WALLDORF — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) will release its full results for the first quarter of 2024 on Monday, April 22, at 10:05 p.m. CEST/ 4:05 p.m. EDT.
SAP CEO Christian Klein as well as CFO Dominik Asam will host a virtual analyst conference to present first quarter financial figures, as well as an outlook on the current financial year.
Media representatives may listen in on the virtual analyst conference via Webcast on April 22 at 11:00 p.m. CEST/ 5:00 p.m. EDT, accessible at broadcast.sap.com/go/QReport.
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It is no secret that I have had technology in my blood since I was young, having received my first computer at age 12 and learned programming at 14. We founded our first company at 17 and, as time went on, we created our first professional application — a mini ERP system to help photographers with their business. With that, I began to realize the power of technological improvements for businesses and how enterprise software impacts lives in general.
For example, the introduction of low-code/no-code has made application development accessible to everyone in an organization — with or without a technical background — to improve experiences for everyone. Just take Dak, the then 12-year-old junior app developer from Massachusetts, who was part of my SAP TechEd keynote in 2022. With SAP Build solutions, Dak was able to develop all kinds of apps and publish them to a wide audience, such as the “Knowledge 4 Ever” app that offers kids a playful learning experience during summer break.
Then, there are cloud technologies that further boost accessibility and offer other benefits. Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has put more power into more hands. Another advancement, composable technology, will make it easier for businesses to quickly assemble, reassemble, and compose solutions to meet their needs and those of their customers.
Over the course of my 11-year journey at SAP, the SAP Innovation Awards have served as a one-of-a-kind global platform to showcase customers and partners that have used their creativity, teamwork, SAP products, and cloud technologies to achieve remarkable results. This year, though, is a different experience for me. As an executive sponsor of the awards, I’ve had the privilege of experiencing up close what makes this program and the participating businesses so special.
Today, I am thrilled to announce the 2024 SAP Innovation Award winners. Out of 170 businesses, one in three were chosen as finalists and now the winners have been announced. These winners come from various industries and locations worldwide. What all of them share is the use of SAP products and technologies to create innovative solutions for their customers, employees, and communities. Congratulations to all participants for demonstrating remarkable abilities and highlighting the importance of curiosity and continuous learning!
The SAP Pinnacle Awards, our most prestigious global partner recognition program, shine a spotlight on our top-performing partners that demonstrate excellence in unlocking innovative new ways for customers to run their businesses.
SAP’s ecosystem plays a key role in our vision to enable every organization and every industry to become a network of intelligent, sustainable enterprises. Through their unique industry expertise, implementation methodologies, complementary solutions, and commitment throughout the Customer Value Journey, partners help customers thrive and succeed with SAP.
Across 26 categories in the areas of Customer Success, Intelligent Enterprise Realization, Sustainability, and Social Impact, partners are recognized for their outstanding contributions, exponential growth, and simplification. Through delivering cloud innovations that help customers achieve their goals, these partners exemplify dedication to teamwork and embody our vision for partnering excellence.
Twenty-five of the 2024 winners and finalists were selected from SAP’s wide-ranging partner base, using system-generated data on core metrics and key performance indicators. A steering committee of global SAP representatives reviewed, vetted, and ranked the achievements according to our internal criteria, which aligned with SAP’s communicated business strategies.
The only exception is the Social Impact category, which recognized a partner’s lasting societal impact by leveraging SAP innovation with concrete results. Partner nominations were evaluated and ranked by a panel of jurors consisting of SAP internal and third-party representatives.
Winners and finalists for all categories will receive a communication package to help them promote their success to their customers, prospects, and the media, including logos for online and physical marketing vehicles. To increase their global exposure, SAP will list the winners and finalists on its Web site for an entire year, in addition to running a comprehensive campaign that promotes these winners and finalists to joint prospects and customers.
Congratulations to the winners and finalists! We look forward to celebrating your success at SAP Partner Connect and SAP Sapphire.
Karl Fahrbach is chief partner officer at SAP.
SAP Pinnacle Awards showcase partners that have excelled in helping customers become best-run businesses
WALLDORF — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) announced that Ericsson, a world leader in 5G and communications technologies and services, has selected the SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain (SAP IBP) solution to drive further operational efficiencies in its global supply chain network.
