What Intelligent Technologies Make Up SAP’s Autonomous Enterprise?

Modern enterprise efficiency is defined by the speed of data-driven action. Seven core technologies make up the SAP Business AI architecture. Combined, they form a closed-loop system that allows the enterprise to see, think, act, and learn alongside its human counterparts.

Why Workforce Planning Matters in Manufacturing 👥 | SAP Connect 2026

Workforce planning is one of the biggest opportunities for improvement in manufacturing.

In this short Q&A, Dimitar Niklev shares how skills, qualifications, compliance, and real-time workforce visibility can help organizations move from reactive scheduling to proactive planning.

See how SAP solutions for HCM and manufacturing can help connect workforce insights with production needs, so teams can plan with more confidence and keep operations moving.

Learn more: https://sap.to/6056BHGhqY https://sap.to/6057BHGhql

#SAPConnect #BusinessAI #SAP

SAP Showcases the Autonomous Enterprise in Action

Just five months after promising customers that it would enable them to become AI-native autonomous enterprises, SAP has delivered: showcasing it with on-stage demos and live customers at SAP Connect in Las Vegas.

SAP Connect in 2026: Advancing the Autonomous Enterprise

“It’s time to show you the Autonomous Enterprise in action underpinned by great customer stories,” SAP CEO Christian Klein told his keynote audience at the start of the event.  

Klein reminded the audience that SAP introduced the Autonomous Enterprise at its SAP Sapphire conference in May 2026 as “the beginning of better.” Since then, he said, SAP has worked with hundreds of customers to implement Joule Work as the AI engagement layer for the Autonomous Enterprise. 

A new UI for AI 

“This month, we are rolling out Joule Work for all customers,” Klein said, describing it as a new UI for AI. He noted that for decades, users had to learn how SAP worked, but with Joule Work, SAP learns how people work. “From now on, the more than 400 million SAP users can talk in their own language to SAP, and Joule Work gets the job done.” 

How Tide Scales Growth with SAP Cloud ERP and YASH Technologies

Tide is preparing for its next stage of growth with SAP Cloud ERP, supported by implementation partner YASH Technologies.

As one of Europe’s fastest-growing fintech companies, Tide provides a digital financial platform that helps small businesses save time and money. To support continued expansion, Tide needed an ERP foundation built for scalability, standardization, integration, and security, without requiring another major software change as the business grows.

In this customer story, hear how SAP Cloud ERP helps Tide connect data across systems, streamline key finance processes, and stay current with cloud-based updates. You’ll also learn how YASH Technologies supported a fast implementation using SAP best practices, out-of-the-box capabilities, SAP Business Technology Platform, and standard API management to enable real-time data exchange across Tide’s application landscape.

Explore how SAP Cloud ERP can help growing businesses move faster with a secure, scalable ERP foundation:
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About SAP:
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The Operational Backbone of the Autonomous Enterprise

At SAP Sapphire earlier this year, SAP defined the role of its Business Transformation Management portfolio in the Autonomous Enterprise and SAP Business AI Platform: to apply process intelligence, enterprise architecture, digital adoption, and transformation execution as the operational backbone through which enterprises deploy, govern, and scale AI agents.

Today, at the SAP Transformation Excellence Summit in Atlanta, SAP unveils the latest innovations for SAP Signavio, SAP LeanIX, WalkMe, and SAP Cloud ALM to show how their integrated capabilities become the system on which enterprises can rely for end-to-end agent operations.

See your landscape clearly, improve how your processes run, and guide your people through every change

SAP Signavio expands AI capabilities and advances AI agent excellence

SAP Signavio is bringing AI deeper into every stage of process transformation while giving enterprises the foundation to run AI agents with confidence. Enterprises no longer question whether to use AI. They ask where it matters most, and how to trust the agents that act on their behalf. With its latest release, SAP Signavio answers on two fronts: building AI agents into every part of the suite to make transformation faster and more accessible, and helping organizations achieve AI agent excellence by giving their agents the knowledge and governance they need to deliver real value.

