, maintain standards, and foster communication and transparency across the organization.
This year, the company joined an SAP early adopter program to learn how AI can accelerate its vision for a future-ready workforce. “We have four use cases that we’re piloting right now with 850 associates. They’re around Joule, compensation insights, enhanced writing, and goal creation. We’ve been getting feedback along the way with those pilots, and we’ve seen some really good results,” Richardson said.
Employees in the pilot share overwhelming positive feedback on the AI-based innovations, reporting 80% favorable feedback overall. To ensure a great employee experience that benefits all employees, Richardson wants to further understand why employees might be hesitant to fully embrace the new AI-led tools: “When we can uncover that – whether its communication, change management, or on the technical side – we think we can have a really positive rollout of these use cases to our associate population and, ultimately, save time and energy and effort.”
SAP Accelerates a Skills-First Workforce with AI
For SAP, a global leader in enterprise applications and business AI, a strong people culture is integral to its mission to help the world run better and improve people’s lives. “At SAP, people are very close to our heart. And that goes back to our founder, Hasso Plattner,” said SAP Chief People Officer Gina Vargiu-Breuer, recalling Plattner’s observation that “we can be proud of our culture because our culture is very much one of customer-centricity, innovation, and people.”
SAP’s People Agenda, essential to its transformation to a cloud-first company, comprises three pillars: SAP’s growth culture, a skills-led people ecosystem, and game-changing people technology. The People Agenda is underpinned by a strong foundation: a people-centric work environment that is nurtured by employee well-being, safety, and health as well as diversity and inclusion to create a feeling of belonging at SAP.
To build a skills-led people ecosystem, SAP is using the AI capabilities of the SAP SuccessFactors HCM suite to gain visibility into the skills of the workforce and improve the employee experience. With the AI-powered growth portfolio in SAP SuccessFactors talent and learning solutions, SAP is currently focused on increasing skills transparency to help employees focus on growth and career opportunities.
“In the growth portfolio, we are relying on AI,” Vargiu-Breuer said. “Without having a market-centric skills taxonomy and without having skills transparency across the entire workforce, it’s very difficult to have, for example, personalized learning and career development opportunities. So, AI is absolutely essential.”
Making Every Employee a Success Story
As these inspiring stories show, SAP customers are using HR technology to support their people agendas and drive HR transformation in their organizations. By advancing productivity and the employee experience, customers are harnessing the power of SAP SuccessFactors solutions to make every employee a success story.
Watch SuccessConnect Virtual on demand.
How Kaeser Uses AI to Add Customer Value
When Kaeser Kompressoren started on a journey to improve its data quality, little did it know that artificial intelligence (AI) would become a major game-changer for its business.
With a workforce of around 8,000 and a global sales and services organization operating in more than 140 countries, Kaeser is one of the world’s leading manufacturers and providers of compressed air solutions and services.
Based in Coburg, Germany, Kaeser considers itself both a pioneer in its industry and an innovator: the family-owned firm was one of the first to purchase SAP R/3 when it went to market over 30 years ago and currently has several SAP software projects running simultaneously. It recently reached another major transformation milestone when it migrated to RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
But the company’s digitization efforts were hampered by growing system complexity and a data volume that it was struggling to manage. “Poor data quality almost always held our projects back,” Kaeser CIO Falko Lameter says.
That’s why the company kicked off a three-year project in 2020 aimed at designing and implementing a new data strategy. Together with SAP, Kaeser wanted to improve data quality and optimize its core business processes.
“AI was on our radar screen back then, but it wasn’t our starting point,” recalls Dr. Norbert Enge, chief business consultant, SAP Business Transformation Services. “Our initial aim was to develop a data strategy road map.”
AI Comes into Play
To start, the project team looked at Kaeser’s master data. “Just to give you one example: our system contains a six-digit number of suppliers, at least two-thirds of whom were inactive,” Lameter says. Maintaining that data manually would have involved a disproportionate amount of effort, which is why many companies hesitate to tackle data projects of this size.
Around the same time, business AI was rapidly gaining traction, so the team began to integrate AI into Kaeser’s data strategy.
The result was Predicting Inactive Suppliers, a custom AI use case based on one of the SAP AI Services – the Data Attribute Recommendation service – and SAP Analytics Cloud. This solution has enabled Kaeser to automate more than 80% of its data maintenance tasks, improve data accuracy, and achieve significant productivity gains.
