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.

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.

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.

Implementation waves

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.”

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.

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.

In an era where artificial intelligence has transitioned from a disruptive force to an operational necessity, global enterprises face new challenges and opportunities. The adoption of AI is no longer limited to experimental use cases or niche areas—it is the backbone of business transformation.

Our commitment to innovation drives every initiative we undertake. As a global leader in enterprise software solutions, we are uniquely positioned to deliver AI capabilities tailored to our customers’ needs. This dedication is at the heart of our enhanced AI strategy and why we are partnering with NVIDIA to embed NVIDIA NIM microservices, including a new microservice designed to work with a broad range of LLMs, which now supports deploying over 100,000 models into our architecture, enabling customers to harness the power of AI while meeting the specific demands of their local markets and industries.

Local AI from SAP can ensure that AI prompts and customer data stay within SAP-controlled environments, helping to enhance security and ensure compliance with regional regulations. By focusing on local deployment and aligning with NIM microservices, our strategy prioritizes scalability without compromising compliance or security.

“NVIDIA NIM microservices deliver optimized inference performance, portability, and enterprise support for custom models, helping customers accelerate innovation at every stage of the AI development and deployment cycle,” said Kari Briski, vice president, Generative AI Software for Enterprise, NVIDIA. “With NVIDIA NIM microservices on SAP Business AI, developers can supercharge AI adoption with local models running on local infrastructure.”

Why highly regulated industries demand a new AI paradigm

Industries like healthcare and public services stand at a crossroads. These are sectors where the stakes are highest—where AI can revolutionize patient care or streamline essential services—but the constraints are equally significant. Data sovereignty laws, compliance obligations, and the need for operational transparency often place these industries in a bind, forcing leaders to choose between accelerating innovation or staying compliant. SAP has long understood these challenges and has taken deliberate steps to provide solutions that strike the right balance.

Collaboration as a catalyst for innovation

As part of our ongoing drive to enhance AI adoption, SAP has optimized its architecture to leverage some of the most advanced inference technologies available. By collaborating with model innovators such as Aleph Alpha, Meta, and Mistral, alongside our own fine-tuned ABAP model, we aim to deliver a curated selection of trusted AI tools. These models are designed to address multilingual, explainable, and retrieval-augmented generation tasks, working to ensure that enterprises have access to solutions tailored to their unique business challenges. By placing our customers’ needs at the forefront, SAP can deliver AI systems that are not only more powerful but also deeply embedded in the enterprise ecosystem.

Building AI that’s market-aware and customer-driven

Enterprise leaders are under growing pressure to translate innovation into measurable outcomes. Our expanded collaboration with NVIDIA aims to address these demands with a focus on:

• Enterprise-grade performance: Leveraging NVIDIA NIM and curated models, fine-tuned by SAP for enterprise-grade performance
• Operational flexibility: Supporting local deployment while seamlessly integrating with SAP’s technology ecosystem
• Strategic alignment: Addressing the shifting dynamics of AI sovereignty and industrial leadership

What’s next for enterprise AI?

The road ahead for AI in enterprises is as exciting as it is demanding. Compliance will remain a core concern, but so too will the need for agility and innovation. Through our partnership with NVIDIA, we are not just responding to these demands—we are anticipating them, building infrastructure and solutions that can empower our customers to stay ahead of the curve.

For businesses ready to embark on this journey, the process starts now. Explore how our AI solutions can redefine what’s possible for your business.

Explore the opportunities ahead.

The demand for supply chain resilience and agility has never been higher. Procurement and supply chain functions have evolved beyond mere cost management, becoming increasingly crucial to customer satisfaction, regulatory compliance, and overall business objectives. To navigate this complex environment, companies need comprehensive B2B solutions that foster collaboration and drive efficiency for both themselves and their trading partners.

In a previous article, I explored how SAP Business Network can deliver measurable value for buyer organizations by accelerating order cycles, improving efficiency, and generating significant ROI. Now, I’m turning my attention to the other side of the equation: the suppliers.

A recent IDC white paper sponsored by SAP, The Business Value of SAP Business Network — For Selling Organizations, sheds light on how business networks can help organizations meet key goals by improving efficiency, reducing costs, and driving innovation. Let’s delve into the findings and explore how SAP Business Network can transform the supplier experience.

Cutting costs through visibility and information sharing

Technology plays a critical role in the buyer-supplier relationship. Traditional collaboration tools, designed to bring buyers and sellers together, are increasingly limited in today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape. To meet new demands, organizations are turning to modern business networks that enable more efficient ways to collaborate with partners.

