Today, 53 years ago, SAP was founded by 5 former IBMers. We’ve come a long way since then, and some facts could surprise you!
Did you know SAP had an AI department in 1987, long before AI was a buzzword? *gasp*
https://sap.to/6058FpCmE
New research from IDC shows how SAP Business Network can speed up product and order delivery, accelerate go-to-market speed, and deliver significant ROI to drive procurement success.
In today’s interconnected business landscape, procurement and supply chain management have evolved from back-office functions to strategic drivers of success. As organizations seek to build resilient, efficient, customer-centric supply chains, the adoption of innovative technologies becomes crucial. Enter SAP Business Network—a game-changing platform that’s revolutionizing how companies procure products and services and manage their end-to-end supply chains.
A recent IDC white paper, sponsored by SAP, titled “The Business Value of SAP Business Network—for Buyer Organizations,” reveals the remarkable impact of SAP Business Network on buyer organizations. The findings, based on in-depth interviews with existing customers across various industries, showcase the impressive improvements in efficiency, cost savings, and revenue growth. Let’s delve into the transformative power of this technology and how it’s reshaping the procurement landscape.
When organizations can better monitor and share global trend data across teams, they can respond to market demands quicker and accelerate their go-to-market strategy. According to the research, SAP Business Network empowered these organizations to:
The result? An average annual revenue gain of $66 million, or $1.2 million per 100 trading partners. This impressive growth contributes to an average three-year ROI of 404% for organizations using SAP Business Network, with a payback period of just 14 months.
Global supply chain success relies on making repetitive, but essential, tasks as efficient as possible. The respondents indicated that SAP Business Network delivered substantial improvements in this area:
These efficiency gains were particularly significant given that procurement team sizes have remained steady despite increased focus on business strategy and execution. By automating repetitive tasks and providing real-time data for informed decision-making, SAP Business Network freed up team members to focus on strategic initiatives.
Similar effects were felt in procurement and supply chain planning, where respondents reported the number of FTEs necessary for these activities decreased by 19% and 47%, respectively.
SAP Business Network provides capabilities to help streamline operations, reduce manual interventions, and optimize resource allocation across various functions. The result, as found through the research, was significant cost savings across departments for interviewed companies.
In total, respondents experienced average annual cost savings of $13.58 million through reduced operational costs and improved efficiency.
The impact of SAP Business Network on operational efficiency was truly impressive:
The transformative power of SAP Business Network is best illustrated through the experiences of its users. One pharmaceutical company reduced its on-hand safety stock by half, while others reported significant improvements in transportation processes and demand forecasting.
These success stories underscore the network’s ability to deliver tangible benefits across various industries and business functions. Real-time data and analytics helped companies respond to shifting market demands and capitalize on new opportunities, allowing organizations to launch products and services and get to market on average 30% faster than they did previously.
The findings from the IDC white paper paint a compelling picture of the potential of SAP Business Network to revolutionize procurement and supply chain management. By enabling faster go-to-market strategies, improving operational efficiency, and delivering substantial cost savings, the network is helping organizations thrive in an increasingly complex business environment.
As we look to the future, it’s clear that platforms like SAP Business Network will play a crucial role in shaping the next generation of procurement and supply chain excellence. Organizations that embrace this technology stand to gain a significant competitive advantage, driving growth and innovation in ways previously unimaginable.
Ready to explore the potential impact of SAP Business Network on your organization? Here are some resources to help you get started:
Stay tuned for upcoming insights that will highlight the benefits of SAP Business Network specifically for suppliers, complementing the buyer-focused insights presented here. The future of procurement is bright, and SAP Business Network is leading the way in unlocking procurement and supply chain management potential and driving business success.
Tony Harris is SVP and head of Marketing & Solutions for SAP Business Network.
Nearly all midsize businesses want to grow and simplify. But to reach these goals, their strategies differ. New research from SAP Insights examines companies’ growth journeys in detail and offers benchmarks for your own business.
Read the full report: https://sap.to/6053F1cCP
Summary: The video discusses how midsize companies are planning to grow and simplify their operations. It highlights insights from a global survey of senior business leaders in companies with 250–1,500 employees. The video explores two main strategies: expansion-minded companies focus on growing their distribution channels and market presence, while improvement-minded companies aim to streamline processes through integration, automation, and new technologies like AI. The video also emphasizes the importance of data security and privacy as companies adopt these new technologies.
#MidsizeCompanies #BusinessGrowth #Integration #Automation #AI #DataSecurity #Privacy
Episodul 3 al seriei „Despre oameni și tehnologie”, ce îl are ca invitat pe Liviu Petre, Chief Financial Officer al Policolor-Orgachim Group, se concentrează asupra călătoriei de digitalizare a Policolor, brand care aniversează anul acesta 60 de ani în industria românească, producător de lacuri și vopsele, adresate către diferite piețe: pentru casă, pentru construcţii, pentru industria auto sau pentru uz industrial.
