The HARTING Technology Group has established itself as a pioneer in sustainability and a leading provider of connectivity solutions for industrial technologies. With the implementation of SAP Sustainability Footprint Management, part of the SAP Sustainability portfolio, HARTING has automated and scaled CO₂ emission calculations for 13,000 materials.
This data-granular, verifiable, one-click solution supports the company on its path to carbon neutrality by 2030.
Challenges and opportunities
HARTING faced the challenge of finding a reliable method to calculate CO₂ emissions across thousands of production materials while meeting customer and supplier expectations regarding sustainability. Leveraging its existing ERP application landscape with SAP and maintaining established green production and renewable energy processes were crucial.
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“Conducting our business and protecting the environment are not mutually exclusive. We are convinced that we must consider both to be successful in the long run,” says Dietmar Harting, member of the Board and partner of the HARTING Technology Group.
Innovations for a sustainable future
Considered the connectivity gold standard across various industrial sectors, HARTING required a robust system to accurately assess emissions. SAP Sustainability Footprint Management can automate data collection, scale emission calculations, and create CO₂ transparency throughout the supply chain. “The key to communicating our CO₂ emissions transparently and recognizing potential for reduction lies in the automated calculation and granularity of the data provided by SAP Sustainability Footprint Management,” explains Dr. Stephan Middelkamp, general manager, Quality and Technology at HARTING.
This solution enables HARTING to provide real-time, granular data to support the “GreenLine” label, an environmentally sustainable designation highlighting renewable materials offering up to a 70% CO₂ reduction.
Strengthening sustainable production
With SAP Sustainability Footprint Management, HARTING can now precisely calculate and report product carbon footprints. This capability is essential to address upcoming EU sustainability regulations, such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and Digital Product Passport. The solution helps simplify complex data into verifiable, one-click results, promoting sustainable production practices.
Also integrated into HARTING’s sustainability strategy is the use of SAP Responsible Design and Production, which helps the company design products responsibly from the start, reduce plastic taxes, and promote recycling.
“The site-level data derived from SAP Sustainability Footprint Management will drive cleaner production in environmentally friendly facilities while mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and reducing the impact on water and land life. Green is how we think, green is how we act,” emphasizes Jordy Brinks, global environmental manager at HARTING.
On the path to a greener future
SAP is advancing HARTING’s sustainability journey by enabling the company to design products more sustainably, reduce plastic taxes, promote responsible sourcing, and further recycling practices. With these efforts, HARTING aims to achieve carbon neutrality at all locations by 2030, underscoring its commitment to sustainable growth and environmental stewardship.
“As a family business, we combine consistency with a willingness to innovate and regional loyalty. For us, this means taking responsibility for people and the environment,” Harting says. “We’re not only shaping a livable planet for our future generations, we’re making the future possible. We want to shape the future with technologies for people.”
The HARTING Technology Group continues to drive meaningful change, connecting business success with a greener future and aligning family ideals with sustainability goals.
HARTING at the 2025 SAP Innovation Awards
All of these efforts did not go unnoticed: HARTING has long been recognized as a pioneer in sustainability. This year, it won an SAP Innovation Award in the Sustainability Hero category, leveraging SAP Responsible Design and Production to create 85% of its plastic packaging material from recycled materials.
In close collaboration with the Partner Ecosystem Success organization and as part of the NEXTLEVEL SAP BTP & AI program, SAP AppHaus has built strong alliances with several SAP global strategic services partners (GSSPs). Since early 2024, SAP innovation experts have started to train and enable them to explore SAP Business AI with SAP AppHaus innovation methods.
The launch of the SAP AppHaus Alliances initiative aims to accelerate the innovation process to help bring the latest SAP technologies into the hands of SAP customers.
An initiative to upskill partners in the latest innovation methods
The SAP AppHaus Alliances initiative helps ensure method maturity of SAP partners, upskilling them with the innovation tools and resources they need to conduct workshops on the latest technologies such as SAP Business AI and agentic AI. Currently, the qualification process is exclusively available to partners enrolled in the NEXTLEVEL SAP BTP & AI program. Upskilling partners allows more SAP customers to benefit faster from the latest innovation tools and methodologies made available in the SAP AppHaus innovation toolkit.
SAP AppHaus aims to humanize business software and make innovation real
“In close collaboration with Partner Ecosystem Success, we launched the SAP AppHaus Alliances initiative because we want to bring the power of SAP’s latest technologies, such as SAP Business AI, into the hands of more customers—faster and with real business impact,” Kathrin Tarnai-Sindl, head of SAP AppHaus, said. “To do this, we train global SAP partners in the SAP AppHaus business AI methodology and equip them with curated workshop modules from our innovation toolkit. We are proud to support this important initiative with our proven methodologies and customer co-innovation experience.”
