See how SAP IBP 2602 makes planning approvals smarter and simpler by bringing approval tasks directly into the Planner Workspaces app, so you can manage S&OP sign-offs without switching applications.
In this highlight tour, you’ll see how approval workflows can be handled end-to-end inside SAP IBP: business process owners configure the right workbook as the approval context, managers review aggregated KPIs and charts, and approvals move the process forward, all within the planning environment. This helps teams implement dual control more easily and keep monthly S&OP cycles running smoothly.
✅ Approvals inside Planner Workspaces — Approve or reject SAP IBP workflows directly in the planning environment—no need to switch to SAP Build Process Automation.
📊 Right context for the right approver — Configure workbooks to show aggregated data at the level managers need, so decisions are informed and fast.
🔁 Seamless workflow progression — Approval tasks arrive in Planner Workspaces with full business context, completed tasks are tracked, and the process automatically continues to the next step after sign-off.
Chapters:
00:00 – What’s new in IBP 2602 approvals
00:07 – Approval tasks inside Planner Workspaces
00:31 – Full business context shown in workbooks
00:56 – Configure approval context via workbook selection
01:20 – Process step moves to “In Approval”
01:36 – Manager reviews & approves in Planner Workspaces
01:49 – Completed tasks + process continues
02:14 – Wrap-up: dual control made simple
• What’s new (Help Portal): https://sap.to/6058hBRjC
• Learn more about SAP Integrated Business Planning: https://sap.to/6053cGTA3
See the top capabilities from SAP Datasphere’s 2025 updates, explained clearly by Klaus-Peter Sauer, in minutes.
From SAP Business Data Cloud to object store (GA), object versioning, and a broad set of efficiency enhancements across modeling, flows, task chains, and catalog, this video breaks down what shipped in 2025 and why it matters. Klaus-Peter also covers SAP Cloud ALM integration for centralized tenant monitoring and a small but powerful update: data access controls based on IdP user attributes, helping teams scale permissions with more consistency and control.
Chapters:
00:19 – SAP Business Data Cloud
01:56 – Object Store (GA)
02:47 – Object Versioning Support
03:41 – Efficiency Features Across SAP Datasphere
05:53 – SAP Cloud ALM Integration
07:05 – Data Access Controls (IdP User Attributes)
Explore SAP Datasphere. 👉 https://sap.to/6054CmSMO
Inventory is the foundation of supply chain planning in SAP S/4HANA because every logistics and planning process depends on how stock quantities and values are classified, managed, and moved.
See what’s new in SAP Mobile Start 2.5, from Apple’s Liquid Glass design refresh to smarter ways to stay on top of work on the go.
In this “What’s New” walkthrough, we highlight how Liquid Glass changes the look and feel of SAP Mobile Start (including a more dynamic, translucent navigation experience in iOS 26) and what that means for custom theming.
We also cover key productivity updates to To-Dos, including new filtering aligned to semantic groups from SAP Task Center, plus a refreshed list view that makes it easier to scan and manage a busy workload. Finally, we show how empty pages are now hidden so users can stay focused on mobile-relevant content.
SAP Design Talks: The multidisciplinary teams at ART+COM push the boundaries of art and technology in spectacular installations that communicate complex information. Jussi Ängeslevä, creative director, explains how they do it.
Watch design leaders from some of the most iconic brands share their stories and insights: https://sap.to/605977Lhl
Join host Fernanda Rodrigues and SAP experts Rajarshi Ghosh, Steven Wolter, and Fabian Sommer in a deep dive into collaborative maintenance with SAP Business Network Asset Collaboration. Discover why network-enabled capabilities are crucial for outsourcing maintenance and how integration strengthens asset-heavy industries. Explore real-world demos and learn about planned enhancements for seamless integration with SAP Cloud ERP Private applications. Gain valuable insights from DSAG’s customer perspective on intelligent asset management. Enhance your understanding of the collaborative processes driving efficiency and transparency in asset management.
🔗 Learn more about SAP Business Network Asset Collaboration: https://sap.to/60547smU
🔗 Why Collaborative Maintenance? https://sap.to/60557smUZ
🔗 What’s new with Collaborative Maintenance? https://sap.to/60567smUw
👍 If you found this video helpful, give it a thumbs up.
💬 We value your feedback; drop your questions and thoughts in the comments!
🔗 Share this episode to spread the knowledge about SAP Logistics innovations.
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Time is running out for Europe’s automakers to prepare for the new carbon emissions rule. The EU automotive industry, which is responsible for 6% of total EU employment and 7% of EU gross domestic product (GDP), will be heavily impacted by the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM).
