NEWS 22 - The World Management

23 October

Business people high fiving in a coffee shop

SAP Scales AI-Integrated Instant Resolution and Self-Service for Customer Support

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In today’s always-on, digital-first world, customers expect answers now, not “within 16 business hours.” While great support requires human empathy, some issues can be resolved with human-generated knowledge at first contact. This is where instant resolution and self-service tools come in. These tools play a crucial role in building fast, scalable, and modern customer support experiences.

As the first step in a much broader playbook toward a next-gen, agentic case resolution workflow, SAP is launching instant resolution and self-service tools to help make support smarter and more proactive. How do these offerings help in real-world support scenarios?

AI-accelerated instant resolution

Imagine a customer submits a routine ticket about a known error during a routine update. Instead of waiting in a queue, the customer gets an instant response from a specifically trained AI agent with a direct link to a relevant SAP Note or SAP Knowledge Base Article. It’s accurate, contextual, and fast. What’s more, it can reduce ticket volume and free up engineers to handle more complex or urgent problems. As a result, the customer resolves their issue in minutes with no back-and-forth or productivity loss.

Take another example of a user uploading logs after encountering a defect. An instant resolution tool like a smart log analyzer can review the data, immediately flag the root issue, and respond to the user with a link to the fix. What you get is near-instant technical diagnostics and zero-escalation resolution.

Instant resolution has clear, real-world benefits in customer support: faster answers, fewer escalations, and a better experience for users. But beyond the promise of speed and convenience, how effective is it really? What does the data tell us about the quality and reliability of AI-driven support at SAP?

Let’s take a look at a few metrics that shed light on the performance of our Auto Response Agent and the value it can deliver.

Agentic AI turns support from reactive to action-oriented, dramatically reducing time-to-resolution while enhancing accuracy. For example, the confidence rate of SAP’s Auto Response Agent is at 80%. In other words, to avoid wasting the customer’s time, this agent can deliver highly relevant solutions with a confidence score of 80%. This is a strong indicator of the quality our AI agents can offer.

First contact resolution (FCR) is a general customer service KPI and indicates that the case is closed after the first interaction either with humans or with AI agents. The FCR rate for cases that are answered automatically by SAP’s new Auto Response Agent is currently at 40%. This is in line with what human interactions achieve.

AI-enabled self-service

Before AI, self-service in customer support was mostly static and manual, like FAQs, basic help articles, and keyword-based search. While these knowledge base articles are extremely helpful, customers had to dig through generic content, hoping to find something relevant, often with little guidance or context. There was no personalization, no real-time assistance, and limited ability to troubleshoot complex issues on their own. It worked for simple problems but often left users turning to human support for detailed answers.

Instead of prompting users to search through static FAQs or documentation, AI dynamically surfaces the most relevant knowledge base articles, fixes, or guided workflows based on issue context, behavior, and history. Instead of a manual hunt, customers can take advantage of an intelligent, conversational experience—often resolving issues before a ticket is even needed. The result? Fewer support cases, faster resolutions, and more empowered customers.

Thanks to SAP’s AI-integrated self-service offerings, we’re able to instantly resolve customer issues four out of the five times they come to us. Structured knowledge and content allows us to build AI and AI agents with high confidence levels. Currently, SAP’s customer support addresses over 82% of issues via self-service.

AI and the evolving role of human expertise

This move to augment auto response with AI isn’t about replacing people. It’s about freeing up people so that they can focus on high-impact tasks that need creative thinking and human insight. SAP’s instant response and resolution are only activated when the system is very confident with its response. Our commitment to the relevant, reliable, and responsible use of AI ensures that there’s no experimentation with customer cases that deserve hands-on attention from engineers and experts.

The road ahead

We move forward with a clear goal to achieve a support system that is faster, smarter, and more human because of its intelligent use of AI, not in spite of it. By augmenting first-touch support with agentic AI, SAP has a blueprint for handling simple and complex issues at all levels of enterprise support.

Stefan Steinle is executive vice president and head of Customer Support & Cloud Lifecycle Management at SAP.

