Swarovski has followed its cloud transformation from 2023 with a global go-live of SAP Cloud ERP Private after choosing an exciting brownfield approach for the rollout. With its migration, the luxury brand is laying the foundation for using AI and for reaching its strategic targets by 2030.

Anyone who is looking for a prime example of how migration to the cloud can do far more than just simplification and standardization should take a closer look at Swarovski. The legendary manufacturer of precision-cut crystals, jewelry, and watches—with its origins in Wattens, in the Austrian region of Tyrol—has transformed its IT landscape from a cost factor into a strategic tool for a digital future.

The transformation was guided by Lea Sonderegger, serving in a dual role as CDO and CIO at Swarovski, with such great success that she was awarded the special “Cloud Excellence” prize in the large enterprise category at the CIO of the Year ceremony held by CIO Magazine last October.

The judging panel found her brownfield approach to be especially praiseworthy: Swarovski employees use SAP Cloud ERP Private but continue to use the familiar processes and databases. A complete redesign of these processes in parallel to the migration would have been too risky and cost-intensive. It would have also resulted in a much longer project duration, Sonderegger is convinced.

25,000 tests with 600 participants

The brownfield implementation was carefully executed. Preparations took two years and involved more than 600 participants performing around 25,000 tests. Two dress rehearsals with strict governance ensured that every function and every data point was ready for the migration.

Sonderegger and her colleagues reserved a 66-hour conversion window for the go-live on April 20, 2026. During this period, all global IT processes at Swarovski were paused. During the subsequent sensitive hypercare phase, 24×7 support ensured that any issues that arose could be dealt with quickly. Thanks to these measures, the transition was seamless. After the conversion window closed, all processes resumed without problems. 

Simplification and standardization ensure consistent data

Despite the large effort involved, this migration was merely the first step. While the switch to SAP Cloud ERP Private created the technical foundation, it’s the subsequent investments that deliver additional added value. These investments concentrate on the incremental reduction of complexity through consolidation of fragmented solutions, the reassessment of user-specific code, and the harmonization of data—all with the overall goal of creating a more coherent, easier-to-handle ERP landscape.

To achieve this, Sonderegger and her team are replacing user-specific applications with SAP standard solutions step by step and only leaving custom developments in place where they offer clear advantages. “The combination of simplification and a return-to-standard solutions improves data consistency, provides for robust, reliable processes, and, ultimately, makes our entire organization more agile,” Sonderegger says.

Cloud technology is not an end in itself

By integrating key functions such as finance, supply chain management, retail, and e-commerce—and enabling their combined use in the cloud—SAP Cloud ERP Private provides for reliable processes and consistent data quality all while enabling customer experiences on a wide variety of front-end solutions on this side of the ERP system.

SAP Cloud ERP Private manages a diverse product range at Swarovski across different regions and price points and integrates with the planning results provided by other SAP and non-SAP systems.

“In all of these activities, cloud technology is never an end in itself, but rather a lever for improving efficiency, resilience, and innovative capabilities,” Sonderegger says. This determination is especially important to her.

It’s not an IT project, it’s a business transformation

Ultimately, Sonderegger and her team succeeded in executing the project on time and on budget because its scope was clearly defined, and strict discipline in change management prevented mission creep. In addition, the company benefited from the experience of its implementation partner, SAP Consulting, and its unrestricted access to SAP expertise.

The example of Swarovski proves that even an essential, unavoidable migration can and should do much more than just avoid risks and cut maintenance costs. The implementation of SAP Cloud ERP Private was imperative here, because SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC) had reached the end of its lifecycle.

And the implementation is showing the luxury goods manufacturer the way to the future because everyone involved in the process didn’t just consider it to be an IT project but, above all, a business transformation from day one. One that involved hundreds of experts from different fields and that enjoyed full management support from the beginning.

AI-driven demand forecasts optimize warehouse stocks

Artificial intelligence is also playing a key role in this implementation, with SAP Cloud ERP Private as the operational backbone of an AI ecosystem that can deliver reliable, real-time data and robust, standardized transaction processes.

Swarovski doesn’t use artificial intelligence as a standalone technology, but instead as an integrated capability that complements business processes across all functions. The company is already using AI for demand forecasting, for example, and then uses the results to optimize warehouse stock levels across regions, with the aim of improving the customer experience.