Who joined already?
Since its inception in April 2025, the following partners have already gained the qualification in SAP Business AI methods and tools provided by SAP AppHaus, with more partners joining regularly:
Delaware
Deloitte
DXC Technology
EY
HCL Tech
IBM
KPMG
NTT Data
Looking back and forward
The enablement activities stretch from virtual SAP Business AI inspiration sessions to onsite trainings, for employees and trainers, in different workshop methodologies. Currently, there have been more than 700 attendees, many of them consultants, and 100 AI-related use cases, of which 37 were identified and selected as part of the NEXTLEVEL program. Also, more than 10 SAP-validated partner use cases have been released in the SAP Partner Finder site to be found as so-called accelerator packages.
The different enablement formats are:
90-minute virtual enablement sessions on the latest workshop formats available in the SAP AppHaus innovation toolkit
60-minute virtual business AI Inspiration sessions to introduce and showcase available SAP AI technology
Train-the-trainer sessions on SAP Business AI explore and design workshops
Train-the-trainer sessions on SAP Business AI agent discover and design workshops
What started as a small pilot hosting road shows to partners within the NEXTLEVEL SAP BTP & AI program has evolved into a global initiative that was joined by SAP AppHaus in 2024. Enrolled partners can benefit from the proven co-innovation methodology and focus on use cases with high business value. They can learn how business solutions can be taken to the next level through the latest SAP technologies infused with artificial intelligence.
“The newly-launched SAP AppHaus Alliances initiative exemplifies our commitment to advancing skill development and co-innovation within our ecosystem,” Karl Fahrbach, chief partner officer, SAP, said. “Through strategic collaboration and rigorous training, we are enabling our partners to master and apply the latest SAP methodologies and technologies, such as SAP Business AI. As a result, SAP customers can unlock the full potential of our solutions and drive unparalleled business impact.”
Imke Vierjahn is communications lead for SAP AppHaus.
In a significant move to bolster the study and research of business transformation management, SAP and Queensland University of Technology (QUT) have announced a strengthening of their partnership aimed at enhancing industry collaboration and academic excellence. This alliance is set to pave the way for innovative educational and research opportunities, with a focus on equipping students and researchers with the skills needed to navigate disruption and build business transformation as a capability.
Turn business transformation from a project into a core capability
The decision to further strengthen this long-standing partnership was unveiled during a guest lecture at QUT’s Gardens Point campus, where Julian Lebherz, SAP Strategic Advisor, addressed Master’s students enrolled in the QUT Business Process Analytics course. The lecture emphasized the importance of integrating business transformation into standard operations, highlighting real-world applications as well as why some companies are more successful than others at realizing tangible and sustainable value when it comes to deploying business process intelligence solutions.
A key highlight of this collaboration is the nomination of Lebherz as QUT Industry Fellow, underscoring the ambition and momentum of the connection between SAP and QUT. With over a decade of highly specialized experience deploying process intelligence solutions and establishing associated delivery organizations in various industries, he is globally recognized as one of the leading experts in the field. Having served in the steering committee of the IEEE Task Force on Process Mining and co-organizing several international conferences on the subject, Lebherz will contribute significantly to the university’s academic and research endeavors, fostering a deeper integration of industry insights into the curriculum.
“SAP is committed to equipping QUT and its students with the expertise and technology required to turn business disruption into competitive advantage,” Lebherz said. “Business transformation must become a ubiquitous capability, and hence we [SAP] are doubling down by strengthening partnerships with leading organizations.”
The partnership aims to explore various avenues for collaboration, including internship and research project opportunities, executive education programs, and hackathons. These initiatives are designed to provide students and researchers with hands-on experience and exposure to real-world challenges, aligning academic pursuits with industry needs.
Professor Alistair Barros, head of the School for Information Systems at QUT, expressed enthusiasm for the partnership, stating, “QUT’s School of Information Systems is intensifying both research and education of holistic business transformation and enterprise computing, encompassing the continuous flywheel of process execution, intelligence, improvement, and change deployment.”
Professor Moe Thandar Wynn, leader of QUT’s process science group and co-director of QUT’s Centre for Data Science, highlighted the benefits of strong industry ties, noting, “Our researchers and students benefit tremendously from strong industry collaboration. Partnerships like this one enable us to align curricula and research projects closely with real industry needs.”
The announcement marks a significant step forward in QUT’s position as a global leader in business process management and process intelligence. By integrating end-to-end business transformation into the academic curriculum across multiple courses, as well as deepening the connection to real-world outcomes, QUT and SAP are set to redefine the landscape of business transformation education, preparing students to thrive in an era of constant disruption.