Stand up to disruption with connected processes and fast, flexible planning
Supporting networks with more than 2.5 billion subscribers in more than 180 countries, and with 40% of the world’s mobile traffic outside China carried over its networks, Ericsson needed a technological foundation to provide for a single source of truth for its entire planning and logistics process.
The cloud-based SAP IBP solution integrates business planning capabilities across various business functions, improves the ability of companies to anticipate supply-chain risks and offers mitigating solutions. With SAP IBP, Ericsson will be able to navigate complex planning requirements while improving response times of sales, operations, resources, and inventory planning. This will empower Ericsson to further focus on driving innovation and improving cost efficiencies.
The ability to predict and meet demand in an agile manner is crucial for companies to achieve several business objectives. Choosing SAP IBP is part of a long-time SAP and Ericsson partnership, in which SAP has supported Ericsson’s vision of providing limitless connectivity for the world.
“Agility, resilience and trust are critical for global leaders like Ericsson to achieve supply-chain resilience and meet customers’ needs,” said Dominik Metzger, head of the SAP Digital Supply Chain organization. “Ericsson and SAP have had a strong collaboration over the years, and its choice of SAP IBP allows us to support it in further digitalizing its supply chain to cement its position as one of the world’s leading telecommunications companies.”
Over the past few years, HR has steadily evolved into one of the most critical functions for any organization. HR not only has a seat at the table, but the ability to become a driving force behind organizational change and growth. Most customers I speak with recognize this opportunity, but many have the same question: how can HR make the most impact?
Each year, the SAP SuccessFactors Growth & Insights team conducts in-depth research on the latest trends and predictions impacting the HR function. Our PhD-level organizational psychologists and market intelligence experts aggregate and analyze a mountain of HR trends and predictions data to deliver a list of actionable “meta-trends.” For 2024, a list of 611 individual trends were broken down into nine key themes.
Above all, there is no question that 2024 is the year of artificial intelligence (AI). No longer just hype or speculation, AI is officially here. Exciting possibilities have become realities and organizations must embrace AI or risk being left behind. And while our number one HR trend is AI, you can also see its effects across every trend.
Below is a snapshot of the 2024 HR meta-trends, with examples of how SAP SuccessFactors solutions can help organizations stay ahead of the curve.
1. AI Upends the World of Work as We Know It
I don’t go a day – or maybe 10 minutes – without a customer asking for all the latest and greatest on AI innovation. That makes sense, as AI has dominated the 2024 trends discourse and it’s increasingly become seen as a way to augment human work.
Trends indicate that using all forms of AI to improve day-to-day productivity will be top of mind for organizations in 2024. In particular, self-serve AI tools like copilots are poised to increase employee productivity on various day-to-day tasks. As employee sentiment about using AI tools at work has improved, so has the ability of these tools to make employees more efficient and effective.
HR use cases abound, particularly within talent acquisition, but concerns continue about data privacy, ethics, and regulatory compliance. There’s a lot of noise and movement in the space, and regulators and enforcement agencies are acting quickly to keep up.
With the tech landscape and market realities in mind, the HR leaders who head AI implementation programs, maintain a strong policy posture, and avoid overhyped or underbaked propositions to take advantage of the most valuable capabilities will steer their organizations down the right AI path.
Embedding an AI copilot in HR solutions, like Joule in SAP SuccessFactors solutions, can help employees and managers work faster and smarter by making it easier to find information and complete common HR tasks, such as updating personal data, giving feedback, and initiating a promotion.
Joule, SAP’s AI copilot. Click to enlarge.
2. Skills Become the Center of HR Practices
As AI needs rise within organizations, many organizations will need to immediately respond to determine what AI skills are needed, who possesses those skills, and how to fill skill gaps – whether build, borrow, buy, or bot. On the other hand, AI capabilities will also drive the ability for organizations to more effectively engage in strategic workforce planning.
Furthermore, in today’s increasingly complex business environment, traditional top-down human resources approaches fail to address employees’ increasing expectations for flexible and personalized career development. In 2024, HR will need to meet employees’ growing expectations for bespoke career paths while also solving the broader organization’s growing skills gaps and talent shortages, which present a major concern for leaders.
