NEWS 58 - The World Management

14 November

How Kaeser Uses AI to Add Customer Value

When Kaeser Kompressoren started on a journey to improve its data quality, little did it know that artificial intelligence (AI) would become a major game-changer for its business.

With a workforce of around 8,000 and a global sales and services organization operating in more than 140 countries, Kaeser is one of the world’s leading manufacturers and providers of compressed air solutions and services.

Based in Coburg, Germany, Kaeser considers itself both a pioneer in its industry and an innovator: the family-owned firm was one of the first to purchase SAP R/3 when it went to market over 30 years ago and currently has several SAP software projects running simultaneously. It recently reached another major transformation milestone when it migrated to RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

But the company’s digitization efforts were hampered by growing system complexity and a data volume that it was struggling to manage. “Poor data quality almost always held our projects back,” Kaeser CIO Falko Lameter says.

That’s why the company kicked off a three-year project in 2020 aimed at designing and implementing a new data strategy. Together with SAP, Kaeser wanted to improve data quality and optimize its core business processes.

“AI was on our radar screen back then, but it wasn’t our starting point,” recalls Dr. Norbert Enge, chief business consultant, SAP Business Transformation Services. “Our initial aim was to develop a data strategy road map.”

AI Comes into Play

To start, the project team looked at Kaeser’s master data. “Just to give you one example: our system contains a six-digit number of suppliers, at least two-thirds of whom were inactive,” Lameter says. Maintaining that data manually would have involved a disproportionate amount of effort, which is why many companies hesitate to tackle data projects of this size.

Around the same time, business AI was rapidly gaining traction, so the team began to integrate AI into Kaeser’s data strategy.

The result was Predicting Inactive Suppliers, a custom AI use case based on one of the SAP AI Services – the Data Attribute Recommendation service – and SAP Analytics Cloud. This solution has enabled Kaeser to automate more than 80% of its data maintenance tasks, improve data accuracy, and achieve significant productivity gains.

“Given what I know now, I would say that you can’t maintain that amount of data manually – you can only do it with AI,” says Lameter. “The time for AI has come, and I’m convinced that the future will be data driven.”

Visual Spare Parts Search

The team’s main objective was to find AI use cases that would benefit the end customer. One of these scenarios concerns the search for spare parts. Due to the large number of variants of similar items, this was often a difficult and time-consuming task that created significant extra work for service personnel.

But now, Visual Spare Parts Search, a custom AI use case developed in cooperation with nyris, allows Kaeser service technicians to simply take a photo of the needed spare part. The embedded nyris Visual Search AI service uses image recognition to compare uploaded images against the spare parts database and identify the correct asset ID number.

This helps service technicians pinpoint spare parts much more quickly and enables customers to identify spare parts themselves.

Intelligent Product Recommendations

The most promising AI use case is the SAP Intelligent Product Recommendation application, which helps sales employees analyze customer requirements and processes and translate them into accurate product recommendations. Based on natural language prompts, the solution can analyze a customer’s requirements using machine learning and generative AI and recommend the most suitable compressors.

“Making product recommendations is an art,” Enge says. “If you have the technology to make better recommendations, that’s a real lever.”

There’s More to a Successful AI Project Than Tech

Implementing AI technologies is one thing. However, the team found that it’s just as important to get everyone on board and create the right environment. This includes providing employees with the software they need, training them, and discussing the ethical implications of AI.

Having management buy-in and alignment with other teams, such as research and development, marketing, sales, and service, also proved to be key to success. “Ultimately, it’s also about the impact on the people and the community in which you live and work, and I think it’s very important to take this into account,” Lameter says.

It’s at least a pentathlon, Enge says: “Some would say that it’s only a matter of having a good data scientist. That’s certainly a very important point, but you also need to understand business processes and data and, last but not least, you need to address people’s concerns and explain how you arrive at the results.”

Boundless Opportunities

As an IT pioneer, Kaeser was very open to the topic of using AI. “This is part of the company’s DNA,” Enge says. “Right at the very start of the project, we discussed which league we wanted to play in, and it was clear that AI should be part of the toolbox if we wanted to play in the premier league.”

