The SAP Commerce Cloud solution has been a resounding commercial success since its launch in 2018. Today it enables thousands of global companies across over 25 industries and more than 65 countries to process hundreds of billions of euros of GMV securely and reliably. During the holiday season alone, we helped companies process up to US$110M in gross merchandising value per minute with 100% uptime.

While the solution’s functional breadth and depth is well documented, SAP’s primary focus leading up to 2022 was platform modernization. This focus was necessary to make sure that our customers, as well as SAP Commerce Cloud, were set up for long-term success. As a result of that focus, SAP ranked as a major player in the IDC B2C Digital Commerce Report back in 2020. While the modernization journey is truly never-ending, we have clearly turned a corner on that front.

During the last 24 months, this has allowed SAP to focus its investments on functional innovations that can drive measurable business results – including in generative AI – and in 2023 alone SAP delivered over 150 of them. As a result of both modernization and functional innovations, we are delighted to share that SAP has regained leadership in both the IDC B2B and B2C Digital Commerce Reports in 2024. IDC isn’t the only analyst that is paying attention, as Gartner has also improved SAP’s position in the Leader quadrant in 2023 relative to competitors, after a couple of years of a widening gap.

How did we do it? Knowing that if our customers win, we win, we listened and executed relentlessly. Our enterprise customers run some of the largest commerce deployments on the globe, and they told us in no uncertain terms that they needed a platform that solved their very complex commerce challenges with the utmost flexibility, but not at the cost of agility or TCO. As a consequence, we made a long-term commitment towards modernization by advocating for and adopting pragmatic composability to help our customers evolve on their digital transformation journey, no matter where they are from a digital maturity perspective. We accelerated innovation for SAP Commerce Cloud through an all-cloud deployment model with continuous innovation across all commerce areas including headless, API- and event-based architecture, composable storefronts, modern microservices-based implementation of core areas such as payments, promotions, order management, sourcing, and inventory availability, and more.

Here are some of the innovation highlights that we have communicated recently and that help our customers succeed at critical points in the customer experience they are trying to deliver.

Generative AI

For many years, AI in commerce has been about personalizing the customer experience to increase loyalty and profitability. While this remains true and important, generative AI is opening more ways to empower commerce teams to remove mundane tasks and work more efficiently, with the end results of connecting customers more quickly with the products they’re looking for. 

To leverage AI for better outcomes, SAP utilizes its wealth of operational and experiential data, along with third-party data, to help provide the holistic view our customers need. For SAP Commerce Cloud, a new set of AI tools has been made available to help supercharge catalog management and product discovery. Many commerce managers know the difficulty and mundaneness of keeping up with catalog hygiene. Although this task is arduous, it’s critical for product visibility and discoverability. Our set of AI capabilities within SAP Commerce Cloud can review product tags and catalogs, generate and customize product descriptions, embed supplemental technologies such as machine vision, and guide customers to the right choice for their needs. 

Order Management Systems

A connected enterprise is a prerequisite to delivering seamless and delightful customer experiences. Acting as the central nervous system and connective tissue of unified commerce, order management systems enable orchestration of orders from order placement to fulfillment and delivery.

At NRF, we announced new retail capabilities through SAP Order Management Services, including the SAP Order Management solution for sourcing and availability as well as SAP Order Management foundation. With these modular solutions, organizations can create frictionless omnichannel experiences that can respond to business events, such as fraud holds, delivery, or in-store pickup, and determine the optimal sourcing strategies to deliver customer satisfaction while protecting margins and optimizing organizational business outcomes.

Open Payment Framework

With our latest announcement at Shoptalk, we are working to help accelerate our customers’ time-to-market with the open payment framework for SAP Commerce Cloud. This packaged business framework can connect SAP Commerce Cloud via low-code or no-code with third-party payment service providers, including Stripe, Adyen, WorldPay, and Airwallex – with numerous more planned for the future. This modular, extensible, headless framework helps give power back to retailers to pick their own payment partners based on their needs, whether local or abroad. Organizations can be equipped to scale faster and avoid being confined to a single provider, making wrangling multiple connectors and manual flow mapping a thing of the past.

