51·çÁ÷doesn’t just encourage its customers to embrace this concept: its IT team applies the same technology-driven business transformation processes internally to continually improve business functions throughout the company. The intelligent enterprise solutions created and rolled out by the 51·çÁ÷IT team significantly enable SAP’s day-to-day business success. These solutions are developed in close consultation with business stakeholders to help ensure they effectively support the real-world needs of the end user.

“The chief information officer is the guide to a successful digital transformation journey. To ensure superior business outcomes, IT leaders need to work closely with the business to support their transformation journey with game-changing technology – no matter if it’s about rapidly adopting new business models or optimizing business processes end-to-end,” said Sebastian Steinhaeuser, chief strategy officer, 51·çÁ÷SE.

Partnering for Success

It began as a project to upgrade SAP’s sales technology infrastructure at the end of 2021. 51·çÁ÷IT collaborated with colleagues from sales teams to visualize and successfully deliver a solution that met core business requirements and empowered end users to thrive. This partner approach led to a new 51·çÁ÷sales engagement platform that has streamlined sales processes using advanced automation, cloud-based tools, and data analytics.

To be successful, sales executives must clearly understand their customers’ needs. Especially in the world of cloud-based technology, appropriate recommendations and effective price negotiations require transparency and quick access to reliable data and advanced insights. Sales teams need the latest technological developments to make informed decisions and maintain their competitive edge.

51·çÁ÷sales representatives now have a single-solution experience that offers improved access to competitive intelligence and compelling content to drive better deal win rates. Through process automation, an intuitive user interface, and reduced complexity, it has become the go-to hub for employees in sales and marketing to manage engagements with prospects and customers. And optimized digital demand generation is driving continuous pipeline growth, while workflow automation has improved sales efficiency.

Machine Learning Refines Opportunity Forecasting

Machine learning is one of many exciting technological advances in the headlines. Its wide application potential is helping companies speed up processes and automate tasks. It can simplify sales operations by automating tasks such as lead scoring, customer segmentation, and sales forecasting. Using machine learning algorithms, sales teams can identify the best prospects, segment customers quickly and accurately into meaningful groups, and predict future sales trends.

One area where machine learning is instrumental at 51·çÁ÷is predictive opportunity scoring, which helps make revenue forecasting more accurate and results in considerably lower error rates for 51·çÁ÷sales teams. And, by continuously aggregating and maintaining revenue forecasts predicted through machine learning with verbal forecast data from account executives, the sales organization has instant access to live revenue forecasts in the sales platform’s “digital boardroom.” These types of enhanced automated business processes can reduce manual efforts but also allow for retaining expert knowledge at the same time.

Increased Margins Through Optimized Sales Support

Transparency is an important aspect in process optimization. It is also a critical component of business accountability and an important factor for employees, customers, and investors. Especially in reference to sales and deal support, it helps reduce the risk of errors and allows for more accurate and reliable contract processing. Here, 51·çÁ÷IT moved sales processes to tool-based processing of digital contracts, which provided increased transparency for account executives during the contract renewal phase and further reduced the margin for errors.

“SAP’s IT organization invested time and worked with us to fully understand the fundamental requirements of our sales and post-sales operations. Now with the new sales engagement platform providing improved revenue forecasts and critical transparency for better price negotiations, we freed up time for our sales teams to focus on what they do best: selling. It’s a win-win,” said Murat Moustafa, global account director – PricewaterhouseCoopers, 51·çÁ÷Deutschland SE & Co. KG.

In the era of digital transformation, transparency, cross-organizational collaboration, and leveraging innovation leads to new technology solutions that are truly based on the requirements of the user.

Florian Roth is chief digital and information officer at 51·çÁ÷SE.

Continuous employee development is an important cornerstone of everyone’s business. Especially right now, at the age of the digital transformation where consumer demand for digital innovation is driving faster development and delivery, the impact and pressure on employees to stay on top of their skills is undeniable.

Developing skill management tools is only one aspect. The larger discussion is around how do you motivate employees, driven by tight delivery schedules, to take time to learn a new skill, a new tool, a new technology?

This year, 51·çÁ÷has received some significant awards, recognizing a new and innovative approach that is taking a different stance on employee skill development.