Lucas de Boer, Global Marketing Program Lead, SAP Signavio
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At this year’s SAP for Energy and Utilities Conference (EUC) in Rotterdam, Netherlands, leading experts met to discuss current challenges and opportunities in the energy sector.
Daniela Haldy-Sellmann, global VP and head of Energy & Utilities Industries at SAP, spoke about key trends and the role of new technologies and gave her take on the future of the utilities sector.
Q: What do you see as the challenges and opportunities for the energy sector today?
A: In Germany and across Europe, we have a decentralized market in which a variety of players generate, transmit, distribute, and supply power. The challenge for energy suppliers is to make their pricing and services more attractive. So they are no longer just selling electricity or gas, they are also focusing on building customer loyalty and on fostering interaction between themselves and their customers. As for consumers, they want transparency about whether the electricity they are using really is “green,” and whether they can produce energy themselves—by installing solar panels, for example.
Daniela Haldy-Sellmann. SAP for Energy and Utilities, Presented by TAC Insights
Energy suppliers are completely rethinking their offerings as a result, which is also putting pressure on their competitors to become true market leaders and to align their offerings with those of conventional retailers. On the distribution side, we are seeing how more and more energy is being generated outside the grid and then being fed into it—from smaller sources such as residential solar installations to large, new B2B plants. The energy market is in a period of disruption, which is inevitably affecting energy prices and driving the need for products and services that are viable in the long term. With energy providers’ profit margins shrinking dramatically, additional energy services will become their main source of income.
Decentralization was one of the major talking points at the conference. In that context, could you explain what “distributed energy resources” are?
Traditionally, our energy has been generated in large, centralized power plants and sent—in one direction, via a transmission system operator and distribution system operator—to consumers. In the future, the flow of energy will be bidirectional, because now, in addition to large conventional generation plants and a growing number of sustainable alternatives such as onshore and offshore wind parks and solar parks, we also have consumers who produce their own energy and feed it into the grid. Distributed energy resources (DER) refers to the assets that consumers and businesses have for generating power and distributing it through a grid that, in the future, will allow that energy to flow in two directions rather than one.
How does SAP help suppliers manage distributed energy resources?
Manage distributed energy resource business models while seizing new growth opportunities
Our enterprise resource planning (ERP) system can already cover all of a company’s core processes. For transmission and distribution system operators, that means all of their network assets, including power grids, generation plants, and substations, right up to the point of consumption. What we at SAP are now doing is providing transparency for meter operators, grid operators, and energy providers about the systems and devices consumers have installed in their homes. This data used to be highly unstructured. Now, thanks to our measurement concept management component, energy providers can map data for consumers who have an EV charger, solar panels, battery storage, or a heat pump, and use it to plan their capacity. They know, for instance, how much power a solar installation generates and what its maximum capacity is. So when a surplus occurs, they can remove any excess power from the grid or, in the event of a shortage, have their customers feed more energy into it. Depending on the scenario, the SAP software can analyze meter data from the cloud, format it, and make it available. Energy providers integrate this data into their DER platform to provide transparency about consumption and to allow an appropriate level of control over the power entering and leaving the grid.
Which solutions does SAP offer for managing sustainability goals and compliance?
SAP’s sustainability portfolio is extensive. It provides answers to questions such as “What are my supply chain emissions?” and “What emissions does a specific product I supply or manufacture produce?” Having this information means that, first, companies have proof for an auditor of the precise emission values per product. And second, that they can track those emissions to see, for example, how the values change. They can show that they use various technologies, that their products meet all the current environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards, and that they can prepare not only consolidated financial statements but consolidated emissions reports as well. Here, SAP offers SAP Sustainability Control Tower and SAP Sustainability Footprint Management. Then we have the SAP Green Token solution and SAP Green Ledger, which aligns carbon and financial data.
Did SAP present a use case at the conference?
Yes. We presented the Energy Dashboard, which can show me exactly how much energy is being generated overall, how much I am producing, and how I can use it. Whether you’re a consumer, an energy provider, or a transmission system operator, you want an accurate picture of how much energy you have available, or need, to keep the power supply in the area or region you cover stable—because that’s what matters most.
SAP for Energy and Utilities, Presented by TAC Insights
What is SAP’s strategy for utilities?
We help our customers migrate from their existing SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC) and SAP S/4HANA IS-U systems to a cloud-based RISE with SAP landscape to help ensure that they have a consistent data layout. The standardized digital core with SAP S/4HANA is complemented by flexible cloud solutions for customer management and more.