22 October

BUSINESS NEWS

CERATIZIT and Soley Embrace SAP Technology for Sustainable Product Portfolio Management

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Soley GmbH and its customer CERATIZIT Group, nominees for this year’s SAP Innovation Awards and winners of the Supply & Demand Chain Executive award earlier this year alongside SAP, have demonstrated a groundbreaking approach to sustainable product portfolio optimization.

Through their innovative implementation of Soley’s Product Mining Platform with SAP’s supply chain management technologies, they prove that sustainability and profitability can go hand in hand.

The challenge: managing complex product portfolios at scale

CERATIZIT Group, a leading provider of hard material solutions for machining and wear protection, faced a challenge common to many modern manufacturing companies: managing a complex product portfolio with over 65,000 products. The company’s Cutting Tool Solutions division needed a solution to balance economic and ecological objectives while maintaining competitive advantage.

Klaus Lupfer, product lifecycle manager at CERATIZIT Deutschland GmbH, explains the company’s motivation: “In addition to the economic perspective on the product portfolio, the ecological aspect was equally important when partnering with Soley. As a company committed to sustainability for years, we are especially excited about the opportunities that the expansion of product carbon footprint data offers.”

The challenge was not just the product portfolio’s size but also the lack of transparency regarding product performance and sustainability metrics. Employees spent considerable time compiling reports rather than making strategic decisions, while limited insights into critical materials and suppliers prevented efficient phaseout of high-emission products.

AI-powered product portfolio analysis

Munich-based Soley GmbH, a past participant in the SAP.iO program, SAP’s former startup accelerator designed to foster and integrate innovative solutions into the SAP ecosystem, developed an innovative response to this challenge. The Soley Product Mining Platform, available as part of SAP’s extension and add-on solutions, transforms complex product data into actionable insights through three core, AI-driven innovations that enable faster, smarter, and more impactful business decisions.

AI Advisor uses AI to recommend precise actions—for example, suggesting which products should be phased out to minimize carbon footprint without sacrificing margins.
AI Assistant provides an intuitive, natural-language interface that allows users to effortlessly interact with Soley, without requiring deep technical expertise.
AI Detective analyzes data to uncover hidden dependencies and reveal strategic opportunities, such as identifying which configuration options should be eliminated to optimize both profitability and sustainability.

The Soley Product Mining Platform draws data from SAP S/4HANA and SAP Business Warehouse, utilizing SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) as the service layer. SAP Datasphere helps consolidate SAP data and analytics, while SAP Analytics Cloud provides the analytics that form the core of the AI model. This technical architecture enables intelligent data extraction and transformation through SAP Databricks, while massive graph analytics enable complex dependency analysis.

“With these SAP solutions, we’re delivering a true game changer for the sustainability of the high tech and manufacturing industries,” says Ephraim Triemer, shareholder and advisor of Enterprise Accounts at Soley. “For the first time, our customers can go beyond ESG reporting and take real action—driving sustainability while staying laser focused on profitability.”

Seamless SAP integration creates value

By combining CERATIZIT’s Product Carbon Footprint (PCF) data with financial metrics, the Soley Product Mining Platform creates a digital twin that uncovers opportunities, identifies risks, and analyzes product hierarchies, bills of materials, and carbon footprints. With AI-driven intelligence guidance, Soley developers ensure the platform’s capabilities enable decisions and outcomes that improve both profitability and environmental stewardship.

Earlier this year, Dominik Metzger was appointed as president and Chief Product Officer of SAP Supply Chain Management, bringing a renewed focus on resilience, sustainability, and intelligent automation.

“My chief priority is to ensure that we help customers not only respond to disruptions but also proactively prepare and act,” Metzger said. “We can do so by leveraging AI, generative AI, real-time data, and predictive analytics with the power of SAP’s technology. Our vision is to build an autonomous supply chain—connected, contextualized, and collaborative.”

SAP SCM leadership driving transformation

The implementation delivered impressive, measurable results that demonstrate the power of combining AI-driven analytics with SAP technologies. CERATIZIT achieved an 87% implementation rate of suggested measures, driving product sustainability and supply chain optimization. Simultaneously, the company realized a reduction of over 30% in end-of-life “ballast” products with negative carbon footprints while creating 100% transparency in sustainability data across all elements, product sets, and aggregation levels.

