Weir Minerals Optimized Customer Service by Digitalizing Field Service Management and Data Collection

With a commitment to sustainability, Weir Minerals, a part of The Weir Group plc, has more than 11,000 employees across 60 countries. The mining equipment manufacturer helps customers work to their fullest, most sustainable potential.

The company develops engineering solutions for mineral and mining technology markets. Servicing a regionally distributed clientele across geographies, Weir Minerals depends on a synchronized web of data processing and analysis systems that give it the right balance of foresight and agility to sustainably manage customer data. Operating through an integrated system of tech hubs, manufacturing operations, and local service centers, the company creates sustainability solutions that help track the lifecycle of mining equipment, predict part deterioration, and minimize detrimental environmental impacts.

However, Weir Minerals had been using isolated, offline sources, like spreadsheets, to store records and data. “Our paper-based methods and siloed process put us at a disadvantage,” said Karun Naidoo, global process owner service at Weir Minerals.

The reliance on siloed data sources left the company – and ultimately its customers – vulnerable to risks. This inefficient approach to collecting and processing data and inventory planning was time-consuming, error-prone, and difficult to adapt to changing circumstances. Often, technicians had to travel from location to location to collect necessary customer audit data. By the time that data was properly categorized, it was largely outdated, preventing the company from making agile supply chain decisions, like having the foresight to order specific spare parts for aging machines. Additionally, employees had to focus on completing paperwork and other low-value tasks, which was time-consuming and prevented them from focusing on giving customers the desired service level. This inefficiency and a lack of central digitalization left customers wanting more.

“To remediate our relationships with customers and continue our sustainability mission, we needed to digitalize our core infrastructure to match modern technology and data analysis standards,” Naidoo remarked.

Revitalizing Data Processing Environments to Enhance Agility

As a long-standing SAP customer, Weir Minerals, conducted an internal evaluation to find a solution within SAP’s portfolio that could meet its unique inventory planning and data processing needs. The team found that SAP Field Service Management was ideal for the widespread remote workforce due to its centralized and digitalized hubs, which could help prevent manual errors, reduce silos, and improve transparency.

Empower your field service team with SAP Field Service Management

“Besides SAP Field Service Management we also use the customer service functionality of the SAP ERP application,” Naidoo said. With that, customer recommendations can be included much faster and more precisely with an improved view of relevant service information.

The integration of SAP Field Service Management and SAP ERP helped Weir Minerals create digital customer service history reports and improve communication between the back office and field technicians, facilitating the collection and analysis of real-time, centralized data. The company also established a change management framework for internal project ownership.

With both solutions, the company enhanced its internal data collection infrastructure with a digitalized channel that provides real-time insights without excess, time-consuming, manual processes. The solutions allow technicians to make vital service notes in a digital environment instead of on paper, which improves data availability for both personnel and customers. Through a greater level of communication in terms of audits, supply, and demand, the company saw that SAP Field Service Management could meet the needs of its widespread remote workforce.

Weir Minerals can better forecast demand by monitoring machine lifespan and inventory data, allowing it to swiftly provide customers with solutions instead of relying on outdated information. Once the company could establish real-time visibility in multiple environments, including on mobile devices in the field, it could improve efficiency and satisfy its customers more effectively.

Creating Agile Analysis Environments to Forecast Supply and Demand

Weir Minerals has seen significant business improvements since implementing SAP Field Service Management integrated with SAP ERP.

Data veracity and visibility are critical; the solutions let the business digitally collect and analyze customer data, helping to create predictive models to outline product demand, maintenance, and quality and generate service history reports. SAP Field Service Management also enables the company to use a built-in digital data integration that facilitates smoother analysis on the backend.

Technicians can upload daily digital reports from both mobile and site-based devices, leading to increased data richness. These reports make data analysis and collection much faster, improve communication between technicians and the backend, and eliminate time-consuming, error-prone paper processes. 

The readily available reports and digitalized channels of data recording help both field employees and customers better understand how customers use equipment. This informs sustainability measures and allows personnel to better predict trends in customer spare part demand. Through sophisticated, digitalized data insights, the company can determine that proper part inventory is available at the right warehouse, allowing it to quickly meet customer needs.