The transition in the energy industry is also about shifting toward a greater reliance on renewable energy, phasing out fossil fuels, and helping companies in the sector diversify their product and service portfolios. We are seeing, for example, more and more oil and gas companies expanding into biodiesel and other biofuels. We’re seeing new carbon capture technologies emerge and huge investments in hydrogen, though these need to increase dramatically. And that is exactly what SAP’s strategy is designed to support by providing an application landscape with a clean core model in which the latest innovations can be readily adopted.
What excites you the most about working at the intersection of technology, sustainability, and the utility industry?
I’ve had jobs in many different industries, including automotive, manufacturing, high tech, and healthcare. But the energy sector is where I see the most collaboration and the most disruption. If you look at the net-zero and carbon-neutral targets that we need to achieve in Germany, Europe, and worldwide, and at the money being poured into renewables and green bonds, this is an industry with enormous opportunities for growth and investment. Technology is the backbone of everything, and we at SAP are contributing to the energy transition not only by simplifying processes for consumers, but also by developing technologies that fundamentally change the options that are open to them.
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.
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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.
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Arpan Shah is SVP and head of Business Suite Product Management at SAP.
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ONTRAS Gastransport GmbH is a transmission system operator overseeing 7,700 kilometers of pipelines. The company is responsible for transporting natural gas all over East Germany and prioritizes reliability for its customers.
Achieve efficient and sustainable field service operations with AI-powered insights, advanced scheduling, and optimized workforce management
As the company expanded, ONTRAS sought better visibility across its operations, especially those carried out by service providers. Manual communication interfaces led to information loss, hindering operational efficiency and service quality. To address these challenges, ONTRAS aimed to improve field operations with offline capabilities, ensuring better data integrity for uninterrupted operations and much faster response times.
After thorough research, the German utility company implemented smart forms within SAP Field Service Management to capture and monitor real-time data from its field operations. Convista supported ONTRAS throughout the implementation process, serving as the interface to SAP and customizing and enhancing SAP Field Service Management, including customizing the SAP Field Service Management, connector for SAP ERP, in order to meet the company’s specific requirements.
Faster process runtime with improved data visibility at ONTRAS
Working with a large external staff and a dispersed system led to a significant data gap.
Ines Kurmies, an SAP specialist at ONTRAS, explained: “Our internal staff extracted data from SAP, while external staff used a manual Excel logging process, which made it difficult to understand the status of orders.”
The external staff was receiving the orders through the SAP system, but it was not possible to track their work. Feedback was received within the SAP system only after completion, and the logs were uploaded to SAP, which meant the company lacked visibility into the steps in between.
ONTRAS needed a solution to maintain maintenance plans and functional locations within SAP while providing access to external service providers via an interface. The company sought comprehensive data integration and a single source of truth with real-time data monitoring.
With the full integration of logs and smart forms, ONTRAS can now guide technicians through tasks, capture data, and provide a structured way to document the inspection process in real-time. Integrating these disparate systems created a single source of truth, helping the company eliminate inefficiencies and data gaps, enabling faster process runtime.
“With the full integration of logs and smart forms, we achieved a much faster checklist revision,” Eva Scholl, a maintenance engineer at ONTRAS, shared. “Now we have an end-to-end digital process, so the process runtime in itself is one of the greatest benefits.”
Real-time data and comprehensive tracking are crucial for preventative maintenance, rapid response to issues, and compliance.
During a gas pipe fitting inspection, the company’s system creates an order dispatched to a service provider, the responsible specialist, who then assigns it to an assembler. The assembler inspects the fittings, logging their work using smart forms in SAP Field Service Management. This information is sent back to the responsible specialist, who reviews and completes the order. Finally, an audit report is generated as a PDF and transferred to SAP Plant Maintenance Rapid Mart, where the company can view and process the inspection results. Without this real-time data flow, a faulty fitting might go unnoticed, leading to a gas leak and potential safety hazard.
The company can see what order is dispatched when it is processed and what the status is.
“Now, field sales representatives have more information and experience less information loss because they directly see the order from us — exactly what we want to see,” Scholl added. “Previously, there was a manual communication interface, which inevitably led to information loss.”
Running safe, efficient, compliant operations in remote and challenging environments
For utility companies, inspecting and maintaining natural gas pipelines in remote rural areas is crucial. These locations often suffer from unreliable internet connectivity, leading to potential data gaps.
ONTRAS has significantly improved its field operations by implementing offline capabilities. Technicians can now conduct inspections, record findings, and complete digital checklists directly on their mobile devices on-site, even without internet access. Once back in an area with connectivity, all data automatically syncs to the central system, updating records and informing supervisors of completed work.
“With SAP Field Service Management, there is the app that can be connected to all applications,” Kurmies added. “We achieved the broadest coverage of our use cases for the first time, with many already covered by the standard product.”
