Finance professionals have proven their resilience through volatility, from shifting interest rates to evolving regulatory landscapes, putting intense pressure on leaders to make faster and smarter decisions.
Deep research AI and role-based assistants, coupled with SAP Business Suite innovations, take efficiency to new heights
However, the pace of change has made traditional approaches, like best-of-breed point solutions, no longer sufficient to help finance teams keep up.
That is why the future of finance technology should act as an orchestra, not disjointed soloists.
Finance teams require a unified experience where applications, data, and AI work seamlessly together. With SAP Business Suite, these elements come together as one orchestra, enabling finance to operate in harmony and deliver outcomes that point solutions alone cannot achieve. This means not only faster close and stronger liquidity, but also tighter compliance and credible plans that hold up under change.
To strengthen collaboration across finance and bring innovation to the CFO’s office, SAP unveiled Joule’s next stage as the AI force at the center of SAP Business Suite’s value creation. A new generation of role-aware assistants in Joule are designed to partner with people in their specific business roles by tapping into the right agents behind the scenes for the job. For finance professionals, SAP introduced the next round of automation support using agentic AI.
SAP is embedding AI-powered reasoning directly into finance processes to automate routine work and elevate the strategic role of finance with the following new agents:
The Accruals Agent will calculate accruals and deferrals based on system data and present the accountant with a proposal for review, along with a detailed explanation of the calculation logic.
The Cash Management Agent will automate daily bank statement reconciliation tasks and recommend opportunities for optimization.
The International Trade Classification Agent will reason over product characteristics and trade regulations and act to classify goods for international shipping, recommending customs tariff numbers and commodity codes
By bringing automation to critical but repetitive finance processes, these agents underscore SAP’s commitment to equipping the office of the CFO with AI-driven innovation that strengthens resilience in an increasingly complex business environment.
Finance as the conductor of the enterprise
The role of the CFO has expanded far beyond closing the books or reporting quarterly earnings. Today, finance teams are expected to bring together data, processes, and people from the entire business to enable seamless collaboration.
With SAP’s AI-first, suite-first approach, applications and data flow seamlessly, allowing finance leaders to coordinate business operations with confidence. This unified foundation ensures that insights are not siloed, but instead shared across the enterprise, enabling faster and smarter decisions.
Take working capital management, one of the biggest pressure points for finance leaders: A recent Economist Impact survey of 480 CFOs found confidence levels were strong in almost all areas, including revenue, profit, and customer retention, but only 36 percent felt confident in their ability to achieve working capital targets. SAP Business Suite can help organizations meet their targets by automating manual work and enabling actionable decisions — all by leveraging dynamic, autonomous, and action-oriented solutions in SAP Business Suite.
When an organization manages incoming receivables, outgoing payables, as well as cash and inventory within SAP, that connected experience creates data that provides real-time visibility into liquidity through SAP Business Data Cloud. That data fuels SAP Business AI to analyze situations, recommend actions, and even resolve issues like disputed invoices automatically, which would otherwise slow the cash collection process. And with the integration of Joule and intelligent agents, SAP Business AI not only automates, it senses, reasons, orchestrates, and acts — turning insights into outcomes that free capacity and accelerate the business.
As AI agents take on more of the behind-the-scenes work, finance professionals can step fully into their role as the conductor of the enterprise. They can guide strategy with foresight, aligning every function in harmony and shaping outcomes that extend far beyond revenue or cost goals.
CFOs and their teams can then move beyond reactive decision-making toward shaping strategy in real time. This will position their office as a driver of growth, resilience, and innovation.
Looking ahead
SAP is laying the foundation for a new era of autonomous finance, where routine processes are automated, insights are delivered in real time, and finance teams are empowered to focus on strategy and growth.
These innovations mark just the beginning of SAP’s commitment to helping businesses navigate an increasingly complex financial landscape with agility, intelligence, and confidence.
Lawrence Martin is chief product officer and head of Public Cloud Engineering at SAP. David Imbert is head of Finance Product Marketing at SAP.
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Manual workflows are still a reality for many teams, but automation can offer a solution. Discover how SAP Build enables automation to streamline tasks and reduce human error.
With SAP Build automation, you can handle Excel-based sales orders, purchase requisitions, and invoices with AI-powered bots that automatically scan emails, validate data, and trigger SAP S/4HANA transactions. With prebuilt content from the SAP Build Store, setup is faster than ever, and the latest extensibility wizard helps you create SAP Build extensions directly from your cloud ERP.
SAP customers have already automated as much as 90% of their of annual invoices, saving over 8000 hours of manual work per year using SAP Build. Want to see how much time your team could save? Try SAP Build free for 30 days and start automating your most repetitive workflows today. https://sap.to/6057AKuqB
Phoenix Global selected a winner of the SAP Innovation Awards for their bold digital transformation journey, highlighting innovation, sustainability, and real-world impact in the mining and metals industry.