The proportion of SAP Business AI in Kaeser’s data project rose from less than 10% in the first year to over 30% in the third. Today, the team is now 100% focused on SAP Business AI and has developed 12 specific use cases targeted at adding value for customers.

And there is more to come. Kaeser has developed a prototype application with the NVIDIA Omniverse platform for visualizing the intelligent product recommendation process, as SAP CEO Christian Klein demonstrated in his keynote at SAP Sapphire in 2024.

“Get your journey started and you will discover fascinating things,” Enge says. “The progress is huge, and everyone can share in it.”

Photos courtesy of Kaeser

13 November

BUSINESS NEWS

Menzies Aviation Soars with Cloud HR, Elevates Employee Experience

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In the dynamic day-to-day activity of some of the world’s busiest airports – whether Miami or Mumbai, Santiago or Stockholm, or many other hubs – the 55,000-plus employees of Menzies Aviation are engaged to ensure that you complete your journey safely, efficiently, and on time. As a global leader in aviation services “working above and below the wing,” Menzies provides a myriad of services, including ground services, fueling, air cargo handling, and executive services, together with comfortable lounges at more than 295 airports in 65 countries.

Menzies Aviation delivers time-critical logistics that annually result in 1.3 million aircraft turns, 3.2 million aircraft refueled, and 2 million tons of cargo handled. Already in its third consecutive year of double-digit growth since the pandemic, Menzies accelerates its market momentum through a mix of strategic partnerships, contract wins, and acquisitions. And demand for modern, efficient passenger and cargo services is ever increasing. In fact, the global airport services market is forecast to grow from US$196.96 billion in 2024 to $570.12 billion in 2032.

Ask the employees of Menzies Aviation what they like about their jobs, and they’ll likely tell you that it’s the variety and pace of work in an environment where every day is different and every action matters.

Sarah Mackinlay, senior vice president of People Projects & Integrations at Menzies Aviation, says that outstanding teamwork is at the heart of Menzies’ success: “There isn’t one person who can do their job alone. You need a team of people to prepare, load, and push back an aircraft. Everybody working positively together drives that excellence. It’s that united vision of wanting to safely provide the best possible service.”

This team spirit inspires employees to work toward their full potential to achieve exceptional service. To empower its employees to deliver safe and trusted aviation services that are integral to its mission, Menzies is on a transformative journey to harness the power of technology for greater productivity and business agility. Menzies now provides employees in 53 countries with an improved employee experience – a result of its global HR transformation to adopt the cloud-based capabilities of SAP SuccessFactors HCM.

About Menzies Aviation – World’s Largest Aviation Services Company

Menzies’ proud heritage started in 1833 when John Menzies, spotting a gap in the market, opened his first bookstore in Edinburgh to become the only wholesale bookseller in Scotland. The advent of rail travel soon created a market for railway bookstalls, which led to the expansion of Menzies’ business across the region. When air travel took off in the twentieth century, Menzies’ organization adapted quickly to provide services to this emerging industry. In 1987, it acquired companies specialized in overnight and heavy freight. To position itself in the twenty-first century, the company strategically pivoted to providing cargo handling and passenger services, expanding rapidly through acquisitions. In 2022, it merged with National Aviation Services (NAS), under the ownership of Agility, to create the world’s largest aviation services company. It is now the No.1 aviation services provider by number of countries, airports, and aircraft turns.

Putting “People, Passion, and Pride” at the Center of Business

With a proud heritage that dates to 1833, Menzies has always been a business that is about people, Mackinlay underscores. The company aligns its business and people strategy on three pillars: people, passion, and pride. “From a people strategy point of view, we’re very much focused on three key drivers: making Menzies a great place for our people to work; being passionate about growing our employees and growing our own leaders; and taking pride in getting the basics right,” she says. “That third pillar is where my focus is at its strongest. By doing that, it makes [Menzies] a great place to work, and it gives people the opportunity to lead, learn, and grow.”

By choosing SAP SuccessFactors HCM, Menzies now has a unified platform to help it attain data-driven insights for business agility and provide a modern employee experience with opportunities for learning and career development. “My job is an enabler for so many other things within our organization,” Mackinlay says. “Providing a solution that supports our frontline employee or manager in the business to do their job more efficiently, smoothly, and easily – those things are what really excite me.”