Looking forward, it will be interesting to see whether the average organization fully engages in long-term, strategic, skills-based workforce planning, which has long been a strategic objective for many but often remains out of reach as they react to immediate priorities. AI skills could work as a forcing function here – and contribute to other trend areas like learning and employee potential.
SAP SuccessFactors solutions for talent management can drive better employee experiences and business outcomes by using a common skills framework across recruiting, learning, performance management, internal mobility, and development.
Overview of skills and aspirations in a growth portfolio for SAP SuccessFactors. Click to enlarge.
3. Hybrid Work Returns to the Office
Looking back at our yearly analyses of HR meta-trends, we saw the hybrid work topic shift from a focus on remote work as a reactive tactic to protect employees’ health and safety in 2020, to a focus on flexibility in 2021, to maintaining productivity and collaboration while working flexibly in 2022, and finally to an emphasis on underlying flexibility and the need for and benefit of malleable guidelines and principles in 2023. With the recent increase in partial and full return-to-office (RTO) policies, 2024 trends data suggests that the pendulum has swung back to hybrid, referring specifically to work location versus a broader perspective centered on flexibility.
Companies in 2024 will continue to experiment with motivating employees to return to the office in ways that promote productivity, collaboration, and cost savings but don’t alienate their top talent. But some organizations are focusing more on redesigning the nature of work rather than just mandating where or when work gets done.
SAP SuccessFactors solutions for core HR, time, and payroll help employees adopt a hybrid working model by providing options for common HR tasks regardless of when and where they are working, such as clocking in and out via desktop, mobile, or Microsoft Teams.
Clock in and out via Microsoft Teams with SAP SuccessFactors solutions. Click to enlarge.
There are plenty more strategic takeaways in the full report – the entire paper is a must-read for HR leaders to learn more from our research team on the latest trends in:
Diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEI&B)
Recently, SAP partnered with the Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS Formula One Team to upshift its IT infrastructure and become future-proof. Together with SAP, the team will tap into cloud solutions, infrastructure, and services that will enable them to thrive on and off the track.
Formula One is a technologically innovative form of motorsport, where each car features over 300 sensors onboard that generates 1.5 terabytes of data in a single race weekend – data that needs to be analyzed to detect potential performance enhancements and reliability and safety concerns.
But until the late 1960s, Formula One cars were designed on traditional drawing boards by engineers using retractable pencils and a set of French curves. This is not dissimilar to the tech industry, where for decades the value cases for investing in technology were architected for customers by busloads of engineers armed with Excel spreadsheets.
Cloud computing changed not only what technology to buy, but also how businesses engage with their vendors when making investment decisions. Enabled by new technologies like mobility and artificial intelligence (AI), customers now expect immediate responses, exponentially faster time-to-value, immersive experiences, and flexible and intuitive engagements powered by robust low-touch and self-service capabilities. Not surprisingly, industry research shows that four out of five B2B customers will want to be engaged digitally by 2025.
SAP executes digital customer engagement via digital hubs located on six continents. The hubs are home to highly collaborative teams of diverse, digitally skilled talent that can deliver comprehensive, virtual customer engagement services. Like an F1 team, digital hubs use cutting-edge technologies to help drive accelerated business outcomes for customers with great customer experience, incredible innovation speed, and optimal levels of productivity achieved through data-driven, surgically precise execution.
Speed of Execution: Embracing Flexibility and Adaptability
Formula One teams operate in a relentless pursuit of speed, continuously refining their strategies to gain a competitive edge. Similarly, the ability to deploy teams to serve SAP customers virtually with the latest digital innovations allows us to reach more businesses faster at precisely the time they need us, no matter where in the world they might be and which stage of their digital transformation journey they are at.
Step into the future with SAP digital hubs, where innovation meets opportunity
Digital customer engagement can allow us to close the feedback loop across thousands of customers around the globe at velocity, helping to shorten their time to value from years to months and from months to weeks. In 2023, SAP digital hubs supported more than 22,000 digital customer engagements across the globe, setting these customers up for successful digital transformation journeys at unprecedented speed.
Speed matters and the race is on. The ability to recognize what a customer needs to grow and to work with partners that can quickly address these needs has foundationally elevated the need for digital customer engagements.
