WALLDORF — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today launched new cloud capabilities for SAP Product Lifecycle Management (SAP PLM) solutions. In a strategic co-innovation with Hilti AG, a leading global provider of products and services for the construction industry, SAP is helping customers connect their business data to both engineering and research and development departments, enabling businesses to be more efficient and save money.

The new capabilities of SAP PLM solutions include native connectivity with SAP cloud ERP solutions and supply chain management solutions from SAP. This connectivity enables businesses to deliver the right product at the right time at the right price by providing end-to-end visibility and control across the entire value chain. By smoothly linking product data with business processes, companies can efficiently organize product information, streamline workflows and foster cross-functional collaboration, ultimately enhancing their ability to meet market demands. Leveraging partnerships with DSC Software AG, Cideon and others, the solution also integrates with third-party product data management and computer-aided design tools, shrinking implementation times.

“Integration is critical for companies modernizing their manufacturing strategies and operational processes,” said Dominik Metzger, head of engineering for SAP Digital Supply Chain. “Collaborating with Hilti not only demonstrates their trust in our product lifecycle management solutions but also allows us to shape the future of cloud-native SAP PLM offerings.”

A centralized repository for product data management is embedded directly into the SAP PLM portfolio, serving as a single source of truth. This simplifies data organization, minimizes errors and accelerates time to market by fostering effective teamwork across various stakeholders.

“By leveraging cloud-native SAP PLM solutions, we are not only enhancing our product development processes for customer-specific products, but we are making construction better,” said Johann Stadler, head of large projects IT for Hilti.

Hilti, operating in over 120 countries, has been at the forefront of innovation with a comprehensive range of construction products. The company has embarked on its next phase of digital transformation by adopting SAP PLM to bring unprecedented levels of efficiency and transparency to its product development processes, providing customers specifically engineered and on-demand prefabricated products.

Learn more about cloud-native SAP PLM solutions here or watch the SAP PLM Keynote 2024.

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Fratelli Branca Distillerie is the maker of Fernet-Branca, a uniquely flavorful bitter liquor with a legendary backstory that galvanizes its revered status as Argentina’s unofficial drink. Whether served neat or con coca (with soda), Argentinians simply can’t get enough of this iconic liquor and consume the most of all Fernet-Branca produced globally. In addition, Fernet-Branca’s loyal following in the international bartending community has boosted its popularity as the go-to drink at shift handover: the “bartender’s handshake.”

Fernet-Branca originated in Italy in 1845 as the creation of herbalist Bernardino Branca, who intended it as a medicinal digestif. Produced from a secret recipe of herbs, flowers, roots, and spices – thought to include saffron, rhubarb, myrrh, and artichoke – the drink remains popular for its many curative properties.

While the strong bitterness and unique flavor is arguably an acquired taste for most, sales of Fernet-Branca remain robust for global producer Fratelli Branca Distillerie, headquartered in Italy with production plants in both Italy and Argentina and from there they export to other countries.

Gaston Vega, director of IT at Fratelli Branca Distillerie in Argentina, summarizes the brand’s success: “In the last three years, counting until 2023, Fratelli Branca has been exceeding the sales level every year – meaning that each year of the last three, from 2021 to 2023, was a record.”

But with such success comes pressure to meet rising demand. For many years, Fratelli Branca in Argentina relied on a patchwork of outdated tools and time-consuming manual methods for its customer relationship management (CRM). To become a world-class, sales-driven organization, Fratelli Branca needed to carry out a digital transformation to modernize and automate its CRM processes for improved efficiency. But first, it urgently required an internal champion who could devote time to investigate the technology market and introduce new digital solutions. Vega, who had only recently joined the company in 2022 after many years in the consumer products industry, came to a disquieting realization: “In the mass consumption sector, the truth is we were quite behind,” he says. “There were many opportunities for automation, digitalization, and technology modernization.”