Unlocking Business Insights from Global Visibility of Data

Menzies had previously relied on a mix of people processes and platforms, and struggled to make sense of its people data, which was siloed in disparate systems in various regions. “The simple question of ‘How many employees do you have?’ we couldn’t answer that at the click of a button,” says Mackinlay, noting the critical nature of seasonal travel fluctuations that impact the workforce. “That could take us several days to a week to be able to go out to all our regions and check and validate those numbers, because data was held across multiple systems and spreadsheets.”

Already experienced working with the SAP SuccessFactors Learning solution since 2015, along with SAP SuccessFactors Performance & Goals for graded management across the business, Menzies Aviation had selected SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central as its core HR system, but the implementation was very gradual in the early years and by the end of 2022 the solution had been rolled out to just 11 countries. In early 2023, Menzies began its transformative journey to leverage the broad benefits of cloud HR. Working with EPI-USE as its implementation partner, it accelerated the global rollout by prioritizing a defined baseline consistency model over more detailed, country-specific customizations. It also benefited from pre-delivered localization capabilities, such as language support, local best practices, and automated legal and regulatory updates. In one year, 52 countries were up and running on SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central, integrated with the SAP SuccessFactors Learning, SAP SuccessFactors Performance & Goals, and other core business systems, making it the source of truth for employee data where live.

October saw the latest location join this journey when Hong Kong went live with SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central and SAP SuccessFactors Learning. Utilizing this momentum, Menzies is now expanding its use of the SAP SuccessFactors Employee Ce n tral Payroll solution, which is already available to its workforce in the UK and will soon include Portugal and Hong Kong.

“We’re a small team, but each person contributed an exceptional effort, both in time and skill, to bring the organization together around this transformation – that includes stakeholder buy-in, mapping and cleansing the data, all the quality checks, and communicating clearly and openly with HR teams around the business to ensure adoption and change management,” says Mackinlay, who is optimistic about what the next phases of Menzies’ cloud HR journey will bring. “There were some long days, indeed, but as a team we can be proud of what we’ve accomplished so far – and the benefits to the business are already becoming apparent. This is the real foundation for what we can go on to achieve next and having the support of the local HR teams continues to be critical to the success of the rollout.”

Today, Menzies no longer needs to estimate how many employees it has at any given time. Having a single source of data means that it can pull up this information at the push of a button for the present as well as the historical past for comparison. “We can start to see trends, so we can start to understand what our future models would look like as well,” says Mackinlay, who values the improved reporting capabilities that provide greater visibility into the business – which, for example, helps the teams to understand the type of work people are doing and how their time and effort contribute to the business. “Being able to have business insight and business data to make decisions has been really important on our continued journey with SAP SuccessFactors and supporting our global strategy.”

Menzies is reaping the benefits of moving towards one global solution, which include consistent and standardized HR processes across its multiple countries and territories of operation, role-based authorizations for data access, worldwide regulatory compliance with localization, simplified maintenance for a single solution, and ease of integration with other HR processes and functions. As Mackinlay summarizes, “For us, this journey is about having a single source of truth with global consistency, data insight, and visibility yet maintaining local data ownership. Data security and integrity are at the very core.”

One Stop for Employee Experience

For Menzies Aviation, the journey gains momentum as more employees engage with the platform, opening the way to transform how work is done. Currently, Menzies is focusing its effort to elevate the employee experience by introducing self-service capabilities for all employees, giving them access to their own data and streamlining HR service delivery with efficient, real-time processes for workflows and approvals.

More than two-thirds of Menzies employees perform their work away from a desk, so communication with these employees for routine employment matters can be challenging. The new self-service capability is the next part of Menzies’ journey enabled by its SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central base platform. Menzies is partnering with other core business systems to create a new one-stop entry point for all employment-related information, including upcoming shifts, holidays, and tools to support employees in their day-to-day roles.

A key benefit for HR teams is that it frees them to focus on more value-added work. As Menzies continues to grow and hire new employees, it plans to look for digital solutions to accelerate the recruiting and onboarding processes. Menzies is also excited to explore how AI-enabled technologies can further support the HR team – including adopting Joule, SAP’s AI copilot, and using generative AI.