The solution setup and mobile integration capabilities further empower Weir Minerals employees to drive change and digital adoption in the field. This improves customer satisfaction with enhanced data analytics and digitalized ability to implement smoother and more relevant sustainability measures into customers’ operations.

Overall, data availability and agility are appealing to customers that demand transparency and clear service history reports. This led to:

  • 40% greater satisfaction with better-quality data and service
  • 70% time saved when generating customer service reports
  • 50% more timely reports with real-time timesheets and parts records

Broadening SAP Portfolio to Further Optimize Planning Processes

After the successful implementation of SAP Field Service Management integrated with SAP ERP, Weir Minerals now plans to utilize more data management, available-to-promise, and inventory planning solutions from SAP to help increase digitalization, product availability, and data accuracy.

It’s also looking at SAP Transportation Management for enhanced logistics planning and transportation processes across its global enterprise. No matter how its technological framework evolves in a modern industry, Weir Minerals is dedicated to its sustainability efforts and aims to use the improved infrastructure for eco-friendly mining operations.

“Through the adoption of SAP Field Service Management along with SAP ERP, we successfully digitalized manual processes and improved availability of real-time data as well as enterprise-wide communication,” Naidoo concluded. “Our technicians can now focus on value-adding activities and raising service levels, ultimately leading to greater customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.”


Karin Fent is senior director for Global Customer Success Digital Supply Chain at SAP.

Photo courtesy of Weir Minerals

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Syntax Grows SAP Digital Supply Chain Services with Argon

Syntax Systems has announced its acquisition of Argon Supply Chain Solutions, strengthening its position within the SAP digital supply chain ecosystem. Syntax Systems, a global provider of cloud solutions and services, has expanded its service offerings by acquiring Argon Supply Chain Solutions, a company focused on warehouse management and supply chain optimization. Argon, an SAP […]

The post Syntax Grows SAP Digital Supply Chain Services with Argon appeared first on InsideSAP.

How Hitachi High-Tech’s Greenfield Transformation Simplified Life for Its Users

A clean slate sounds great! But it’s a brave call indeed to implement from scratch, especially if you’re a big multinational. Yet a decades-long SAP customer did just that, driven by its own customers’ demand for speed – and a clear mission.

“Our mission is to help the customer be fast-moving,” Takuya Sakai, general manager of Hitachi High-Tech Corporation’s Digital Transformation Business Group, said in an SAP Winning Insights video after appearing in an SAP TechEd keynote last year. “And our corporate vision is a simplified customer process.”

So, in the name of speed and simplicity, Hitachi High-Tech did more than just modify its solution architecture; the Tokyo-based subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd. opted for a greenfield SAP S/4HANA transformation. That meant designing and building a new environment customized for its specific needs.

And it did so via an ambitious digital experience program with the goal of helping to simplify its customers’ high-tech processes across nano-technology, analytical and medical, as well as other business categories.

SAP Sustainability Data Exchange Now Available to Help Companies Achieve Net-Zero Goals

Next month, business leaders, government officials, policymakers, and innovators from all over the world will get together for COP29 to tackle the most pressing sustainability challenges. This is where innovative technology plays a huge role in efficiently acting on climate goals and achieving net-zero emissions. To transform the way companies collect, share, and analyze carbon-related data, SAP has announced the general availability of SAP Sustainability Data Exchange, a SaaS application that can enable standardized carbon data sharing.

While it’s relatively straightforward to control and reduce a company’s direct emissions, mitigating those that arise along the whole supply chain requires a lot of time, collaboration, and data sharing. One major challenge companies face is outdated tools, such as spreadsheets or questionnaires, and disconnected processes to collaborate with their network. Furthermore, the lack of standardized carbon footprint calculations and exchange methods has led to a variety of different approaches to collect and report on data, resulting in many organizations relying only on industry averages rather than actual numbers.

Drive scalability, standardization, and trust in carbon data exchange across your supply chain

Managing carbon to accelerate a net-zero future makes measurability critically important. That is where technology and innovation can make a real difference. With SAP Sustainability solutions and our ERP-centric, cloud-based, AI-enabled approach, we support our customers to use integrated sustainability data and embed it holistically into their core business processes.

What Is SAP Sustainability Data Exchange?