“Given what I know now, I would say that you can’t maintain that amount of data manually – you can only do it with AI,” says Lameter. “The time for AI has come, and I’m convinced that the future will be data driven.”
Visual Spare Parts Search
The team’s main objective was to find AI use cases that would benefit the end customer. One of these scenarios concerns the search for spare parts. Due to the large number of variants of similar items, this was often a difficult and time-consuming task that created significant extra work for service personnel.
But now, Visual Spare Parts Search, a custom AI use case developed in cooperation with nyris, allows Kaeser service technicians to simply take a photo of the needed spare part. The embedded nyris Visual Search AI service uses image recognition to compare uploaded images against the spare parts database and identify the correct asset ID number.
This helps service technicians pinpoint spare parts much more quickly and enables customers to identify spare parts themselves.
Intelligent Product Recommendations
The most promising AI use case is the SAP Intelligent Product Recommendation application, which helps sales employees analyze customer requirements and processes and translate them into accurate product recommendations. Based on natural language prompts, the solution can analyze a customer’s requirements using machine learning and generative AI and recommend the most suitable compressors.
“Making product recommendations is an art,” Enge says. “If you have the technology to make better recommendations, that’s a real lever.”
There’s More to a Successful AI Project Than Tech
Implementing AI technologies is one thing. However, the team found that it’s just as important to get everyone on board and create the right environment. This includes providing employees with the software they need, training them, and discussing the ethical implications of AI.
Having management buy-in and alignment with other teams, such as research and development, marketing, sales, and service, also proved to be key to success. “Ultimately, it’s also about the impact on the people and the community in which you live and work, and I think it’s very important to take this into account,” Lameter says.
It’s at least a pentathlon, Enge says: “Some would say that it’s only a matter of having a good data scientist. That’s certainly a very important point, but you also need to understand business processes and data and, last but not least, you need to address people’s concerns and explain how you arrive at the results.”
Boundless Opportunities
As an IT pioneer, Kaeser was very open to the topic of using AI. “This is part of the company’s DNA,” Enge says. “Right at the very start of the project, we discussed which league we wanted to play in, and it was clear that AI should be part of the toolbox if we wanted to play in the premier league.”
The proportion of SAP Business AI in Kaeser’s data project rose from less than 10% in the first year to over 30% in the third. Today, the team is now 100% focused on SAP Business AI and has developed 12 specific use cases targeted at adding value for customers.
And there is more to come. Kaeser has developed a prototype application with the NVIDIA Omniverse platform for visualizing the intelligent product recommendation process, as SAP CEO Christian Klein demonstrated in his keynote at SAP Sapphire in 2024.
“Get your journey started and you will discover fascinating things,” Enge says. “The progress is huge, and everyone can share in it.”
Photos courtesy of Kaeser
Introducing Joule – The AI Copilot that Truly Understands Your Business
Learn how Joule is revolutionizing the way every employee interacts with SAP business systems. From finance, procurement, supply chain, human resources, customer experience, and more, Joule is ready to assist in helping your employees get work done faster, smarter, and better while maintaining control over decisions and data.
https://sap.to/60545UweY
00:00 Introduction to Joule’s Impact on SAP Systems
Joule revolutionizes interaction with SAP business systems, simplifying every task and touchpoint.
00:10 Joule Enhancing Sales Management
See how Joule assists a busy sales manager in SAP Sales Cloud, from preparing account summaries to product recommendations.
00:36 Preparing for a Sales Meeting
Joule extracts customer requirements and integrates with SAP Intelligent Product Recommendation, streamlining the preparation process.
01:00 Managing To-Dos and Approvals
Joule helps the sales manager handle tasks like expense approvals by reviewing company policies and providing confident decisions.
01:30 Joule’s Versatility Across Roles
Joule supports various business roles, including finance, procurement, supply chain, and HR, improving efficiency and decision-making.
#AICopilot #Joule #AIAssistant” #sap
SAP SuccessFactors HCM Earns 2025 Buyer’s Choice Award From TrustRadius
We are thrilled that SAP SuccessFactors HCM has received the TrustRadius 2025 Buyer’s Choice Award. TrustRadius is a peer research and review platform designed to help business leaders find and select the right software to meet their needs.
“This recognition is driven by the voices of customers who rely on SAP SuccessFactors HCM to elevate their workforce management strategies. It’s a testament to SAP’s ability to meet the evolving needs of HR teams and empower organizations to succeed,” said Allyson Havener, senior vice president of Marketing and Community at TrustRadius.