The latest release of the Process Consulting Agent introduces process mining capabilities, analyzing process performance data across SAP and non-SAP environments, surfacing bottlenecks, and recommending where agents can be applied to create the most value.

Knowing where to act is only the starting point. Realizing that potential requires processes that are designed for AI from the ground up. The re-designed SAP Signavio Process Modeler brings in AI-native process design, integrated governance, real-time collaboration, and suite-wide connectivity into a single canvas, making process modeling faster, more accessible, and built for the way transformation teams actually work.

Good process design sets the intent. SAP Signavio Process Intelligence closes the loop with AI-native and increasingly agent-driven analysis, providing an ever-more autonomous monitoring layer that watches how work runs and helps teams act on recommendations with confidence.

To enable agents to act on those recommendations within organizational context and guardrails, SAP Company Memory preview will offer both people and AI agents a single, consistent source of an organization’s rules, standards, and process know-how.

SAP Signavio provides the process intelligence layer where AI supports both the people analyzing processes and the agents acting on them. That leads to the question of the enterprise architecture underpinning AI agents.

Bring architecture intelligence to life with SAP LeanIX

Enterprise architecture has long been one of the most strategic functions in any organization, yet its value rarely travelled beyond the architecture team. SAP LeanIX is changing that by delivering architecture intelligence directly to the CIO making portfolio decisions, to the transformation office managing change at scale, and to the AI governance leads navigating an expanding agent landscape.

That requires architectural knowledge that is active, not just documented. The enterprise knowledge repository stores approved architecture principles, security standards, and technical decisions as governed knowledge that agents reason over, turning a documented standard into active context that shapes agent design and runtime behavior. The AI Enterprise Architect Assistant has been extended to combine live workspace data, industry benchmarks, and SAP best practices to support complex architecture decisions, with human judgment retained throughout.

The SAP AI Agent Hub provides the foundation for enterprise-grade AI governance, inventorying agents, large language models, and MCP servers across the enterprise, mapping them to capabilities and owners so governance becomes a continuous operational discipline. The new AI Governance Assistant embeds EU AI Act and NIST compliance intelligence directly into this inventory, automating risk classification and reassessing automatically when systems change.

As AI reshapes the enterprise faster than traditional governance can handle, SAP LeanIX shows that architecture intelligence is no longer purely reserved for the experts. It is the architectural backbone the whole business needs to move forward into the AI-native era with confidence.

But architectural confidence does not automatically become employee behavior. That gap is where the WalkMe portfolio operates.

Adoption and execution across every application

Transformation only delivers when people actually change how they work.

Three years into the enterprise AI era, the numbers make that gap painfully clear: Gartner research shows 87% of IT leaders say AI adoption has not happened automatically, and only eight percent of employees use enterprise AI in any meaningful way. That’s happening largely because AI still sits outside the flow of work. With the latest innovations announced today, WalkMe is closing that gap.

Contextual AI assistance proactively surfaces AI tools, including Joule Agents, assistants, and skills, directly where people are already working, across SAP and non-SAP applications. The right capability reaches the right person at the right moment, with the governance controls to manage what agents run, who can access them, and when they trigger.

But surfacing AI is only part of the answer. Agents still need to act, and much of the enterprise is not reachable through an API. WalkMe’s UI-native agent solves the connectivity problem by operating the interface itself, extending Joule’s reach into legacy systems, heavily customized ERP environments, and third-party applications that standard agent architectures simply cannot touch.

Two new capabilities sustain this at scale. AI Authoring lets teams describe the experience they want in plain language and generates a live, deployable plan. With AI Insights, leaders can query how workflows and content are performing and receive analysis, charts, and dashboards built from real data.

More than simply providing access to AI, its real business impact is felt when people start actually using AI, consistently, in the moments that count.

Sustaining that performance, from the first transformation project through live operations, requires one platform to govern the entire life cycle.