SAP Sustainability Data Exchange helps facilitate standardized carbon data exchange between partners along the supply chain, supporting organizations to move from estimates to actuals in their upstream emission data. The application allows users to share emissions data to help implement their net-zero strategy and take climate action by identifying products or processes with high potential for CO2 reduction, avoiding double emissions counting, and optimizing footprints with actual supplier data. It helps drive scalability, standardization, and trust in carbon data exchange across the supply chain.

Screenshot of SAP Sustainability Data Exchange

SAP Sustainability Data Exchange is seamlessly embedded into the SAP landscape, connecting to SAP S/4HANA for master data replication and integrating with SAP Sustainability Footprint Management to help enable accurate product carbon footprint calculations on a large scale.

To Harness the Power of Networks, Standardization Is Key

To be able to exchange carbon footprint values, standardization and interoperability with industry networks and frameworks are key, as they foster co-innovation and collaboration without a loss of data sovereignty. SAP Sustainability Data Exchange is interoperable and compliant with the new standards set by the automotive network Catena-X and the Partnership for Carbon Transparency (PACT) by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD).

PACT, for example, developed the global standard for calculating and exchanging consistent, comparable, and credible emission data that occurs along a company’s value chain and is outside its direct control, known as scope 3 emissions. Catena-X works closely with PACT to establish a joint standardization foundation on carbon accounting and sharing while adding industry-specific extensions.

Catena-X has certified SAP Sustainability Data Exchange for its sustainability use case. WITTE Automotive, a tier 1 automotive supplier, was one of the first customers to harness the application when it faced challenges in calculating its product carbon footprint in a standardized way to exchange product carbon footprint values with both customers and suppliers. With SAP Sustainability Data Exchange, WITTE Automotive can integrate the supplier footprints it receives through the Catena-X network, precisely calculate the product carbon footprint of parts and components, and publish the calculated values of its finished products within the network.

“This open and collaborative data ecosystem perfectly reflects SAP’s vision to enable every organization to become a network of intelligent, sustainable enterprises and gives the companies leveraging the Catena-X automotive network access to a broad portfolio of SAP solutions, from enabling the traceability of products across multiple parties in the supply chain to tracking and calculating the scope 3 emissions.”

– Christian Klein, CEO, SAP SE

In addition, SAP Sustainability Data Exchange embraces the power of SAP Business Network, leveraging the depth and breadth of a global network trusted by millions of businesses, through which nearly US$6 trillion of annual commerce is executed via over 750 million transactions.

Screenshot of SAP Business Network

A Core Pillar of the Green Ledger

Having an accurate view of carbon emissions across the entire supply chain not only enables data exchange but can have a real impact on the bottom line. Many companies want to make carbon an integral part of the corporate balance sheet, measuring and managing it with the same precision as cash – therefore treating carbon like money. The use of SAP Sustainability Data Exchange and SAP Green Ledger, which will be generally available at the end of 2024, can provide a strong basis for making financial decisions.

Start the SAP Sustainability Data Exchange product tour here to learn more.

SAP Sustainability solutions can support even more than carbon management and environmental, social, and governance (ESG)-related disclosures. Check out our sustainability page to learn more about support for operational compliance and material transition and subscribe to the sustainability newsletter to stay up-to-date.


Gunther Rothermel is chief product officer and co-GM for SAP Sustainability.

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Achieving Success Together: The New SAP Services and Support eBook

The new SAP Services and Support eBook explains SAP’s offerings in a clear, comprehensible way and addresses differences between the requirements of new customers and experienced users.

It is not a marketing brochure, as evidenced by the participation of SAP user groups like ASUG and DSAG, whose feedback has been reflected in the eBook. For instance, Geoff Scott, the CEO of ASUG, provided significant input.

Focusing on ongoing development and support, it provides a great deal of relevant information about the right SAP offerings for the different phases of the customer journey – summarized in a single document that refers to a wide variety of sources.

SAP Services and Support in Action

What’s more, the eBook not only states the highlights of the SAP Services and Support portfolio, but also provides a clear overview of applications in actual customer scenarios. Through six exemplary customer scenarios, the eBook illustrates how customers can use SAP solutions and services as efficiently as possible to help achieve optimal results and drive innovation forward more quickly.