“We’re a people business,” Mackinlay says. “We want our HR teams to be with our people. It’s a journey that we’re on – and we’ve been on since 2015 – to enable our HR teams to have the tools to be more employee facing and available to support our employees as they grow and develop their potential towards an exciting career at Menzies Aviation.”

Find out more about SAP SuccessFactors HCM.

12 November

BUSINESS NEWS

QIG Undergoes SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Migration

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Qatari Investors Group (QIG) has recently completed a significant technological transition from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, with strategic support from YASH Technologies. YASH Technologies, a global leader in IT and business consulting, partnered with QIG to execute this migration, which is part of QIG’s broader goal to align its digital capabilities […]

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12 November

BUSINESS NEWS

Accelerating Your Journey: AI’s Transformative Role in Sustainability

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As the 29^th UN Climate Change Conference (COP29) opens today in Baku, Azerbaijan, the global community continues to face an urgent call to action on climate change. Coordinated, innovative solutions are paramount to addressing this complex crisis, and advanced technology – especially AI – stands as a powerful enabler for transitioning to a net-zero economy. Recognizing AI’s potential to drive climate action, SAP has delivered two use cases that highlight how AI-driven sustainability software can streamline processes, eliminate manual work, and enhance precision.

With automated Emission Factor Mapping in SAP Sustainability Footprint Management and AI-assisted ESG Report Generation in SAP Sustainability Control Tower, SAP can support companies in setting meaningful environmental targets, ensuring compliance, and managing carbon footprints with heightened efficiency and accountability.

“Sustainability executives are on board with artificial intelligence. More than half say improving data analysis and consolidation using AI are top actions they will be taking over the next three years to enhance ESG capabilities.”

Addressing the Strategy Execution Gap in Sustainability Reporting, KPMG, February 2024

Emission Factor Mapping in SAP Sustainability Footprint Management

To calculate product carbon footprints accurately, companies must assign emission factors to thousands of purchased products. Ideally, emission factors are provided directly by suppliers, but often companies need to use industry averages based on product attributes like name, category, or location. Up until now, this mapping process has been a manual, time-consuming, and error-prone task that required expertise in lifecycle assessment (LCA), determining the environmental impacts associated with all the stages of the lifecycle of a product, process, or service.

To help make this process easier and more efficient, SAP has introduced an AI-based capability within the SAP Sustainability Footprint Management solution. SAP’s AI engine can automatically suggest emission factor mappings for purchased products and services and can assign a similarity score to each recommendation.

For the mapping, SAP generates embeddings for both, emission factors from LCA databases and product data from the ERP system. Embeddings are vector representations – numerical representations of textual information to provide context and meaning of a text. Both sets of embeddings are saved in SAP HANA Cloud vector engine.

The system compares these embeddings to help identify the quality of the mapping and provide suggested results. This helps businesses reduce manual effort by up to 80% and calculate product and corporate carbon footprints quicker and with greater precision, even without LCA experts. It can also accelerate their sustainability reporting timelines and help them respond faster to regulatory demands.

AI-Assisted ESG Report Generation in SAP Sustainability Control Tower

In addition, SAP embedded a generative AI-powered reporting capability within SAP Sustainability Control Tower. Creating sustainability reports that align with internal strategies and meet external standards, such as the CSRD, is essential for staying compliant and transparent. However, gathering relevant environmental, social, and governance data and drafting these reports can be highly resource-intensive, involving multiple teams and complex data sources.

That’s why SAP’s AI capability helps generate comprehensive ESG report drafts based on best-practice templates and the company’s available ESG metrics. Once users select a template, AI can automatically collect the most relevant metrics from SAP Sustainability Control Tower, create graphs to visualize the data, and generate a polished report draft. That helps companies spend up to 98% less time collecting ESG metrics and up to 80% less time in creating a report.

Some key benefits of the feature include:

Efficient data utilization: The AI-powered solution leverages large language models and SQL grounding techniques, which help transform natural language inquiries into precise database queries that access real-time data from structured databases. That’s how it transforms raw data from customers’ systems into accurate, comprehensive reports tailored to specific timeframes.
Visualization: The AI generates insightful textual content through SQL-based data retrieval, helping to ensure data integrity and compliance. Additionally, it creates visually appealing charts and tables to help enhance report clarity and understanding.
Automated verification: Our robust system prioritizes data security by avoiding direct SQL query execution and employing a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) process to help safeguard against informational discrepancies.