Precision in Execution: Leveraging Data and Technology for Optimal Performance
In Formula One, every aspect – from car design to the race strategy – hinges on harnessing and analyzing terabytes of data, often in real time. Similarly, in an increasingly competitive business environment, embracing precision through technological innovation allows organizations to balance accelerating their digital transformation decisions and optimizing profitability. The balance can be struck only through an almost unreasonable obsession with measuring and executing on fact-based insights.
At SAP digital hubs, we can track key value metrics across the entire customer journey, be it for demand campaigns, customer value propositions, personalized digital asset performance, the adoption of new productivity-driving tools, and so on. We do this not only to understand what’s most relevant to our customers but also to track the effectiveness of what we do and how we do it in the context of what our customers need.
Customer Experience: Focusing on Value, Personalization, and Great Experiences
In Formula One, success is not solely measured by speed. The sport thrives on delivering a captivating experience tailored to engage multifaceted fans from a multitude of angles, making sure everyone gets value from the event. The same is true in the digital business world.
SAP’s digital hubs virtualize and leverage SAP’s rich heritage of industry best practices and benchmarks to help personalize the customer journey, bringing customer stakeholders in alignment with one another and delivering on SAP’s value promises across geographies, cultures, and industries through immersive and memorable experiences. SAP digital hubs can accomplish this across the entire customer journey with SAP – from the time we create awareness, to customer onboarding, to supporting customers with valuable solution and industry expertise, until we help customers realize the full value of the SAP solutions they adopt.
AI-Powered, Human-Led Approach: Focusing on Digitally Native and Digitally Skilled Talent
In Formula One, decisions pivot on data. But it’s the team that uses their experiences to apply that data and simulate different scenarios to discover new ways to drive superior outcomes. Similarly, while data and AI technologies fuel decisions and actions in SAP digital hubs, it’s human ingenuity that leverages the tech and data and elevates customer outcomes.
Just like the F1 teams, our hubs attract and employ only the best of the best, offering a high-energy working environment that thrives on intricate collaboration. The individuals who join us can gain immediate cross-role and cross-geography exposure, enabling them to become productive members of the team in record time. Continuous learning and pointed diversity, with gender parity in half of our digital hubs today, form the backbone of our digital culture, where everyone is treated with respect, skills are constantly honed, and different roles are seamlessly orchestrated to present a unified customer experience.
The rules change, and we have to as well. Every pit stop and each customer touchpoint is a chance to pivot in real time, refine, and go faster, helping SAP customers and shareholders gain more value at exponential velocity and great volumes. This is the “3V” promise of SAP digital hubs and this is how we win the race!
Sam Masri is global head of Digital Hub, Customer Success at SAP SE.
SAP SE, a global leader in enterprise software, has announced the extension of Dr. Juergen Mueller’s contract as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) until the end of 2027. This strategic move reflects the company’s commitment to accelerating its cloud growth and driving innovation for customers worldwide. As SAP CTO, Mueller plays a pivotal role in shaping […]
With the gathering pace of headlines touting artificial intelligence in the business press, one could be forgiven for assuming that all facets of the enterprise stand to benefit equally from its application – everything from the electric stapler to the espresso machine to the ergonomic furniture.
But in reality, some functions are much better suited than others to gain from AI. The deeper the reservoir of data associated with an operational process – and the broader the sharing of that data not only within an organization but among its trading partners as well – the greater the potential for AI to bolster collaborative capabilities, instill operational resilience, and unlock exponential value.
By facilitating the convergence of trading partners’ operational data, cloud-based networks strengthen transparency and foster collaboration across interconnected processes such as procurement, supply chain, logistics, and asset management. The vast troves of data accumulated from these functions – and the insights they reveal – bear significant implications for forecasting demand, planning inventory, sourcing components, procuring labor, maximizing utilization, managing logistics, gauging sustainability, achieving compliance, and securing financing. Yet the sheer volume of such data, sometimes spanning billions or more transactions, can defy human interpretation in the quest to optimize decision-making.
That’s where artificial intelligence comes in.