Înregistrarea episodului a avut loc în luna ianuarie, 2025.
URL: https://sap.to/60520Qyha
NHL front offices operate in a fast-paced, high-stakes environment where every decision—from roster moves to contract negotiations—can shape a team’s future. To support these critical decisions, SAP and the NHL are introducing the SAP-NHL Front Office App for iPad.
This powerful tool can streamline and centralize access to key data, helping general managers and hockey operations departments manage roster planning, salary cap considerations, and player contracts more efficiently.
For over a decade, SAP and the NHL have worked together to advance and enhance the game through cutting-edge technologies. From bringing real-time data and insights onto NHL benches with the SAP-NHL Coaching Insights App for iPad to supporting the League’s sustainability efforts with NHL Venue Metrics and reimagining the NHL EDGE advanced stats section on NHL.com, each innovation has put data at the center of decision-making for League stakeholders, players, coaches, and fans alike. Now, SAP and the NHL are extending this approach with the SAP-NHL Front Office App for iPad, bringing the same level of informed decision-making and operational efficiency to NHL Club front offices.
Powered by SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), the SAP-NHL Front Office App for iPad consolidates multiple NHL-owned data sources into a single, intuitive platform. By providing a centralized view of team, player, and League data insights, front offices can make more informed, real-time decisions with greater accuracy and efficiency.
The SAP-NHL Front Office App for iPad consists of three core sections:
Additionally, the app introduces enhanced data points such as Long-Term Injury designation, projected off-season cap room, projected free-agent status for all players, complete language related to No Move/No Trade clauses, retained salary transaction information, detailed waiver status, and performance bonus tracking. By integrating this information into a single platform, the SAP-NHL Front Office App for iPad can equip teams with the tools they need to navigate complex decisions more efficiently.
The SAP-NHL Front Office App for iPad is part of the NHL’s broader initiative to enhance the distribution of official Central Registry player and Club data, ensuring that all NHL teams have timely and consistent access to critical League information. Since 2017, iPads have been a core part of NHL game operations, delivering real-time insights and video to coaches and players on the bench. Developing the SAP-NHL Front Office App for iPad was a natural next step to bring the same level of efficiency and accessibility to front-office decision-makers.
To support this expansion, the NHL leveraged its existing SAP BTP infrastructure, which provides the League with a scalable, cloud-based platform for application development, automation, data management, analytics, and AI. By building the SAP-NHL Front Office App on SAP BTP, the League extended its technology ecosystem while seamlessly integrating new capabilities to support evolving business needs.
Beyond front-office operations, SAP and the NHL continue to collaborate on optimizing League-wide business processes. As part of its commitment to innovation, the NHL also recently selected SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition and SAP SuccessFactors solutions to help enhance workforce management and streamline financial operations.
As hockey continues to evolve, SAP remains dedicated to delivering technology-driven solutions that empower NHL Clubs, drive League-wide efficiency, and unlock new possibilities for the sport.
Danielle Venino is part of Integrated Storytelling for Global Sponsorships at SAP.
The global supply chain landscape remains under pressure, facing unprecedented challenges and poised to undergo seismic shifts based on geopolitical conflicts, climate events, and workforce shortages. Persistent disruptions are sending shockwaves through the global economy, forcing companies to reimagine their operations and seek innovative technologies to build resilience against an increasingly unpredictable future.
In this era of constant disruption, SAP stands at the forefront of supply chain transformation. Our vision is clear: to empower our customers with transparent, resilient, and sustainable supply chains. We’re committed to delivering innovative cloud solutions and collaborative business networks that enable autonomous supply chains seamlessly integrated with SAP Business Suite.
To spearhead this critical business, SAP recently appointed Dominik Metzger as the new president and chief product officer of Supply Chain Management at SAP. Metzger brings a wealth of experience and deep-rooted passion for tackling supply chain complexities. His years of hands-on work with customers navigating disruptions and driving transformation make him uniquely qualified to lead SAP’s new unit. This team combines SAP’s digital supply chain, business network, and field service management solutions, positioning the company to address the multifaceted challenges of modern supply chain management.
Nearly three months into this role, I caught up with Metzger to hear about how he’s adapting and his vision for the future of supply chain management at SAP.
Q: Having spent the last five years working in a variety of roles at SAP, what are your priorities for the new role?