To find out more about the SAP Innovation Awards and how to submit your own innovative ideas, visit: https://sap.to/6050fTQBI
Philipp Herzig, SAP’s Chief Technology Officer, shares our bold vision for Business AI: empowering you to achieve more, wherever you work – across any device, with SAP or non-SAP data. https://sap.to/60524YCUQ
SAP Business Suite helps drive innovation by uniting core business applications, data, and AI capabilities
For businesses today, uncertainty isn’t the exception—it’s the environment in which they operate every day. From supply chain disruptions to shifting market conditions and evolving customer trends, businesses are constantly on their toes about what will happen next.
At SAP Sapphire in 2025, we continued to lay out the vision we’re bringing to life with SAP Business Suite to help companies find confidence amid this uncertainty.
SAP Business Suite is a seamlessly integrated system of applications, data, and AI that can connect and optimize every part of your business, enabling smarter decisions, real-time insights, and intelligent automation. It’s delivered via SAP Business Suite packages tailored to the needs of functions across the business and easily extended with modular add-ons.
SAP CEO Christian Klein used the analogy of a flywheel in his SAP Sapphire keynote to describe the power of applications, data, and AI coming together. The benefits of the SAP Business Suite were presented in sessions throughout the event, including key topics like:
Harmonized SAP Business Suite user experience (UX)
Seamless end-to-end processes
Suite qualities
Structured and guided transformation journeys
Businesses today need resilient processes running seamlessly across different lines of business. As we’ve seen time and again, point solutions can’t solve for the challenges and opportunities of today’s business world. This is why we’ve developed a seamless, integrated suite that can allow our customers to move faster, whether responding to a problem or ensuring readiness when opportunity knocks. Imagine if your key business processes like lead-to-cash or hire-to-retire were harmonized with seamless data flows. That’s key for staying ahead of the competition.
Harmonized user experience
An exceptional user experience within SAP Business Suite is paramount for ensuring seamless interactions and heightened user engagement. By providing a harmonized, intuitive interface, SAP Business Suite can enable users to navigate complex processes with ease, fostering a streamlined workflow that can enhance overall efficiency. The user-centric design places emphasis on simplicity, accessibility, and responsiveness, working to ensure that each module within the suite operates cohesively.
The UX highlights include personalized dashboards, real-time analytics, and adaptive design elements that can respond to user behavior, creating a more engaging and productive environment. Enhanced visualization tools and intuitive controls further facilitate quick decision-making and effective data management, positioning SAP Business Suite as a robust platform for driving business success.
Check out this session from SAP Sapphire, which goes into our strategy for delivering a consistent, integrated, suite-first experience across SAP Business Suite.
At the same time, we are working to improve the experience, efficiency, and intelligence of individual SAP products and solutions.
An AI-assisted smart solution for situations in My Home is planned to be available in preview for beta testing with the August release of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. The sign up is already available here.
Seamless, end-to-end processes
An essential part of business transformation lies in optimizing and automating end-to-end processes. As presented at SAP Sapphire’s SAP Business Suite Break-Out, this is a major benefit of SAP Business Suite, which covers the following key processes:
Procure-to-pay
Design-to-operate
Hire-to-retire
Lead-to-cash
Record-to-report
Lead-to-cash, for example, is a process that directly impacts sales performance and involves several stakeholders across functions. In this process, critical information is added via lead generation and along the process into ordering and billing. Every break in this process directly impacts customer satisfaction and profitability.
With the help of embedded AI capabilities and the support of SAP’s AI copilot Joule, companies can accelerate productivity and increase response times.
SAP Business Suite Experience and Seamless Business Processes
Suite qualities
SAP Business Suite offers qualities such as streamlined onboarding and provisioning, effective configuration, extensibility, and advanced analytics.
Provisioning helps ensure rapid deployment of applications, while configuration allows customization to meet specific business needs. Extensibility supports integration with other systems and applications, helping to enhance flexibility. Advanced analytics can provide real-time insights and predictive capabilities, empowering businesses to make data-driven decisions. These attributes can collectively drive efficiency, scalability, and security.
Extensibility and adaptability
SAP systems are highly flexible and configurable, which is why they’re widely used across industries and regions. Robust extensibility features allow customers, partners, and SAP’s own industry units to adapt and enhance the standard software to fit their unique requirements.
With SAP Business Suite, extensions are created for end-to-end scenarios with minimal time to value (TTV), total cost of implementation (TCI), and total cost of ownership (TCO). This enables:
Meta-data-driven, in-app extensions; full-stack, side-by-side extensions; and everything in between
A range from self-service key-user extensions to partner-implemented and -provided extensions
Building on the foundation of a unified extensibility across SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition and SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP)-based applications, a wizard for SAP Fiori apps templates and partner-customer reference apps for SAP BTP-based extensibility has been made available.