As the company continues to grow, the German Association of Gas and Water Compartments regulations are a central component, implemented to guarantee the technical security of the installations and the security of supply.
With SAP Field Service Management, the company can now operate offline remotely without internet coverage and maintain the patching and checklist functions. This is especially important for technicians in remote areas lacking internet connectivity. Technicians must adhere to strict safety protocols and document every step. Offline checklists and patching functions ensure that no steps are missed, even in remote locations.
“This was the big challenge that we are also becoming more and more digital,” Kurmies further explained. “You also want to provide digital protocol templates and we simply reached our limits.”
Convista played a crucial role in guiding the company through the SAP implementation process, acting as the interface between SAP and the company while adjusting SAP Field Service Management to meet ONTRAS’ specific needs.
Heiko Winkler, IT manager at ONTRAS, highlighted the reliability and commitment of Convista as an implementation partner: “Convista is an exceptionally reliable and committed partner. Even in the second phase of the project, which was initially considered high-risk, their expertise and dedication ensured a successful implementation.”
Winkler noted the significant creativity applied to advising on the implementation, especially considering the initial uncertainty about its feasibility. Additionally, the company collaborated with Proaxia Consulting Group for the technical implementation of the SAP Field Service Management, connector for SAP ERP, and made several adjustments to the setup and error messages. The entire implementation took approximately a year and a half.
The company currently uses SAP ERP Central Component and is transitioning to SAP S/4HANA, having already implemented SAP Field Service Management. Winkler noted that they strategically rely on cloud products: “Our philosophy is not cloud only, but cloud first.”
ONTRAS aims to advance further with smart forms and continue to expand its SAP S/4HANA implementation in the near future.
In the face of growing economic volatility and rapidly evolving trade dynamics, supply chain leaders are under pressure to shift from reactive logistics models to proactive, data-driven operations. Organizations that quickly adapt to policy changes and global disruptions are better positioned to maintain resilience, while those that cling to the status quo may struggle to keep pace in a rapidly evolving marketplace.
The challenge is clear: without a plan to adapt and evolve, organizations expose themselves to rising logistics costs and limited scalability. To remain agile and deliver on rising customer expectations, companies must move along the logistics maturity curve—transitioning from manual, fragmented practices to agile, automated operations.
With four key techniques outlined in our Supply Chain Logistics Maturity Model, organizations can accelerate their maturity journey and build supply chain logistics operations that are efficient, resilient, and orchestrated.
Driving efficiency: From manual tasks to intelligent automation
At the initial stages of maturity, logistics operations often rely on siloed and manual processes, such as contracting carriers via e-mail and managing data in spreadsheets. This fragmented approach creates inefficiencies, increases the risk of errors, and limits the scalability of operations.
Improving efficiency starts with the process of digitalization. By integrating enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms with transportation and warehouse management systems, companies can streamline routine tasks like data entry, eliminate redundant communications, and better utilize resources. For example, intelligent operations can optimize transportation costs through load consolidation and mode shifting; enable better planning by reducing reliance on spot shipments; improve mileage and fuel consumption through route optimization; and prevent overpayments with invoice validation.
Automating these processes breaks down the first barrier to decision-making by handing valuable time back to logistics teams. And as organizations mature, these efficiencies become embedded into daily workflows that span the organizational gap across carriers and trading partners. Resource allocation becomes data-driven and adaptive, setting the stage for more advanced capabilities and collaboration.
Enhancing visibility to turn data into actionable insights
Limited visibility is a common pain point for lower-maturity organizations, where shipment status is either unknown until final delivery or only accessible by leaving the core fulfillment process. Without timely and integrated insights, it’s difficult to adjust to disruptions or meet rising customer expectations.
Drive orchestrated and resilient logistics operations with SAP
To move forward, businesses must turn insight into action, eliminating data silos to integrate real-time visibility into core order fulfillment processes. This technology enables proactive decision-making, powered by predictive analytics and automation.
Companies can further enhance agility and visibility by optimizing executable transportation plans that align with fulfillment needs. With these capabilities, customer service teams can forecast potential delays or disruptions and create automated customer notifications for exceptions or changes. Improved visibility ultimately leads to insights that can help companies commit to and then deliver on customer promises.
For businesses that need help turning data into action, SAP supply chain logistics solutions can unify information from multiple sources to help align transportation management with broader supply chain operations.
Building resilience for the unexpected
In today’s volatile landscape, resilience puts leaders ahead of the pack. It’s a prerequisite for success. Mature organizations are built to absorb shocks and continue delivering, while less mature systems are often left scrambling to respond with costly, reactive measures.