Front-End Framework Modernization

Digital experience composition, as Gartner puts it, is the new frontier in commerce composability that leverages agile API orchestration and front-end as a service to deliver personalized experiences in a unified way. Our vast ecosystem of best-in-breed partners helps us provide a strong digital experience composition, so that customers can deliver the experiences that their customers want. We continue to grow our partner ecosystem as the market evolves and new technologies emerge, striving to provide multi-business model, multi-market, and multi-industry coverage.

Commitment to Sustainability

Part of SAP’s mission is to provide the tools to empower our customers to attain their sustainability objectives. That commitment extends to SAP Commerce Cloud, as we offer a recommerce module to embrace new circular business models and help the world reduce retail waste. SAP Recommerce caters primarily to retailers to help digitally create processes to introduce consumer excess as well as restored, returned, and used products back into the market, creating a circular revenue stream to help drive additional growth.

As we continue our commerce journey, we are working with our customers to help ensure that they can innovate their businesses with speed and pivot when the market demands it. Customers like Roche are able to step into the future with software monetization platforms, powered by integrations with SAP Commerce Cloud.

Roche is a leading multinational Swiss healthcare company that provides cancer treatments around the world. To transform the patient journey, Roche adopted digital solutions that can empower people to manage their health better, allow healthcare providers to confidently diagnose and treat diseases, and help healthcare institutions unlock greater efficiency. With SAP Commerce Cloud, integrated with SAP Subscription Billing and SAP Entitlement Management, Roche was able to propel itself into the future by enabling the commercialization of its digital products, removing manual interventions, allowing customers to upgrade or downgrade subscriptions via a self-service portal, and providing product managers the ability to quickly develop, test, and deploy ideas among broad ranges of business models. All this only took Roche four and a half months to go live in three countries and 13 more within the year.

“If we want to be customer-oriented and efficient, a software monetization platform is a key enabler. It is indispensable for serving, fulfilling, and servicing digital products in a scalable way, laying the foundation for our future business.”

Moritz Hartmann, Global Head of Roche Information Solutions

We invite you to learn more and reach out to see how SAP Commerce Cloud helps deliver profitable digital commerce growth, from discovery to delivery and beyond. Check out our latest blog on our Q1 2024 release highlights.

Last week in Barcelona, during SAP Sapphire in 2024, I had the honor of inviting several SAP customers on stage to share their stories of business transformations. One of them was Rob Coombe, CIO of Royal Eswatini Sugar (RES). He spoke about his company’s journey in the public cloud and how it has enabled them to adopt a company-wide digital mindset, save 14% to 18% on their costs, and attract new graduates to work in their remote operations, among other benefits.  

But what struck me the most was his simple answer to my question about his advice for others in helping them make the case for change. He said, why change? This is the wrong question to ask. The better question is, why not change?  

RES’s story and the many others shared by SAP customers at SAP Sapphire Orlando and Barcelona reminded me of an essential truth about business transformations in the age of generative AI. While the solutions and technologies are impressive, the stories of business value and business results matter the most.  

During those two weeks, SAP showed over 25,000 customers, partners, analysts, and media members, both on-site and online, how we support businesses to bring out their best. We announced new AI-embedded solutions within our apps, including expanding our generative AI copilot Joule throughout our enterprise portfolio, and expanded collaborations and partnerships with AWS, Microsoft, Google Cloud, Meta, Mistral AI, and NVIDIA to deliver even more value for our customers. 

We also announced our intention to acquire WalkMe with its state-of-the-art digital adoption platform. Along with SAP Signavio to manage processes and SAP LeanIX to manage enterprise architecture, with WalkMe to guide user adoption we will soon have a best-in-class transformation portfolio and help our customers maximize the value of their cloud investments with SAP and continue driving tangible results for their business. 