One life cycle, one governance model

The measure of agentic AI is what happens after deployment. SAP Cloud ALM governs the full journey: from managing cloud transformation end to end with AI assistants and Joule spanning system analysis, configuration, testing, and rollout. Once agents are live, its AI agent monitoring capability tracks every agent action so operations teams can confirm AI is working as designed, catch deviations before they compound, and demonstrate the business outcomes that justify the investment.

Business Transformation Management solutions from SAP drive the Autonomous Enterprise by operating as a system: SAP Signavio defines how work should run and measures whether agents are improving it; SAP LeanIX governs where agents operate and whether they can be trusted; WalkMe ensures people and agents can execute together across every application; SAP Cloud ALM governs the transformation and deployment life cycle, validating that agents are tested, trusted, and ready before they go live, and monitoring their performance in production to protect the outcomes the business invested in.

Business Transformation Management solutions from SAP are the system that keeps all of it in motion.


Andre Wenz is general manager and chief product officer for Business Transformation Management at SAP.

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Playing the Long Game: Why Team Liquid’s Race to World First Runs on SAP Business Data Cloud

In esports, success is often measured in milliseconds. A single decision can decide a match. Yet some competitions test far more than reaction speed and strategic execution. World of Warcraft’s Race to World First is one of those events.

SAP BDC Helps Team Liquid Optimize Player Performance

Unlike traditional esports tournaments that play out over a few hours, Race to World First pushes teams through days and sometimes weeks of continuous competition. Players face extreme cognitive load, limited recovery time, and the constant pressure to execute flawlessly against the most complex encounters ever designed in gaming. At that level, performance is no longer just about mechanics. It’s about endurance. And endurance creates a data challenge.

Performance analytics beyond the game

Over the last several years, Team Liquid has become one of the most innovative organizations in esports.

Together, we have built data platforms, advanced analytics capabilities, and AI-powered solutions such as Joule Agents that help players, analysts, and coaches access insights faster than ever before. As we discussed our next innovation journey with the team, one question emerged quickly: What if coaches could see not only how players are performing in the game, but also how they are performing as human beings?

Historically, game statistics, biometric measurements, and wellness data were often analyzed independently, limiting the ability to understand how they influence one another. Therefore, the next evolution of esports analytics is not collecting more data. It is connecting data.

For Race to World First, we helped Team Liquid bring gameplay analytics, player wellness information, and biometric signals from wearable devices together in SAP Business Data Cloud—and relationships that were previously difficult to identify became visible.

This sounds simple, but it fundamentally changes how coaching decisions are made.

SAP Recognized as a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for HCM Suites for 1,000+ Employees for the 11th Consecutive Time

For the 11th consecutive time, SAP is recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud HCM Suites for 1,000+ Employee Enterprises. 

We believe this recognition reflects our ongoing commitment to helping organizations navigate an increasingly complex world of work through innovation, global scale, and AI that helps connect workforce decisions to business outcomes. 

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request here.

A new era of HCM 

Organizations today face unprecedented workforce challenges.

Turn HR into a strategic growth engine with Autonomous HCM

Skills requirements are evolving rapidly. Workforces are becoming increasingly distributed. Business priorities shift faster than traditional planning cycles can accommodate. At the same time, leaders are being asked to make workforce decisions with greater speed, precision, and confidence. As these pressures increase, the role of HR and HCM technology is fundamentally changing.

Organizations no longer need systems that simply record workforce data or automate HR processes. They need connected, intelligent systems that can help anticipate workforce needs, surface recommendations, remove friction from everyday work, and help people make better decisions. This is why we announced our vision for Autonomous HCM at SAP Sapphire in May.

As part of SAP’s broader vision for the Autonomous Enterprise, Autonomous HCM brings together trusted workforce and business data, embedded intelligence, AI, and HR processes to help organizations respond more effectively to changing workforce needs. The goal is not simply to automate more tasks. It’s to help organizations understand what’s happening, determine what to do next, and execute with greater speed and confidence. Achieving this requires trusted workforce and business data working together to provide the context needed for better decisions and better outcomes. 

