SAP Strategy
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SAP Document and Reporting Compliance Boosted by Thomson Reuters
The recent expansion of the partnership between Thomson Reuters and SAP marks a significant step forward in tax reporting automation. The integration of ONESOURCE Sales & Use Tax Compliance into SAP Document and Reporting Compliance for SAP S/4HANA aims to help businesses streamline their tax processes more efficiently, leveraging the robust capabilities of SAP technologies. […]
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How Mindsprint Uses High Tech to Help the World Grow and Eat Better Food
We don’t often think about how cutting-edge technology helped get fresh produce to our grocery store – or our doorstep. But that’s exactly what agritech firm Mindsprint is trying to do, alongside its parent company, whose mission is to reimagine the overall food supply chain.
Agritech, or agricultural technology, looks to improve yields and efficiency on farms using technology, and Mindsprint helps customers digitally transform sustainably. The Singapore-based technology and business services firm’s services include digital transformation, cybersecurity, and more – which requires a robust landscape.
“Now, we have added almost every product that SAP has into our environment,” Amit Jain, senior vice president and head of SAP at Mindsprint, said. This includes moving to SAP S/4HANA as well as running SAP SuccessFactors solutions, SAP Concur solutions, SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain, and more. “We work very, very closely with SAP – not just on the product side, but also on the services side.”
This has helped Mindsprint stay nimble and continue serving its customers – and their customers – as market demands have shifted.
Transparency for All
“People are not going to the shops anymore,” Jain said. “People want to order everything online.”
COVID-19 helped accelerate that shift, giving rise to food startups and other e-commerce sites, according to Jain. And Mindsprint uses logistics, finance, and manufacturing solutions within SAP S/4HANA to help those customers meet growing online demand and add transparency to the process.
“When you talk about the food supply chain, people want to be sure that the food that they’re eating is good – so they’re able to trace the origins of the food,” Jain said.
Toward that end, Mindsprint also relies on SAP to help refine transportation management every step of the food’s journey, from farms to ports and all the way to consumers, according to Jain. And between each of those trips, SAP Extended Warehouse Management proves to be important, as different foods require different temperatures and other conditions.
New SAP Concur Research Reveals Five Challenges for Business Travel in 2024
As global workforces grapple with the disconnect of remote working, efficient business travel is a top priority, offering access to new markets, insights, and development opportunities. However, it comes with complications, as revealed by new SAP Concur research of 3,750 travelers and 600 travel managers across global markets.
Many influences are driving – and sometimes stalling – the business travel industry. To ensure maximum productivity and well-being for travelers and travel managers, businesses must support them with the right education and tools in 2024 and beyond. To ensure smooth running and maximize their investments in business travel, business leaders must understand its friction points. The sixth SAP Concur Global Business Travel Survey explores some of the most pressing challenges facing business travelers today. These are the top five takeaways:
1. The Threat of Disruption
- Eighty-eight percent of travelers have been forced to make last-minute changes in the past year because of unexpected delays, cancellations, or the need to re-route.
- Eighty percent opt to add “booking buffers” to the start or end of their journey, or both, incorporating extra time to counteract unexpected schedule changes. This frustrating cycle discourages business travel altogether.
2. Traveler Safety Concerns
- Business travelers cite safety (44%) or political or social (35%) concerns about the destination as the most common reasons that would cause them to decline a business trip.
- Many travel managers experience burnout due to the range of aggravating factors they must consider when planning and provisioning for business trips. A third feel like they are expected to take on a more strategic role without further training.
3. The Toss-Up Between Sustainability and Costs
- Over a quarter of business travelers are willing to decline a business trip due to the environmental impact or the inability to choose sustainable options.
- Twenty-seven percent, on the other hand, claim their company has cut back on paying more for sustainable travel options over the past 12 months.
- Over a third of travel managers face difficulties because they are expected to provide more sustainable travel options without an adequate budget.
4. Unequal Access to Travel Opportunities
- Two in three business travelers say that travel is critical for their career advancement – but the same proportion feel they haven’t received equal opportunity to travel compared to their colleagues.
- Staff cite reasons for unequal access such as their level of seniority (19%), age (18%), and gender (11%).