The most important customer scenarios on the way to the cloud with SAP S/4HANA include transformation strategies, RISE with SAP, SAP Business AI, SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), SaaS and integration scenarios, and hybrid operations.

Screenshot of the six customer scenarios included in the eBook
The SAP Services and Support eBook provides full transparency for SAP’s portfolio and support services, together with useful information about specific scenarios. Click to enlarge.

Support for Differing Customer Needs

The “Power Your Support” chapter shows customers which tools and services are already part of their software licenses and therefore available free of charge, and invites them to explore the diverse range of SAP offerings to help further optimize their software landscapes.

“Accelerate Your Path” demonstrates how to enhance the value of SAP solutions with personalized plans and project-based services, working to ensure SAP solutions are used in the best possible way to support strategy and business goals.

“Drive Company-Wide Transformation” provides insights into premium engagements, strategic long-term partnerships that offer a holistic approach and support companies in implementing transformation in functions, processes, and business areas. Find out how SAP can support you on your individual transformation journey.


This article also appeared on the German SAP News Center.

SAP Services and Support: Your success is our priority

Employee Experience Ownership: How HR, Managers, and AI Shape the Future of EX

In today’s workplace, employee experience (EX) is no longer just the responsibility of HR; it’s a collaborative effort that includes people managers, IT, leadership, and even employees themselves.

Build the skills you need and provide the best employee experience possible with SAP

As EX evolves, understanding who “owns” it is crucial to developing strategies that improve day-to-day HR operations and create a more engaged and satisfied workforce.

The SAP SuccessFactors HR Research team conducted the “What’s n(EX)t for EX” study and shared insights on the evolution of EX as a concept, who the owners are, how it is measured, and how AI might play a role in its future.

In the past, HR was the sole area responsible for employee experience and engagement in most organizations. This has evolved into a new ownership model endorsed by HR leaders, with four additional stakeholder groups that must coordinate their efforts to drive EX effectively: managers, IT, leadership, and employees themselves.

Role of HR in EX: Manage Process and Listen to Employees

From recruitment and onboarding to performance management and benefits, HR has always been seen as the primary owner of EX. But to truly enhance EX and demonstrate measurable results, HR must put particular focus on its responsibility for conducting employee listening. Only by listening to employees — either actively, through surveys and town halls, or passively, through social sentiment and monitoring tickets — can organizations understand the impact of their EX strategy and track towards their strategic goals.

As HR measures, reports, and acts on employee listening results, they should make sure to bring employees along: enable them with better information and encourage them to take a more active role. Otherwise, they might become fatigued by endless surveys that yield no results.

With solutions like the SAP employee experience management solutions by Qualtrics, HR gains access to AI-powered insights and action planning that help identify essential EX factors and enhancing EX factors. Essential factors are the “table-stakes” requirements that heavily impact employee experience and include fair pay, psychological safety, and adequate tools. Organizations should aim for 100% satisfaction in these factors. Enhancing factors are “nice-to-haves,” like flexible work arrangements, career development, and meaning and purpose. Focusing on a select group of enhancing factors can provide a unique value proposition for employees and candidates within an organization.

Role of Managers in EX:  Shape Day-to-Day Experience

Managers play a critical role in shaping the day-to-day experiences of their teams. Our research shows that managerial factors such as clear communication, support, and competence directly impact key essential EX factors like team relationships and psychological safety. Yet, many managers still face challenges in both resourcing and training that keep them from improving EX.

To bridge this gap, the SAP SuccessFactors HCM suite provides personalized insights through manager dashboards that track team sentiment and help organizations identify and develop top managerial talent. By equipping managers with the right resources, organizations create a culture of positive experiences and address the most impactful EX factors.

With SAP SuccessFactors Learning, organizations can offer managers resources for enablement and continuous development, tailored to their individual learning preferences and needs. To help managers empower their teams in upskilling and reskilling, AI-driven recommendations from the talent intelligence hub assist employees in discovering new growth opportunities, preparing them for future roles while helping those managers stay informed about internal mobility possibilities. This supports employees’ development and enables managers to find specific opportunities for their direct reports, creating a dynamic, growth-oriented environment that drives individual and organizational success.