And the AI agent factory initiative enables the development of AI agents that link SAP Cloud ERP Private data with data from non-SAP systems, always with the objective of “automating repetitive tasks, supporting decision-making, and boosting productivity along the entire value chain,” Sonderegger emphasizes.

Top image courtesy of Swarovski

With a record-breaking heatwave gripping the UK in late June, the “action” in London Climate Action Week 2026 needed no explanation. Much like the temperatures outside, the conversations inside intensified, and the soaring mercury served as a live stress test for the very subjects under discussion: infrastructure, public health, business continuity, and the resilience of the systems everyone depends on.

Under the official banner of Climate Cooperation in a Fractured World, delegates spread across the city and the tone was noticeably different from previous years. Fewer pledges, more blueprints. Less “what should we aim for,” more “who is going to finance and build it.”

Sustainability is a driver of growth

If there was a single reframing that ran through the week, it was this: sustainability is not a cost of growth, it is a driver of it.

That shift was visible in how decarbonization was discussed. Conversations that once centered on targets now centered on operations: Scope 3 emissions, value-chain engagement, procurement and logistics decisions, energy demand reduction. Practitioners repeatedly pointed to an “execution gap”—the distance between climate strategies on paper and projects that are actually permitted, financed, and built—and to the unglamorous work of unblocking infrastructure and untangling supply-chain bottlenecks as the real frontier.

Electrification gave the growth argument its clearest expression. The launch of the Electrify Now initiative, which aims to lift electricity’s share of final energy demand from roughly 20% today to 35% by 2035, was framed as an industrial strategy. Nearly doubling electricity’s share of energy demand in under a decade is an acceleration, and the week’s energy-transition summits were clear about what it demands: scaling renewables at pace, doubling down on energy efficiency, and, above all, building out the grid infrastructure to carry it. Speeding up permitting and resolving supply-chain constraints were named repeatedly as the bottlenecks that will decide whether the target is met. 

The heatwave outside made that case tangible. As cooling demand surges and extreme weather stresses networks, a clean, resilient electricity system is fast becoming a precondition for business continuity and not just decarbonization. UK-focused sessions highlighted the substantial clean energy investment flowing into the country since 2024 as evidence that the low-carbon economy is now a growth story in its own right. 

The same logic ran through the finance agenda. Sessions on moving from risk to resilience and from risk to opportunity focused on mobilizing capital for adaptation and climate-resilient infrastructure, and on the practical challenge of connecting available capital with investable projects through better data, governance, and pipeline development.

Nature is now on the agenda

Perhaps the most striking development of the week was where nature sat on the agenda, and where it is headed. Speakers were blunt about the underlying problem: our economic system is very good at valuing what we take from nature and very poor at valuing nature itself. Worse, we actively pay to destroy it. Figures cited during the week put global investment flows that harm nature at around US$7.5 trillion a year, against roughly $250 billion flowing into activities that help it. As one speaker put it, the task is not to lament that imbalance, but to get the economics right and to start treating nature as something that can be measured, managed, and steered with the same discipline as carbon or financial risk.

That “getting the economics right” is fast becoming a data challenge for business. Work such as the LSE’s research on the economics of landscape restoration suggests that investing in nature can generate returns comparable to investing in factories, railways, or other conventional infrastructure. As nature-related risks and opportunities are codified into emerging frameworks and regulation, companies will have to treat nature as a set of measurable data points: impacts and dependencies per site, per supplier, and per product line, rather than a one‑off narrative in a sustainability report.

Governments have levers too, from requiring companies to stress test for nature-related risk, to shaping incentives so that capital flows toward restoration rather than degradation. For corporate leaders, that translates directly into new categories of information that need to be captured and governed: nature‑related financial exposure, land use and biodiversity metrics, and nature‑positive investment pipelines. What was once an externality is quickly becoming a set of operational KPIs.

Sir Andrew Steer, professor at the London School of Economics, noted that this was the first year nature was represented at the event, but also how far it still has to travel: “Today here in the outdoor tent, next year in the big room.” The implication for businesses is that the organizations that move nature into their core data models and decision frameworks now are better positioned when this topic inevitably moves from the tent to the board agenda.