5. The Need for AI Solutions and Education
- Most travelers (95%) are open to using AI-enabled options when arranging travel, but there is a prevailing “wait and see” attitude. Fewer than one in ten are comfortable using AI-enabled options currently.
- Eighty-nine percent of business travelers want more company support, including assurances for personal data protection, potential biases, and protection from repercussions if AI-assisted bookings contravene company policy.
Leaders won’t be able to solve current travel disruption overnight – but they can make it more manageable for staff. By introducing measures to improve travel flexibility, training opportunities, and next-generation software solutions, organizations can adapt to a challenging market and future-proof their business travel posture for the long term.
For more information about the survey, including additional findings, please download our business traveler, travel manager, and SMB business traveler whitepapers.
Charlie Sultan is president of Concur Travel at SAP Concur.
The SAP Concur Global Business Traveler Survey was conducted by Wakefield Research between April 5-26, 2024, among 3,750 business travelers in 24 markets: U.S., Canada, UK, Germany, France, Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg), Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Italy, Spain, ANZ (Australia, New Zealand), Middle East (UAE, Saudi Arabia), Japan, Korea, India, Mexico, Brazil, SEA (Singapore, Malaysia), South Africa, Portugal, Switzerland, and Austria. Data has been weighted to facilitate tracking.
The SAP Concur Global Travel Manager Survey was conducted by Wakefield Research between April 5-26, 2024, 2024, among 600 travel managers, defined as those who direct or administer travel programs for businesses, across 6 markets: Germany, Canada, Japan, ANZ Countries (Australia and New Zealand), UK, and U.S.
Roca Group Transforms by Migrating to SAP S/4HANA
Roca Group, a global leader in bathroom fixtures and design, is embracing a new era of digital transformation by migrating to SAP S/4HANA. This strategic move aims to integrate and standardize its IT systems, paving the way for enhanced operational efficiency and real-time, data-driven decision-making. Founded over a century ago, Roca Group has established itself […]
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SAP Named a Leader in B2B and B2C IDC Digital Commerce Reports
The SAP Commerce Cloud solution has been a resounding commercial success since its launch in 2018. Today it enables thousands of global companies across over 25 industries and more than 65 countries to process hundreds of billions of euros of GMV securely and reliably. During the holiday season alone, we helped companies process up to US$110M in gross merchandising value per minute with 100% uptime.
While the solution’s functional breadth and depth is well documented, SAP’s primary focus leading up to 2022 was platform modernization. This focus was necessary to make sure that our customers, as well as SAP Commerce Cloud, were set up for long-term success. As a result of that focus, SAP ranked as a major player in the IDC B2C Digital Commerce Report back in 2020. While the modernization journey is truly never-ending, we have clearly turned a corner on that front.
During the last 24 months, this has allowed SAP to focus its investments on functional innovations that can drive measurable business results – including in generative AI – and in 2023 alone SAP delivered over 150 of them. As a result of both modernization and functional innovations, we are delighted to share that SAP has regained leadership in both the IDC B2B and B2C Digital Commerce Reports in 2024. IDC isn’t the only analyst that is paying attention, as Gartner has also improved SAP’s position in the Leader quadrant in 2023 relative to competitors, after a couple of years of a widening gap.
How did we do it? Knowing that if our customers win, we win, we listened and executed relentlessly. Our enterprise customers run some of the largest commerce deployments on the globe, and they told us in no uncertain terms that they needed a platform that solved their very complex commerce challenges with the utmost flexibility, but not at the cost of agility or TCO. As a consequence, we made a long-term commitment towards modernization by advocating for and adopting pragmatic composability to help our customers evolve on their digital transformation journey, no matter where they are from a digital maturity perspective. We accelerated innovation for SAP Commerce Cloud through an all-cloud deployment model with continuous innovation across all commerce areas including headless, API- and event-based architecture, composable storefronts, modern microservices-based implementation of core areas such as payments, promotions, order management, sourcing, and inventory availability, and more.
Here are some of the innovation highlights that we have communicated recently and that help our customers succeed at critical points in the customer experience they are trying to deliver.
Generative AI
For many years, AI in commerce has been about personalizing the customer experience to increase loyalty and profitability. While this remains true and important, generative AI is opening more ways to empower commerce teams to remove mundane tasks and work more efficiently, with the end results of connecting customers more quickly with the products they’re looking for.