Watch a demo to learn more.

The Future of AI in Sustainability

The use cases above are just the beginning. AI’s potential to transform sustainability management is enormous, and at SAP we are accelerating the creation of use cases to be at the forefront of our customers’ sustainable transformation journeys. For example, users will be able to interact through natural language with SAP’s AI copilot Joule that can offer actionable recommendations and simulations to help improve environmental and social performance. And we will continue to apply AI to make the acquisition of sustainability data easier.

Using SAP’s ERP-centric, cloud-based, AI-enabled approach, we’re working to ensure AI’s massive potential turns into both real business transformation and sustainability outcomes. AI and technology can help us better understand and monitor the environment, improve energy efficiency, optimize resource management, and develop innovative solutions for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

As COP29 convenes in Baku, it is essential for global leaders and decision-makers to fully explore AI’s transformative role in addressing climate change. The urgent demands of this crisis call for the kind of innovative, AI-driven solutions that can unlock greater precision, efficiency, and impact. By leveraging AI not only to streamline business operations but also to set and meet ambitious environmental goals, we are shaping a future where technology empowers businesses to thrive responsibly, contributing actively to a sustainable and resilient planet.

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

11 November

BUSINESS NEWS

Bridgestone Advances Operations with SAP S/4HANA Upgrade

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To enhance its operational efficiency and future-readiness, Bridgestone has completed an SAP S/4HANA upgrade with consulting support from Bluecrux, a value chain and technology firm. Bridgestone’s move to SAP S/4HANA comes as part of a strategic update to its enterprise resource planning (ERP) capabilities, replacing an aging system due for support phase-out in 2027. The […]

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09 November

BUSINESS NEWS

Molex Modernizes Operations with SAP Business Network for Industry Transformation

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Molex’s digital supply chain overhaul leverages SAP Business Network for industry transformation, fostering seamless collaboration and enhancing efficiency across its global operations. Molex, a renowned player in electronics and connectivity solutions, has been advancing its supply chain strategy in partnership with SAP, leveraging SAP Business Network to enhance digital transactions and streamline communication with suppliers […]

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08 November

BUSINESS NEWS

10 Generations of Sustainable Winemaking? Here’s How with the Right Tech

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It took five generations for the González family to carefully steer their vineyard through to the 21^st century, and the next five aim to carry on the business. Headquartered in Jerez de la Frontera, Spain, the family-owned vineyard has been around since 1835 and was the first to export sherry on the recommendation of Robert Byass, its agent in England.

The González Byass partnership has continued to this day with a mission to make great wines and spirits that bring people together. Now, the company has over 2,000 hectares of vines under cultivation in 12 wine-growing regions of Spain, Chile, and Mexico, where the producer deploys sustainable agricultural techniques to bring indigenous vines back into production.

08 November

BUSINESS NEWS

SAP SuccessFactors Sales Performance Management Solutions Win 2025 Buyer’s Choice Award from TrustRadius

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TrustRadius has awarded sales performance management solutions in the SAP SuccessFactors portfolio with the 2025 Buyer’s Choice award. TrustRadius is a review platform where users share experiences with software and services. It helps businesses make informed decisions through user-generated reviews and insights on product performance.

“Congratulations to the sales performance management solutions from SAP SuccessFactors for winning the TrustRadius Buyer’s Choice award,” said Allyson Havener, SVP of Marketing and Community at TrustRadius. “This award is a direct reflection of the positive experiences shared by customers who trust SAP SuccessFactors to optimize sales performance and drive results. It’s clear that these solutions are making a significant impact in helping organizations achieve their sales goals through streamlined processes and actionable insights.”

Buyer’s Choice awards are determined solely by verified, unbiased customer reviews, highlighting products with top capabilities, great value, and excellent customer relationships.