The AI warning: get sustainability data in now

Underpinning nearly every theme was data. Location-specific climate analytics were described as “the new lens” for understanding financial risk, and AI featured in almost every discussion of how organizations can gain visibility and control over complex energy, water, and supply chain systems.

But the sharpest point made during the week was a warning. As Stephen Jamieson, chief marketing officer of SAP Sustainability, put it: “If we don’t get sustainability data into AI right now, AI will optimize around it. AI works within the systems, the data, and the constraints you give it. If your sustainability priorities live only in documents and presentations rather than in your data and processes, AI will optimize confidently in entirely the wrong direction.”

The logic is uncomfortable, but hard to argue with. Sustainability now plays out at the transaction level—such as carbon cost per shipment, Scope 3 exposure per supplier, packaging compliance per SKU—and the volume, granularity, and pace of those requirements exceed what manual processes and fragmented tools can manage. An organization whose carbon tool cannot see its financial constraints, or whose supply chain system cannot see supplier regulations, hands its AI a broken map.

SAP’s answer to this is the Autonomous Enterprise: a maturity journey that starts with intelligence based on trusted, transparent data; moves to optimization where AI is weighing trade-offs across cost, risk, and sustainability impact in real time; and progresses toward autonomy, where sustainability rules are embedded directly into enterprise workflows and executed within defined guardrails. Sustainability stops being a reporting activity and becomes a governing factor in how decisions are made. The architecture choices organizations make now will determine whether that automation can scale safely later.

From the tent to the big room

London Climate Action Week 2026 closed with an uncomfortable message delivered in 35-degree heat: the climate is not waiting for business strategies to mature. But a hopeful signal surfaced, too: the growth case, the nature case, and the technology case for climate action are converging, and each is being made in the language of returns, resilience, and competitive advantage.

The task for business leaders is to bring those cases inside capital allocation, procurement, and the data and systems where decisions are actually made. The organizations that thrive will be the ones that move the sustainability agenda into the big room, before the next heatwave makes the argument for them.

For more information on scaling sustainability for your business, visit SAP Sustainability.

Monica Molesag is global head of Sustainability Communications at SAP.

At SAP, our mission has always been to help the world run better and improve people’s lives. Thousands of organizations worldwide rely on SAP’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) and other software to manage their most critical business operations—from corporate finance and human resources to supply chain management and project delivery.

Equally important to our customers are the on-premise maintenance and support practices that help safeguard the software’s ongoing performance and resilience, with regular updates and technical assistance that support business continuity.

As we continue to innovate across our portfolio, we also continue our efforts to let our commercial practices reflect the flexibility and transparency our customers need, and on engaging constructively with regulators around the world.

In a constructive dialogue with the European Commission, SAP has now agreed to a set of adaptations to these practices that will further improve this flexibility, transparency, and predictability. These measures reflect our broad commitment to continuously evolving our practices to serve customers better as their businesses and technology landscapes change.

Our updated policies will apply to all current and future SAP customers worldwide for all of SAP’s on-premise products. Taken together, they represent one of the most customer-friendly maintenance and support approaches in the business software industry, and they set a leading example of what customers can expect from SAP. This further flexibility will not come at cost of business continuity, reliability, and scale, of course.

Specifically, SAP is committed to the following adaptations:

Greater choice in maintenance and support

SAP understands that customers that run SAP on-premise software want the choice and flexibility to tailor their maintenance arrangements to match the way their business operates. In response, SAP is further enhancing how customers can organize their SAP system landscape by providing a clear, streamlined framework for splitting it into separate parts, known as commercial installations, for which customers can select different levels of SAP support, elect no support at all ,or make other choices outside of SAP Support for that particular installation. This gives organizations even greater ability to tailor their on-premise support arrangements across different parts of their SAP environment in a way that best fits their operational and commercial priorities, allowing them to scope their maintenance and support strategy to match their strategic positioning and unique business outlook.

Providing more flexibility on unused licenses

SAP already offers attractive programs to leverage unused licenses by reallocating on-premise licenses to cloud subscriptions, to other on-premise licenses, or simply to terminate them.

With additional commitments, SAP is offering even more flexibility to help customers terminate licenses, in objectively justified cases. This concerns severe workforce reductions, software products in customer specific maintenance, bankruptcy, divestiture, and implementation failure cases.