The business impact was equally impressive: CERATIZIT recorded a 10% increase in its Earnings Before Interest and Taxes (EBIT) through optimized working capital, a 75% improvement in delivery reliability and resilience, and a 40% inventory reduction within nine months. Return on investment was achieved in less than 12 months.

Alexander Springer, CEO of Soley GmbH, explains the strategic significance: “If you know which products are the most critical to the overall success of your business, you can focus on safeguarding the value chain for those products, taking proactive steps to avoid any potential supply risks.”

A model for sustainable digital transformation

The successful partnership between CERATIZIT, Soley, and SAP demonstrates how modern companies can achieve both economic and ecological goals through intelligent use of data and AI. The combination of proven SAP technologies and innovative analytics solutions creates measurable value for companies of all sizes. For other SAP customers and partners, this example shows that sustainability and profitability need not be opposing forces—with the right technologies and partners, both objectives can be achieved simultaneously.

Learn more about the latest updates to SAP supply chain management. The Soley Product Mining Platform is available on SAP Store.

22 October

BUSINESS NEWS

The Next Phase of SAP Sustainability Footprint Management: Greater Insights for Competitive Advantage

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Global pressures are intensifying, regulations are evolving, and value chains are growing more uncertain. In this complex environment, companies are seeking to manage regulatory, market, and environmental externalities with proactive strategies and strategic action. SAP’s answer is a suite of sustainability solutions that can enable reporting, optimize towards sustainable business transformation, and build resilience against evolving global challenges.

Since 2021, SAP Sustainability Footprint Management has been SAP’s key solution for efficient carbon management. We are excited to share major new updates, both delivered and planned, as the solution evolves into a new phase: one where customers rely on SAP Sustainability Footprint Management as their single source for environmental footprints beyond carbon.

SAP Sustainability Footprint Management is an ERP-centric, AI-enabled foundation to help calculate, analyze, and manage your company’s environmental impacts. Read on for details about changes that enable companies to move beyond carbon reporting and turn sustainability into competitive advantage.

A single source for scalable footprint calculations, optimization, and reporting

Companies today face growing pressures: meeting evolving regulations and standards, rising investor expectations, high carbon and emissions-related costs, and data insights that flow back into processes like procurement, finance, or strategic planning.

As companies seek to keep up, they need highly accurate footprint data that is grounded in actual business data. Delivered and upcoming updates to SAP Sustainability Footprint Management extend footprint calculations beyond CO2 emissions to include other impact categories, such as land use, energy, waste, and abiotic resource depletion. With insights into more environmental levers, your company can fulfill the most common reporting standards, manage risk, decrease costs, and control externalities.

SAP Sustainability Footprint Management can turn fragmented data into integrated, actionable insights. By leveraging actual business data from SAP Cloud ERP and enriching it with additional sources such as energy flows and supplier information, it helps automate the calculation of accurate, audit-ready footprints at both corporate and product levels. Embedded into core business processes like procurement and finance, these insights enable companies to move beyond compliance-driven reporting toward strategic sustainability that can drive competitive advantage.

Updates to SAP Sustainability Footprint Management extend the same data governance, auditability, and automation to more impact areas. From the corporate level down to individual products, this enables calculations of actual footprints—not just estimates—for numerous environmental factors. Automation and AI capabilities help reduce manual effort, while high data quality can ensure that reporting is detailed and decision-making is well-informed.

One foundation, many environmental levers and business outcomes

Staying competitive in a changing global environment and driving change make it critical to identify ways to reduce costs and invest in AI-based technology. Because SAP Sustainability Footprint Management is deeply integrated with SAP Business Suite, it can enable customers to gain transparency across their entire supply chain—thereby making sustainability actionable and surfacing sustainability insights where decisions are made across the enterprise.

SAP Sustainability Footprint Management is the single source of truth that can be embedded across your operations, turning reporting into business value.