Resilient logistics operations are flexible, sustainable, and data-driven. They make quick but methodical decisions when disruptions arise based on embedded analytics and intelligent optimization.
In the face of disruption, mature organizations look for ways to make marginal gains throughout planning, contracting, and execution. They understand that constant incremental improvement creates broader success. This can take the form of optimizing routes to minimize miles or shifting to lower-emission modes or equipment to reduce carbon footprints. These organizations may also examine their load configurations to fit more cases or pallets into a trailer or container, stacking efficiencies across their operation.
With the right tools and processes in place, businesses can transform potential disruptions into opportunities for competitive advantage.
Enabling orchestration by coordinating people, processes, and partners
Automated orchestration is the final step of the supply chain maturity model. Seamless, harmonized coordination of systems, people, and partners is the apex of supply chain logistics maturity. Here, every component of the logistics ecosystem operates in sync, guided by autonomous, AI-based technologies across a unified strategy. Such a high level of ecosystem integration allows organizations to anticipate risk, respond dynamically, and collaborate across their ecosystem.
Achieving orchestration demands connected systems across a unifying platform, real-time collaboration, and adaptive execution across the supply chain. Key elements to enable orchestration include access to predictive, real-time data on shipments, demand, capacity, weather, traffic, and port congestion that enable synchronized optimization, spanning a unified platform for digital transactions extended to a multi-modal carrier network.
In an era defined by an abundance of data yet a perpetual risk of disruption, standing still is not an option. Connecting the dots between people, processes, and partners will help companies stay ahead of potential disruptions and build the foundation for a collaborative, data-driven, and optimized supply chain.
Advancing with the right capabilities
No matter where an organization stands on the logistics maturity curve, the techniques outlined above can drive tangible progress—provided the right plan is in place.
SAP’s supply chain logistics management software can empower organizations to optimize and automate execution and achieve real-time visibility to respond effectively to changing market conditions. Solutions like SAP Business Network can further enhance collaboration between shippers and carriers, helping to reduce cost, improve on-time delivery rates, and eliminate friction across logistics processes.
To remain competitive, businesses must chart a clear path toward orchestrated logistics operations or risk being left behind by those that do.
Doug DeLuca is an SAP Business Network product marketing manager.
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In 1896, Teresa Marzetti and her husband Joseph, arrived in Columbus, Ohio, from Florence, Italy, and opened a small Italian restaurant. Marzetti’s Restaurant grew from a local favorite with students from Ohio State University into a four-star restaurant known, in particular, for its salad dressings.
The dressings were so well loved, customers could be seen leaving the restaurant with bottles of their favorites. By 1955, the restaurant’s upstairs kitchen had become a full-scale salad dressing factory and Marzetti dressings could be found in grocery stores throughout Ohio. Today, Marzetti produces many of the salad dressings, fruit and vegetable dips, frozen baked goods, and specialty brand items found on U.S. store shelves.
Liam Durbin, Marzetti’s Chief Information Officer, was brought onboard in December 2018 by Marzetti’s CEO, Dave Ciezinski, who had worked with Durbin previously at Heinz. Durbin was charged with replacing Marzetti’s legacy green-screen PRISM software, which had become outdated, with a modern ERP system.
After a competitive bidding process, SAP was chosen as the new ERP system. Durbin says SAP was selected in part because of its dominance in the consumer-packaged goods (CPG) industry, which aligned well with Marzetti’s business requirements.
Tailwind
The transformation project, known as Project Ascent to reflect its aspirational nature, received board approval within months of Durbin joining, and by April 2019 the company had begun hiring personnel for the project with Capgemini as the system integrator.
Durbin emphasized the strong support the project received from both the CEO and the board—support which he said “created a lot of tailwind” for a project they saw as crucial to ensure the company’s future success.
“The CEO and the board were clear that they wanted the ‘A players’ for the project, creating a dream team to ensure its success,” Durbin said, so they rented a new building to house the project team, providing separation from the main office and allowing the team to focus on the project. This approach ensured that the project team had the necessary resources and environment to work effectively and deliver the project on time, Durbin said.
The initial plan was to execute the project and move to SAP S/4HANA Cloud running on Microsoft Azure in four waves, but it eventually became six waves because of COVID-19. The pandemic forced the team to send everyone home, adding an extra year to the project timeline.
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To adapt, they created wave zero, which involved moving a facility in New Jersey—one of about 16 facilities overall—onto SAP from a technical perspective. “This allowed us to kick the tires and make sure the functionality worked,” Durbin said.
The project team also implemented SAP Trade Promotion Management during this extra time. Overall, the phased approach allowed the team to manage risks and ensure that each wave was successfully completed before moving on to the next. For example, wave one covered finance, trade, procurement, and customer support—“everything touching the customer,” Durbin said, adding that waves two, three, and four went pretty much as planned. “We chose to split wave four in two to de-risk it because it contained two large facilities,” he added.