Hear from some of our customers on how much they value the sales performance management solutions:

“This [sales performance management solution] has provided us a platform for us to show our partners visibility day by day on their incentives and their proposed payments. This has also allowed us to decrease our expected timeframes in which our partners are expected to be paid and thus increased the visibility and usefulness of this tool.” – Senior Business Analyst, Telstra
“[SAP SuccessFactors Agent Performance Management] is a great application to create different payout structures to process the producer’s compensation or internal agent’s compensation.” – Senior Scrum Master and Product Lead, Healthfirst
“Some of the benefits we have obtained with sales performance management are standardization, centralized control in commission calculations, and natural integration with SAP S/4HANA Cloud. Our goal is to have a flexible and reliable tool that can solve the different cases we have in calculating commissions at Grupo La Moderna.” – Corporate Director, Grupo La Moderna
“At Kyndryl, we replaced a 100% legacy system with sales performance management. The solution is deployed across all [55] countries we operate in and calculates the incentive payments for 3,400 sellers.” – CIO Enterprise Applications Sales, Kyndryl

We are proud to create products that inspire such gracious feedback in our user community. Explore our product tours for SAP SuccessFactors Incentive Management and SAP SuccessFactors Territory and Quota to experience these solutions in action. Thank you for supporting our work and sharing your feedback on TrustRadius.

Request a demo to discover how to equip sales team with the tools they need to create impactful sales experiences.

Robert Hartsough is general manager of Sales Performance Management at SAP.

07 November

BUSINESS NEWS

SAP SuccessFactors Delivers New AI-Based Innovations for Greater Efficiency and Unparalleled Experiences

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In a world where change is constant, organizations must rely on their people to stay competitive. Human resources (HR) leaders are at the forefront of shaping strategy that impacts all areas of the organization – for example, finding and retaining top talent, keeping up with changing regulations, and managing productivity. Myriad new HR tools and technologies on the market promise to use data and artificial intelligence (AI) to transform the role of HR into a strategic partner for the organization. In the race to evaluate and gain value from AI tools, some organizations are beginning – or preparing – transformations of their HR environments with the goal to accelerate productivity.

SAP SuccessFactors customers convened recently at SuccessConnect, SAP’s annual human resources customer event, held October 28-30 in Lisbon, Portugal, and on demand through SuccessConnect Virtual. Attendees learned more about how SAP – the world’s largest cloud HR tech vendor – is leading the market with unmatched investment in and delivery of new AI capabilities. As announced at the event, SAP is delivering new innovations and embedded AI, including 30 new AI use cases, across the SAP SuccessFactors HCM suite to help provide organizations with greater efficiencies and unparalleled experiences.

“Our mission is to make every employee a success story,” Dan Beck, president and chief product officer for SAP SuccessFactors, told customers at SuccessConnect. “We’re really at a special point in the arc of technology. This is why I truly believe the next two years of HR tech, the way we can impact the workforce, is going to be more interesting than the prior two decades….The world is moving very quickly. The world is not standing still. And as a trusted partner, SAP SuccessFactors can help you stay ahead in that always-changing world.”

AI Boosts SAP’s Core HR and Payroll

With the 2H 2024 release of SAP SuccessFactors, available in November, customers can benefit from SAP’s steadfast commitment and investment in AI and gain new generative AI capabilities that help improve the employee experience across the talent lifecycle. For example, managers can receive help in making AI-assisted 360-degree reviews. SAP’s AI copilot Joule can guide new hires through the onboarding process, nudging them to complete data review forms and e-signatures. AI-assisted writing capabilities can help employees complete tasks, with text translation available in the same window. Joule will be able to support 80% of the most-used business tasks across SAP’s portfolio by the end of the year.

SAP’s unique approach to business AI is founded on the principles that every AI use case must be relevant, reliable, and responsible to ensure that it is compliant with ethical, business, and privacy regulations around the world. SAP is deeply committed to the ethical development of AI, with its Global AI Ethics Policy, Steering Committee, Advisory Panel, and more.

Beyond infusing even more AI capabilities throughout the SAP SuccessFactors HCM suite, SAP continues to lead the market with a strong global HR core that combines the power of SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central, SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll, and SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking. SAP’s HR core is cloud native, AI-enabled, and can scale to meet any customer need. Differentiating it from other vendors, SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central is equipped to help handle diverse regulatory and compliance requirements, with localization for more than 100 countries for core HR and payroll supported in 52 countries. For HR teams, this can bring peace of mind regarding risk and compliance, avoidance of penalties, and the ability to focus on other strategic initiatives.