These networks offer greater convenience, speed, and a broad selection of products and services, transforming how businesses sell products and manage their end-to-end supply chain. To succeed, teams need meaningful visibility into supply chain activity. Discovering opportunities to improve operational efficiencies and deliver business value requires access to real insights across key metrics. Business networks make this possible by enabling end-to-end tracking of orders, shipments, and inventory. This transparency also contributes to stronger collaboration with customers, allowing teams to respond quickly to changes in demand, optimize inventory levels, and maintain more reliable and accurate forecasts.

These benefits can be realized through automation capabilities contained within the platform, bringing further cost savings. For one customer using SAP Business Network, automated order processing eliminated manual checks and data entry, significantly reducing costs. While manually processed orders cost around $30 each, automated orders cost them less than a dollar.

Beyond order processing, automation and data visibility also improved demand forecasting. Users reported a 19% increase in forecast accuracy, which helped reduce stockouts, overproduction, and production waste. These improvements not only delivered operational efficiencies but also contributed to higher renewal rates and new business opportunities.

Driving value while staying efficient

Automation through SAP Business Network helps companies reduce manual tasks, saving employees’ time and resources while improving accuracy, efficiency, and compliance. These process improvements can also enhance employee performance, allowing them to focus on higher-value tasks that drive better business outcomes.

Tasks like customer support see major benefits from efficiency gains through business network automation. Structured data ensures deeper integration with other systems, allowing employees to quickly access complete storefront and portfolio data to respond to customer inquiries faster. Business networks can also provide better visibility and near-real-time data, leading to faster, more accurate responses to customer needs and boosting customer satisfaction by nearly 37%. These improvements help reduce product turn-times and allow companies to deliver products promptly, benefiting both employees and customers.

SAP Business Network customers also saw invoice approvals and shipping notices processed 50% and 48% faster with automation compared to manual methods. This also led to a 21% increase in on-time document delivery, reaching 91% overall, highlighting the significant impact of SAP Business Network on operational efficiency.

With fewer errors, faster payments, and enhanced visibility into financial data, automation through SAP Business Network helps procurement teams do more than streamline operations. It can empower them to deliver the added value that companies have been searching for.

Strengthening and streamlining business development efforts

Strong visibility helps teams understand customer needs and use a data-driven approach to identify new opportunities more quickly. Business networks can even help boost a supplier’s profile as well, with certification and trust ratings that help bring in more business. These metrics can help translate new opportunities into bigger picture products and solutions.

Process automation and accelerated payments inherently increase customer value by responding to their needs faster. At the same time, they give organizations additional time to reach and maintain more customers to drive growth through new agreements that could allow them to scale further. SAP Business Network helped customers accelerate their go-to-market speed by 20%, reducing the time from product development to market launch.

Businesses using SAP Business Network also report that the effects of speeding up and simplifying the selling processes were crucial to overall business success, showing a 36.8% increase in customer satisfaction and a 53.8% improvement in sales administration efficiency. The total annual revenue gain through these means added up to $2 million per organization.

Leveraging SAP Business Network as a supplier

As companies search for solutions that enable them to build resilient, agile, and sustainable supply chains, business networks have emerged as a powerful tool to meet performance goals, improve efficiency, and comply with regulatory requirements.

SAP Business Network takes this a step further by integrating with both traditional and emerging supply chain management applications. By enabling suppliers to grow their customer base and build stronger relationships through increased visibility and trust, SAP Business Network helps empower suppliers to operate more strategically and competitively in today’s digital economy.

The benefits highlighted in this research complement the buyer-side advantages explored in my previous article, underscoring the holistic value that SAP Business Network can bring to the entire supply chain ecosystem. As we continue to navigate the complexities of modern procurement and supply chain management, platforms like SAP Business Network will undoubtedly play a pivotal role in shaping the future of business collaboration and efficiency.

Tony Harris is SVP and chief marketing and solutions officer of SAP Business Network.

When it comes to digital transformation, having the right software is only part of the equation. Companies navigating the complexities of cloud migration also need a partner committed to walking with them every step of the way. This is where SAP Preferred Success services can drive momentum.

More than a support plan, SAP Preferred Success offers a guided, proactive success model that helps accelerate outcomes, reduce risk, and drive continuous innovation. As companies move to cloud ERP solutions, especially in regulated and complex industries, the services can become a strategic advantage in bridging the gap between implementation and long-term business transformation.