Project Ascent is now considered complete, and over the past two years the IT team has focused on standing up the product organization and building relationships between product owners and department heads. The product owners, who were part of the project team, now work closely with their respective departments to prioritize and implement enhancements. Durbin said this structure ensures that the company continues to optimize and improve its ERP system, delivering ongoing value to the business.
Master data project and analytics
As part of the final wave, the team undertook a master data project to ensure data accuracy and consistency across the organization. By standardizing and cleaning the master data, the company improved its ability to make data-driven decisions and enhance overall business operations.
The company chose Microsoft for its analytics platform, which, Durbin said, “allowed us to keep the clean core so we now do most of our reporting and analytics on the Microsoft platform.”
He said one of the objectives of the project is to democratize access to data within the company. As part of this process, the team is trying to build a community of super users who can create reports themselves using Power BI and Power Platform, “so the democratization is underway,” he said while acknowledging that those employees in operations “are going to need some help.”
AI projects
The company already has several AI projects underway, including an accounts payable (AP) automation project using optical character recognition to streamline the process and reduce manual effort. “In addition to projects like AP automation, we are also very excited to see what AI capabilities SAP will be adding to its products,” Durbin said.
Looking back at the Project Ascent, he highlighted the importance of having a fully-staffed organizational change management team for SAP training and change management. He said the team played a crucial role in ensuring the project was rolled out on time and provided training and support to employees, helping users—some of whom had never used a computer mouse—adapt to the new system.
“The amount of work involved in training people on how to interact with SAP was a lot bigger than we thought because how technology has changed,” Durbin said, adding that another challenge has been recruitment. “As COVID-19 started to ebb and people were starting to go back into their jobs—and this condition still persists today—a lot of factories and manufacturing businesses have had difficulty hiring hourly workers again.”
“Some of the glamour of a well-paying manufacturing job has sort of gone away in America, and I think other companies, other countries as well, need to restore that,” he said. “So, we’ve had to deal with high turnover in some of our locations. Turnover is a wild card, and for the success of a project you just can’t understate it.”
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Vital is in the midst of a digital transformation focused on moving to SAP S/4HANA. The biggest grocery wholesale group in Argentina is developing a clean core strategy and using analytics to drive the business while democratizing data access throughout the company.
In addition to groceries and food, the group sells electronics services and has around 400,000 customers, along with 80,000 business clients and more than 1,800 suppliers, according to Vital CIO and CTO Alexander Gonzalez.
Gonzalez is part of a new executive committee that is leading with the purpose of seeking to expand company reach, improve efficiency, and strengthen its market position.
“It all started in 2018, when we decided to have an analytics system and a clean core SAP system to make all the data available to all the different parts of the company so they can make real-time decisions on purchasing and pricing for our customers,” he said.
Gonzalez explained that this is particularly important in a nation like Argentina because prices are extremely volatile. “It’s important for us to have that information readily available because Argentina is a highly inflationary country, where prices change really quickly,” he said. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic Vital sometimes had to change 20,000 product prices in less than a day, “so we have to do all of that analysis really fast.”
From finance and sales to the supply chain and beyond, your entire business can benefit from cloud ERP
Vital was a long-time SAP customer, but when it came to choosing a digital transformation technology partner, the company did its due diligence.
“One of the main reasons we chose SAP [S/4HANA] is we were used to using SAP,” says Gonzalez. “But we did do our homework. We analyzed our business and processes for a year, then we took six months to talk with a lot of suppliers, SAP included, and another three.”
Ultimately, he said Vital decided on SAP S/4HANA because it offered the potential to integrate a customer activity repository with its basic financial and core systems.
It took Vital 18 months to implement, but Gonzalez said the system “integrated with our providers on the first day and we had all this real-time data within a week of going live. So that was great for us.”
As a result, analytics that used to take three to four days can now be done in two hours and Vital can have a new pricing structure implemented in less three hours. Instead of employees wrangling Excel spreadsheets, Gonzalez said decisions are now based on real-time data and “are not influenced by what a person wants, but by what the data is telling them to do.”
Because all the company’s data — including customer data and POS data — are stored in a centralized customer activity repository, Vital now has complete visibility into that data and can use algorithms to predict sales and set prices and distribution priorities. “We can change our pricing policy based on reception of goods and new purchase orders and adopt new pricing in real time,” said Gonzalez.
Over the last year, he says, Vital saved around $35 million on perishables after the system warned managers that they would not be able to sell products on time. “We negotiated with our suppliers; we made offers and made predictions of how it would work out and it turned into a real savings — that’s what technology is doing for our company.”