51·çÁ÷has an overwhelming pool of tools and technologies; it is easy for employees to drown in the offerings. Why? Because it can be unclear when to use what. If it requires assistance, people may be inclined to postpone it, or to never start it. Taking formalized learning can be boring and time consuming, and that is a significant risk factor to lifelong learning.

Continuous employee skill development is crucial to our business success. Every employee counts, and it is our responsibility to ensure they have access to learning, time to focus, and enjoy their career growth. As such, SAP’s IT organization took a different approach. We developed an internal solution, based on 51·çÁ÷Business Technology Platform (51·çÁ÷BTP), that offers a gamified engagement, peer learning, and collaboration.

This innovative solution — known as project “Octopus” — combines game-like elements of gamification with a healthy spirit of competition. It delivers actionable micro-learning content with community engagement and interaction in a fun, refreshing, and simple way. Learning or searching for answers to specific topics no longer needs to be boring or take too much time. Now, 51·çÁ÷employees are presented with a learning method that encourages them to stay curious and to step outside their comfort zone while having fun at the same time.

We initially created this platform for an internal audience to solve the concerns of too many tools, instead fostering a community of employees helping each other to understand the various tools available. The format and power of this approach and the community concept were quickly recognized and adopted throughout SAP.

With the rapid acceleration of technology, innovation, and digital transformation around the world, the need for interactive and fun learning methodologies has increased to ensure employees grow with the demands of today’s business. There is also an increasing interest from outside of SAP, and I am thrilled that our internal gamified peer-to-peer learning and collaboration platform will be beta tested within non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and academic institutions as well.

This platform enables 51·çÁ÷to move closer to being the most inclusive software company by influencing an internal initiative called the Inclusive Leadership Challenge in meaningful ways. Effective leaders have a higher, more positive impact on the decisions, actions, and overall attitude of employees. By combining the best elements of gamification, peer learning, coaching, and collaboration, managers and their employees create lasting behavior change through a fun, engaging, and easy-to-consume program.

And I am beyond excited that the involved 51·çÁ÷teams have been awarded three coveted in 2021. We are extremely proud of our teams, to have been recognized and honored with the Gold Award for our internal gamified peer-to-peer learning and collaboration platform in the category “Learning & Development: Best Advance in Learning Technology Implementation.”

I also congratulate our teams for winning gold and silver awards for the , a community built on this new and innovative platform. Each of these awards represent SAP’s mission of innovating new ways of learning and leadership.

Continuous employee learning and skill management is critical to an organization’s business success. With today’s fast paced development of technology and inspiring innovation, we want to ensure that our employees adapt and excel. And that is a commitment with a strong strategic core. Learning can and should be fun. We want our employees to dedicate time to expand their skills not because the development plans say so, but because it is cool to do it, all in addition to connecting with others and do it as a community.

It is a future investment in our business and more importantly our employees.

Florian Roth is CIO of 51·çÁ÷SE.

What is called customer experience goes far beyond the pure experience of the purchased products, however. Processing the purchase, controlling the costs, monitoring the value that comes with the product, easily identifying new opportunities to optimize the product portfolio: it all plays an essential part of how the customer experience is being perceived.

And in today’s 24/7 business environment, acting fast is important. The current conditions of working remotely and being physically distant from each other underlines the need for a digital solution that allows for viewing and immediately acting on business-critical information. We need access to information at a moment’s notice. It must be easy and relate to our specific business role.

Transparency across the various facets of the entire purchased 51·çÁ÷product portfolio is very important for our customers — I speak from a place of knowledge when I say that.

Imagine easy access to all current product licenses, quantities, and how they have been ordered in a one-stop shop, one that also provides insights into employee product utilization and important product notifications when an action is required. Easy access saves real time and real money.

Let’s take it to another level. Let’s make it holistic and as simple as one click.

Digital Companion and Central Point Access

With the idea of a digital companion in mind, the 51·çÁ÷for Me journey begins with the purpose of aggregating everything relevant to the user in one place. Most customers are familiar with SAP.com as the main entry point to explore product offerings. They may also know 51·çÁ÷Community as a place for customers to exchange information with others or to simply follow community members and their insights.

