SAP recently released SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition 2023 FPS03, packed with new AI, automation capabilities, and usability improvements to transform business operations.

These powerful capabilities help reduce manual effort and empower smarter decision-making while helping businesses stay ahead of the competition. 

Exploring AI-assisted capabilities 

In the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition 2023 FPS03 release, innovative AI capabilities continue to be shipped at a fast pace. They help businesses improve employee productivity, assist in decision-making, and provide predictive insights, in order to better adapt to changing demands and better compete in an unpredictable environment. 

New AI capabilities include: 

• AI-assisted journal upload: This capability simplifies the process of creating journal entries by using generative AI technologies. It is designed to assist accountants in managing large backlogs of period-end journal entries, which are often required for transactions executed outside the accounting system, temporary postings, settlements, accruals, and provisions. By leveraging AI technologies, this feature enhances efficiency and accuracy in managing journal entries, ultimately benefiting accountants and financial departments. 
• Predictive labor demand planning: Labor demand planning now enables the prediction of planned durations for picking and packing processes, enhancing the efficiency of resource and workload planning. By utilizing historical workload data, the capability provides accurate predictions for task durations, eliminating the need for extensive preprocessing or reliance on engineered labor standards. This feature allows warehouses to optimize labour allocation and reduce inefficiencies by predicting the time required for tasks such as picking, packing, and outbound deliveries. 
• AI-based explanation of detailed scheduling optimizer results: Production planners often struggle to quickly understand the detailed scheduling optimizer results, as they are intricate and can lack clear explanations. This complexity can leave planners uncertain about the decisions made by the optimizer, making it challenging to address exceptions efficiently. SAP’s AI assistant now includes a capability that offers explanations for detailed scheduling optimizer planning results. Production planners can ask questions in natural language through a chat interface, allowing them to intuitively grasp what occurred during the scheduling process. This helps them to focus on any exceptions. 
• AI assisted in-house service initiation: Repair shops receive a significant amount of paperwork. Manually converting this paper-based information into the SAP system is labor-intensive and prone to errors, which can lead to data loss, especially under tight deadlines. The AI assisted in-house service initiation leverages the Document Information Extraction service to capture incoming paper documents. The SAP system automatically extracts the necessary data and creates a list of repair objects for the corresponding in-house service. Repair staff then reviews the generated order and continues processing it to completion.

Additions to SAP’s unified copilot Joule

After having released many transactional and navigational use cases with S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition FPS02, we continue our journey with releasing Joule support in these areas: 

• Dispute management for contract accounting: Transactional capabilities for dispute resolution and payment resolution
• Revenue accounting and reporting: Transactional capabilities to manage revenue accounting items, manage revenue contracts, revenue contract schedule, combine revenue contracts, and reconcile revenue contracts 
• Sales: Transactional capabilities to perform single or mass changes to sales order fields, provide issue resolution for sales order fulfilment issues, create sales documents with reference, and fetch billing document information 
• Service: Transactional capabilities to fetch service confirmation details, reference objects, release service orders and service order items, cancel service confirmations, and complete service confirmations 
• Asset management: Transactional capabilities to display maintenance orders, maintenance notifications, and maintenance jobs, and perform activities on jobs 
• Enterprise portfolio and project management: Transactional capabilities to display or change a project work breakdown structure (WBS) element, or network in project builder 
• Procurement: Transactional capabilities to create purchase requisitions with or without material or service items, show a list of materials or suppliers, update the delivery date for all schedule line items in one or more purchase orders, show the details of purchase order items and workflow approver emails, process invoice reminders
• Product lifecycle management: Transactional capabilities to fetch details of bills of material and navigate to the Maintain Bill of Material app, and fetch details of change records
• Convergent invoicing: Transactional capabilities to display clarification cases, billing plans, invoicing documents, and billing requests 

Additional innovations across functional areas

The latest release features a wealth of new enhancements to improve business processes across procurement, finance, manufacturing, R&D, and service and asset management. The enhancements include:

Procurement

Mass change of price scales in central purchase contracts enables procurement professionals to efficiently perform mass changes on central purchase contracts by uploading or downloading scale values for item condition types using Microsoft Excel. 