The Buyer’s Choice Awards are determined by verified, unbiased customer reviews. These awards recognize products that excel in capabilities, performance, value for money, and customer relationships.
Here’s what some of our customers are saying about SAP SuccessFactors HCM:
- “With SAP SuccessFactors solutions, the ease with which our people data flows throughout our organization is superb. This is key to helping us ensure compliance and high data integrity throughout the employee lifecycle, such as recording attendance at a talent review.”
– Assistant Manager, Sun Pharma - “We use SAP SuccessFactors as our core HR system and have many of the modules, including Performance Management, Succession and Development, Compensation, Learning and Recruiting and we utilize it globally. SAP SuccessFactors enables us to have all of our team members in one system and manage their ongoing career development as well as the day-to-day transactions.”
– Director, HRMS, Wyndham Hotels & Resorts - “SAP SuccessFactors is helping us integrate all employee management tools in one. It helps us integrate learning for the employees, tracking and approving leave application and also track employee development discussions in one place. As a manager it helps me track data for all the employees in just one place and further helps me in planning.”
– Store Manager, Tata Starbucks Pvt ltd. - “SAP SuccessFactors has a robust framework which makes it an absolute platform for scaling and scaled companies, including the ones of larger sizes. [SAP] SuccessFactors is contributing to maintain the data quality and automated workflows. [SAP SuccessFactors] had almost automated every single HR process which has removed the manual intervention altogether.”
– Manager, IBM
The SAP SuccessFactors HCM suite provides global HR cloud software with powerful artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to help organizations meet the business demands of today and innovate for tomorrow. More than 10,000 customers worldwide — from startups and midmarket companies to large enterprises — use SAP SuccessFactors solutions to elevate every experience, guide every people decision, and connect HR across every aspect of the business.
Innovating to help our customers solve their biggest business and people-focused challenges is at the heart of everything we do.
Last week at SuccessConnect, we announced several exciting new updates to the SAP SuccessFactors HCM suite, including SAP SuccessFactors Career and Talent Development, new enhancements to SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll, and several new AI capabilities, including AI-recommended jobs for candidates, AI-assisted 360-degree reviews, and, with Joule, a conversational way to complete onboarding tasks.
Learn more about SAP SuccessFactors HCM and read our customer reviews on TrustRadius. For more information about these recognitions, visit the TrustRadius scoring FAQ page.
Looking to share your own feedback? Leave us a review here.
Lara Albert is global vice president of Product Marketing for SAP SuccessFactors at SAP.
SAP S/4HANA Migration: What IT Executives Need to Know
Migrating to a cloud ERP system is a critical step in digital transformation.
IT executives should focus on three strategic considerations: choosing between the GROW with SAP and RISE with SAP offerings, exploring possible migration paths, and making necessary IT infrastructure adjustments.
Implementation Approach
RISE with SAP and GROW with SAP differ significantly in terms of methodology, target audience, and objectives.
GROW with SAP is ideal for small and midsize businesses (SMBs) that want to move to a modern cloud ERP system quickly and cost-effectively. With preconfigured solutions and standardized processes, companies can easily take advantage of the benefits of the cloud with minimal effort and in a short timeframe. They can choose from several scenarios based on industry best practices.
RISE with SAP, on the other hand, is designed for large enterprises and corporations seeking a comprehensive transformation. The offering goes well beyond ERP functionality to help provide comprehensive management and optimization services as well as migration support. This robust support can enable companies to migrate their entire IT landscape to the cloud while developing new digital business models.
Transformation Paths
A key aspect of migrating to SAP S/4HANA is the variety of transformation paths available to companies. These paths can offer the flexibility needed to tailor the migration to specific requirements and the existing system landscape.
- System conversion (brownfield approach): This approach enables the migration of an existing SAP ERP system to SAP S/4HANA. It is particularly suitable for companies that want to retain their existing business processes. A key advantage is that the existing database and configuration are retained, which significantly reduces the transition time.
- New implementation (greenfield approach): This method involves starting from scratch and allows organizations to redefine their business processes without being constrained by existing limitations. It provides the opportunity to implement the latest best practices. However, the planning and preparation phases typically take a relatively long time.
- Selective data transition (hybrid approach): This approach combines elements of the two methods described above. It is best suited for organizations that want to preserve certain historical data and processes while phasing in new functionality.
Infrastructure: Adapt or Transform?