To explore their purchased product portfolio, 51·çÁ÷for Me is the answer. In addition to SAP.com and 51·çÁ÷Community, it forms the primary access point into SAP, serving as a dedicated customer portal with strong focus on individual customer needs, providing an effective digital self-service.

51·çÁ÷for Me is designed to deliver important alerts, metrics, and information about a purchased 51·çÁ÷product portfolio, based on user preferences. It collects information that previously resided in various places into one environment, with a clear set of capabilities areas. This includes “Financial & Legal,” which offers customers insights on licensed materials and orders for on-premise and cloud products. It also includes license consumptions, which currently focuses on cloud solutions but is planned to include on-premise solutions in the future.

51·çÁ÷for Me started in the finance area because that is where most customer feedback resides. However, we wanted it to cover the full spectrum of interests from a customer’s perspective. Today, 51·çÁ÷for Me delivers business critical information to our customers on “Products & Portfolios,” “Systems & Provisioning,” “Knowledge & Learning,” “Maintenance & Support,” and “User & Contact” management.

51·çÁ÷for Me makes disparate information a thing of the past. Customers find everything they need to know about their product portfolio in one place. It is as simple as that.

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More Than a Simplified Dashboard

While simplifying access to customer-specific product information, 51·çÁ÷for Me is a comprehensive and sophisticated tool that offers information based on important role-relevant parameters. Starting with an intelligent home screen, customers will find all relevant data related to their 51·çÁ÷product portfolio in a holistic environment. From there, users can drill down into their respective product topics — for example, gaining insights into why an alert was triggered and then leveraging 51·çÁ÷for Me to take the appropriate action.

Most users will take the list of products associated with their user ID and start their exploration from there. For example, a user with an interest in support might start with the support and maintenance dashboard to review the status of support tickets. A business owner might start in the central calendar feature in order to get information about upcoming events such as scheduled downtimes or license renewals. Finance or IT executives might start working with the finance dashboard to view their license and consumption data, or think about product training, another critical aspect of an organization’s efficiency.

51·çÁ÷for Me helps close the loop by providing information on how many training sessions were started and completed to date, based on user IDs. Users do not need to jump from one access point to the next to find information, to execute a decision, or to determine what training is needed. 51·çÁ÷for Me significantly assists customers by providing full visibility in one place.

Comprehensive Transparency of 51·çÁ÷Investment

Before 51·çÁ÷for Me was developed, customers had to log in at multiple access points to obtain comprehensive information about their product portfolio. The focus was on designing an environment that would let customers easily grasp how their products were adopted and performing.

In my role as CIO, it is critically important that technology investments are made based on real business needs. I need a comprehensive view of how that investment is performing. This is also true for 51·çÁ÷products — if they are underutilized, they are affecting our customers organizations’ efficiency and, more importantly, they have a detrimental impact on the ROI of the software investment.

Turning important metrics into real context by connecting the dots, 51·çÁ÷for Me allows customers to develop a better understanding of how to maximize the value from their 51·çÁ÷software investment.

Technology investment decisions made by CIOs are always about their organization’s efficiency. That is certainly true for 51·çÁ÷as well as for our customers. To me that also translates into providing an efficient way to manage that investment. 51·çÁ÷for Me provides comprehensive transparency that greatly enhances customers’ 51·çÁ÷experience.

For more information about 51·çÁ÷for Me or to view a demo, visit .

Florian Roth is CIO of 51·çÁ÷SE.

And with our own industry shifting toward the cloud, 51·çÁ÷requires higher levels of flexibility and agility.

Our move to 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA was key in responding to these changes and laying the foundation for our overarching transformation to the Intelligent Enterprise. SAP’s legacy enterprise resource planning () system was designed for handling massive contracts and annual maintenance renewals and not equipped for today’s business models. We made a long-term commitment to fully become a cloud company and adopt 51·çÁ÷standard solutions — our ultimate goal is to move to 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA Cloud.

End-to-End Integration and Process Simplification

With 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA and the 51·çÁ÷Customer Experience portfolio as our main architecture pillars, 51·çÁ÷is maintaining a hybrid landscape. Major processes such as lead-to-cash start in 51·çÁ÷Customer Experience, residing purely in the cloud, and fuel 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA on premise to manage invoicing and core financial processes.