The new regulation will require companies to account for carbon emissions on select imported products. For the auto industry, the steel and aluminum categories are especially critical.
Complete automobiles are not currently covered by CBAM, but the automotive sector is among the most exposed because of its dependence on emissions-intensive materials. Components such as body panels, chassis, frames, and battery enclosures rely heavily on imported steel and aluminum.
CBAM is currently in its transition phase and will enter the definitive phase on January 1, 2026, meaning that companies need to track their imported emissions on covered products throughout 2026 and begin purchasing certificates for those imported, tracked emissions in February 2027, with the first report due August 2027.
CBAM costs will add up quickly
The modern passenger vehicle contains around 1 tonne of steel and 200 kilograms of aluminum. Global averages hover around 1.9 tonnes of CO2 emitted per tonne of manufactured steel, and each tonne of primary aluminum produces around 15 tonnes of CO2.
With analysts projecting carbon ETS prices could reach €150 per tonne of CO₂ by 2030, a newly manufactured vehicle could soon be subject to €300 in CBAM certificate costs, assuming manufacturers import 20% of the necessary steel and 54% of the required aluminum, consistent with EU import data. Given that Germany produced 4 million cars in 2024, German automakers and component manufacturers could be on the hook for about €1.2 billion in CBAM certificate purchases in 2027.*
Looking past 2027, the European Commission plans to add categories like chemicals and plastics to the regulation, bringing more auto parts under the CBAM umbrella and making it even more important for European automakers and component manufacturers to solidify their CBAM strategies today.
Build a more compliant, sustainable, and resilient business with SAP Sustainability
CBAM preparations for automakers and component manufacturers
Across the EU automotive industry, companies seem insufficiently prepared for the new phase of CBAM.
This is not completely due to inaction by companies—EU regulators have not yet finalized details of the emissions value calculations methodology or how to verify data. That said, regulators already clarified the scope of companies that must report and the timelines to purchase certificates.
With this information, it’s now crunch time for European automakers and component manufacturers to get ready for the rules taking effect in January 2026. Here’s what they should prioritize.
1. Get familiar with CBAM and evaluate your process
The core elements of CBAM have been defined and companies must act now. If you haven’t done so yet, start by understanding the overall process and requirements.
If you are in scope—meaning you meet the de minimis threshold of either importing more than 50 tonnes of CBAM affected goods per year or 100 tonnes of embedded CO₂ annually—determine which parts of your supply chain are most affected. Identify your top suppliers and imported goods, develop a focused approach for obtaining actual emissions data from those suppliers, and assess the potential financial impact. As more materials come under the scope of CBAM, and as the carbon ETS prices rise, the financial impact will increase in the years ahead. Companies must prepare to meet these new obligations and manage this financial impact.
2. Collaborate with your suppliers
Identify and focus on your most critical suppliers—typically the top 50 to 100—and build a targeted engagement plan while defining an informed approach for the broader supplier base. Consider updating procurement terms to require future data sharing and provide support to suppliers in educating and calculating emissions where needed. Close collaboration will be essential to obtain actual emissions data to avoid the more expensive default values and identify decarbonization potentials.
Accessing trusted supplier data is one of the biggest challenges facing companies today.
While the EU provides mechanisms for data exchange between suppliers and importers, Catena-X, an industry network for the European automotive sector, in combination with third-party data exchange software, offers an alternative to collecting trusted, standardized emissions data. Catena-X enables companies to collaborate and share data in a trusted environment. It brings together manufacturers, technology providers, and suppliers to standardize data sharing processes across the value chain. Beyond data exchange, these networks foster knowledge sharing, allowing members to learn best practices, align on standards, and accelerate compliance readiness collectively.
To participate, companies typically register with the network, adopt certified software that supports standardized data exchange, and begin collaborating with other members. This approach ensures interoperability and automates trusted emissions data collection. Catena-X is actively refining its scope and standards to support CBAM.
3. Find the right technology for your business
Most importantly, you want to find the right technology partner that will streamline CBAM reporting and support the integration of carbon into core financial accounting processes.
The EU CBAM report requires a lot of data, all of which can be requested, filled, and reported automatically using actual emissions values with tailored, ERP-based systems. The SAP Green Token solution can support CBAM declarant reporting by enabling standardized, auditable reporting workflows. The SAP Green Ledger solution will manage the certificate repository and help ensure financial and carbon accounting of CBAM emissions and certificates in alignment with accounting standards like US GAAP and IFRS (planned for H1 2026).
Manual processes, like e-mails and Excel files, are prone to error, do not scale, and will make CBAM compliance time-consuming and resource intensive.