The new phase of SAP Sustainability Footprint Management moves from compliance-driven reporting to steering and value creation. The updates are part of SAP’s vision to transform sustainability data into a catalyst for long-term business value. Our approach to sustainability treats environmental footprint calculations—now with an expanded scope in SAP Sustainability Footprint Management—as a strategic asset that enables businesses to make business decisions like:

Innovating products and services to decrease environmental impact and support a more circular economy
Driving environmentally-sound value chains with better material sourcing and design decisions
Identifying ways to increase resource efficiency, create new revenue streams, and achieve higher margins
Budget and optimize for environmental related costs, like anticipated carbon usage
Building a strategic relationship with suppliers and manufacturers, leveraging sustainability data to drive mutual growth and competitiveness

SAP’s suite of sustainability solutions can enable reporting, insights, and confident decision-making across every process, product, and partner network. Our approach helps bridge the gap between sustainability, finances, and operations. SAP’s portfolio of sustainability solutions is evolving to make sustainability actionable, measurable, and more embedded, powered by AI, trusted data, and deep process integrations.

Listen to the recent Inside SAP S/4HANA Cloud podcast episode to learn how BASF Coatings uses SAP Sustainability Footprint Management to calculate, manage, and reduce environmental impact. Check out other recent SAP Sustainability Footprint Management updates here.

21 October

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BUSINESS NEWS

SAP Named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises

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I am proud to share that SAP Cloud ERP has once again been recognized as a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises.

For our customers—manufacturers, consumer goods leaders, and high-tech innovators—this recognition is more than a placement on a chart. We believe it reflects how SAP Cloud ERP is helping enterprises become more agile, resilient, and innovative in a world shaped by supply chain disruption, shifting customer expectations, and the imperative for sustainable operations.

This recognition comes to life in the stories of our customers.

Customer spotlight: FUWO

One example is FUWO, a fast-growing global manufacturer that turned to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition to unify its operations. By automating dozens of financial and supply chain processes, FUWO shortened its monthly close by nearly half, improved forecast accuracy by 30 percent, and boosted on-time delivery rates by 15 percent.

As Luo Jianyong, director of Business Transformation and IT at FUWO, explained: “SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition has enabled us to automate our process from production to delivery. The resulting agility and efficiency have helped us gain greater trust and more collaboration opportunities with customers worldwide.”

And from a finance perspective, Director Zhao Ziqiu added: “In a market that changes rapidly, real-time data control gives us a critical advantage in decision-making.”

Why this matters now

Cloud ERP today must go far beyond core finance. Product-centric enterprises need end-to-end capabilities to manage design, manufacturing, supply chains, logistics, and sustainability in one integrated system. That’s why SAP Cloud ERP is not only the foundation of the SAP Business Suite, but also the gateway to the world’s largest business network, connecting companies to suppliers, logistics partners, and customers in real time. By extending processes beyond the enterprise, customers can anticipate disruption, improve resilience, and unlock new opportunities for collaboration.

These benefits come even faster with our new SAP Business Suite Suite packages. Out-of-the-box integrations such as SAP Integrated Product Development bring design, manufacturing, and supply chain closer together, reducing time to market while cutting complexity. Combined with SAP Business Technology Platform for integration, data harmonization, and AI-driven insights, enterprises gain the ability to both run intelligently today and continuously adapt for tomorrow.

Visual of Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises — Source: Gartner

When we speak to customers about SAP Cloud ERP, they appreciate our global network of partners that enable customers to scale, extend, and innovate. They highlight SAP’s strong road map for agentic AI, as well as comprehensive ERP capabilities that go far beyond core finance.

For us, recognition as a Leader is an important milestone, but not the end of the journey. Customers tell us they want deeper industry-specific functionality, simpler pricing, and even greater clarity in roadmaps. We are acting on that:

Industry depth: In 2025 we are delivering expanded capabilities for discrete manufacturing, consumer products, and high-tech.
Clarity and simplicity: With new commercial models, customers gain more predictable and transparent ways to adopt innovation.
Customer experience: Through our “Suite-First” approach, we are simplifying how customers consume innovations across ERP, supply chain, and spend management.

From cloud ERP to the suite

What makes SAP unique is that cloud ERP is not a standalone product, it is the doorway to the entire SAP Business Suite. By connecting processes across finance, supply chain, procurement, HCM and CX, we deliver outcomes that no single application can achieve in isolation. This is where SAP customers gain confidence: with harmonized data, AI at scale, and innovation that spans industries.