Delivering transformation as a service

Technology implementation, even for cloud ERP with embedded AI and automation, can only take a business so far. To drive true business transformation, expertise is still essential.

SAP Preferred Success helps overcome challenges in realizing expected ROI and business outcomes, such as adoption gaps, siloed insights, and reactive operations that slow progress. The services can provide strategic support tailored to each organization with a structured engagement model, direct access to SAP experts, and proactive recommendations aligned with business goals.

For example, organizations can realize the full value of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition and other cloud solutions from SAP faster and with less risk by leveraging:

• Tailored guidance and best practices from SAP experts across industries
• Proactive insights to help customers align innovation with strategy
• Accelerated adoption of SAP innovations, including embedded AI and SAP Fiori apps
• Optimization support to help continuously refine system performance and processes
• Business-specific planning aligned with transformation milestones

SAP Preferred Success can also deliver best practice guidance through structured success checks—touch points where SAP experts assess alignment with standard processes, identify risks, and provide tailored recommendations. This proactive approach supports a “keep clean, stay clean” strategy, helping customers safeguard system integrity and accelerate future innovation.

For IT teams, the services can decrease time spent on incident resolution while increasing system stability. Access to architectural reviews, upgrade planning, and expert troubleshooting enables a critical shift from reactive support to proactive innovation.

At the same time, business teams can be better positioned to adopt new features quickly, leading to higher productivity and measurable progress on strategic KPIs. SAP experts can assist in defining and tracking those KPIs from the beginning, helping ensure the technology evolves with the business. In addition, with each new release, SAP Preferred Success can provide guidance on how to adopt what matters most.

To see the services within SAP Preferred Success in action, let’s consider Eurofarma. Operating in more than 20 countries, the pharmaceutical company turned to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition to modernize and scale its operations. However, the turning point wasn’t just the technology but also the partnership through SAP Preferred Success.

As noted by William Almeida, operations support systems coordinator at Eurofarma, in a video:

“SAP Preferred Success has significantly impacted our operations by driving innovation and enabling us to fully leverage all the tools contracted with SAP. We share our business needs with them, and they connect us with SAP experts in each area. This partnership has been instrumental in improving performance, scalability, and our ability to utilize cloud-based tools, ultimately enhancing our overall modernization.”

SAP Preferred Success helped Eurofarma align its cloud environment with evolving business goals, optimize infrastructure, and adopt new tools more quickly. With personalized guidance, the company moved from reactive maintenance to proactive transformation—boosting its productivity, improving compliance, and building a stronger digital foundation for growth.

Turning embedded AI into business outcomes

When embedded with purpose and backed by expert guidance, AI becomes more than a tool. It drives tangible business outcomes. Yet, most companies struggle to adopt the technology because they lack a clear path to value.

Although it’s designed to transform business operations with intelligent recommendations, automation of manual tasks, and foresight that once took hours to uncover, the full potential of AI requires more than flipping a switch.

SAP Preferred Success offers an AI acceleration path through its AI exploration service, designed to help organizations move from isolated pilots to strategic, embedded intelligence. The service can provide expert guidance to identify high-impact use cases, align capabilities to business goals, and help ensure secure, scalable adoption.

From streamlining financial close processes to enabling natural language interactions through the Joule copilot, companies can gain the insight and support needed to make AI truly work for their business. For industries where speed, compliance, and innovation go hand in hand, this level of enablement helps clear the way for a personalized, scalable approach to innovation.

Creating a trusted foundation for future-ready businesses

Cloud transformation isn’t a one-time event; it’s a continuous journey. SAP Preferred Success can support every step, from go-live and scaling to innovation and evolution.

Whether the focus is on modernizing finance, optimizing supply chains, embracing generative AI, or shifting to a clean core strategy, SAP Preferred Success brings structure to transformation, clarity to complexity, and confidence to your most important decisions.

Ready to get more from your cloud investment? Find out how SAP Preferred Success services can help you get there.

Mine Ecevit is global lead for SAP Preferred Success Sales at SAP.
Andreia Bessa is global program lead for Global Customer Engagement and Services at SAP.

The TUI Group is a leading global tourism company headquartered in Germany, offering integrated travel services like hotels, cruise ships, and travel agencies to its 20 million customers. At SAP Sapphire in Orlando, Laura Dean, digital adoption and training lead at TUI, shared the company’s success in streamlining its HR processes in SAP SuccessFactors solutions with WalkMe.