Finance

• Improved data integration and flexibility for planning in manage financial plan data app: To continuously optimize the integration between SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, a new framework in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition enables users to efficiently configure and schedule jobs for financial plan data to be integrated from SAP Analytics Cloud into SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition.
• Hedging of subsidiary exposures by treasury center (balance sheet FX risk) aggregates the balance sheet exposures of subsidiaries on treasury center level and performs hedging of the net exposure centrally without any additional internal transactions. 

Manufacturing

• Manage production models materials app: The production model provides a joint view of the manufacturing bill of material (MBOM) and the shop floor routing to facilitate hand-in-hand definition of the MBOM components and shop floor production steps, supported by a 3D visual of the header material of the MBOM. 
• Check optimization log app: Increased transparency for production planners is available through insights into status indicators, runtime metric, cost, and solution quality metrics. 

R&D

• Project cost overview and project cost line items apps to include service transactions: Project cost and revenue transparency for the service business managed projects is possible by analyzing service contract items and service order items assigned to WBS elements.
• Standard contents for dangerous goods regulations allow users to continuously consume up-to-date compliance requirements for dangerous goods management by benefiting from a simplified process to receive fast and frequent updates of dangerous goods regulations. 

Service Management

Service hierarchy with collective accounting: Enhance commercial flexibility in creating bundled service offerings by grouping of service order items into service hierarchy and by consolidating financial reporting and revenue recognition. 

Asset Management

• Manage maintenance orders simplifies the management of maintenance orders. With this new SAP Fiori app, the planner can display a comprehensive list view of maintenance orders, create maintenance orders, and process individual orders. 
• “As-found” data recording in performance maintenance job: Improve recording of asset reliability data by recording the as-found condition of the maintained asset in a proactive maintenance job without an assigned maintenance notification.

SAP is resolutely at the forefront of the AI revolution, embedding ever more capabilities in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition. We redefine how businesses run and how people work, and this is only the beginning. We are working on new agentic capabilities soon available via Joule, underpinned by our recent launch of SAP Business Data Cloud. 

With the FPS03 release, our aim is to equip businesses with new capabilities to increase their level of automation, improve their users’ experience, boost their efficiency, and uncover new business opportunities.  

To see these innovations in action, make sure to join our upcoming webinar, which will deep dive into the new AI functionalities and other innovations introduced here. You can also learn more about our recent innovations by reading: What’s New in SAP S/4HANA and SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition 2023 FPS03.

Maura Hameroff is senior vice president of Cloud ERP Product Marketing at SAP.

Enterprises lost $104 million to underused tech in 2024

WalkMe has just released our 2025 State of Digital Adoption Report: Special AI Edition. As the pioneers and leaders of the digital adoption platform (DAP) category, WalkMe has consistently tracked digital adoption’s evolution.

Aptly for our time, this year’s report focuses on the state of AI adoption in organizations across the globe. There is no doubt that AI is transforming enterprise ambitions, but its success depends on people. The human part of the equation seems to be what is standing in the way of realizing the great promises of AI.

The findings must be considered in context of the consistently missed opportunity that has characterized many digital transformation efforts. BCG research shows that while digital transformation leaders generated $9 trillion in shareholder value from 2018 to 2023, others missed $5 trillion in potential gains. Enterprises now face a choice: continue accumulating transformation debt and lag behind the competition, or embrace digital adoption as the bridge to AI-powered success.

The report outlines seven digital adoption best practices and their business impact. Implementing even a single digital adoption best practice can nearly triple digital transformation ROI from 22 to 64 percent. Success in the AI era will not be won with technology alone, but with holistic adoption excellence.

For our fourth annual State of Digital Adoption Report, we surveyed nearly 4,000 enterprise leaders and employees globally and dove deep into AI adoption trends. Likely the most comprehensive research into today’s digital adoption efforts, it provides a blueprint for harnessing AI to achieve HyperProductivity. At WalkMe, we’re committed to helping you turn the promise of digital transformation into measurable business impact.

Here’s a peak into some of the findings:

Despite AI spending projected to grow 64 percent in 2025 — from $14 million to $23 million at large enterprises — many organizations struggle to translate investment into impact. Our research highlights that while 79 percent of executives express confidence in achieving AI transformation goals, only 28 percent of employees feel adequately trained, and just 25 percent can use AI to work more efficiently. This readiness gap proves that without strategic adoption, AI investments often fail to deliver meaningful business value. The cost of the resulting digital inefficiencies at large enterprises was found to be over $104 million in 2024 alone due to underutilized technology and poor productivity practices.