Looking ahead

We are proud of this recognition, but even more excited about what lies ahead. Together with our customers and partners, we are shaping the next decade of intelligent, modular cloud ERP – harmonizing data, automating at scale, and innovating across industries.

Read the full Gartner report here.

Dominik Metzger is president and chief product officer for SAP Supply Chain Management.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

21 October

BUSINESS NEWS

Driving Digital Transformation Forward: Why SAP Document AI Deserves Your Attention

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Leadership knows, and the frustration is real: Though the organizations take on different digital initiatives, manual tasks still slow down many processes. Across industries, organizations are still dealing with scanning manual documents, such as invoices, contracts, and forms.

According to a Gartner report, 70 to 80 percent of enterprise information lacks structure. This poses challenges for organizations that must unlock the potential and mitigate the risks of content to ensure data-driven decisions.

Take a simple, one-document example: It can cost up to $30 to process a single purchase order by hand. While this number seems small at first, it grows significantly when thousands of documents are processed every month over the years. And it doesn’t stop there—each manual processing increases the risk of errors and potential loss of hours on the mundane job, hence missed opportunities. This leads to a high cost of running “business as usual” and a drag on innovation.

SAP Document AI: rescue business process

Manually processing documents is not just error-prone; it is also slowing down the response to market shifts, dragging down the creativity of skilled workers, and posing real threats to businesses.

SAP Document AI enables efficient and agile paperless business processes. AI-powered solutions can speed up business document processing by up to 70 percent through automating the extraction, classification, and processing of data—imagine the boost in productivity, agility, and resilience.

This is not only theory. SAP Document AI is enabling leaders to deliver reliable answers because it is grounded in the comprehensive and up-to-date training data of actual quality certificates:

More than 180,000 annotated document pages
Over 105 million annotated characters
28 countries in the data set
More than half a billion unstructured documents processed each year

That is equivalent to approximately 8.5 years of manual information extraction and auditing, now available as a standard SAP cloud product.

Take De Agostini Publishing as an example. With SAP Document AI, the company is now saving around 500 hours per month, and more than 91 percent of purchase order-referred invoices are automatically processed. Read more about De Agostini here.

FRoSTA AG is one of the largest manufacturers of frozen foods in Europe. The company leveraged SAP Build Process Automation together with SAP Document AI, and it takes less than a minute to process an invoice from arrival to posting. Seventy percent of the invoices processed through automation are booked without any touch. What is even more interesting to note is that it took three months from project ideation to the go-live event. Read more about FRoSTA here.

More than 34,000 customers are already using SAP Business AI to transform the way they work.

From procurement and finance to HR and supply chain, SAP Document AI is changing how work gets done. It is natively embedded in SAP’s key platforms, making it easier for leaders to orchestrate truly intelligent workflows.

The road ahead: leading with certainty

Leaders know that change is the only constant. Digitizing more paper is not the future of document management. It’s about using unstructured data to our advantage. Looking at the road map, SAP Document AI will soon be able to handle even more types of documents. Enhancements such as vision-enabled information extraction, custom large language models (LLMs), and prompting are not too far off either.

Executive takeaway

Winning organizations do have one thing in common, and it is not the use of technology. They recognize that people drive business forward. By removing the manual burden, teams can be empowered to focus on what matters most: customers, strategy, and growth.

Leaders owe it to their teams to let them do what they do best, spending their time coming up with new ideas, making plans, and talking to customers. If employees are still buried in paperwork, it’s time to find out how much it really costs to wait. With SAP Document AI, companies can develop the kind of flexibility and strength that today’s markets need.

Learn more about the benefits and new possibilities for business with SAP Document AI.

Rashmi Kumari is a principal solution advisor at SAP.

21 October

BUSINESS NEWS

Submissions for the 2026 SAP Innovation Awards Are Open

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SAP isn’t just shaping global business; it’s helping real people and teams turn fresh ideas into solutions that matter. With ERP-centric, cloud-based, and AI-enabled tools, organizations can navigate fast-changing times, spot opportunities, and avoid risks with confidence. The most meaningful innovations go beyond one person’s success. They ripple outward, inspiring others and making a real difference in communities and industries around the world.