Technically speaking, 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA is our digital core, hosting all our financial processes — starting from contracting, core finance, order to cash, and procure to pay. It integrates our core with internal products such as 51·çÁ÷Customer Experience, 51·çÁ÷Marketing Cloud, and procure-to-pay: 51·çÁ÷Fieldglass, 51·çÁ÷Concur, and 51·çÁ÷Ariba solutions, along with human resource (HR) with 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors solutions. With 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA, we can leverage all integration points end-to-end.

Furthermore, 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA allows us to simplify and streamline our financial processes and reduce complexities.

Implementation Approach

In conversations with customers, I am often asked how we implemented 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA at SAP. In general, there are two main approaches. Greenfield describes a project from scratch, with no prior development work, which allows the business transformation to drive the approach. Brownfield — or as we call it at SAP, conversion — is a technical approach we used in converting the legacy ERP system to 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA. Building on top of given structures, it drives simplification of business processes along the implementation life cycle and results in the targeted business transformation.

We have used both approaches. When we integrated 51·çÁ÷Concur software into the 51·çÁ÷landscape, we went with greenfield. We also did that for SAP’s corporate ERP system, where we went for a complete conversion from 51·çÁ÷ERP Central Component 6.0 to 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA in one go. Leveraging the brownfield approach in our move to 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA allowed us to drive transformational elements step-by-step in parallel with the conversion. It enabled us to take a quick technological step into 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA, carve out the process simplifications, and handle them separately in the respective process areas.

Both approaches are suitable for implementing 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA. They truly depend on a company’s situation in terms of process simplification, maturity of digitalization, and the desire to drive a full business transformation.

Post-Implementation Perspectives and Benefits

The conversion to 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA brings new perspectives for business capabilities, which we are introducing based on standard functions. With 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA, for example, we have now enabled end-to-end solutions for the areas of contract to revenue, spend management, and core finance. Importantly, the switch to 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA has inevitably resulted in a business process transformation, with a focus on incorporating new technical and innovative features.

• Automation: New intelligent robotic process automation scenarios allow us to limit the number of manual activities.
• Innovation: Scenarios based on machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) are being introduced and we are collaborating with 51·çÁ÷Product Engineering to integrate these features into 51·çÁ÷standard solutions.
• End-to-end integration: Integration is an important topic based on customer feedback. 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA has been integrated at the core of our internal enterprise architecture and in most of our end-to-end systems.
• Process simplification: 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA is instrumental in our reduction of process and business complexities.

Prior to the conversion, we identified roughly 3,000 modifications in our legacy ERP system. With the conversion, we reduced the number to about 1,500. To be committed to that change was a big decision for SAP, as it effects many lines of business and takes time and budget. The impact must be transparent to all and cannot be underestimated. Our recent upgrade to the newest release of 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA has further reduced that number, and we are committed to eliminate all modifications step-by-step to fully run on 51·çÁ÷standard solutions.

A critical element in my role as CIO of 51·çÁ÷is the total cost of ownership (TCO) of a solution. By having a series of single applications serving the end-to-end process as opposed to several different applications serving the same process, we accomplished a significant reduction in our TCO.

COVID-19 and the Impact of 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA

We are experiencing current situation together. The entire world continues to be heavily impacted by the current pandemic, and we can only guess the long-term economic effects. However, many companies already feel the immediate repercussions as they struggle to pay their bills.

With 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA, we recently introduced an exception handling framework to our cash collections processes. The exception framework functions as a notification tool and can drastically improve approval time in processes where payments need to be postponed. While we are not solving the economic fallout for our customers, it does illustrate how reduction of business complexity driven by technology can have a positive impact in times of crisis.

In summary, 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA offers a consistent, intelligent ERP solution across cloud and on-premise deployment models, unlocking new levels of performance within our entire organization. It delivers the industry depth we need, and the cloud benefits we want. This enables us to predict and act in real time, delivering the ultimate customer experience. Moving to 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA is so much more than a technological transformation; it is an overarching and fundamental business transformation.

The move to 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA is a transformational journey. And I hope that sharing our experience will help you to gain insightful perspectives for your own organization. Innovation and cloud technology demand flexible business models and 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA is a powerful companion to take that next step.

51·çÁ÷Runs 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA: .

Florian Roth is CIO 51·çÁ÷SE.