To leverage AI for better outcomes, SAP utilizes its wealth of operational and experiential data, along with third-party data, to help provide the holistic view our customers need. For SAP Commerce Cloud, a new set of AI tools has been made available to help supercharge catalog management and product discovery. Many commerce managers know the difficulty and mundaneness of keeping up with catalog hygiene. Although this task is arduous, it’s critical for product visibility and discoverability. Our set of AI capabilities within SAP Commerce Cloud can review product tags and catalogs, generate and customize product descriptions, embed supplemental technologies such as machine vision, and guide customers to the right choice for their needs.
Order Management Systems
A connected enterprise is a prerequisite to delivering seamless and delightful customer experiences. Acting as the central nervous system and connective tissue of unified commerce, order management systems enable orchestration of orders from order placement to fulfillment and delivery.
At NRF, we announced new retail capabilities through SAP Order Management Services, including the SAP Order Management solution for sourcing and availability as well as SAP Order Management foundation. With these modular solutions, organizations can create frictionless omnichannel experiences that can respond to business events, such as fraud holds, delivery, or in-store pickup, and determine the optimal sourcing strategies to deliver customer satisfaction while protecting margins and optimizing organizational business outcomes.
Open Payment Framework
With our latest announcement at Shoptalk, we are working to help accelerate our customers’ time-to-market with the open payment framework for SAP Commerce Cloud. This packaged business framework can connect SAP Commerce Cloud via low-code or no-code with third-party payment service providers, including Stripe, Adyen, WorldPay, and Airwallex – with numerous more planned for the future. This modular, extensible, headless framework helps give power back to retailers to pick their own payment partners based on their needs, whether local or abroad. Organizations can be equipped to scale faster and avoid being confined to a single provider, making wrangling multiple connectors and manual flow mapping a thing of the past.
Front-End Framework Modernization
Digital experience composition, as Gartner puts it, is the new frontier in commerce composability that leverages agile API orchestration and front-end as a service to deliver personalized experiences in a unified way. Our vast ecosystem of best-in-breed partners helps us provide a strong digital experience composition, so that customers can deliver the experiences that their customers want. We continue to grow our partner ecosystem as the market evolves and new technologies emerge, striving to provide multi-business model, multi-market, and multi-industry coverage.
Commitment to Sustainability
Part of SAP’s mission is to provide the tools to empower our customers to attain their sustainability objectives. That commitment extends to SAP Commerce Cloud, as we offer a recommerce module to embrace new circular business models and help the world reduce retail waste. SAP Recommerce caters primarily to retailers to help digitally create processes to introduce consumer excess as well as restored, returned, and used products back into the market, creating a circular revenue stream to help drive additional growth.
As we continue our commerce journey, we are working with our customers to help ensure that they can innovate their businesses with speed and pivot when the market demands it. Customers like Roche are able to step into the future with software monetization platforms, powered by integrations with SAP Commerce Cloud.
Roche is a leading multinational Swiss healthcare company that provides cancer treatments around the world. To transform the patient journey, Roche adopted digital solutions that can empower people to manage their health better, allow healthcare providers to confidently diagnose and treat diseases, and help healthcare institutions unlock greater efficiency. With SAP Commerce Cloud, integrated with SAP Subscription Billing and SAP Entitlement Management, Roche was able to propel itself into the future by enabling the commercialization of its digital products, removing manual interventions, allowing customers to upgrade or downgrade subscriptions via a self-service portal, and providing product managers the ability to quickly develop, test, and deploy ideas among broad ranges of business models. All this only took Roche four and a half months to go live in three countries and 13 more within the year.
“If we want to be customer-oriented and efficient, a software monetization platform is a key enabler. It is indispensable for serving, fulfilling, and servicing digital products in a scalable way, laying the foundation for our future business.”
Moritz Hartmann, Global Head of Roche Information Solutions
We invite you to learn more and reach out to see how SAP Commerce Cloud helps deliver profitable digital commerce growth, from discovery to delivery and beyond. Check out our latest blog on our Q1 2024 release highlights.
IDC MarketScape Names SAP a Leader in Worldwide Carbon Accounting & Management Applications
SAP has been named a leader among 18 vendors in the first-ever IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Carbon Accounting and Management Applications 2024 Vendor Assessment.