A: During my time at SAP, I’ve seen how supply chain management has transitioned into a dynamic and connected ecosystem that demands constant collaboration, end-to-end data integration, and agile processes to keep pace with constant disruptions. My chief priority is to ensure that we help customers not only respond to disruptions but also proactively prepare and act. We can do so by leveraging AI, generative AI, real-time data, and predictive analytics with the power of SAP’s technology. Our vision is to build an autonomous supply chain, enabling customers to have highly efficient processes and personalized, context-rich insights that incorporate data from across the enterprise. This approach allows their teams to focus on truly complex decisions.
With SAP Business Suite, we offer our customers deeply connected, end-to-end supply chain processes—from product data management for discrete and formulated products to planning the demand, supply, production, and inventory levels to purchasing parts and materials to manufacturing execution, logistics, and finally asset and service operations. These processes are turbocharged with a wealth of AI capabilities to help truly bring the experience to a business user.
Yet, AI is only as good as the data it runs on, so we are committed to ensuring all processes are relevant and responsible. Our recent launch of SAP Business Data Cloud (SAP BDC) is a cornerstone of helping our customers fix their data at its very core, within the context of their business process. This makes any ontology or data semantic discussion obsolete: SAP can provide out-of-the-box, semantically aligned data products, spanning end-to-end supply chain functions, enriched with unstructured data through our partnership with Databricks.
Our AI-first strategy will help enable companies to leverage the wealth of structured and unstructured data to become highly adaptive and, ultimately, autonomously act on even the most complex disruptions. This holistic approach helps guarantee that customers will shape their supply chain strategies with real-time intelligence. By embedding this technology deep into SAP’s supply chain management applications, we can drive greater productivity, improve operational efficiency, and create more resilient, agile networks that can adapt to shifting market conditions. We are now conquering the next frontier of truly autonomous supply chain agents, contextually rich and deeply anchored in customers’ business processes.
Now, one of the most valuable sources of data we have not yet discussed: data out of your n-tier supply chain. In the highly interconnected environments companies are operating in, the supply chain business is a network business. My top priority is to enable our customers to benefit from the immense value of SAP Business Network. Our emphasis lies on increasing operational visibility and efficiency. Deep collaboration can enable buyers to identify new sources of supply, even during times of disruption. With market conditions constantly shifting, we are helping businesses to identify risks in the depth of their upstream supply chains to keep operations running and significantly reduce time to recovery.
How has your previous experience helped shape you for this position?
My career has taken me around the world—from Southeast Asia to Europe to the Northeast United States—and through various roles. In my early days, I served as a supply chain application consultant, learning the nuances of SAP technology, the intricacies of industry processes, and the challenges that go along with technology transformations for SAP customers. This helped shape my approach, as I aim to deliver real value by ensuring our solutions are adaptable and capable of driving meaningful business outcomes.
Additionally, while I’m now based in Munich, Germany, I spent years of my adult life in Singapore and New York City. I was exposed to different business cultures, market dynamics, regulatory environments, and languages. This reinforced the importance of flexibility, creativity, and inclusivity, as SAP supply chain management strives to build globally scalable solutions. In this new role, I’m combining those insights and experiences to guide supply chain management at SAP. I want our offerings to align with the real-world challenges our customers face daily, regardless of whether they’re a retailer in Asia or a manufacturer in North America. Ultimately, my experience has driven my commitment to ensuring our solutions are relevant, adaptable, and impactful.
Can you share some insight into what we can expect from SAP’s supply chain management team over the coming months?
We will focus on integrating SAP’s broader AI-first, suite-first strategy that enables customers to seamlessly implement advanced technologies into their daily operations. Our focus will be on expanding automation, improving supply chain orchestration, and bolstering business network collaboration—all critical steps to maintaining resilience in an ever-evolving market.
Another priority is reducing emissions and helping customers meet sustainability goals. Through SAP Green Ledger, customers can integrate carbon emissions data into existing digital supply chain technology, aligning sustainability with sourcing and supply chain management strategies.
My team is also working on several exciting product launches, including announcements at SAP Sapphire in May and SAP Connect in October. Be sure to tune into both events for more information.
A strong, diverse, and collaborative team is essential in addressing any client challenge. By uniting diverse perspectives and expertise under one vision, we can develop platforms that deliver meaningful, long-term business outcomes for SAP customers around the world.
To learn more about Metzger’s insights on supply chain management, listen to a recent episode of the Future of Supply Chain podcast: AI & Manufacturing: Smart Technologies for a New Era of Industry.
Cindy McKendry is director of Corporate Communications for Intelligent Spend and Supply Chain at SAP.
In today’s business landscape, enterprises need AI that reasons through challenges, anticipates outcomes, and takes action. That’s why SAP and NVIDIA are deepening our work together to deliver more advanced AI capabilities into the hands of businesses worldwide.