Customers that use SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll can look forward to updates in the first half of 2025, including a new user interface for unified user experience, a payroll control center to help manage all payroll process activities, and a position and budgeting control for compliance in the public sector. With the update, employees can use Joule to ask questions about their pay slip and receive answers in seconds – creating a better experience for employees while saving HR time addressing service tickets.

To ensure that HR doesn’t operate in a silo, it’s vitally important that it’s connected to everything the larger business is doing, as Beck explained. Together with the rest of the SAP cloud ERP offerings, customers can deliver a unified, consistent, and connected experience for employees no matter where they sit in the business. And SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) helps them connect it all.

Ahold Delhaize: Putting Associates in the Driver’s Seat

Netherlands-based Ahold Delhaize is one of the world’s largest food retail groups, with more than 402,000 associates globally serving 63 million shoppers each week. In 2018, it began an HR transformation to unify its complex and fragmented HR landscape. A lack of unified processes and a scattered tech stack was holding business leaders and their teams back from completing their people-related work and impacting the organization’s decision-making. Most associates are deskless, so building a mobile experience that gave them access to their data was an important goal for the project.

“This required consolidation and streamlining of our existing HR processes onto a single, secure platform – and for us that was [SAP] SuccessFactors,” said Barbara van der Zanden-Sandtke, global head of HR Tech, Data Innovation, and Associate Experience at Ahold Delhaize.

To achieve its goals, Ahold Delhaize took a phased approach to its implementation of SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central and SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll. By summer 2023, it had completed the implementation and began to focus on how an improved employee experience will benefit the future of its associates. As Tim Piepers, senior director HR Technology Platform at Ahold Delhaize, summarized, “We are putting our associates in the driver’s seat – of their data and information, learning and development, and career trajectories. And as a result, we are building a more strategic, agile, and future-forward company.”

Talent and Learning with AI-Based Career Recommendations

To address the skills gap, talent and learning is consistently one of the most critical areas of investment for HR leaders. “Ultimately you can’t hire yourself out of a skills gap,” said Beck, who noted that many HR leaders are looking for ways to reskill their workforces for the future needs of the organization. “SAP has been investing significantly to solve this problem and I’m excited to introduce a new solution for us, the SAP SuccessFactors Career and Talent Development solution. This combines the best of our talent products into a single guided experience, an all-new look and feel for data-driven career planning.”

Employees will be able to access new insights about their growth and career development. They will be able to receive AI-assisted recommendations for career growth, such as skills, roles, and learning opportunities. The new solution helps empower employees and managers for better strategic workforce planning.

To support customers in becoming skills-based organizations, SAP is enhancing the talent intelligence hub, which can enable customers to automate the creation of a skills library based on job roles, continuously build employee’s skills profiles as they grow, and enrich job profiles. “The objective behind the talent intelligence hub is to infuse skills throughout the entire talent journey, associated with your profile, directly from recruiting,” Beck said. “All of this is built on top of SAP Business Technology Platform.”

The talent intelligence hub – available to all SAP SuccessFactors customers – helps enable customers to move from being reactive to proactive on skills while offering a personalized employee experience. As announced at SuccessConnect, the talent intelligence hub is now an open, extensible platform that can integrate skills data from SAP partners. This helps customers by consolidating and standardizing skills data on one platform for better visibility. The first SAP partners to integrate with the talent intelligence hub include Beamery, Degreed, IMOCHA INC, Korn Ferry, Lightcast, Phenom, TalenTeam, and Techwolf.

Capgemini Empowers Employees with Skills-First People Management

Capgemini is a leading strategic partner that helps organizations unlock the value of technology for business transformation. Headquartered in Paris, France, Capgemini has 340,000 employees working in 50 countries. It fosters a culture of growth and continuous learning, empowering clients and employees with its promise: “Get the future you want.”

“This promise is at the heart of everything we do and really drives our people strategy,” said Jihane Baciocchini, head of Global Talent Acquisition, Capgemini. “One of the main pillars of making this promise a reality is skills. Investing in skills means investing in people, which is really driving our HR strategy.”