While executives estimate an average of 37 applications are in use at their organizations, WalkMe data shows the average large enterprise actually has on average 625 applications in use — a 17x discrepancy or visibility gap of 1,600 percent. How can organizations effectively optimize their technology investments if they lack the visibility into what applications are actually being used and how? The answer is, of course, they can’t. Enterprises must first discover precisely which applications are in use across their organizations before meaningful productivity gains can be realized. It’s the most basic first step in setting up each individual employee, team, and business unit for success using the technology tools that are already being paid for.

Ninety-three percent of enterprises surveyed are reevaluating their IT infrastructure, software applications, and talent strategies to ensure AI success. With so much in flux at even the world’s most innovative companies, one thing is clear: AI’s promise can only be realized if people are using it. Enterprises that invest in human-centric workforce AI adoption will not only maximize their AI investments, but will also lead the charge in shaping the future of work.

The digital adoption imperative is not only motivated by ROI, employees are all but crying out for help using these increasingly complex and numerous technologies at work. The report found that employees are still struggling with the technology tools available to them, so much so they waste an average of 36 working days a year dealing with technology frustrations. That’s akin to having every single employee take almost two full months off purely to deal with digital friction.

We can do better.

I invite you to explore more of this year’s findings and talk to WalkMe about how your workforce can thrive with AI and achieve HyperProductivity. Download the full 2025 State of Digital Adoption Report: Special AI Edition here and join our webinar, “Bridging the AI Divide,” on February 25, 2025, at 11:00 a.m. ET, featuring experts from WalkMe, Accenture, State Farm, and EDF Renewables (register here).

Dan Adika is CEO and co-founder of WalkMe.

AI agents mark the next era of AI and a quantum leap in business productivity. They stand ready to address one of the biggest roadblocks to your business growth and competitive agility — friction in true collaboration across end-to-end processes.

Every day, your people spend too much time aligning data, decisions, and actions across functional silos. AI agents can help bridge these silos, so that core processes run flawlessly and the entire organization operates more efficiently.

However, capturing this opportunity is not about creating lots and lots of siloed agents across the enterprise that help reinforce more functional independent tasks. Instead, it’s about having the right agents, grounded in the correct business context and data, that can work together, supporting human collaboration and improving end-to-end processes.

At SAP, we have been investing heavily to deliver the full promise of AI agents. From the start, we’ve architected SAP Business AI with a Suite-first principle that ensures an integrated AI strategy that brings exceptionally more value with every skill, feature, or scenario added to our portfolio of applications and platform.

Joule, our generative AI copilot, provides one seamless integrated experience across the suite, providing a unified user interface across all business functions and more than 1,300 skills to perform work across the organization. You can ask any question or present any business problem, and Joule will work across every part of your business to solve it like no other solution in the market.

These investments set a strong foundation for realizing our vision for Joule agents — a vision we first shared at SAP Sapphire in 2024. Joule agents are uniquely capable of working together and with business users in various roles to execute complex cross-functional processes with speed and reliability.

Watch the video: How Joule Agents Work

With today’s announcement of SAP Business Data Cloud, the foundation for Joule agents becomes even stronger, because AI agents are only as powerful as the data in which they are grounded.

SAP Business Data Cloud equips Joule agents with a single trusted data layer that breaks down data silos, unifying data across SAP and non-SAP sources. With SAP Business Data Cloud, Joule agents access the most complete and context-rich data sets, allowing them to reason more deeply and act with more insight to solve problems.

SAP Knowledge Graph, previously announced at SAP TechEd in 2024, serves as the semantic bridge between Joule agents and SAP Business Data Cloud. SAP Knowledge Graph reveals the connections between data and processes, helping Joule agents find all the most relevant data to ground their decisions and actions.

While knowledge graphs are not a new concept, combining them with new advanced technologies makes them extremely powerful. SAP Knowledge Graph is rapidly advancing to make SAP’s unique 50-plus years of business process expertise available to Joule agents. This process grounding further enables Joule agents to be aware of the context in which they operate and, therefore, to solve more challenging problems that involve multi-step processes spanning supply chain, procurement, finance, and more.

