SAP has been positioned in the Leader Category of the 2026 IDC MarketScape for AI-Enabled Direct Spend Vendor Assessment.*

We believe this recognition reflects SAP’s long-term investment in helping manufacturers connect sourcing, engineering, planning, and supplier collaboration on a single foundation.

Direct materials procurement doesn’t get enough credit for how hard it actually is. Unlike indirect spend, direct materials sit at the intersection of engineering, planning, finance, and supplier relationships—often all at once. A design change triggers a sourcing event. A commodity price spike ripples into contract terms. A supplier quality issue lands on the production floor before procurement even knows it happened.

The organizations that manage this well don’t just have good sourcing tools. They have connected systems, trusted data, and the ability to act quickly when conditions change. Solving for that complexity is what SAP’s direct spend portfolio is built to do.

Connecting design, sourcing, and execution

SAP’s direct spend offering is built with an industry-specific lens. A cookie-cutter approach to procurement business processes does not work for direct materials.

An engineering-oriented industry like automotive or aerospace, where a design change can trigger a sourcing event, has fundamentally different needs than a brand- or asset-oriented industry such as consumer goods or chemicals, where commodity exposure and supplier scale dominate. SAP builds for both, with purpose-built offerings tuned to how each actually works.

What our offerings share is a single, unbroken data model running from new product introduction through sourcing, contract award, and purchase order execution, all within SAP Business Suite: no bolt-on connectors, no manual handoffs between systems.

This matters more than it might seem. Data fragmentation across the design-to-source-to-settle workflow remains one of the biggest barriers to AI delivering real value in direct spend. When procurement decisions are connected to engineering, planning, supplier, and financial data on a shared foundation, AI has meaningful context to work with.

A network and ecosystem that extends the core

The sourcing suites are the center of gravity, but what surrounds them is equally important for manufacturers managing complex, multi-tier supply chains.

SAP Business Network connects millions of trading partners across roughly 190 countries, with more than US$7.7 trillion in annual commerce flowing through it. The network supports forecast collaboration, purchase order execution, inventory management, logistics visibility, quality processes, and supplier communication. For global manufacturers managing complex supply chains, that scale can be operationally significant.

Customers are already seeing the benefits of a more integrated approach to direct spend. For example, global automotive supplier Multimatic selected SAP’s direct materials sourcing solution because of its close integration with core ERP processes, including bill of materials management, production planning, and cost calculation. By connecting sourcing more closely to product development and manufacturing workflows, the company is helping procurement, engineering, and suppliers work from the same foundation throughout the product life cycle.

Additional SAP capabilities extend the process further across product development, commodity management, supply planning, supplier collaboration, financing, and analytics. Together, these capabilities help organizations manage direct spend as part of an integrated process that spans from early design collaboration through supplier payment, supported by a unified data foundation.

Taken together, these capabilities span a much broader scope than traditional sourcing software, from early design collaboration through supplier payment, all governed on SAP Business Data Cloud as a unified analytics foundation.

Where AI stands today, and where it’s going

Today, SAP delivers AI-powered supplier and item recommendations, invoice data extraction, category strategy insights, supplier risk scoring, and Joule capabilities embedded throughout the suite. These are production capabilities already helping customers streamline procurement processes.

Looking ahead, SAP plans to expand its AI capabilities across the direct spend life cycle, with new agentic experiences focused on areas such as market intelligence, supplier discovery, RFx orchestration, negotiation support, contract authoring, and supply chain impact analysis. These innovations will be delivered through Joule Work and Joule Studio 2.0, a no-code/low-code environment built on SAP Business AI that enables organizations to create and manage agents grounded in live business data and end-to-end process context.

The foundation underneath this road map is what makes it credible. Agents are only as good as the data and process context they can access. When that foundation is fragmented across disconnected systems, AI adds noise as often as it adds value. When it’s unified, agents can execute with greater relevance and accuracy.

Who this is built for

The SAP Ariba offering foo direct spend works with any ERP backend, with the added benefit of integrating out of the box with SAP Cloud ERP. For aerospace and defense customers with data sovereignty requirements, SAP offers deployment options for sovereign cloud that few vendors in this space support. For brand- and asset-oriented enterprises, a consolidated source-to-pay platform spanning both direct and indirect spend can simplify governance while reducing complexity.

For manufacturers operating complex global supply chains, the value of a natively integrated approach is straightforward: fewer manual handoffs, better visibility across functions, faster response to disruptions, and AI that can draw on connected business data rather than isolated point solutions.

What this recognition means to us

We’re grateful to the customers and partners whose real-world feedback shapes how we build these products. We believe an IDC MarketScape recognition reflects their experiences as much as it reflects our road map, and we don’t take that lightly.

This recognition energizes us. For more than 50 years, SAP has helped organizations run their most critical business processes, and direct spend is one of the areas where that experience comes together most clearly. We’ll continue investing in deeper integration, broader network capabilities, trusted AI, and the industry expertise our customers rely on. We’re grateful to the customers and partners that continue to help shape these solutions and help us deliver meaningful innovation across the direct spend life cycle.

Fang Chang is executive vice president and chief product officer for SAP Procurement and External Workforce Solutions at SAP.
Baber Farooq is chief marketing officer for SAP Spend Management.

*IDC MarketScape: Worldwide AI-Enabled Direct Spend 2026 Vendor Assessment, IDC #US54900426, September 2026.

BETHESDA — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced that Lockheed Martin has successfully gone live with SAP SuccessFactors solutions, including SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central, SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll, SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting and SAP SuccessFactors Onboarding, marking a significant milestone in the company’s workforce transformation journey.