Capgemini’s approach is determined largely by the needs of its clients to drive their sustainable and digital transformations, Baciocchini explained: “The reality is our clients are now expecting us to anticipate the skills they will need in the future. The same goes for our people.” Its emphasis on skills makes Capgemini a valued partner to its clients and an employer of choice for top talent.

Capgemini uses SAP SuccessFactors solutions to power the entire employee lifecycle, from hire to retire. With the talent intelligence hub, employees will receive personalized career path recommendations linked to their skills and aspirations within the SAP SuccessFactors Opportunity Marketplace.

Strategic Partnerships and Extensibility That Accelerate Value

SAP SuccessFactors has more than 350 partner apps in SAP Store to help provide trusted and integrated solutions for unmatched flexibility on a wide range of business needs, including wellness, benefits, learning, and time tracking. As the needs of the workforce and business change, customers can use these certified solutions to extend SAP SuccessFactors technology in a consistent, reliable way.

The newest solution extension partners include Legion, which extends SAP SuccessFactors time capabilities with shift management and integrates with the SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking solution; and Degreed, which orchestrates learning across the entire talent lifecycle and integrates with the SAP SuccessFactors Learning solution.

WalkMe helps organizations adopt technology faster, reduce training costs, and increase value on investments, with some early adopters reporting a 200% improvement of task completion. At SuccessConnect, SAP also announced its intent to add pre-built WalkMe content into SAP SuccessFactors solutions, which will be commercially available in the first half of 2025, allowing customers to improve employee experience and adoption across common workflows.

“As our ecosystem continues to grow, keep in mind that we are part of SAP, which means, among other things, we benefit from that robust technology layer, SAP Business Technology Platform,” said Beck, addressing customers that may be working with many third-party HR applications and are interested in extensibility of SAP SuccessFactors solutions. “Good news: you can build that with SAP Business Technology Platform. We have low-code no-code technology to allow you to build your own application, integrate it, build a workflow, and secure it, with a custom card coming off the SAP SuccessFactors homepage. We have the most robust technology platform in the world.”

Frit Ravich Leads with People and Culture at Its Core for a New Era of Technology

Frit Ravich, a family business founded in 1963 in Girona, Spain, manufactures and distributes chips, snacks, and nuts. With a team of 1,100 employees and presence in 25 countries, Frit Ravich is a company that has people and culture at its core.

In 2017, the company adopted SAP SuccessFactors to drive its transformation. Today it is taking its business to the next level with SAP Business AI to ensure no one is left behind. Maria Saló, Frit Ravich’s chief people and culture officer, summarized the organization’s approach to its people strategy: “Not to change people, but to help them make the most of changes by unlocking their full potential.” For Frit Ravich, that meant carrying out its HR transformation – a project the team named “Butterfly” – with company culture “Feel Frit” at the center and in sync with its business objectives.

Frit Ravich Talent Manager Rebeca Montilla explained: “At Frit Ravich, SAP SuccessFactors isn’t just a tool. It is the core of every process. Our entire strategy is supported by the SAP SuccessFactors portfolio, fully integrated into the day-to-day lives of every employee. The tool usability is very high, with 96% of our employees using it. Our organization is making adoption part of every employee’s development.”

Based on the success of the Butterfly project, Saló looked ahead optimistically: “The disruption of AI reminds us that transformation isn’t about facing changes, it’s about making the most of them. We aim for a more flexible organizational structure, moving beyond a purely functional vision to a skill-based organization. We’ve already shown that Frit Ravich doesn’t leave anyone behind. And that’s still true in this new era of AI.”

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07 November

BUSINESS NEWS

High-Growth Barefoot Footwear Pioneer Be Lenka Steps into the Future with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition

by sherwin@eyeconz.com 0 Comments

As demand for sustainable and innovative consumer goods continues to rise, Be Lenka, the Slovakian pioneer in barefoot footwear and ergonomic baby carriers, has chosen GROW with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition to help broaden its global footprint in the industry.

“We started six years ago in the basement,” explains Peter Brezani, Be Lenka’s chief operating officer, “with seven in the office and only two collections of shoes.” Dedicated to high-quality craftsmanship, innovation, and sustainability, Be Lenka now has more than 100 employees, offers 250 collections of shoes, and delivers products to over 70 countries.