With NVIDIA’s latest announcement of Llama Nemotron reasoning models, SAP is strengthening its agentic AI strategy to help drive even greater business impact. These models allocate more compute time before responding to improve accuracy and enhance AI agents with advanced decision-making and execution capabilities. By integrating them, Joule agents will become more adept at tackling complex business challenges—leveraging deeper contextual reasoning, making more precise decisions, and seamlessly interacting with enterprise data and systems to deliver more intelligent and autonomous operations.
The long-standing partnership between SAP and NVIDIA has already delivered AI innovations that are transforming business operations. Across industries, these AI innovations are revolutionizing how enterprises implement SAP solutions and develop applications on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP).
For example, consultants working on digital transformation projects, such as those driven through RISE with SAP, are now leveraging SAP Joule for Consultants, enhanced with NVIDIA NeMo™ Retriever microservices, to quickly surface relevant insights from SAP-exclusive content. Consultants can ask questions in natural language to instantly retrieve precise guidance from past implementations and get assistance in interpreting ABAP code. This helps reduce the time spent navigating documentation and troubleshooting complex application logic, accelerating solution design, minimizing delays, and improving overall project efficiency.
For developers, AI-driven code generation has become a catalyst for innovation. Joule for developers, powered by NVIDIA NIM™ microservices, part of NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform, helps generate ABAP code faster and more efficiently by enabling faster AI inferences for code generation tasks. SAP and NVIDIA collaborated on end-to-end model development for Joule for developers, including data processing and training the models. LLMs trained on ABAP and SAP’s enterprise logic enable developers to write, explain, and optimize SAP-specific code efficiently. As a result, enterprises can reduce development time, improve code quality, and accelerate innovation, modernizing their SAP environments more effectively.
Beyond implementation and development, AI is reshaping how businesses visualize and interact with their products. Leveraging NVIDIA Omniverse technologies, SAP Intelligent Product Recommendation can bring real-time 3D visualizations to complex products, transforming how companies design, manufacture, and market their offerings. Businesses can now simulate entire supply chains before making capital investments, optimize factory layouts with physics-based modeling, and enhance customer engagement through realistic, interactive product experiences that improve decision-making.
These AI-driven advancements are already reshaping operations in manufacturing, retail, and asset-intensive industries, enabling users to make more informed decisions, unlocking greater efficiency, and enhancing customer satisfaction.
“SAP’s AI agents, orchestrated by Joule, reason through challenges, solve complex problems, and drive efficiency,” said Kari Briski, VP, Generative AI Software for Enterprise, NVIDIA. “SAP plans to integrate NVIDIA Llama Nemotron reasoning models to enhance AI-driven automation and enable businesses to optimize operations.”
With the integration of NVIDIA Llama Nemotron reasoning models, SAP will continue to advance the reasoning of Joule agents, redefining enterprise automation and allowing enterprises to scale automation with confidence and drive efficiency across end-to-end business processes.
Together, SAP and NVIDIA are redefining how enterprises use and benefit from AI—bringing automation, intelligence, and efficiency to every facet of business operations. From advanced AI agents that execute complex cross-functional workflows to AI-driven development and immersive digital experiences, the possibilities are expanding rapidly.
Learn more about the SAP and NVIDIA collaboration today. Explore what AI can do for your business.
Walter Sun is SVP and global head of AI at SAP.
Generative AI has revolutionized how developers work. Rather than spending countless hours on repetitive tasks like debugging errors and dealing with legacy codebases, developers can transform their ideas into code quickly. SAP is at the forefront of embedding AI capabilities across SAP Business Suite, including SAP Build, application development and automation solutions specifically designed for extending and creating business applications.
With more than 17,000 customers now leveraging SAP Build solutions globally, momentum continues to surge, enabling developers to build, automate, and innovate with greater speed and ease. Today, we’re taking a huge step forward to bolster developer productivity within SAP Build solutions!
We’re thrilled to announce new Joule-powered AI capabilities for SAP Build Process Automation and SAP Build Apps. These enhancements complement the previously announced AI capabilities in SAP Build Code and ABAP Cloud—empowering developers of all skill levels to build more efficiently by leveraging comprehensive, AI-infused developer tools to deliver precise, contextualized outcomes powered by purpose-built, SAP-centric AI models. This can free up time for developers to be more productive, creative, and proficient in accelerating ABAP, Java, JavaScript, and visual tool-based application development and automation of SAP processes.
Let’s look at how Joule can unlock new levels of productivity:
Find out how The Hershey Company is ensuring clean, accessible data for better
decision-making with SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP Datasphere, and SAP S/4HANA. https://sap.to/60560Exsm
Learn how Galicia is revolutionizing HR with SAP SuccessFactors and generative
AI, accelerating job description validation, enhancing employee experiences, and preparing to streamline workflows with the Joule copilot. https://sap.to/60550EaLf