As the world’s largest B2B collaboration platform, SAP Business Network facilitates hundreds of millions of transactions per year, capturing a unified, end-to-end view of spend. So prodigious is the cloud-based network’s volume – exceeding US$5.3 trillion in commerce annually, greater than the gross domestic product of every nation except the United States and China – that, through innovations in predictive and generative AI technologies, SAP Business Network is transforming procurement, supply chain, logistics, asset management, and related operational processes, with the goal that every business runs as an intelligent, sustainable enterprise.
Connect people, processes, and systems across multiple enterprises to digitalize transactions
The cloud is uniquely fit for the task of delivering simplicity within a many-to-many network of trading partners. A network’s features, from its search functionality to the matching of buyers with suggested suppliers, must aid the dual goals of transparency and ease of use. Predictive and generative AI capabilities augment businesses’ ability to discover trading partners on the basis of complementary resources, mutual value, and strategic alignment. With every successive use, generative AI sharpens its ability to anticipate operations professionals’ requirements to match supply with demand. Meanwhile, AI helps businesses to automate their most time-consuming procurement and supply chain activities through predictive mechanisms as well, hastening the ability to arrive at better, more informed decisions. When applied to the broadest possible sets of operational data, AI removes the guesswork from business-to-business commerce and replaces it with new leads, renewed confidence, and resilient supply chains.
With these objectives in mind, SAP Business Network is transforming its powerful discovery functionality into a simple chat prompt this year. Also in 2024, generative AI will enable SAP Business Network to create catalog content based on existing data in the network, detect potential errors within invoices, and obtain quote requests from buyers via natural-language, on-screen dialogue with matched suppliers. Integrating AI capabilities into SAP Business Network thus promises to reshape the trading partner experience by enabling buyers to reach far more suppliers with precision for the specific goods and services they produce. Trading partners large and small benefit equally from the increased flow of accurate, detailed, and complete information identifying each other’s offerings and competitive advantages.
As AI technologies take shape and mature, infusing intelligence natively into business processes, digital commerce platforms are certain to introduce many enhanced capabilities. Naturally, with its scale and history of innovation, you can expect SAP Business Network to lead the way. But you’ll know the moment that artificial intelligence has truly transformed enterprise software when its features subtly blend in, almost imperceptibly, to simplify everyday operational processes, making business applications more intuitive and predictive for trading partners. That is our vision for AI at SAP Business Network, where the intelligence may be increasingly artificial but the commitment to customer success is invariably genuine.
For further information on SAP Business Network and how we are equipping enterprises with AI and other digital tools needed to counter disruption, visit sap.com/businessnetwork and sap.com/ai.
Jörn Keller is executive vice president and chief product officer of SAP Business Network.
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WALLDORF— SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) announced that Churchill Downs Incorporated (NSQ: CHDN, “CDI”) has selected the GROW with SAP solution to support the company’s financial technology transformation as CDI continues to grow within the racing, online wagering and gaming entertainment industries.
CDI has chosen cloud solutions from SAP to serve as its technology foundation for the financial systems across its portfolio of 27 properties in 14 states, including Churchill Downs Racetrack (“Churchill Downs”), the home of the Kentucky Derby. CDI’s significant technology transformation builds on the company’s partnership with SAP as a signature partner and the first official technology partner serving Churchill Downs, the Kentucky Derby and the Kentucky Oaks.
SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition: Ready-to-run cloud ERP
By adopting SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, CDI can benefit from the ready-to-run cloud ERP that delivers the latest industry best practices and continuous innovation. Additionally, choosing SAP Business Technology Platform and SAP SuccessFactors solutions allows CDI to leverage the cloud to streamline its data sources while using business data to make informed strategic decisions underpinning business transformation. From creating engaging employee experiences with SAP SuccessFactors solutions to running business analytics to understand and predict data, CDI plans to be able to integrate business data from various acquisitions, allowing it to have one, unified view of its business operations.
“Cloud solutions from SAP will enable us to streamline our financial processes and support the significant long-term growth of our company,” said Marcia Dall, CDI Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. “We are excited to work with SAP to innovate and evolve our financial technology platform with cloud solutions from SAP.”
“Churchill Downs Incorporated has a long history of entertaining and delighting people,” SAP North America President Lloyd Adams said. “By choosing SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition and several other cloud-based solutions, CDI now can integrate data across its portfolio and make data-driven decisions that help the company reach its goals. This is an incredible example of how companies invest in SAP solutions to help them grow.”