All these innovations turn our long-held AI agent vision into a reality, with more innovation to come, faster. Today, we announced the availability of a collection of ready-to-use Joule agents across finance, service, and sales, with more across the SAP Business Suite portfolio in 2025.

The announcement includes the planned first quarter availability of a cash collection Joule agent previewed at SAP TechEd in 2024. The cash collection agent will analyze disputes and work across finance, customer service, and operations to validate details and recommend resolutions. This Joule agent exemplifies the full promise of agentic AI — delivering new levels of operational efficiency by working cross-functionally to complete a complex, multi-step process that usually takes hours in just a few seconds.

Watch the video: Joule Agents Demo – Dispute Resolution

Today’s announcement also includes new ready-to-use Joule agents that advance efficiency across multi-step sales and service tasks. This includes a Q&A agent that continuously monitors opportunities and customer cases, proactively spotting questions and surfacing relevant answers from approved knowledge sources; a knowledge creation agent that automatically identifies novel case resolutions and creates structured knowledge articles that scale expertise across your organization; and a case classification agent that understands case context — for example, recognizing a tax-related inquiry even if the word “tax” isn’t mentioned — and correctly routes the case to the correct team.

This class of functionally focused Joule agents will become part of Joule’s collaborative agent architecture, making them available to team with other Joule agents to solve problems across cross-functional processes. For example, when the case classification agent identifies a customer billing dispute, it can route it to the cash collection agent, autonomously kicking off the dispute resolution multi-agent workflow. Through such agent teamwork, a dispute can not only be resolved in seconds but also within seconds of its receipt, further increasing process efficiency and delighting customers with unmatched response time.

In addition, SAP also previewed a custom agent builder capability for Joule studio in SAP Build. The new agent builder will make it simple for users such as citizen developers to create custom agents for their company’s unique business needs. A guided no-code workflow, informed by SAP’s business process expertise, helps ground custom AI agents in business processes and data, allowing them to solve problems through autonomous actions across a customer’s SAP and non-SAP applications. With the unique foundation provided by Joule, Joule agents, SAP Business Data Cloud, and SAP Knowledge Graph, the agent builder enables organizations to build powerful custom AI agents.

Watch the video: Building Custom Joule Agents in Joule Studio

With Joule agents, Joule is not just an AI copilot, but becomes an AI orchestrator across all your organization. Joule can now adaptively assemble and orchestrate teams of agents — including out-of-the-box as well as customer’s custom-built AI agents — from multiple business functions to perform complex end-to-end processes. With Joule agents, teams work more seamlessly, work moves faster, and businesses operate more efficiently.

To learn more, visit the Joule agents page.

Brenda Bown is chief marketing officer of SAP Business AI at SAP.

It was a special moment when Caroline Hanke began her new role as global head of Organizational Growth and Health at SAP in early October 2024—though in an unexpected way. At the same time, Florida, where her and her family had moved into a new home three months earlier, was struck by Hurricane Helene, followed by Hurricane Milton two weeks later.

“We were evacuated and, fortunately, came out unscathed,” Hanke recalls. “But I had to hold the first all-employee meeting with the knowledge that we’d have to rebuild a flooded house, all while staying in a hotel with an unstable power supply.”

In her role, Hanke oversees strategic workforce planning, health, safety, and well-being, as well as the HR Trends and Innovation, People Insights, Organizational Design, and New Work departments.

Hanke also leads a new area of great importance for SAP’s future: the skills-led organization. But what exactly is a skills-led organization, and why is it important to focus on the capabilities of employees?

“A skills-led organization means moving away from rigidly defined job roles with a limited set of key qualifications and instead focusing more on the individual with their specific skills,” Hanke says. “The personal skill sets of employees will shape internal mobility, professional development, and our hiring strategies as a company.”

The skills-based approach recognizes that current job profile structures often fail to fully reflect employees’ competencies.

Hanke herself is a prime example of a personal skill set that extends beyond what a job description suggests. While she spent the past five years in the People & Culture Board area, her professional roots lie elsewhere.