The deployment brings together core human resources (HR) processes on a flexible cloud foundation designed to simplify HR operations, enhance employee experience and support a global workforce. 

A leader in aerospace, defense and advanced technology solutions, Lockheed Martin is modernizing its HR landscape by moving from legacy systems to a unified platform. The new environment provides a more connected experience for employees and managers while supporting greater consistency and operational efficiency across the enterprise.  

With almost 60% of its 123,000 employees being engineers, scientists and technologists, attracting, developing and retaining highly skilled talent at scale is critical to Lockheed Martin’s continued success. By creating a single source of truth for workforce data, Lockheed Martin is gaining clearer insight into its workforce, enabling more informed talent decisions. 

This transformation allows Lockheed Martin to accelerate its robust applied AI strategy across the workforce to help employees and managers access information more efficiently and unlock new insights across the employee life cycle. 

“Lockheed Martin is advancing an enterprise-wide transformation of exceptional scale and complexity, while meeting the rigorous demands of a highly regulated industry,” said Thomas Saueressig, Member of the Executive Board and Chief Customer Officer of SAP SE. “This milestone reflects Lockheed Martin’s commitment to modernizing workforce operations and investing in technologies that support employees, strengthen organizational agility and position the company for future innovation.”

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SAP Press Room; press@sap.com

Top image courtesy Lockheed Martin

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Each day, businesses invest in new software tools: marketing platforms, commerce engines, service systems, and sales technology. They are told that assembling the right combination will unlock their digital transformation journey and finally deliver that personalized and seamless experience they wish to provide to their customers.

But what if more or better software is not necessarily the answer? Each solution solves a real problem for a specific team. But collectively, they create a consequence no one planned for: every new tool builds its own data world, without a common language or context across them.

In a 2026 study by Oxford Economics, only 25% of respondents described their customer experience (CX) technology environment as fully harmonized and integrated. Twenty-nine percent remain highly fragmented. Organizations with siloed CX tech are more likely to face an inability to connect customer needs to actionable data insights. Fifty-eight percent reported this challenge, compared to 47% among those with harmonized environments.

More than what tools businesses choose to add to their CX landscape, how they connect and interact with each other becomes even more important.

A unified data strategy sounds straightforward in principle. In practice, most businesses find that the obstacle is not ambition but rather execution. Every integration decision made without a clear data architecture becomes a future campaign mired in manual reconciliation, a customer journey that breaks at the handoff, or a personalization promise the disparate data sources cannot support. Implementation without a validated strategy creates new fragmentation inside the solution meant to eliminate the old. And without a structured way to pressure-test decisions before any commitment is made, even well-resourced organizations find themselves repeating the same cycle: invest, integrate, fragment, repeat.

The real barrier is not budget or technology

A Forrester study of more than 1,000 senior executives found that data quality and integration issues are cited more than any other factor as the top cause of delayed or derailed transformation projects (39%), ahead of budget, technology maturity, and talent. The same study found that 56% of respondents struggle with poor data quality; 55% face persistent data silos. This is not for lack of investment in technology, but because the connections between systems were not designed or maintained effectively.

What bridges that gap is not another platform, it is the expertise to think through data connectivity decisions before they are made and the ongoing guidance to ensure those decisions compound into measurable gains over time. The Advanced Success Plan for SAP Customer Experience solutions provides that guidance along every step of the journey.

Define what success actually looks like

The most common reason data unification projects fall short of expectations is not technical failure, it is a failure to define and measure what success looks like for the entire business before the work begins.

The value management session from the Advanced Success Plan for SAP Customer Experience establishes that definition at the outset: What does a fully unified data strategy actually enable? It means running the next marketing campaign without manual data reconciliation, and presenting an AI readiness road map without caveats. Stakeholders will know, at every checkpoint, whether the investment is moving the business forward, not just moving the project forward.

Design the strategy before building the integrations

A robust data strategy starts with good design. Product guidance from the Advanced Success Plan for SAP Customer Experience covers available out-of-the-box integrations, common usage scenarios, and pitfalls and how to avoid them—all delivered in a live remote session by an SAP expert who can answer questions in real time. The data strategy can be conceptualized and pressure-tested before any budget or technical commitments are made.

Validate every critical decision with expert guidance

With the technical assistance and functional assistance from the Advanced Success Plan for SAP Customer Experience, businesses have continuous access to expert guidance at every critical decision point. Beyond resolving immediate questions, the ongoing access also shares insight on how SAP thinks through problems, strengthening in-house expertise with every interaction. The result is an organization that makes better decisions not just now but for the future.

Measure whether the strategy is delivering

Adoption and innovation checkpoints conducted on a quarterly or semi-annual basis bring the measurement back to where it started: the business outcomes defined at the outset. Do campaigns run without manual reconciliation? Is the AI use case performing against its stated goals? A clear throughline from the value management success KPIs to the adoption and innovation checkpoints proves the benefits of the investment.

Where cycles and silos break

The cycle of invest, integrate, fragment, repeat is not inevitable. It is the predictable result of making technical decisions without an anchoring business imperative, and integration decisions without strategic expert guidance. Organizations that break the cycle do not necessarily have better technology than their competitors—they have better judgment about how to use it.

The Advanced Success Plan for SAP Customer Experience exists for exactly that reason: to put proactive and prescriptive guidance at every decision point where that judgment matters most. When data strategy is designed before it is built, validated before it is committed, and measured against real business outcomes, the technology investment already made starts working harder.

The stack was never the problem. When the thinking behind the technology finally matches its ambition, the personalized, seamless experience becomes a reality.

Tara Tracey, global product owner for the Advanced Success Plan for SAP Customer Experience.
Ella De Torres, product manager for the Advanced Success Plan for SAP Customer Experience.