When it comes to the value our customers are getting from our solutions, the stats don’t lie. For example, customers who chose RISE with SAP have outperformed the market in revenue growth by 7%. Solutions like Taulia are helping businesses unlock the power of their working capital to fuel growth and drive innovation, with customers seeing their free cash flows improve by more than US$1 billion. 

When we look across our total customer base and our entire portfolio of solutions, over the coming years we expect to see our customers experience approximately $2.4 trillion in economic savings, around $5.4 trillion in increased revenue, and a double-digit increase in their employee satisfaction, allowing them to retain talent and reduce churn. 

But my favorite part of SAP Sapphire every year is hearing customers tell their stories in their own words. To me, that’s the real magic of SAP Sapphire.  

In Orlando, we heard from Brian Hardee of PureTech Scientific about the impact the public cloud has had on helping them scale up quickly as a standalone business, especially in the life sciences industry where data is everything. Jeff Lischett of Tropicana Brands Group talked about how RISE with SAP gives them newfound speed and agility from a modern ERP to drive growth and set themselves up for success with business AI. Ingo Elfering of Fresenius spoke about the company’s technical implementation of RISE with SAP and how it’s given them simpler processes and a modern base for innovation and change. Takuya Sakai of Hitachi High Tech talked about the value that operating from a clean core has for their business by helping them simplify their processes and gain a competitive advantage.    

Then, in Barcelona, Elisabet Braza Valle of González Byass talked about how her nearly 200-year-old company, famous for producing sherry in Spain, is giving back to the land by putting sustainability front and center at every stage of its operations, thanks to SAP solutions. Özlem Altinişik of Martur Fompak talked about their RISE with SAP implementation, which they called Project Inspire because they saw the offering as a platform for growth and continuous improvement for the future. Ashish Agrawal of KONE spoke about how their embrace of a clean core has enabled them to adopt standardized processes as part of their transformation.   

These are just a small sample of the value stories shared during SAP Sapphire. Most importantly, they show that businesses bringing out their best isn’t hypothetical; it’s happening every day. And in the age of business AI, it is just the tip of the iceberg for what will soon be possible for every business. At SAP, we remain steadfast as we did 52 years ago, to do our best in enabling our customers, partners, and teams every day to bring out their best!  

Scott Russell is chief revenue officer and member of the Executive Board of SAP SE.
This blog also appeared on Forbes.

BARCELONA — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) announced that RHI Magnesita (LSE: RHIM), has chosen the RISE with SAP solution to rebuild and streamline its technology infrastructure for continued growth in the refractory industry.

A global leader in refractories, RHI Magnesita provides essential parts of the infrastructure that we use and need in our everyday lives. Supplying high-grade refractory products, systems and solutions, RHI Magnesita has 47 main production sites across the world, and ships its products to more than 100 countries.

With its vision to sustainably manage heat to build a better world, RHI Magnesita needed a technology foundation that would allow end-to-end interaction across its customers, suppliers and business partners across all geographies, end markets and product lines. Choosing to implement a multi-tier landscape consisting of both SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition and SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, RHI Magnesita is now equipped to redefine all its technology processes and landscape.

Ticiana Kobel, Executive VP Legal & Digital Transformation at RHI Magnesita, stated, “With the revamped digital landscape that we will shape together with SAP, RHI Magnesita will transform into a digitally fortified company, centered around our customers and driven by data. The transition to SAP S/4HANA Cloud marks a pivotal moment in RHI Magnesita’s journey toward unparalleled efficiency, agility, and innovation which will enable us to unlock real-time insights, streamline operations, and enhance decision-making across our global network.”

With SAP S/4HANA Cloud, RHI Magnesita will have one unified view of its operations and supply chain, reducing its infrastructure footprint, and poises itself for better integration of future acquisitions while delivering cost savings. 

“RHI Magnesita is embarking on a true digital transformation that will see the streamlining of several landscapes that will allow it to leverage the cost savings, scalability and flexibility that comes with moving to the cloud,” said Alexander Klaeger, President of SAP MEE. “Already a leader in the industry, I’m excited to see RHI Magnesita use SAP S/4HANA Cloud to sustainably provide infrastructure the world needs.”

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