TUI implemented SAP SuccessFactors eight years ago, and now the company’s over 41,000 employees use various SAP SuccessFactors solutions for performance management, talent management, learning, HR data management, and more. “With so many capabilities and so many employees, as you can imagine, it’s a steep learning curve for our employees,” Dean said. This is where TUI turned to WalkMe to help standardize and automate its HR processes for an improved employee experience and increased efficiency.

Benefits for the business and employees

TUI faced three main challenges when it came to HR processes, Dean explained: employees struggled to learn new systems, legacy training approaches were expensive and difficult to maintain, and time-consuming HR tasks were impacting overall business operations. “We needed something that was going to bring us into the future but that could support the organization as well,” Dean said. The solution also needed to be available 24/7 and in multiple languages to effectively support TUI’s global employee base, which includes flight attendants, pilots, travel agents, and other seasonal roles.

TUI implemented WalkMe to help employees navigate the company’s HR processes more easily and efficiently as well as aid HR staff members. With WalkMe analytics, TUI can identify where users have challenges in existing processes and then build WalkMe solutions to create personalized and automated experiences to help mitigate those challenges. For employees, this can mean the software feels easier to use; for HR staff and the business, it can lead to fewer employee and manager errors and faster time-to-value for SAP SuccessFactors solutions.

Dean described how WalkMe automation helped simplify TUI’s onboarding processes for new employees by automatically assigning e-mail addresses in the SAP SuccessFactors system during the hiring process to reduce login issues on an employee’s first day. This not only improved the new hire experience, it also saved HR teams time and proactively addressed any errors.      

TUI also simplified the time-off request process for HR staff and employees.    

“We set up a process whereby if somebody is booking sick leave and they have annual leave at the same time, WalkMe will intercept them. It will say ‘You’ve actually got holiday at the same time so we need you to cancel that holiday and put it through as sick time,’” Dean said. “What that means then for us is that we’ve got less questions going to HR, less tickets being raised, and more people following the actual process for their region.”

The data speaks volumes

WalkMe analytics can offer visibility into what software is being used and how. With this insight, companies can identify opportunities for improved efficiency and deploy in-app guidance and automations to address specific points in processes. “One of the real benefits of WalkMe is how the data that is available helps us make decisions around how we support employees and how we build digital adoption solutions for our employees,” Dean said. “We’ve focused a lot on the data that’s within the annual employee process and how our users are actually using their system currently.”

Analyzing aggregated annual employee form process data collected by WalkMe over 90 days, Dean saw that HR completed the process with no errors 70% of the time, completed the process with some errors 5% of the time, and did not complete the process 23% of the time. Even more, Dean could see where the errors were occurring and where users who didn’t complete the form were getting stuck. Based on this data, Dean used WalkMe to highlight the most-missed fields on the form, reminding users to complete them before moving on. “If 5% of the time they don’t know that information, I need to do something when they get here to say, ‘Please make sure you have this information before you carry on.’ So, I’m telling them in advance they need to have that, which I can do with WalkMe,” she said.

When asked how easy the analytics dashboards are to build, Dean explained that WalkMe gathers all the forms automatically so there’s no need to build anything additional. With WalkMe flow analytics, you set up the process step-by-step and then the report collects data over time. “It’s super quick and easy. With UI intelligence you get an out-of-the-box set of insights that shows usage of forms in the system. It shows me where people stop and start processing and points of friction,” she said.

Self-service employees

TUI’s brand purpose to “create the moments that make life richer” not only applies to its customers, but extends to its employee base as well. With the help of WalkMe and SAP SuccessFactors solutions, TUI has certainly succeeded in enriching and empowering HR and end users.

“What we’ve been able to see is 80% higher employee self-efficiency,” Dean said. “So the good news is they don’t need to contact their local support team because actually what they can do is go into our WalkMe menu and search for any of the content, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, across six different languages.” TUI has also experienced 70% less time spent on training, a 40% increase in task completion, and 50% fewer support calls with the help of WalkMe.

For Dean herself, WalkMe has enhanced her role as a trainer: “It actually supports me to do that change management piece within my organization. It supports me to educate and enable our end users without me having to be available and fly all around the world.”

Discover how WalkMe for SAP SuccessFactors HCM can help drive adoption and streamline HR processes.

Gillian Hixson is an integrated communications specialist at SAP.