This brings us to the 2026 SAP Innovation Awards, the yearly celebration that honors customers using SAP technologies to innovate with purpose and achieve meaningful outcomes. The awards recognize industry innovators and honor the individuals and teams who make transformations happen, amplifying their stories to a global audience.

Submissions for the 2026 SAP Innovation Awards are now open. Organizations utilizing SAP technologies to tackle real-world challenges are encouraged to submit their innovation stories today, demonstrating how these innovations help solve economic, environmental, and social challenges.

New avenues for growth and innovation

In the past, the SAP Innovation Awards have been described as a tribute to “bold innovators in challenging times.” This is even more true today, given changing global landscapes and the increasing necessity to telegraph—and circumvent—obstacles in advance, combined with the acceleration of AI and other groundbreaking technologies.

The 2026 SAP Innovation Awards have 16 total categories for innovators, with participants encouraged to select one of the following 11 to best describe their submitted transformation:

AI Excellence: For customers that are harnessing SAP Business AI to transform operations, elevate efficiency, and shape the future of work through intelligent automation and smarter processes.
Cloud ERP Champion: For customers that embrace SAP Cloud ERP to transform, future-proof, and unlock new avenues for growth and innovation.
Customer Experience Innovator: For customers that have transformed their businesses with cloud technologies, creating standout experiences that delight customers and fuel growth.
Financial Futurist: For customers that are leveraging our finance solutions to revolutionize financial processes, deliver new business models, optimize working capital, increase efficiency, and reduce risk.
People Experience Pioneer: For customers that are reimagining the employee journey through AI-enabled, cloud-powered transformation, crafting exceptional experiences that inspire and empower their workforce.
Procurement Visionary: For customers that are leveraging our spend management solutions to automate procurement processes and actively manage indirect and direct spend for better control, greater value, more savings, and operational efficiencies.
Services Superstar: For customers that have leveraged our services to accelerate their business goals by enabling organizational learning, increasing user adoption, enhancing productivity, and maximizing the overall value of their SAP solutions.
Supply Chain Catalyst: For customers that are using our supply chain management solutions to build strong, well-orchestrated supply chains. With SAP’s supply chain management solutions, companies can realize increased visibility across their supply chains, improve efficiency and compliance with regulations, and ensure customer satisfaction.
Sustainability Hero: For customers that are harnessing the SAP Sustainability portfolio and the power of connected apps, data, and AI for improved efficiency, streamlined compliance, and business growth for a sustainable and resilient future.
Technology Pathfinder: For customers that have implemented SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) to solve a business problem or unlock an innovative use case that results in a positive, measurable impact on the community or society.
Transformation Impact: For customers that are leveraging SAP Signavio solutions, SAP LeanIX solutions, and WalkMe solutions to generate business value and strengthen their transformation capabilities. These organizations are consistently advancing critical dimensions—such as processes, applications, people, and data—to ensure they remain resilient and well-prepared for the future.

It should be noted that, in 2026, the SAP Innovation Awards will no longer recognize the Partner Paragon category. Details surrounding partner recognition can be found here on the SAP Partner Portal site with more updates expected shortly.

Reshaping the planet

There are five remaining categories, and candidates are automatically entered based on their industry. The “Industry Leader” grouping is focused on customers that are reinventing business or industry models, streamlining operations, engaging customers or serving constituents in new ways, collaborating across ecosystems, and creating meaningful societal or environmental impact. This category is divided into the following areas:

Consumer Industries
Discrete Industries
Energy & Natural Resources
Public Services
Service and Financial Services Industries

A call for submissions, a call to action

Transformative change has become a regular, rather than a sporadic, occurrence. And it is the people on the ground who are not only generating this reframing but using the vast assortment of available tools to make these innovations accessible.

In the tradition of SAP, the 2026 SAP Innovation Awards will highlight those positively shaping business, culture, and the planet. This is your chance to showcase yourself as you help your organization and the world move forward.

I truly hope you will submit your innovative solution to the 2026 awards for the world to see and celebrate.

Sophia Mendelsohn is chief sustainability and commercial officer at SAP.