Bringing Autonomous HCM to life

Over the past year, SAP has continued to invest in capabilities designed to help organizations move more seamlessly from workforce insight to workforce action. From new Joule and AI agents to People Intelligence in SAP Business Data Cloud and SAP SuccessFactors Enterprise Service Management, these capabilities help connect workforce intelligence, decision-making, and execution across HR processes. Our acquisition of SmartRecruiters extends this approach to talent acquisition, helping connect hiring decisions to workforce planning, skills intelligence, and the broader employee lifecycle. Next month at Success Connect at SAP Connect, we’ll share new innovations and customer stories that further demonstrate how SAP SuccessFactors can help organizations automate work, adapt more quickly to change, and drive better workforce outcomes, ultimately moving towards Autonomous HCM.

Creating measurable impact

Organizations around the world are already working towards this reality.

Timken has embedded AI capabilities within SAP SuccessFactors solutions to support employee development, goal setting, recruiting, and career conversations. By giving employees and managers access to AI-assisted tools and insights, Timken is simplifying HR processes, improving employee development conversations, and enabling more informed workforce decisions.

Darussalam Assets is demonstrating how AI can help organizations move from workforce insight to workforce action. With SAP SuccessFactors solutions, the company has streamlined recruiting processes across more than a dozen industries, reducing recruitment duration by 75% and improving hiring efficiency fourfold. AI-generated job descriptions, competency-based interview questions, and workforce insights are helping create a more efficient, consistent, and skills-based approach to talent management.

These examples demonstrate an important shift. AI is no longer limited to providing information. It’s helping employees, managers, and HR teams make better decisions and take action more quickly and effectively.

Looking ahead

We are grateful to our customers whose continued trust and innovation make this recognition possible.

As we look ahead, our focus remains on helping organizations connect workforce insight with action, enabling leaders to make better decisions, respond more quickly to change, and create better outcomes for employees and the business. Learn more about our position in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for HCM Suites for 1,000+ Employee Enterprises.


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Gartner, Magic Quadrant for HCM Suites for 1,000+ Employee Enterprises, By Josie Xing, Ranadip Chandra, Ron Hanscome, Sam Grinter, Kate Jensen, Anand Chouksey, 31 August 2026 
Gartner does not endorse any company, vendor, product or service depicted in its publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s business and technology insights organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this publication, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. 
Gartner and Magic Quadrant are trademarks of Gartner, Inc., and/or its affiliates. 

AI-Powered Memory Games Bring Personal Stories into Dementia Care

A favorite vacation spot. A childhood neighborhood. A beloved pet. A lifelong hobby. For someone living with dementia, as memory and communication become more difficult, these details can turn into powerful prompts, sparking memories, stories, and joyful moments of connection.

Memory Lane Games has long used frustration-free, quiz-style games to create these connection moments for people living with Alzheimer’s and dementia. Now, with help from SAP and EY, the organization is exploring how AI can personalize its games at scale.

“What we saw, as AI was coming in, was that we could take two or three more steps to really personalize the experience and trigger positive memories for each individual,” Bruce Elliott, CEO and cofounder of Memory Lane Games, says. “But, as a six-person startup on the Isle of Man, a little island in the middle of the Irish Sea, it was a daunting task. We had a brilliant vision, but to bring it together we needed support.”

Collaboration for good

Through the MovingWorlds’ platform, Memory Lane Games collaborated with SAP and EY to move beyond generic reminiscence content, creating an AI prototype that is designed to help transform personal details, family photos, and life experiences into memory games.

This project was part of Scaling AI for Good, a MovingWorlds cooperation between SAP, EY, and Microsoft that provides social enterprises—that often have limited resources, complex technical needs, and a lack of access to partners—with strategic coaching, pro-bono consulting, expert-led workshops, and access to a global partner ecosystem at no cost.

For employees at companies like SAP and EY, these engagements are equally transformative. Real-world problem-solving with social enterprises is among the most effective forms of experiential learning, helping to develop skills that benefit both the individual and the organization.

