At the SAP Transformation Excellence Summit in The Hague, the Netherlands, last week, with over 1,500 prospects, customers, and partners in attendance, SAP LeanIX, SAP Signavio, and WalkMe announced a range of new features and products. The theme of the summit, which followed the SAP Transformation Excellence Summit in Austin, TX, in September, was “Power Up.”

The announcements underlined all the ways that SAP’s Business Transformation Management solutions, and the integrated toolchain to which they belong, can empower organizations to develop a scalable and sustainable transformation capability.

Cost optimization, EA standardization, and AI adoption

Companies increasingly look to fund innovation, particularly when it comes to AI, by digging into existing budgets.

At the summits, André Christ, co-founder and general manager at SAP LeanIX, announced new features focused on application TCO (total cost of ownership) to help companies find cost savings across the IT landscape that can be reallocated to more strategic investment. These TCO features include the addition of cost KPIs to the architecture executive dashboard, the ability to enhance factsheets with configurable calculations, and an application TCO view in the application landscape report.

Christ also announced a new approach to target architecture planning in SAP LeanIX, allowing customers to start by diagramming their future state and then modeling backwards. Architects and business leaders thus can get a more streamlined experience, from design to execution, allowing them to make thoughtful, data-driven decisions every step of the way. 

To help further facilitate landscape transformation and management, Christ also announced the upcoming release of AI-assisted architecture guidance.

Finally, Christ made several announcements regarding SAP LeanIX’s support for AI adoption and governance. Here, he returned to the AI agent hub in SAP LeanIX Application Portfolio Management announced at SAP Sapphire. Just as SAP LeanIX can serve as the single source of truth for the application landscape, SAP LeanIX can now serve as the single source of truth for AI agents. This begins with the discovery of agents—custom agents, Joule Agents, and third-party agents—and their subsequent tracking and management.

The goal of SAP LeanIX’s agent governance features is to allow organizations to understand what business capabilities agents support, what applications they access, and where they can have the greatest impact. To this end, Christ further announced a new agent radar report and the ability to assess agent adoption through executive dashboards.

As the last announcement with regard to AI, Christ also announced the launch of the MCP server for SAP LeanIX solutions. Model context protocol (MCP) servers are an open-source standard interface that links AI models with enterprise data, helping AI assistants connect to SAP LeanIX workspaces and inventory data. This feature helps organizations leverage AI agents to maintain data and activate AI workflows.

With the AI agent hub and the MCP server, SAP LeanIX can help accelerate the adoption of AI agents while also enabling consistent and scalable governance.

Process excellence, untapped value, and the organization of the future

The summit in Austin also afforded SAP Signavio’s Founder and General Manager, Gero Decker, the opportunity to talk about new features and capabilities in the SAP Signavio portfolio. Just as Christ talked about the ways that SAP LeanIX helps free up resources to fund innovation, Decker focused on the ways SAP Signavio supports organizations in their “quest for value.”

Transformation is not an end in itself. The goal of transforming the IT landscape, processes, and even the overall business is to unlock and realize new value. SAP Signavio has long helped companies find and pursue opportunities for such process improvement and value creation. Now, the AI-enabled transformation advisor, when connected to SAP Signavio Process Insights, can make this even easier by allowing users to use text-based prompts—such as “Can I reduce costs in my sales operations?”—to help generate analysis and recommended next steps.

While improving individual processes in this way can deliver real value, processes don’t run in a vacuum. In order to address this, Decker also announced transformation management capabilities providing visibility into the interconnections and cross-effects between processes.

By allowing customers to better see and understand the impact of transforming processes on one another, SAP Signavio solutions can enable truly holistic, data-driven decision-making.

Decker also addressed agentic AI by introducing a number of Joule Agents that will see general availability in Q1 2026. These agents, which will include a Screen Guide Agent, a Value Case Creation Agent, a Dashboard Analyzer Agent, a Process Content Recommender Agent, and a Workspace Administration Agent, can enable SAP Signavio solutions to help automate repetitive tasks and accelerate content discovery.

A new breed of digital learning technology

SAP completed the acquisition of WalkMe shortly before last year’s summit in Frankfurt, Germany. In The Hague and Austin, WalkMe took the stage as a key player in the Business Transformation Management portfolio.

The big announcement WalkMe shared at the summits focused on a new digital learning offering. By embedding training directly into the applications employees use every day, even when workflows extend across multiple applications, this new solution can empower learning teams to give employees both a comprehensive learning infrastructure and content they need to keep up. 

The key capabilities of this solution include: comprehensive training delivery with in-app search and discovery, in-app consumption, and customizable learning portals; intelligent content authoring with AI-first authoring that turns prompts and company knowledge into multi-media, multi-modal experiences; and the ability to curate and expose training in context with flexible conditions and triggers and behavior-based segmentation.

These capabilities come equipped with powerful analytics so you can measure and understand user behavior and engagement as well as assess content performance.

The transformation journey is just beginning

The summits showcased the power of SAP LeanIX, SAP Signavio, and WalkMe as individual portfolios as well as their combined power as the foundation of a transformation capability. The events also highlighted the amazing potential of these solutions to shape the way companies transform into the future.

At a time when AI is disrupting operating models and every function across the enterprise, the summits offered a reminder of the central role SAP can play in this disruption. From funding and managing transformation to enabling the workforce to adapt and excel in a rapidly changing world, this portfolio of tools can give every organization what they need to help address the challenges of today while unlocking opportunity for tomorrow.