Prepare your systems for CBAM compliance
CBAM is set to reshape material sourcing in the automotive industry by introducing carbon as a cost factor and driving transparency across global supply chains.
The ideal scenario for automakers and component manufacturers is to take decisive actions to decarbonize—such as sourcing low-emissions steel and aluminum, increasing circularity efforts, and optimizing product design to use less CBAM materials—while fully automating CBAM compliance.
Access to accurate data on supply chain emissions—and their financial implications—provides the insights that business leaders need to decarbonize and reduce risk in the years ahead.
The right combination of software tools and industry network collaboration can enable cost-optimized and automated CBAM compliance and deliver valuable supply chain intelligence. SAP Sustainability solutions can deliver measurable ROI by automating data collection and workflows and enabling finance teams to move beyond manual processes toward strategic analysis and action. This helps create a scalable foundation for ongoing carbon cost management while supporting standardized data exchange and collaboration across the value chain.
Start preparing now to ensure your business thrives as the 2026 CBAM definitive phase approaches.
Read the CBAM playbook and watch the CBAM webinar to learn more.
Thomas Janzen is an industry expert at SAP SE.
*This is a back of the napkin calculation to illustrate the potential impact. This is based on data that shows the EU imported 27.4 million tonnes of finished steel products in 2024. The EU consumed about 129 million tonnes. Therefore, we assume imports account for roughly 20% of EU steel use. In 2023, 54% of the aluminum used in the EU came from imports. Using these averages means about 2 tonnes of imported CO2 per vehicle, or €300, assigning 20% of 1 tonne of steel emissions and 53% of 200kg of aluminum emissions.
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SAP executives speaking at the SAP TechEd event in Berlin this week told their audience of developers, system architects, and technologists that they have a central and vital role in the “agentic AI revolution.”
Advancements in AI agents, data, and platform capabilities equip developers with the tools to drive business transformation
We’re entering a new era, according to SAP Executive Board Member Muhammad Alam, in charge of SAP Product & Engineering: “the era of agentic AI, where AI moves from being just a tool to becoming your trusted teammate.”
Joined on stage by SAP CTO Philipp Herzig and Michael Ameling, president of SAP Business Technology Platform, Alam set the stage during the kick-off keynote, saying: “As developers, you are not on the sidelines of this AI revolution. You are the revolution. And we are here to supercharge you for what’s next.”
Supercharging developers
Together they dismissed suggestions that AI will replace developers. “The truth is that developers aren’t going away,” Alam said. “They are getting supercharged. They’re becoming the architects of smart connected businesses. So, the real question isn’t if we need developers; it’s how fast can we empower them to thrive and lead in this AI-native era?”
Ameling, Alam, and Herzig outlined SAP’s vision and highlighted the integration of AI, data, and intelligent agents to transform business processes and drive innovation. They also emphasized the importance of a unified data fabric and the deployment of advanced AI models and agentic technologies within the SAP ecosystem.
In this new business environment, they noted that every enterprise is becoming a data company and every user experience—from the front line to the boardroom—is becoming AI-driven.
“As developers, you don’t just code anymore,” Alam said. “You also design intelligent workflows and supervise AI agents to shape real business outcomes.” To help developers do this, SAP’s strategy centers on empowering them with applications, connecting them with data, and supercharging them with AI.
SAP BTP is the foundation for AI agents
All this runs on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), which serves as the foundation for building and managing AI agents—both SAP built and custom developed. While SAP BTP is the engine, the Business Transformation Management portfolio is the navigator, ensuring technology translates into real business impact. It aligns strategy, process, and people, turning AI-driven potential into sustainable transformation at scale.
First, he said SAP is continuing to make SAP more open. As part of that, he announced SAP Snowflake, which brings the full data and AI capabilities of Snowflake as a solution extension to SAP Business Data Cloud (SAP BDC). This partnership is exactly what joint customers have been asking for, Alam shared.
Second, he said SAP will provide developers with the most context-rich agentic platform, including the most deeply grounded set of ready-to-use agents that developers can customize to their needs. “Today, you’ll hear about creating custom Joule Agents using low-code and pro-code tools with agent builder in Joule Studio as part of SAP Build” Alam said.
“We’re also standardizing AI agent interoperability with the agent-to-agent protocol, allowing your agents to collaborate securely across ecosystems,” he added.
Third, he announced SAP’s first foundation model built specifically for structured business data: SAP RPT-1, pronounced “SAP Rapid One.” “Our relational pretrained transformer delivers enterprise-grade accuracy and scale, outperforming both LLMs and AutoML for tabular AI, which is critical for building reliable high-value agents,” Alam said.