In addition, partners will have further options to help customers shorten the implementation time. Partners are enabled to package their own extensibility and deploy to multi-customer systems. SAP will also provide an option for partners to promote their own developments on SAP Store for both in-stack and side-by-side extensibility. This can give customers even greater choice to address their business needs.
Join a new era of enterprise management with SAP Business Suite
One further step toward extensions across the end-to-end scenarios of SAP Business Suite is to offer partner and customers true, process-based extensibility, where, for example, field extensibility can be defined consistently along the lead-to-cash process. In this process, customer-specific information can be added at the field-level in lead generation and propagated through the process into ordering and billing.
Common services
SAP Business Suite comes with harmonized document management, which helps enable the sharing of documents and a seamless data flow between the various applications of end-to-end processes that involve various lines of business. The shared attachment service leverages a single UI, which helps further enhance the consistency of the business applications while increasing efficiency. A single service for document management can further reduce the TCO.
Another good example for a central shared service is an AI-based inbound document processing platform for all application scenarios in SAP Business Suite. The application-specific consumption scenarios in lead-to-cash, for example, use the shared service of the SAP Document AI solution for automated document inbound processing during the sales order fulfilment process.
Unlike point solutions, SAP Business Suite helps with harmonizing fundamental compliance and security needs, which are required for audit readiness. The next-generation audit log service offers end users a consistent experience in viewing compliance and security audit log events across SAP Business Suite offerings via a centralized audit log viewer. This highly structured approach of the audit log service can provide several advantages and can better meet compliance and security requirements.
Cross-product analytics
Data products and intelligent apps are core to the value proposition of SAP Business Data Cloud (SAP BDC). They leverage SAP’s understanding of application data at the business process, industry vertical, and geographic level. They act as the one true source of SAP data for line-of-business applications, partners, and customers when working on application integration, AI, and analytics use cases.
SAP Business Suite will bring the experience to a new level, helping to ensure the needs of business users are addressed with intelligent apps for decision-making and actions. Intelligent apps—which are fed by various data products from relevant business domains—can provide comprehensive insight to the business user working in the context of end-to-end business process.
Seamless localization
SAP Business Suite helps ensure seamless localization along the end-to-end process scenarios of the packages, working to meet the unique needs and regulations of each country. These investments will continue across the entire suite, helping to ensure customer choice, regardless of where customers start their journey when opting for one of the packages.
SAP Activate supports your SAP Business Suite transformation journey
SAP offers proven methodologies to help facilitate business transformation to SAP Business Suite, tailored for new customers via GROW with SAP and for existing ERP customers via RISE with SAP.
These methodologies utilize composable SAP Activate road maps for various deployment types, including implementation, adoption, conversion, transition, and upgrades. Thousands of SAP customers employ these road maps during the various stages of their adoption of SAP Business Suite. The road maps are designed to assist customers in achieving their distinct transformation objectives. They help provide a clear starting point and can guide the project team towards the North Star destination of SAP Business Suite.
Customers starting their journey to SAP Business Suite can utilize a single road map or a combination of road maps covering the scope of their deployment to help guide the project team from receiving the initial environment, through the execution of fit-to-standard workshops, to successful go-live and adoption of innovations. This is enabled by the new capabilities for combining the SAP Activate road maps into one cohesive project plan during the initial project setup in SAP Cloud ALM.
Customers can leverage an integrated toolchain and well-defined quality checkpoints to help achieve the objectives of their unique journey. The integrated toolchain enables seamless execution with tools managing customers’ transformation, including SAP Signavio solutions, SAP Cloud ALM, and WalkMe solutions.
Get started now
Ready to dive deeper into the benefits of SAP Business Suite? In this interview, you’ll get additional insights on how to leverage the benefits of SAP Business Suite and what transitions could look like.
Want to learn more about SAP Business Suite? We’re offering a series of free webcasts, with content tracks tailored for different lines of business. Sign up!
Arpan Shah is SVP and head of Business Suite Product Management at SAP.
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În episodul 4 al seriei „Despre oameni și tehnologie” Adrian Crintea, Director Financiar al Premier Restaurants România, Teodor Porfireanu, SAP Portfolio Manager, NTT Data România și Claudiu Rada, Architecture Advisor SAP România discută despre proiectul de digitalizare din cadrul Premier Restaurants România, operatorul restaurantelor McDonald’s la nivel local. Episodul abordează subiecte precum evoluția McDonald’s în România și începuturile colaborării cu NTT Data și SAP, decizia de tranziție către o soluție de tip cloud, impactul digitalizării asupra experienței clienților sau rolul echipelor și al angajaților în succesul unui astfel de proiect.
Înregistrarea episodului a avut loc în luna februarie, 2025.