21 October

BUSINESS NEWS

From Seed to Sale: SAP Helps Trulieve Manage Its Growth

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As the largest vertically integrated operator in the U.S. cannabis industry, Trulieve needs to be able to track everything “from seed to sale,” said Nicole Zimmerman, senior director of SAP Product Management at Trulieve. “From the time the plants get planted in the ground all the way until they end up in a retail store.”

“We are an agricultural company,” she continued, “but we also have to be able to process the product, so we are simultaneously a manufacturing company and a distribution company because we have to control how things are being moved to all of our stores. And then we are a retail company because we sell it in our stores. We track the entire supply chain.”

Trulieve has been an SAP customer since 2020. It initially chose SAP because its legacy system couldn’t keep up with the company’s growth and demand. “We needed to leverage SAP S/4HANA and the scale it gave us just to be able to keep up with sales,” Zimmerman explained. Today, Trulieve’s SAP portfolio also includes SAP SuccessFactors solutions and SAP Concur solutions.

Trulieve started in 2016, so the company is only nine years old, which gave it the ability to be cloud-native from the start. “We didn’t have any of the legacy technical debt that a lot of other companies may have. That enabled us to have all cloud-based solutions and when new technology becomes available, we’re able to quickly adopt it. That definitely puts us in a position to be able to leverage technology of the future, as opposed to being tied to legacy technology,” Zimmerman said.

That’s important because keeping up with the growth in the marijuana market is top of the agenda for Trulieve, which already operates in multiple states and is a market leader in Arizona, Florida, and Pennsylvania.

“Obviously we want to continue that growth,” Zimmerman said. The biggest catalyst for growth is when states legalize recreational marijuana use, which opens up the entire market for Trulieve’s hand-grown marijuana products. “The big focus for us is scalability and stability in our solutions to make sure we are able to support that growth,” she said.

“SAP enables us to have more insight into our growth and manage production better than any other system that’s out there,” Zimmerman said. And since Trulieve is a publicly traded company, running SAP S/4HANA also helps ensure that Trulieve’s management has access to all the internal controls and other features they need for regulatory and other purposes.

18 October

BUSINESS NEWS

SAP to Release Third Quarter 2025 Results

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WALLDORF — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) will release its full results for the third quarter of 2025 on Wednesday, October 22.

SAP CEO Christian Klein as well as CFO Dominik Asam will host a virtual analyst conference to present third 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 at 11:00 p.m. CEST/ 5:00 p.m. ET.

18 October

BUSINESS NEWS

Ahlstrom Renews Global Business Software Platform and Moves to the Cloud in Largest Investment In Company History

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In 2023, Ahlstrom launched a major strategic business transformation project aimed at renewing and harmonizing the operations of its 36 plants worldwide. The solution chosen was SAP S/4HANA Cloud, which enables Ahlstrom to streamline its processes, improve flexibility, and move toward a data-driven and AI-enabled future.

Ahlstrom is a large international manufacturer of specialty materials, with 36 plants around the world and about 7,000 employees. The company’s strategy is to be a global leader in its field.

The business transformation project, called Stella, is the largest single investment in company history. Its purpose is to transfer operations, except HR and product development, to the new SAP S/4HANA Cloud environment. The old group business system dated back to the 1990s and no longer met the needs of global manufacturing. Ahlstrom also uses SAP Ariba for its procurement, which had already been implemented.

“SAP S/4HANA Cloud was clearly the best solution for us, especially for production management and planning,” shared Ahlstrom CIO Kristiina Lammila, who is responsible for the project. “With it, we can harmonize our operations and bring all our plants under the same system.”

Unifying systems and data

One of the main challenges of the project was integrating different systems and unifying fragmented data. With modernization, processes can be streamlined, daily work made easier, and time freed up for more strategically important tasks.

“We have managed to make significant progress with SAP S/4HANA Cloud standard solution,” Lammila said. “We use private cloud, which also allows for fairly flexible modifications. One plant is already live, and next year seven more plants will join. The goal is to complete the entire transformation within five years.”

According to Lammila, the system enables flexible transfer of production from one plant to another and global optimization of the supply chain.