A once nascent market, carbon accounting and management is experiencing a significant transition in the number, type, and capability of solutions available. The landscape formerly comprised of startup and niche vendors has expanded to include large independent software vendors (ISVs) and hyperscalers, all battling for market share.
Organizations are under increasing pressure to track and disclose carbon emissions data to stakeholders including investors, partners, clients, customers, employees, and regulators. Many are collecting data and reporting on Scope 1 and 2 emissions. Scope 3 remains a challenge due to the complexity of reliable data collection and reporting.
Fines and litigation will create a new impetus for reporting as well. Regulations will add a new element of complexity to how companies report. Disclosure of decarbonization initiatives will require unique data analysis and scenario planning tools. The IDC report points to data integration as a principal challenge for carbon accounting vendors.
The IDC MarketScape vendor analysis model is designed to provide an overview of the competitive fitness of ICT suppliers in a given market. The research methodology utilizes a rigorous scoring methodology based on both qualitative and quantitative criteria that results in a single graphical illustration of each vendor’s position within a given market. The Capabilities score measures vendor product, go-to-market and business execution in the short-term. The Strategy score measures alignment of vendor strategies with customer requirements in a 3-5-year timeframe. Vendor market share is represented by the size of the icons.
SAP Carbon Accounting & Management: Rising to the Challenge
SAP is well-positioned to provide organizations with data-driven, purpose-specific carbon management solutions that are ERP centric, cloud based, and AI enabled. These include SAP Sustainability Footprint Management, SAP Sustainability Control Tower, SAP Sustainability Data Exchange, the SAP S/4HANA Cloud solution for EHS environment management, and SAP Green Ledger, which all help to enable carbon accounting and management on a transactional level and transform emissions tracking processes.
Our carbon management solutions are best suited for organizations currently using or planning to use SAP S/4HANA Cloud and looking to capture the value of sustainability, as well as manage sustainability-related business risks. Customers can address these objectives by embedding sustainability into their end-to-end business processes, leveraging ERP and supplier data, and using the metrics to inform business processes and financial reporting.
Having the ability to assess carbon and financial data on the same transactional level adds a new dimension to the way organizations address carbon budgets, make capital allocation decisions, and cascade and scale change management. This transformation allows for targeted sustainability actions and more precise financial decisions.
SAP can leverage its ERP-centric sustainability approach of supporting both corporate and transaction-level product carbon footprints as a differentiator. Integration with other financial applications – procurement, supply chain, risk, and compliance management – is a standard feature of the SAP Sustainability portfolio.
Staying ahead of carbon taxes, penalties, and upcoming regulatory requirements will also play a key role in how organizations report. Alignment between CFOs and CSOs will become more frequent due to the overlapping responsibilities and sustainability management component, as they affect both corporate risk and cash flow.
According to the IDC MarketScape, “the portfolio of sustainability offerings is built on a foundation of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, limiting adoption to the universe of users. Furthermore, while modular in design, much of the solutions’ value is dependent on the adoption of multiple system elements, thus commanding a higher price point.” SAP is responding with the speed and agility of cloud delivery combined with integrated sustainability data within the core enterprise resource planning system. This will be critical in helping to optimize customers’ sustainability and financial performance and become the very foundation of their future business success.
By unifying sustainability and financial data, SAP customers can unlock carbon emissions insights, positively impacting decision-making and forecasting on all hierarchical levels. With end-to-end carbon management and the added transactional-level carbon emissions data, organizations can improve operational efficiency, foster emissions transparency, and comply with developing regulations. Achieving a sustainability transformation – one that benefits the bottom line and the planet – is truly within reach. Find out more here.
The IDC study provides a comprehensive analysis of carbon management platforms, highlighting the increasing need for organizations to track, manage, and report carbon emissions amid evolving regulatory landscapes and stakeholder pressures. It evaluates vendors based on their capabilities and strategies to meet future customer needs, focusing on innovation, customer satisfaction, and the ability to support organizations in their decarbonization efforts. “In an era of escalating environmental scrutiny, mastering carbon accounting is not just compliance, but a strategic imperative for future-proofing businesses,” said Amy Cravens, research manager, ESG Reporting and Management Applications at IDC.
Alicia Lenze is global head of Sustainability Marketing at SAP SE.