Role of Leadership in EX: Set the Vision

Leadership sets the vision of what employee experience should look like at an organization. Alongside HR, leadership establishes the strategic goals and outcomes that the company expects from its EX strategy. Company leaders should be aware of employee listening results and communicate to the workforce regularly about how their feedback is being considered. In doing so, leadership establishes the importance of EX and encourages trust and transparency.

Role of IT in EX: Manage Technology and Harness the Power of AI

IT is responsible for the tools and technology that make up much of an employee’s working experience. As AI technology advances, it has come to play a more significant role in that experience. AI is helping organizations create a dynamic, inclusive, and future-ready workforce. SAP Business AI in HR helps improve employee and candidate experiences by optimizing interactions and delivering highly personalized experiences and career development plans. By integrating AI-driven HR solutions, organizations can improve essential and enhancing EX factors, from seamless onboarding to customized learning paths.

Improving the Experience of Every Employee: N(EX)t Steps

To truly transform EX, organizations must encourage a holistic approach with cross-functional collaboration, leveraging HR tech solutions that empower all stakeholders — HR, managers, IT, leadership, employees — to take ownership of the employee experience.

Now that you have more clarity on different departments’ roles in improving day-to-day operations, you can leverage this first-ever interactive strategic workbook to learn more about the essential and enhancing EX factors with hands-on exercises and expert insights based on research from the SAP SuccessFactors HR Research team.


Mayara Alves Tabone is a Solution Marketing specialist for SAP SuccessFactors at SAP.

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SAP Generative AI Hub Expands Mistral AI’s Advanced Models

SAP generative AI hub is expanding with the inclusion of Mistral AI’s advanced models, enhancing customer access to secure and compliant AI solutions. As part of its continued partnership with Mistral AI, SAP has integrated Mistral’s commercially available models, including the Mistral Large 2, into its infrastructure. This move provides customers with greater flexibility in […]

The post SAP Generative AI Hub Expands Mistral AI’s Advanced Models appeared first on InsideSAP.

Innovations in Spend Management from SAP Help Customers Improve Productivity, Gain Insights and Boost Growth

LAS VEGAS SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) today announced updates to its spend management solutions to help companies collaborate strategically, increase productivity, manage compliance effortlessly and gain business insights.

The announcements were made at SAP Spend Connect Live, the industry’s premier spend management conference, held October 14-16 in Las Vegas.

SAP Embeds Generative AI Across Spend Management and Business Network Solutions

SAP is embedding its generative AI copilot Joule across the SAP Ariba source-to-pay solution portfolio to make it easier for customers to manage routine inquiries, such as status updates, summarization and frequently asked questions. Generative AI will be further infused in SAP Ariba solutions to recommend buying bundles and provide comprehensive supplier summaries.

Automate spending processes and actively manage more spend for better control, greater value and more savings

Joule will help SAP Fieldglass solutions customers perform time-consuming hiring tasks and service requests with speed and accuracy. Joule can recommend best-fit templates to generate job postings and statements of work (SOWs) with prefilled information such as start date and the number of skilled workers needed.

Joule embedded across SAP Business Network will facilitate tasks in logistics and asset management. Generative AI will analyze, categorize and transform unstructured invoice rejection errors into structured, actionable insights to reduce the cost of resolving exceptions. Generative AI capabilities within the SAP Business Network Discovery solution will help match suppliers with new business opportunities.

Joule is currently available within SAP Ariba solutions and will debut in SAP Fieldglass solutions and SAP Business Network in the fourth quarter 2024. Joule will manage 80% of the most frequently performed tasks in the portfolio of intelligent spend management and business network solutions from SAP starting in the fourth quarter 2024 with a phased approach.

New SAP Ariba Intake Management Solution Delivers Simplicity in Procurement

SAP introduces the SAP Ariba Intake Management solution to help transform how businesses handle employee requests and process orchestration, starting with procurement.

With SAP Ariba Intake Management, employees have one place to go for procurement inquiries and visibility on status. The solution collects employee requests, orchestrates processes across heterogenous landscapes and applications, including all necessary stakeholders, and provides visibility on status while shielding employees from process complexity yet keeping them informed. This simpler, more intuitive user experience is designed to help drive adoption and improve compliance.

SAP plans to make SAP Ariba Intake Management available in the first quarter 2025.