Matthew T. Grant is a senior writer for SAP LeanIX and SAP Signavio.

Top photo copyright: Christian Palm

In conversations with customers last month at SAP Sapphire & ASUG Annual Conference, one question seemed to reverberate throughout the corridors of Orlando.

Amid the ongoing stresses to global supply chains exerted by tariffs, geopolitical tensions and the proliferation of mandates in many countries regarding electronic invoicing and materials traceability, how can organizations best deploy cloud-based business networks and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to extend visibility, steady the flow of commerce, and mitigate third-party risk?

To instill resilience throughout mission-critical operations and those of their trading partners, businesses are turning increasingly to AI-powered cloud solutions to orchestrate complex, often volatile, supply chains. But the sheer volume of transactions and rigor of processing across vast troves of underlying data require that digital commerce be anchored within an infrastructure durable enough to withstand today’s pace of change yet supple enough to sustain tomorrow’s scope of innovation.

That is why some of the most significant innovation underway for SAP Business Network, the world’s largest business-to-business platform, involves its ongoing move to SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), a shift with profound implications for SAP customers and their ability to counter disruption.

The cloud-native architecture of SAP BTP optimizes collaboration and innovation capabilities for organizations large and small, and the platform offers the scalability that SAP Business Network customers and their trading partners require to perform at their peak as business needs evolve. With its high-performing infrastructure, SAP BTP ensures seamless connectivity not only between SAP Business Network and other SAP solutions but across third-party systems as well.

Meanwhile, as differing regulatory regimes for electronic invoicing and materials traceability take effect in various countries, the built-in security and compliance features of SAP BTP ensure that businesses can manage multi-tier supply chains while adhering strictly to regional requirements. In addition, ongoing innovation to SAP Business Network takes full advantage of extensive AI capabilities in SAP BTP to automate complex workflows and securely augment applications with agentic capabilities.

Facilitating more than $6.1 trillion in commerce across 761 million transactions annually carries the obligation that a business network continually earn anew the trust of the enterprises that rely on it for operational continuity, data security, decision-support quality, and regulatory compliance.

For SAP Business Network, this means reinvesting on a regular basis in the architecture and infrastructure necessary to accelerate the speed of transactions, responsiveness to up-to-the-minute fluctuations in supply and demand, scalability to support business growth, streamlined integration across SAP and non-SAP systems, greater extensibility and deeper functionality, an intuitive user interface that reduces complexity and friction, and the most advanced, AI-augmented analytics capabilities available anywhere.

The ongoing transition for SAP Business Network to SAP BTP accomplishes all of the above. Over the long run, however, the change that customers are likely to appreciate most is the ease with which they can innovate alongside their trading partners and shape new business models through the insights harnessed by AI applications drawing upon sprawling repositories of accumulated day-to-day operational data.

While SAP Business Network upgrades its platform, it continues to innovate with several new capabilities announced at SAP Sapphire. To provide additional support for product compliance and quality control, SAP Business Network Supply Chain Collaboration is introducing these features:

• Mass upload of certificate documents: Suppliers can now bulk upload quality and compliance certificates directly within the advance shipping notification (ASN) upload template at the line-item level, significantly reducing manual effort and improving data accuracy
• Buyer-controlled document mandates: Buyers can specify which type of certifications are required for each purchase order, automatically enforcing compliance and quality standards while streamlining the process

These capabilities simplify the tracking of critical certifications, including sustainability credentials, carbon footprint documentation, and industry-specific certifications. Benefits include improved compliance, reduced delays, enhanced process adoption, and improved traceability, thus supporting regulatory compliance and sustainability goals throughout the supply chain.

To enhance supply chain efficiency and sustainability, SAP Business Network for Logistics is introducing these features:

• Enhanced greenhouse gas emissions tracking: Integration of actual emissions data from carriers and logistics service providers into SAP Transportation Management, enabling planned versus actual analysis, marks a crucial step toward capturing and analyzing scope 3 emissions data from external sources
• Extended ocean freight support: New ocean tendering and dispute handling functionalities within SAP Transportation Management are essential as the global container shipping market is forecast to grow at a 12 percent compound annual rate to around US$15.87 billion in 2028

To strengthen the ability of operators, manufacturers, and service providers to manage equipment and other physical assets via a digital network for resiliency and transparency, SAP Business Network Asset Collaboration is introducing these features:

• Cloud-based ERP integration: Users can now initiate and manage ERP integration directly from the cloud, offering greater control over data synchronization
• Enhanced material and model integration: Bi-directional integration of materials and models between SAP Business Network Asset Collaboration and ERP systems
• Inbound integration for shared functional locations: Synchronizing shared functional locations to improve collaboration between operators and service providers
• Asset administration shell (AAS) file upload for equipment creation: Automate equipment creation and associated document management through AAS file uploads, reducing manual data entry
• Quality inspection checklists: By the integration of checklists into SAP Business Network Asset Collaboration, operators can share their inspection checklists and characteristics with service providers, who can in turn record the results for the operator

All of these enhancements are scheduled to be available by the end of 2025, offering businesses across industries the opportunity to transform their supply chain operations, drive sustainability initiatives, and attain new heights in efficiency, visibility, and competitive advantage.

Jörn Keller is executive vice president and chief product officer for SAP Business Network.