Through this program, Memory Lane Games gained access to the technical support needed to explore how generative AI could deepen personalization in its games. To start, the project team—Wade Tsai, global client technology architecture leader at EY, and SAP developers Robin Baeurle and Michael Zadikowitsch—looked at what the organization had done in the past and how it could be transformed by generative AI. The intersection of personalization and images was where the team landed.

Pro-bono consulting: good for the world and for the people doing the work

SAP’s investment in programs like Scaling AI for Good is rooted in a simple belief: we want to bring out the best in our people and we want to bring our best to the world. Over the last decade, thousands of SAP employees have generated more than €30 million in in-kind social investment, partnering with social enterprises across more than 60 countries. Eighty-five percent of those social enterprise partners report an increased ability to serve their beneficiaries, and 88% of participating SAP employees say the experience sparked new ideas they brought back to SAP. Pro-bono consulting isn’t a side program; it is experiential learning at scale, and a core part of how SAP is building a skills-led organization.

Turning memories into personalized games

The foundation of the project team’s prototype is a persona profile that the AI can reference. A caregiver or loved one creates a profile for the person living with dementia with basic information like age bracket, gender, first language, places they’ve lived, what they did for work, and cultural background as well as other details like past vacations, favorite foods, hobbies, pets, and more. The goal is to capture the culture of the individual, not personal data. Using that persona profile, the AI suggests topics and then generates games by pulling in open-source images and writing multiple-choice questions.

For example, a demo of the Memory Lane Games prototype showed the creation of a persona profile of a 75-to-80-year-old woman who lived in Savannah, Georgia, was an elementary school teacher for 35 years, vacationed on Hilton Head Island and in the Blue Ridge Mountains, had a tabby cat named Magnolia, and enjoys Motown and soul music, gardening, birdwatching, and cooking Southern classics like pecan pie and shrimp and grits. The AI prototype generated several games for her: Savannah’s Historic Squares, Blue Ridge Mountain Getaways, Savannah’s Southern Kitchen Favorites, and Magnolia the Cat and Backyard Birds.

The AI prototype recommends topics for games after reading the persona profile.
An AI-generated game based on the persona profile.

“At the start, we didn’t know how to solve this problem of extracting metadata from images, or even how to collect images, where to find them, and how to create these games,” Zadikowitsch says. “And then we started experimenting and trying things out—generating questions and then finding images, which didn’t work well, then finding images and then generating questions, which worked better.”

The prototype is currently in the testing stages. Once it is deployed, there is the possibility to expand game personalization with photos submitted by a caregiver or loved one.

Tsai explains that current AI models can identify objects in images, but directing them to extract metadata and EXIF data, which contains the exact date, timestamp, and GPS coordinates indicating when and where the photo was taken, can take it a step further.

The layers of information stored within a photo file can be a treasure trove for Memory Lane Games’ AI prototype. “We can use that information as a hint to extrapolate what else we can pull from the surroundings that could help reshape that memory experience,” Tsai says. “It’s going beyond where that photo is taken.”

AI with tangible human impact, not just productivity gains

While the AI prototype helps Memory Lane Games create personalized games more efficiently, its greater promise is human: helping people living with dementia and loved ones connect through joyful memories.

“Often in the context of AI, the typical audience is people working at other companies, not, for example, people with dementia,” Baeurle says. “There’s a lot of potential that goes to waste in not realizing that these audiences can also benefit from digital solutions and, specifically, AI-powered solutions.”

For the project team, that human outcome was the guiding principle. “Whatever we build, it should spark joy,” Baeurle adds.

“Caregivers are really busy. Family members are really busy. Care staff in care homes are very busy. If we can take one photo from a family and a couple lines of text and create six to 10 questions that can really pull out all of those memories, trigger a positive memory, and start those wonderful stories—that’s what [this collaboration] has been able to help us deliver,” Elliott says.

AI makes it possible to create memory games not only about a city, but about a neighborhood, a local landmark, or another detail closely tied to someone’s life. The more personal the prompt, the more likely it is to encourage conversation and connection.