New SAP Business Network, Promote Subscription to Help Suppliers Grow their Businesses

SAP Business Network in the first quarter 2025 will launch a new promote subscription with value-added features to help suppliers differentiate themselves, attract new buyers and grow their businesses. With millions of companies conducting nearly $6 trillion in commerce annually on the SAP Business Network, promote presents a sizable opportunity for suppliers to accelerate growth.

SAP Unveils Analytics Add-On for External Workforce Management

The new analytics add-on with AI capabilities for SAP Fieldglass solutions helps procurement, vendor management and HR professionals to quickly implement more agile multi-channel talent strategies. This add-on enables business users to benchmark and predict external talent scenarios.

The analytics add-on for SAP Fieldglass solutions lets users:

  • Review performance against over 50 external workforce key performance indicators.
  • Access global market intelligence including rates, talent supply and demand, and time-to-hire trends.
  • Track sustainability initiatives such as spend with diverse suppliers and worker health and safety, while observing cost overruns, worker fatigue, and on- and offboarding compliance.

“With SAP Business AI as the foundation of our intelligent products, customers can improve productivity and gain insights from their spend data no matter where it sits,” said Manoj Swaminathan, President and Chief Product Officer, Intelligent Spend and Business Network, SAP. “Whether it is managing cost, mitigating risk or supporting scope three emission reduction, SAP empowers companies with the right solutions for agile and effective spend management and supply chain functions.”

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SAP Delivers Big on Spend Management: Latest Innovations Unveiled at SAP Spend Connect Live

SAP Spend Connect Live is the industry’s premier spend management event — a reputation that is well earned. And this year will be no exception.

Automate spending processes and actively manage more spend for better control, greater value and more savings

Once again, we are prepared to showcase groundbreaking innovations that will revolutionize the landscape of spend management. As I continue to engage with our customers, their enthusiasm for our latest offerings helps validate our commitment to delivering solutions that streamline processes and empower businesses to achieve their full potential.  

At SAP our focus is on automating tedious, time-consuming tasks, allowing you to concentrate on the strategic decisions that drive your organization forward. SAP continues to invest heavily in innovations across the spend management and business network portfolio, including new artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities and seamless integrations, enabling users to navigate uncertainty, seize optimization opportunities, and simplify processes. Our goal is to give you the freedom to shape your business’s future without the distraction of day-to-day operational noise. 

Betting Big on Your Success with SAP 

During my keynote, I outlined our product strategy for the coming year, emphasizing three key pillars: Data, Intelligence, and Suite. These focus areas are a direct response to the valuable input we’ve received from customers. I am confident that our continuing investments in these areas will provide them with the insights needed to make informed, strategic decisions that propel their organization to new heights.  

Our newest capabilities across our intelligent spend management solutions enable customers to gain visibility across all of their processes, eliminating fragmented touchpoints that hinder progress.

As Mickey North Rizza, group vice-president of Enterprise Software at IDC, recently shared, “SAP continues to dominate the procurement applications space as measured by market share because customers want a seamless user experience with which to conduct the full spectrum of their spend management/procurement activity. When layering in the breadth of SAP’s industry experience, the expansive business network, and direct sourcing capabilities, SAP has clearly earned its place.” 

I couldn’t agree more.  Our commitment to maintaining our position as the industry standard in spend management is unwavering, and we will continue to set the benchmark for providing a smooth, efficient user interface while delivering unparalleled visibility into every aspect of spend.

Now, let’s dive into this year’s announcements.  

Generative AI Transforms the Source-to-Pay Process 

SAP is dedicated to delivering best-in-class solutions infused with AI, empowering you to prioritize strategic initiatives over mundane tasks. We understand and hear the concerns surrounding data security when implementing AI, which is why we have made no compromises in ensuring our AI capabilities set the standard for compliance. From third-party advisory boards to adhering to the UNESCO 10 Guiding Principles for Ethical AI and singing the EU AI Pact, we enable customers to harness the power of AI without sacrificing control over their data.  

SAP’s generative AI copilot Joule will be seamlessly integrated across SAP Ariba, SAP Business Network, and SAP Fieldglass starting in Q4 of 2024. Joule will enable users to manage their most important tasks quickly and accurately across all areas of our spend management portfolio.  