Just as importantly, Gonzalez said Vital now works with one version of the truth. “In all of the applications every user sees the same data, be it clustered by store or by department. The result is the same for everyone. There’s no difference in what the financial department sees, what operations see, what our buying department sees, or what our pricing department sees. All the data is clustered in one huge data center.”
“The technology has really advanced how our users in the company experience data and decision making,” Gonzalez added. Instead of spending time pouring over spreadsheets and reports, much of the analytical work is now done by the system, enabling users to make decisions in real time, for example, while they are negotiating with a supplier.
Now Vital is in the process of migrating all its applications, including its ERP, to the cloud. “All our applications are cloud-ready, and we maintain a clean core, so we can upgrade really fast,” said Gonzalez, who expects to be ready to make that the move by the end of the year.
The Vital CIO and CTO is also looking to AI to help the company’s employees make even better purchase and pricing decisions. “We don’t see AI as replacing our personnel or people in the industry,” he said. “We see it at enhancement, we see it as turbocharging our system and making the data more reliable and useful.”
Gonzalez believes that other companies can learn from Vital’s experience democratizing access to data.
“A lot of companies regard their data as really private and don’t share it with everyone in the company,” he noted. “We are open with the data. We tell everyone– from our people in the stores to our managers and our directors — that they have all the same data. This has really opened us up to be a really integrated and group-friendly company.”
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Enterprise AI has long been confined to software, whether to accelerate workflows, support decisions, or power intelligent automation. But the boundaries are expanding to the physical world. We’re now entering the era where software intelligence meets robotic autonomy, and businesses can drive efficiency, safety, and adaptability not only in digital processes, but also on the warehouse floor, in logistics hubs, and across industrial operations. In this world, AI agents don’t just guide work—they do the work, both digitally and physically.
At SAP, we’re collaborating with NEURA Robotics and NVIDIA to bring this future to life. Our goal is to make physical AI a reality for businesses across industries. By combining SAP’s business process intelligence, NEURA’s cognitive robots, and NVIDIA’s Omniverse Platform, we’re enabling a new class of autonomous physical agents that connect enterprise systems to real-world action.
Experience AI and agents that actually understand all your business processes and data
A convergence of intelligence, simulation, and execution
This next evolution of enterprise automation requires more than just robotics or AI in isolation. It’s about orchestrating data, reasoning, and motion end-to-end.
SAP’s Joule Agents, underpinned by SAP Business AI, serve as the cognitive layer, understanding enterprise context and directing workflows.
Mega NVIDIA Omniverse Blueprint enables teams to simulate and refine agent behavior in complex, realistic operational scenarios—before deployment.
NEURA’s cognitive robots then execute these tasks in the real world, with the ability to perceive, decide, and adapt as environments shift.
This tight integration creates a loop of continuous learning where each real-world action generates feedback to retrain and improve the performance of both agents and robots.
Real use cases, real value
This isn’t a future vision—it’s already happening. Early adopters are applying this innovation in manufacturing, retail, and logistics, where traditional automation falls short. For example:
Autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) can handle multi-step inventory tasks in dynamic retail environments.
Cognitive robots can assist with equipment inspections and repairs, reducing downtime in asset-intensive industries.
Physical agents can orchestrate movement of goods and materials in complex supply chains, all while staying connected to SAP core systems.
The result: faster execution, safer operations, and intelligent adaptation to real-world variability.
A shared vision to transform industry
Each partner in this collaboration brings a unique capability—and together, we’re enabling more than any one of us could alone.
“We are proud to bring the power of our cognitive robots into the partnership with SAP and to jointly take the next step towards automating real-world tasks,” said David Reger, CEO of NEURA Robotics. “Together, we are redefining what is possible and creating solutions that truly serve humans and transform industries.”
“With the Mega NVIDIA Omniverse Blueprint, enterprises can test and validate mixed robot fleets at scale, bridging the gap between digital simulation and reliable physical-world implementation,” said Mike Geyer, head of digital twins at NVIDIA.
This vision aligns closely with SAP’s mission to help the world run better and improve people’s lives—not just through better software, but by connecting data, intelligence, and physical action. The collaboration reflects a bold step forward: turning digital intelligence into autonomous execution at the edge, guided by business context and enterprise processes.
Looking ahead
The fusion of business AI, simulation technology, and cognitive robotics opens a new frontier—where enterprises can confidently extend automation beyond digital workflows into the physical world.
By shaping this new category of physical AI agents, SAP, NVIDIA, and NEURA Robotics are enabling businesses to reimagine what’s possible by creating a future where AI doesn’t just make decisions but also brings them to life.
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