SAP is also expanding access to single-metric contracts, which provide an alternative and often simpler way of calculating license fees on which maintenance and support fees are based. Broader availability of these contracts will give customers an even more transparent and predictable basis for managing their ongoing costs. The maintenance and support fees for the single metric contract are scaling with the single metric, which allows better adjustment to changing business conditions.

Simpler contract terms and policies

Clarity in contractual terms and policies is essential for customers making long-term technology decisions. As part of these commitments, SAP will further clarify some of its key contractual provisions and applicable policies. This provides even greater predictability, ensuring that customers can plan their support obligations with full confidence as they expand their SAP deployments.

Easier terms for returning customers

When a customer returns to SAP maintenance and support, it benefits from the innovation and corrections that were deployed during that time. Our commitments introduce meaningful improvements to the terms for customers that resume SAP maintenance and support after a period of absence.

SAP will not charge any administrative fees for customers coming back and limit the back-maintenance fee to the minimum of six months or 50% of the fees for the time off. In addition, a defined set of outdated products will not trigger any back-maintenance at all. These improvements provide further confidence that returning to SAP maintenance and support will be straightforward and cost-effective.

All these commitments were developed in a close and constructive discussion with the European Commission, but also with SAP’s customer representatives, like the German-Speaking User Group (DSAG).

“From the perspective of DSAG member companies, this is an important step in the right direction. The provided flexibility will help more customers to make the right decisions regarding their SAP system architecture. Even with SAP’s cloud-based strategy, it is important to decide on your own how to proceed with systems that still have a positive impact on the company and there’s no need to shut them down,” said Jens Hungershausen, Chairman of the Executive Board of DSAG. “We see this development as the result of our effort to drive an ongoing dialogue and partnership between SAP and the customer community on such improvements. These commitments will deliver tangible benefits for customers and strengthen trust while keeping customer choice and flexibility at the center.”

Our teams are ready to help

To support a seamless experience for every customer, SAP account executives and customer-facing teams will be fully briefed on all the changes outlined above. They are equipped to walk customers through the details, answer questions, and apply these commitments in a fair, transparent, and predictable way. Whether a customer is looking to restructure their system landscape, explore single-metric contracts, terminate unused licences, or understand the improved terms for returning to SAP support, SAP teams stand ready to guide them through every step of the process. There will be a clearing structure set up by SAP in case a customer may contend the application of these new rules.

Looking ahead

At SAP, we are committed to empowering organizations with the enterprise software and services they need to thrive as they modernize toward an AI-enabled autonomous enterprise at their own pace. We champion customer choice and continuously work to maintain an open, vibrant ecosystem for our partners and customers alike. These commitments are the product of constructive and collaborative engagement with the European Commission, and they are designed to deliver real, meaningful benefits to our global customer base.

As noted above, these commitments relate to our on-premises maintenance and support services. Our cloud offerings continue to evolve through ongoing innovation in areas like SAP S/4HANA Cloud, RISE with SAP, and our broader cloud portfolio and are unaffected by these changes. However, the added clarity and flexibility support customers as they modernize toward an AI-enabled autonomous enterprise at their own pace

We believe these commitments establish a new benchmark for customer-friendly practices in the enterprise software industry.

For full details on the commitments, including the conditions for their application, please visit here.

The full text of the commitments as adopted by the European Commission is also available on the Commission’s competition website under case number AT.40823.

We look forward to continuing to support the success of our customers’ businesses in the future!

Stefan Steinle is executive vice president and head of Global Customer Support at SAP.

SAP’s internal IT organization—specifically its People Analytics team—acts as  “customer zero,” serving as the first adopter of new SAP products before they are introduced to the broader market.

Operating within a complex landscape that spans all aspects of ERP, including HR with SAP SuccessFactors HCM, SAP’s People Analytics team faced growing demand for HR data and insights—from HR, as well as Sales, Finance, and Operations. What started as a challenge soon became an opportunity for a more governed, self-service approach.

Centralized dashboards hit their ceiling

For years, SAP’s People Analytics function operated from a centralized model focused on the consumption layer: building, maintaining, and optimizing dashboards tailored to specific business requirements. The MyTeam Dashboard—a 360-degree view of workforce data available to every people manager at SAP, covering upcoming birthdays, salary, and performance information—became the company’s single most used report. That success was a testament to how much the business valued easy access and visibility into key HR data.