“We know that social isolation is one of the top modifiable risks for dementia in older age, so the more we can get people talking and those neurons firing, just by letting them talk about something they want to talk about, is powerful,” Elliott says.

The future of AI-enabled memory care

What this collaboration between Memory Lane Games, SAP, EY, and MovingWorlds showed is that AI has a place in memory care. “The team demonstrated that AI can help create engaging [memory] games. I think this was the goal,” Zadikowitsch says.

This achievement was recognized at the United Nation’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) AI for Good Global Summit this summer, after Tsai won the “AI for Good for Entrepreneurship” category in EY’s inaugural AI for Impact Challenge with this Memory Lane Games project.

The project team is confident that this is just the beginning for AI-enhanced memory care and has already come up with more use cases: an AI companion optimized for dementia that runs on speech-based interfaces and emotional and voice intelligence, adding more languages since dementia patients often revert to their first language, and using generative AI to create images of places for which no photos exist.

“We’ve always taken a very simple yet scalable approach. And this [project] has taken both of those: kept it simple for the user but made it infinitely scalable. And I think that’s where the real magic of AI is,” Elliott says. “AI is the key to us scaling, and we needed this collective help, this collaboration, in order to test those interesting hypotheses. And we’ve seen positive early results.”

For Memory Lane Games, that magic is not technology for technology’s sake. It is the possibility of helping more people reconnect with the stories, places, and people that make life feel familiar and spark joy.

MovingWorlds has supported more than 3,000 successful projects across 110 countries, unlocking more than $50 million in pro-bono consulting expertise for social enterprises. If you are a social enterprise in need of skilled support in AI or another line of business, apply for support on the MovingWorlds’ platform. 


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Connecting Cargo: How Live Positioning Is Streamlining Supply Chains

Hapag-Lloyd has equipped 2 million shipping containers with tracking devices that transmit location data in real time. SAP uses this data in its ERP systems to help businesses identify potential delays and adjust their production schedules accordingly. Carriers, buyers, and production planners all over the world are benefiting.

Managing logistics operations has become increasingly challenging in recent years. The coronavirus pandemic and its repercussions caused unprecedented disruption across global supply chains, and today, hostilities in the Strait of Hormuz are severely hindering shipping traffic.

Gain supply and delivery assurance by tracking orders and shipments in real time

In situations like these, the only option many companies have to protect their manufacturing and delivery timelines from delays and uncertainties is to carry larger inventories. This inevitably leads to higher costs.

Now, a combination of container tracking technology and real-time data is revolutionizing supply chain visibility, enabling businesses to keep their inventories at efficient levels. Hapag-Lloyd, the world’s fifth-largest shipping company, provides live position data for its containers. SAP uses this information in its ERP systems and SAP Business Network Global Track and Trace cloud solution, connecting it to the shipment and material data that is stored there. Which means that, as well as being an SAP customer, Hapag-Lloyd is an SAP supplier and partner, too.

Karsten Schmidt, director and product owner of the Live Position and Track & Trace tools at Hapag-Lloyd, and Sven York Pohl, chief expert for Digital Adoption at SAP SE, discuss how the collaboration between the companies began, how it is benefiting users already, and what opportunities lie ahead.

Q: Tracking technology has advanced rapidly in recent years. What sparked the wave of innovation we’ve seen here?

Pohl: During the coronavirus pandemic, we experienced serious delays in the movement of goods and materials. And we realized that logistics processes need to be much more transparent.

Schmidt: Until recently, we could only track certain milestone events in sea shipping, such as a container arriving at a port or being loaded onto a ship. We knew when a container had been loaded onto a ship or when it left the Port of Hamburg, but if it failed to arrive in Munich as planned, we had no way of knowing what had happened to it.

Q: So how do you track containers today?

Schmidt: After the pandemic, we decided to equip all our dry containers with IoT tracking devices that continuously transmit location data. By mid-2024, we had fitted these devices to 90% of our container fleet. Since then, we have been able to track more than 2 million containers worldwide and provide position data every 15 minutes for shipments on land—and every six hours for shipments by sea. This means that our customers can check the precise location of “their” containers online in real time.