Benefits for both employees and customers

Modern cloud ERP systems benefit all stakeholders. Streamlined production processes reduce waste and improve quality. Harmonized purchasing brings savings and the most visible change for Ahlstrom’s customers is smoother supply chains and better availability of products. The use of AI and analytics is expanding. Especially in sales support, AI solutions built on SAP Sales Cloud data are already in use at Ahlstrom.

“We can integrate even more closely with our customers, as many of them also use SAP,” Lammila explained. “This facilitates and streamlines the flow of information between companies.”

From the employee’s perspective, SAP S/4HANA Cloud makes teamwork easier. For example, order and inventory balances can be checked conveniently based on real-time data. Lammila also pointed out that the updated system supports employer branding, as job seekers expect to have appropriate and up-to-date tools at their disposal.

Strong change leadership is key to success

Lammila advises companies planning similar projects to approach transformations as comprehensive initiatives that must engage all employees, including management, not just the IT department.

“Strong management commitment and a shared vision of where we are going and how to get there are needed. The project must be led as a deep transformation, and the end result must not be compromised due to haste. Poorly executed work is difficult to fix later,” she concluded.

Ellen Vig Nelausen is an integrated communications expert for SAP Regional Communications.

17 October

BUSINESS NEWS

SAP Named a Leader in 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud ERP for Service-Centric Enterprises

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I am happy to share that SAP Cloud ERP has been recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Service-Centric Enterprises for the fourth year in a row.

This recognition is based on our Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute in the cloud ERP market for service-centric enterprises.

As businesses navigate constant change, they need systems that connect every function, scale intelligently, and provide infrastructure for continuous innovation. I believe this recognition underscores SAP’s commitment to deliver exactly that.

SAP Cloud ERP is the foundation of our broad portfolio of applications, and the centerpiece of the SAP Business Suite. It’s an out-of-the-box enterprise management solution with embedded AI, real-time insights, and the agility to support growth at any stage. Verticalized from day one with industry-specific best practices and capabilities, SAP Cloud ERP helps organizations scale intelligently, stay compliant, and adapt quickly.

When we speak to customers, they appreciate that SAP Cloud ERP is part of a broader portfolio, including our cloud platform SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), and that it allows customers to quickly take advantage of the latest AI innovations with Joule. In addition, SAP stands out for our extensive, global network of implementation partners.

For us, this recognition is a milestone, but it also pushes us to keep innovating and delivering even greater value to our customers. We hear from customers that we need to be clearer in our value proposition, make adoption easier, and speed up innovation delivery. We take this feedback seriously:

Cross-functional complexity: We are accelerating the SAP Business Suite strategy to deliver tighter native integration, a unified user experience, and simplified end-to-end processes across finance, supply chain, procurement, HCM, and CX.
Live customers in complex organizations: Building on global deployments like Bain & Company, we are expanding programs, references, and accelerators to further invest in our industry and geographic scale.
Pricing clarity: To make planning and TCO more predictable, we have launched persona-based bundles that simplify pricing and clarify the path to adopting AI and extensibility at scale.

Pursuing innovation

Today, the need for clarity and alignment across every business function is critical. Businesses run on a unique mix of applications and data sources, often creating heterogenous landscapes that are difficult to connect. To meet their goals, businesses need a solution that goes beyond isolated applications for individual challenges.

SAP Business Suite offers a path to connecting every business function, including: an end-to-end portfolio that unifies connected applications, powerful AI agents, and contextualized data on SAP Business Technology Platform. Together, they orchestrate cross-functional processes across an interconnected landscape.

And as the foundation of SAP Business Suite, SAP Cloud ERP ensures seamless integration across finance, supply chain, procurement, and more. With SAP Cloud ERP at the core, SAP Business Suite streamlines critical business functions into a unified system. Our scalable, flexible solutions ensure businesses of all sizes benefit from modern, tailored ERP.

I believe this recognition from Gartner highlights the need for intelligent, modular cloud ERP. With SAP’s integrated approach, organizations can harmonize data, automate at scale, and expand across regions and industries. As we celebrate this recognition, we remain focused on continuing to lead through innovation and impact.

Read the full report.

Eric van Rossum is chief marketing officer of SAP Business Suite and CPO Globalization & Industries at SAP.

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Service-Centric Enterprises, 13 October 2025, Robert Anderson Et Al.
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