Migrating to SAP S/4HANA requires adapting the IT infrastructure to take full advantage of the platform’s capabilities.
- Cloud migration: Many companies choose to migrate to the cloud to improve scalability and flexibility. The choice of public or private cloud depends on an organization’s specific requirements and security strategy.
- Integration and data management: Migrating to SAP S/4HANA requires a thorough review and optimization of integration scenarios and data management strategies. SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) can provide many tools to help support and enhance these processes.
- Security and compliance needs: Moving to the cloud brings new security and compliance challenges. Careful planning and implementation are essential to protect sensitive data and meet regulatory requirements.
By aligning these three key components – implementation approach, migration path, and infrastructure – organizations can achieve a successful SAP S/4HANA migration.
Guide to a Successful Transformation
The points above provide an initial overview of the challenges and decisions involved in migrating to SAP S/4HANA. However, this only scratches the surface. For IT executives who want to go deeper, the new “Mapping Your Journey to SAP S/4HANA” guide is a comprehensive resource. It provides detailed background information, real-world examples, and additional links that can be valuable to organizations planning to migrate to cloud ERP and those amid the process.
Thomas Bamberger is president of SAP Customer Evolution.
SAP BTP Innobytes – New AI Features – October 2024
SAP BTP Innobytes – fresh, snackable SAP BTP insights that you can quickly consume and easily share. A monthly video series, sharing the latest hits and top SAP BTP innovations.
October’s Innovation Highlights:
0:13 SAP Business AI Feature Catalog and Estimator
Learn more: https://sap.to/6051qCSZl
1:21 Generative AI Feature in SAP Automation Pilot
Learn more: https://sap.to/6052qCSZm
2:12 Quick Account Setup with Terraform
Learn more: https://sap.to/6053qCSZW
You might also be interested in:
SAP BTP Garage – monthly LIVE webinar with hands-on use case walkthroughs and demos: https://sap.to/6055obEjb
SAP BTP Talk Podcast – monthly podcast covering all things SAP BTP: https://sap.to/6056obEjj
Future-Proof Innovation: Industrial Data Sharing with Manufacturing-X
A big obstacle to digitalizing industry could soon be a thing of the past. The Manufacturing-X initiative makes a new type of data exchange possible between industrial partners – innovative, self-determined, and trust-based.
Manufacturing-X was launched as part of the Industry 4.0 platform, with the aim of promoting digital ecosystems and establishing an international standard for data exchange. It is an industry-wide initiative of the German government with various projects for different industrial sectors.
“The realization that the digitalization of industry is inevitable has become the norm over the past few years,” says Georg Kube, head of Industry Data Ecosystems at SAP SE. “A variety of use cases for different industries and new business models have been developed. They are successful – but only as long as companies work with other companies with which they already have a close partnership.”
“The most well-known of the [Manufacturing-X] projects is certainly Catena-X for the automotive sector,” Kube says. “The common aim of all these projects is to establish a new form of data exchange.”
For example, an automaker that wants to digitally integrate its direct suppliers typically requests all the data about the supplied parts from its partners, and the suppliers usually feel comfortable providing this data because of the trust that has grown over the years between the partners.
But it’s different when data is needed from companies without a direct business relationship. “A typical example is the determination of a vehicle’s CO2 footprint,” Kube says. “Suddenly, information about the CO2 footprint of the smallest plastic parts is needed, which may come from companies in the supply chain with which a company has never had direct contact. It’s not easy to access that data.”
Ein episches SAP S/4HANA-Transformationsprojekt mit dem Schweizer Energieversorger ewz (German)
Werfen Sie einen Blick hinter die Kulissen des vierjährigen S/4ewz-Transformationsprojekts und erfahren Sie etwas über ewz und den Einsatz von SAP-Systemen. Wir haben Dominik Götz und Volker Merz am ewz-Hauptsitz in Zürich, Schweiz, über den Weg von SAP ERP zu SAP S/4HANA befragt.
➡️ Hier finden Sie mehr Informationen: https://sap.to/6051qlwXD
Revolutionizing Car UX Design: Polestar’s Software-Driven Innovations | SAP Design Talks
Discover the future of UX design, electric cars, and technology innovations with Ruben Rodriguez, Head of UX Design at Polestar.
Learn about creating positive user experiences and the game-changing speed of charging for EV cars.
Can’t get enough of design insights? Visit us on: https://sap.to/6054kROUG
#sap #design #ux #cars