But it also revealed the limits of the model. As demand grew, the analytics team found itself permanently on the defensive, saying “no” far more than “yes,” managing backlogs of individual KPI additions, and negotiating timelines for incremental changes. Furthermore, data management, maintenance, and governance proved to be a challenge. The centralized dashboard approach could not scale to meet the breadth of data needs across an organization of SAP’s size and complexity.

The solution: using data products with People Intelligence in SAP Business Data Cloud

SAP IT made a strategic decision to shift the center of gravity in its analytics architecture, moving to govern and open up the data layer beneath the consumption layer. At the heart of this change is the data product, a managed asset that ingests data from systems, transforms it, and exposes it in a governed, reusable form so downstream analytics can rely on consistent, trusted building blocks.

Data products fall into two categories: primary data products, which are sourced directly from transactional systems, such as a job structure data product from SAP SuccessFactors HCM, and derived data products, which combine these primaries to answer broader questions. An example of this is a total employee and external workforce data product that fuses multiple sources into a single, harmonized view.

This is where People Intelligence in SAP Business Data Cloud became transformative for SAP’s People Analytics team. Rather than building all foundational HR data products from scratch, People Intelligence delivers a catalog of pre-built, SAP-tested data products and derived insights directly on top of SAP SuccessFactors HCM. Workforce composition insights alone include 69 data products, encoding hundreds of joins, tested and documented by SAP product teams, which is complexity that even AI-assisted modeling tools cannot yet reliably replicate without extensive testing and governance work.

SAP IT’s approach is deliberate: adopt SAP-delivered data products out of the box, build differentiating derived products on top, and free IT capacity for what actually differentiates and optimizes SAP’s HR processes.

Data sensitivity is also top of mind for the SAP team. With People Intelligence, the same data product is made available in multiple “flavors”—a full PII (personally identifiable information) view and a mini view with common company-visible information—helping to ensure the right data reaches the right consumer in the right format. This is especially useful with regards to Works Council’s sensitivity requirements of PII data. This data governance can help humans and agents work with the data in a compliant way.

“There is a meaningful difference between data you can trust and data sourced informally,” Oliver Huth, head of Platform, Corporate Functions, & Analytics at SAP, states. “Building that trust at scale is what the shift to data products—powered by People Intelligence in SAP Business Data Cloud—is making possible for our teams at SAP.”

What’s changed and what’s coming

The outcome for both IT and the business is clear. SAP IT populated its internal data product catalog rapidly, reaching the critical mass needed for broad adoption. HR data that was previously locked behind dashboard requests now powers use cases across functions. For SAP’s business teams, the outcome is faster time to insight. Pre-built intelligent content in People Intelligence serves as an 80% starting point for business conversations, replacing blank-sheet requirement gathering with focused discussions. Leaders and managers can also access personalized KPI views through MyMetrics, choosing a KPI, seeing an overview and AI summary, and jumping to the dashboard if additional information is needed. Users can also turn to Joule to ask questions in natural language and get replies with visualized charts. This pre-built, self-service approach has significantly reduced the volume of HR data inquiries and dashboard requests

SAP’s next steps for People Intelligence include recreating the MyTeam Dashboard by composing it from the readily available data products.

In addition, SAP IT is very excited to adopt AI agents that can operate directly on top of governed data products, querying a variety of data including employee, salary, and skills. As Huth notes, “Investing in a data product strategy is the essential first step. It is what enables governed data access and produces AI-ready models as a result.” SAP’s standard development teams are currently building Joule Assistants and Joule Agents, including a People Intelligence Assistant to be released in November 2026

Learning from SAP’s experience

For HR and people analytics teams facing growing data demand, fragmented access, and the pressure to deliver more with less, SAP IT’s experience offers a clear road map: adopt People Intelligence in SAP Business Data Cloud, use SAP-delivered data products out of the box, invest now in a governed data product architecture, and treat intelligent content as a starting point. This can improve analytics delivery today and is the infrastructure that will make AI agents trustworthy tomorrow.

Learn more about People Intelligence.