“In short, we’re embracing an open ecosystem, supercharging agents with deep process and data context, and giving you the tools to amplify AI and agents,” he said. As the keynote continued, Ameling and Herzig detailed these and other innovations, explaining how they will help developers work smarter and achieve more.
Michael AmelingPhilipp Herzig
SAP BDC and Snowflake
Ameling expanded on the new partnership with Snowflake, which will bring Snowflake’s fully managed data and AI capabilities to SAP customers. Together with the introduction of SAP BDC Connect for Snowflake, he said this will result in cost savings and simplified data landscapes. “This enables you to integrate SAP and non-SAP data products seamlessly between SAP BDC and Snowflake, so that you can deploy intelligent applications faster and share across your preferred data marketplace.”
Ameling also positioned SAP HANA Cloud as “the database AI was looking for.” With SAP HANA Cloud and SAP BDC, SAP provides the best business data fabric to help address these challenges, he said. “Without SAP HANA Cloud, you would have one database for each and every data representation, which leads to disaggregated data siloes that limit your AI potential. With SAP HANA Cloud, we have all these powerful engines in one integrated, multi-model database.”
Building on this, Herzig emphasized that every business requires a strong data foundation because “AI is nothing without well-organized data…On top of the data foundation sits our AI Foundation that allows you to not only use the latest frontier AI technologies out there in the market, but also to extend SAP’s out-of-the-box AI capabilities and build your own experiences deeply contextualized in your business processes and data.”
SAP pioneers a tabular foundation model
Herzig then explained that SAP RPT-1 was designed to address a crucial problem for developers and enable them to deliver much better predictive capabilities, enterprise-grade accuracy, and scale to business customers.
Until now, Herzig said, “We still had to go back to good old machine learning …to train what we call ‘narrow’ AI models that are specifically made for each [business] task. Therefore, you really had to train a hell of a lot of models.” For example, to solve 10 predictive tasks across 10 different entities like company codes or plants would require training 100 different models.
“What we really want to do is get rid of all these models and just introduce one giant model that only requires a small amount of data to learn from,” he said. That’s what SAP RPT-1 is. “We believe SAP RPT-1 is the most capable predictive foundation model that’s out there today,” he said, delivering much higher prediction quality while being very fast and super-efficient in terms of resource requirements.
Joule, Joule Agents, and AI assistants
The SAP CTO also emphasized that the company is committed to providing developers with the most context-rich agentic platform. He noted that SAP has already shipped 20 Joule Agents across lines of business and will have approximately 40 by the end of the year, and that these agents can leverage more than 2,100 pre-delivered Joule skills. In addition, more than 300 embedded AI scenarios across product lines are available for customers to date, including Joule Agents, growing to 400 use cases in total by the end of the year.
Ameling added: “Our promise is simple: build with intent. You describe the outcome and SAP Build uses AI agents to generate code, logic, and UIs for you, all with seamless access to your applications and data while you stay in the flow… [SAP] Joule for Developers enables vibe coding experiences to make intent-based development simple and intuitive.”
SAP is taking it one step further by providing extensions to work with VS code, Windsurf, Cursor, OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, Cline, and more directly in SAP Build. “You choose a tool, and we meet you where you are,” Ameling said. He also announced that fine-tuned ABAP LLMs with ABAP 1 on AI Foundation will be published in Q4 this year.
SAP is redefining how developers interact with AI through innovations in Joule and agentic AI, but also in terms of physical AI. Herzig welcomed Torsten G. Mueller, Group CIO and COO BPS at Sartorius, to discuss how the partnership between Sartorius, NEURA Robotics, and SAP is bringing to life robots that understand the what, when, and how based on live business context. “This is how we’re really imagining the future, right? Humans and robots working in harmony through Joule, through AI,” Herzig said.
Quantum computing
Looking to the future, Herzig ended the keynote by talking about another “compute paradigm that is still hard to seize”: quantum computing. While he made it clear that SAP is not building a quantum computer, SAP is teaming up with quantum hardware leaders, like IBM—whose Director of Research and IBM Fellow Jay Gambetta joined via video—to help evaluate quantum computing for business processes and applications.
“We believe quantum will join classical and AI compute in your stack, and we’re embedding it into the processes and apps you’re already using, so it just shows up in the workflows of your enterprise,” Herzig said. “And of course, with the cloud, we scale it all. Now, SAP has got you covered, and you’ve got your business covered.”
SAP TechEd: Read news, stories, and coverage from the event