Valuing a Tradition of Continuous Innovation

For more than 175 years, Fratelli Branca has honored the company motto “Novare serbando” – a Latin phrase that means to keep innovating while respecting tradition. This commitment to continuous innovation is evident in the broad portfolio of premium beverages that the company produces, including many brand-name brandies, liquors, vermouths, vodkas, and whiskies.

Now it was time for the sales organization to champion this commitment to innovation through its digital transformation. Would the team be ready for a new way of working? Yes, Vega says: “When I raised the idea of implementing a CRM, I had the unconditional and absolute support of the sales director and the entire commercial area.”

With key stakeholders in agreement, Fratelli Branca evaluated a range of CRM solutions on the market. It chose SAP based on best performance, value, and ease of integration with the organization’s existing SAP enterprise resource planning software. “SAP Customer Experience solutions won in that bid for different reasons: first, we liked the application better, for cost, for different reasons,” Vega says, explaining that “basically, the need arose from automation. Many very manual processes were being done here. The sales order system was obsolete, almost unsupported. That was why we looked for an application like this.”

The sales team participated in the demo sessions and asked detailed questions to gain an in-depth understanding of how the new SAP solution could enhance productivity. “It is an application that they really liked from the first moment,” Vega says. “They thought it was super agile, super versatile, and that it was going to bring them many benefits. Reducing their manual and administrative tasks meant that they gained productive time. So, that’s a very big benefit.”

SAP Sales Cloud: Optimizing Each Customer Interaction for Improved Profitability

SAP Sales Cloud is an advanced CRM solution that helps sales-driven organizations maximize customer interactions and profit margins simultaneously. Using a data-driven approach, the solution expedites a comprehensive strategy to help optimize sales, customer service, and marketing operations. The integration of AI features can enable sales representatives to turn data into actionable insights to help enhance customer engagement, drive customer retention, and ultimately increase sales.

SAP Sales Cloud’s success can also be attributed to its versatility and adaptability; it can be seamlessly integrated into an organization’s existing IT infrastructure without interrupting routine workflow.

Dynamic and Strong Support Drives Project Success

To ensure project success, Fratelli Branca chose global consultancy Avvale, an SAP partner with a proven track record in helping clients accelerate value from digital transformation of core technologies. The work chemistry with Avvale was an important consideration, Vega says: “We have a great dynamic with them. They are people who understood very well what we needed and did not try to go a different path. They recommended things to us; we adopted them. So, that was the first milestone.”

Also, SAP continued to monitor the project’s progress, so Fratelli Branca was never alone or stuck for answers. “SAP obviously sold us the product, it sold the licenses, but it never stopped accompanying us in the implementation,” Vega says. 

With a strong team and stakeholder support, the implementation of SAP Sales Cloud, including the SAP Emarsys Customer Engagement platform, proceeded quickly, so that within five months, Fratelli Branca was ready to introduce the new CRM solution to the sales team. The implementation team knew that selecting highly motivated key users would be necessary to ensure acceptance and spur adoption. “When you bring a new tool that no one knows about, finding the key user who is your internal partner is essential,” Vega says. “Luckily, we had that commitment on the side of the key users.”

Real-Time Data Access with Mobile-Ready Solution

With a host of powerful capabilities for sales teams, SAP Sales Cloud offers a mobile-ready solution to help meet the needs of a remote and traveling workforce, meaning that salespeople can have immediate access to critical data and analytics from anywhere. For the sales team at Fratelli Branca, access to real-time information while in the field has been a game-changer.

With sales coverage responsibility for the entirety of Argentina – from rugged Patagonia in the south to the wine-growing region of Cuyo in the west and the sunny wetlands of the Argentine Littoral in the northeast – Fratelli Branca’s sales team is on the go to meet customers, take sales orders, check invoices, and monitor sales progress. Now equipped with tablet computers and mobile phones, the team is achieving new levels of efficiency, as they can better perform their work in the field. “[It’s] everything that a CRM gives you and in a super agile way,” Vega says. “Imagine that we went from almost prehistory to modernity.”