In SAP Ariba, users will be able to use generative AI-infused capabilities to create RFPs and request help with routine inquiries and surface risks. These capabilities will also provide buying recommendations along with comprehensive supplier summaries from different data sources. In addition, sustainability scorecard from SAP Ariba ensures that customers can make informed decisions that align with their organizations’ environmental, social, and governance (ESG) objectives.  

With Joule, SAP Fieldglass users can take advantage of template recommendations to generate job postings and SOWs with pre-filled information, saving precious time. Users can now request assistance and insights in natural language, and immediately receive responses from Joule directly from the SAP Help Portal. It is now possible to ask Joule how to create a job posting and receiving accurate, step-by-step instructions complete with links and resources.  

SAP Business Network will use Joule to help with logistics and asset management tasks. Joule provides SAP Business Network users a natural language interface and navigation for scenarios such as status requests and queries, supporting freight orders, freight bookings, invoice disputes, equipment, notifications, and work orders. It will also provide insights into rejected invoices to reduce manual intervention for errors. Suppliers can dive into potential business opportunities based on keyword matching that selects best-fit profiles for RFIs. 

Streamlining Procurement with SAP Ariba Intake Management  

Most companies have a complex landscape of disparate and siloed solutions for handling procurement needs such as purchase requests, contract processing, or helping onboard a new services provider. Typically, employees don’t know which platform, portal, or system will handle their request because it isn’t a task they perform regularly. Hours of time may be wasted trying to figure out how to make the request in the first place and track down subsequent status updates. 

But no more: SAP Ariba Intake Management, a brand-new solution built on SAP Business Technology Platform, will automate procurement request creation and provide process orchestration, including routing and support across diverse procurement landscapes and complex workflows. By connecting different systems into one central location for procurement inquiries and status updates, employees can adhere to your organization’s policies and comply with necessary regulations without the need for time consuming manual corrections. SAP Ariba Intake Management will offer one pane of glass for status updates and requests, making procurement orchestration simpler and more intuitive. Scheduled to be available in Q1 of 2025, the solution will offer out-of-the-box integration with other SAP solutions and a robust set of connectors for third-party integration.  

Empowering Suppliers with SAP Business Network, Promote Subscription  

We announced a new promote subscription for the SAP Business Network, designed to deliver immediate value to suppliers, helping them to find new business, improve match potential, and build relationships with buyers using the network catalog. Through the promote subscription, suppliers will receive recommendations to improve discoverability, advanced search results, supplier profile verification, and network catalog APIs. With the help of generative AI tools, suppliers can now load their full suite of offerings into the network catalog faster and with enhanced product descriptions and summaries. The new promote subscription will also help suppliers identify sales opportunities based on regional search data and use advanced insights to track business growth on the network.  

Elevating External Workforce Management with SAP Fieldglass Analytics Add-On 

SAP Fieldglass delivers a new, enhanced analytics capability with next-level insights into your external workforce. The analytics add-on with AI capabilities will help businesses meet sustainability and human rights goals, acquire talent quickly, and implement multi-channel talent acquisition strategies. Users can benchmark and predict external talent scenarios, review performance against KPIs, track trends against industry averages, and monitor sustainability and compliance initiatives.  

As we continue to listen to our customers and invest in our spend management and business network solution offerings, our commitment to setting the standard for spend management software remains steadfast. We are committed to providing innovative solutions that help our customers collaborate strategically with their business partners, enhance productivity, and improve compliance.  

To learn more about these new innovations, read “Innovations in Spend Management from SAP Help Customers Improve Productivity, Gain Insights and Boost Growth.”

If you couldn’t attend SAP Spend Connect Live in Las Vegas, sign up here for the virtual experience on October 24 to access live and on-demand content from across content tracks. Join us as we continue to shape the future of spend management together. 


Manoj Swaminathan is president and chief product officer for Intelligent Spend and Business Network at SAP.

Go all in on spend management and explore the SAP Spend Connect Live virtual experience

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SAP to Release Third Quarter 2024 Results on October 21

WALLDORF — SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) will release its full results for the third quarter of 2024 on Monday, October 21.

SAP CEO Christian Klein and CFO Dominik Asam will host a virtual analyst conference to present Q3 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.

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