Born in Germany, at the age of four Hanke moved to the U.S. with her parents for her father to work as a professor in computer science and software engineering at the University of Maryland. The planned one-year stay turned into nearly 10.

“I believe those formative childhood years in the U.S. not only gave me native-level English skills but also a deeper understanding of how culture shapes people’s thinking—and the importance of wanting to understand those differences,” she says.

While studying business information management in Mannheim, Germany, she joined SAP as a working student and gained experience in development. She later supported Daimler-Chrysler, initially as a technical quality manager and later as an engagement architect, where she served as a key SAP contact.

She then developed and led a customer management program for the private cloud, which at that point was still in its infancy. In that role, she reported weekly to the Executive Board of SAP SE and then-CEO Bill McDermott, which eventually led to discussions about her becoming his chief of staff.

“When I got the call, I thought there must be a misunderstanding because I hadn’t applied,” Hanke remembers. “The colleague on the other end laughed and said, ‘It seems someone recommended you.’”

This role took Hanke and her husband, along with their son born in Heidelberg, Germany, back to the U.S., where she had grown up. “I’ve never regretted it,” she says. “All in all, I’ve spent almost half my life in the U.S. and feel very at home here. I’d describe myself as half American, half German.”

After McDermott left SAP, Hanke worked in several roles for the new CEO, Christian Klein, before becoming COO in the then-new People & Operations Board area. Though she initially had little contact with HR, she quickly found the topics as engaging as they were challenging, especially given their impact on people and the organization.

“I think my own career path shows how much more experience and skills each of us brings beyond the role officially assigned to us,” she says. “The skills-based approach allows both the company and its employees to make better decisions. Employees want to stay relevant, and as an employer SAP aims to minimize disruptions for its people during changes.”

Skills Development with SAP SuccessFactors HCM

Two key areas impacted by the skills-based approach are training and hiring. Skills-based hiring means that while degrees won’t become irrelevant, the search for candidates will increasingly focus on individual skills and prior experiences.

But how can a company gain a clear picture of each employee’s range of skills?

This is where the growth portfolio, part of SAP SuccessFactors HCM, comes into play. All employees can conduct a skills inventory and add additional skills unrelated to their current role. These skills, often gained outside their formal roles, can now be documented.

Since it’s part of SAP SuccessFactors HCM, the growth portfolio can integrate seamlessly with functionalities like hiring, learning, career development, and talent management—areas that benefit the most from maintaining up-to-date skill data. Based on this information, the system can offer employees personalized, AI-driven recommendations for training and development, paving the way for their next career step.

The skills-based approach also brings significant advantages for workforce planning.

As Hanke explains: “For example, we want to avoid looking externally for skills that already exist within the company but haven’t been utilized or are in the wrong areas. That’s why transparency is so crucial.”

The more accurately workforce planning reflects the skills within the company, the better decisions can be made.

“Business and HR Need to Work More Closely Together”

“HR is one of those areas where everyone thinks they can weigh in,” Hanke says. “Looking back, I must admit I initially approached it with a typical business mindset: HR—how hard can it be? But I quickly learned otherwise. The topics are incredibly complex because there’s no right or wrong answer—solutions must be tailored to individuals. My respect for the HR organization has only grown since then.”

Hanke made a deliberate decision to stay in the People & Culture Board area. For her, HR is more than just a reporting or operational function; it must be deeply integrated into business decisions.

“I believe that people transformation can be a significant competitive advantage in today’s dynamic world,” she says. “And with my mix of business and HR knowledge, I can add value here because these two areas can no longer be separated.”

Hanke also emphasizes the strategic importance of health, safety, and well-being. “Employee well-being is one of the fundamental requirements for a functioning organization.”

SAP’s award-winning health management program, Run Healthy, is set to expand globally to additional countries in 2025. Mental health, especially in the context of COVID-19 and global political developments, remains a critical focus.

“I’m continually impressed by how advanced and diverse SAP’s offerings are,” Hanke says, who has personally benefited from some of them. As a leader, she feels particularly responsible for addressing health-related topics appropriately.

“It’s important to us to see employees as whole individuals and support their holistic development,” she emphasizes. “The skills-based approach, which enables employees to fully leverage their potential, offers exciting new possibilities. We’re embarking on this journey together—and I’m looking forward to it.”