Q: How did the collaboration between Hapag-Lloyd and SAP begin?

Pohl: I was involved in an SAP transformation project at Hapag-Lloyd, which meant I had frequent meetings with Karsten. We realized early on that position data had immense potential, both for Hapag-Lloyd as a shipping company and for its customers. If you know exactly when an intermediate product will arrive, or how many days late it will be, you can plan your downstream production steps with pinpoint precision. And this obviously works best if position data is visible not only on a separate website, but also in the applications you use to manage your production and other business processes. So Karsten and I began discussing how we could feed position data into SAP ERP systems.

Q: Which SAP applications use this data?

Pohl: The SAP Business Network Global Track and Trace cloud solution offers companies transparent shipment information in real time along the entire supply chain. And it enables this data to be embedded natively in back-end systems. Which means, for example, that you can integrate automated alerts directly into SAP S/4HANA that show where a container is currently located. The data can also be leveraged in SAP’s cloud-based supply chain collaboration platform, SAP Business Network for Logistics, to seamlessly connect shippers with logistics services providers and carriers. And, aside from ensuring visibility, real-time data such as that provided by Hapag-Lloyd maximizes supply chain security and drives sustainability by enabling businesses to track materials from their source to the finished product.

Q: Who benefits most from Hapag-Lloyd’s tracking data?

Schmidt: Logistics managers, definitely. Because they need precise information about where their containers are located and when they will arrive. The tracking data also provides insights into how sustainable a transportation chain is. Warehouse planners benefit too, because they can keep inventory levels as low as possible, without them dropping too low. And as well as enabling carriers to plan their routes with maximum efficiency, tracking data can also help streamline and optimize payment processes.

Q: Would you say that the current conflict in the Middle East has highlighted the value—and necessity—of using tracking technology to plan shipping routes?

Schmidt: Absolutely. A huge number of containers have been transported from the Persian Gulf across Saudi Arabia to the Red Sea port of Jeddah to be shipped on from there. Our container tracking solution keeps me constantly updated on the land route I have chosen and on where my container is currently located.

Q: What happens if the container is held up somewhere? How does the system help?

Schmidt: That’s what we’re working on right now. Usually, when customers want to know where their container is, they call our customer service number. But with 15,000 containers held up in the Persian Gulf, we were unable to handle the sheer volume of inquiries we received by phone. So we gave all our customers access to our live positioning service, even those who had not booked it. The solution we implemented to deal with this exceptional situation showed us the potential that was there going forward to simplify our customers’ processes—and our own.

Pohl: Looking ahead, SAP users will be able to ask their software what options they have when shipments get held up, and what alternative modes of transportation are available to them.

Schmidt: If, for example, a ship is delayed and misses its scheduled rail connection, the system will provide a predictive service, telling the user whether onward transportation by truck is possible and how much longer the journey will then take.

Pohl: We will also use Joule, the flagship AI brand that is built into SAP’s cloud portfolio, for this service, so that users will be able to ask AI to suggest specific actions.

Schmidt: Obviously, when goods are transported over long distances, and especially by sea, you can never rule out delays entirely. But what we can do is remove that feeling of helplessness and of having no room to maneuver when events occur that are out of my control.

Hapag-Lloyd container tracking

  • Hapag-Lloyd has equipped 2 million standard containers with IoT tracking devices that transmit their current position in real time.
  • Customers can constantly monitor the position of their shipments online.
  • SAP integrates position data into its SAP Global Track and Trace cloud solution and embeds it in its cloud ERP back-end systems.
  • Looking ahead, when shipments are delayed, these systems will proactively suggest alternatives and recommended actions.
  • Joule will also help users make informed decisions that support efficiency in the supply chain.

Top image via Hapag-Lloyd

What Is the SAP Digital Payments Add-On?

The digital payments add-on was introduced in 2017, as a cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering, hosted on SAP BTP.

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