Fratelli Branca continues to evolve its use of the new digital solution to further automate sales processes and eliminate onerous manual and repetitive tasks. One of the features it plans to implement is a survey module that can save photographs at the point of sales – usually a bar or restaurant – and gather important sales-related information about pricing and competitor data.

Overall, Vega describes the adoption of SAP Sales Cloud as “super positive, with always good positive comments. The truth is that I never had a complaint.” He notes that previously the “sales team was manual and today they are digitalized; you clearly notice that the sales team and the directors value precisely this greater efficiency [from] having digitized certain processes.”

The intelligent automation revolution has arrived. According to a recent report from McKinsey & Co, this is the third wave of digitization and generative AI, in which businesses can add new unstructured content to analytical AI’s structured data capabilities. This means we see massive productivity gains for businesses, especially regarding their finance operations.

For the CFO and their teams, there is a wealth of opportunity here, but also not inconsiderable risk. The best CFOs are masters of balancing risk with opportunity; those who can do it well right now have an immense opportunity to write a new playbook for AI leadership. That’s because effective AI strategies involve more than just tools. They require a strong sense of where the business value lies and a keen sense for ensuring every technology investment has a clear return for the business — all things savvy CFOs have in abundance.

Two areas that stand out are payments and cash flow management. Recent research from Gartner compared organizations it saw as leading the way with successful AI strategies and implementations with their competitors. The study revealed that 46% of organizations with the most successful AI implementations leverage AI in customer payment forecasting, illustrating the vast potential for AI in this space.

But it’s not just about forecasting accuracy. It has been estimated that as much as $44 trillion is locked in global supply chains at any time. Accessing these funds, or at least ensuring they are working as efficiently as they can for you, can go a long way in helping you invest, expand, or diversify. McKinsey ranks enhanced working capital management as one of the top three areas for AI investment, alongside predictive cash flow forecasting and growth prioritization/M&A targets.

The real game-changer is the natural language-based tools and the capabilities to generate thorough financial scenarios. For example, you could ask, “What are my options to ensure the Board has the $750 million needed to make that acquisition or R&D investment in the year’s second half? What are the three best scenarios to ensure we achieve a free cash flow of $500 million in Q4 of this year?”

Assuming you have the data, the combination of predictive and generative AI will give you the analysis you need and the narrative to provide a clear pathway to your business goal.

Another opportunity is around fraud detection. Electronic payments are standard in many countries and supply chains are increasingly complex, which means the threat of fraud is increasing. AI can detect unusual patterns from typical transaction profiles, minimizing the rejection of legitimate transactions and maximizing the accuracy of fraudulent payments.

Automation is also an area that is ripe for significant leveling up. The future of payments powered by AI strives for complete autonomy, from predicting future incoming payments based on behavioral patterns to independently initiating dispute management in the event of non-payment to automated incoming payment reconciliations.

When we talk about AI’s transformative abilities, the most significant benefit is its ability to support continuous optimization. Whether it’s benchmarking against industry peers, risk modeling, or analyzing supplier behavior to optimize payment, the ability of AI tools to absorb and analyze vast amounts of data and generate scenarios in a multitude of forms gives you the power to act faster, with greater cost efficiency and insight.

Of course, it’s not just the technology that delivers the difference; it’s the combination of technology, financing partners, and processes. AI tools are most effective in the hands of a team that understands how to use them and has the processes in place to enable them to be used effectively. They also require access to vast amounts of data, internal and external.

For many businesses, the most effective and least risky investment is in platforms and technology tools that already have AI capabilities built in and in the people who know how to leverage them.

There is no doubt that the potential for everyone is significant. The early evidence suggests that those who have taken the plunge and are investing strategically are already reaping the benefits.

It points to a future full of incredible opportunities ahead and we are really excited about it!

Scott Russell is chief revenue officer and a member of the Executive Board of SAP SE.
Cedric Bru is CEO of Taulia.

This story also appeared on SAP BrandVoice on Forbes.