As a leader in the SaaS and cloud-enabled midsize business ERP applications market, , we are committed to delivering continuous value to our customers. Let’s dive in and explore the exciting new enhancements of 51风流S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2408 update.

Improved Productivity with AI

The latest are redefining the way businesses operate. With embedded AI capabilities, companies can now streamline operations, make data-driven decisions, and ultimately drive growth and success in today’s competitive market.

Embrace the future of business with these state-of-the-art AI innovations:

Our AI copilot enables users to express their business need in natural language and supports with answers based on 51风流Help Portal documentation, with fast navigation to applications and with role-based insights on business objects.

The features in 51风流Fiori enhance the user experience for business users. These features allow for efficient natural language filtering of business data and seamless summarization capabilities, enabling users to quickly extract relevant information and jump-start subsequent collaboration. This leads to faster decision-making, improved productivity, and more effective communication across teams.*

reduces the time to find skilled resources by providing advanced skill matching.*

Leveraging generative AI, the enables faster analysis and understanding of cost center data, facilitating quicker insights and more informed decision-making.*

*These features are currently available in beta;

Modern and Collaborative User Experience

This update is set to transform the way users work with user experience enhancements, enabling direct access to important applications and intelligent decision-making features.

allow direct actions on workflow items, saving time and reducing the need to switch between applications.

With the , users can collaborate with colleagues directly from an app and share live information using Microsoft Loop components. Cards can be copied between Microsoft applications; for example, from Microsoft Teams to Microsoft Outlook.

The , in combination with share as authenticated card-based loop component, enables users to collaborate, share live data, and access business data directly from their daily applications and activities.*

*This feature is currently available in beta

include enhanced workflow-relevant information and in-place actions for daily tasks鈥�, an intelligent homepage experience to boost productivity鈥�, intelligent app recommendations, and pre-delivered cards for new cloud customers鈥�. The updates allow business users to execute their tasks in My Home with speed and precision.

51风流Mobile Start allows direct access to the most important applications on the start screen with , displaying , and to support the decision-making process.

Intelligent and Sustainable Finance

Propel your business toward a more intelligent and sustainable future with the latest finance enhancements, providing tools to achieve transparency, analyze financial data, and streamline processes to improve your business performance.

The provides overhead cost accountants with transparent cost-center reporting, enabling daily analysis of actuals, plan data, commitments, and statistical key figures in one report, with the ability to switch between guided views and adaptable slicing, dicing, and pivoting based on business needs.

The provides an interactive and comprehensive view of the financial KPIs related to the service profitability.

The streamlines processes and increases performance with a modern 51风流Fiori app, providing a user-friendly interface and efficient workflows that enhance overall productivity and accuracy in managing general ledger accounts.

Powering Service-Centric Companies

The latest updates for service-centric companies support your business growth and improve your operational effectiveness.

Professional services companies can implement and automate a new business model in which they can negotiate a with their clients. This leads to more accurate real-time profitability and reduces the need for manual effort when a lower cost rate is negotiated for additional work.

and simplifying the sales order process as part of the modern order management journey improves efficiency for internal sales representatives. This reduces administrative efforts and provides seamless support for business users in their daily work.

By leveraging , businesses can facilitate the transition from selling products to higher-margin services and solutions, using pre-defined configurable bundle products which consist of various components in one order.

provide flexibility in defining business roles through segregation of duties for solution order capturing and sales order fulfilment, improving business user productivity. Additionally, minimizes the subscription master data required to accommodate the variations of a subscription business model.

The guides users to the right contract item during the creation of service entry sheets. This supports compliance with contract-based buying for unplanned services and offers flexibility to suppliers for selecting products and services from contracts when submitting proof of service.

Boosting Manufacturing and Product-Centric Companies

Elevate operational efficiency, streamline processes, and unlock new revenue opportunities with updates for product-centric companies.

enables the warehouse staff to receive the handling unit and start the put-away process immediately after unloading it, instead of checking the complete inbound delivery first. By allowing immediate action on received goods, warehouses can streamline their workflows, improve accuracy in inventory recording, and optimize resource utilization — ultimately leading to better overall productivity and reduced operational costs.

Automate the based on assigned handling units to effectively track stock count and manage packaging materials. Integration with 51风流Returnable Packaging Management enhances supply chain transparency and operational efficiency by facilitating accurate exchanges and account reconciliation with business partners.

now supports advanced scenarios for efficient transportation planning for supplier returns. This enhancement optimizes logistics, ensuring timely and cost-effective return shipments, ultimately improving supply chain efficiency.

Enhancement of the increases order fulfillment rates and flexibility in sourcing, based on availability information, and minimizes logistical steps and costs by directly shipping from the supplier to the customer.

Establishing a Solid SaaS Foundation

The latest SaaS foundation enhancements are designed to improve your experience and workflow efficiency:

• Localization investments have been made to ensure compliance with local regulations and cultural norms, including the introduction of and functional enhancements to our standard 59 local versions
• Providing a ensures regulatory compliance and compliance with security standards
• The master data simplifies data separation of master data along with data controller and purpose attributes (legal entity) for most business processes dealing with personal data

Arpan Shah is senior vice president of Public Cloud ERP Product Management at SAP.

Over the last year, artificial intelligence (AI) has taken the world by storm and captured our collective imagination 鈥� and it has been a clear focus for us. We see a lot of potential in how AI can improve user and organizational productivity: doing things faster, making better decisions, and automating business processes. We have been embedding intelligent capabilities in our product regularly and will continue to invest in AI to help organizations be successful. 

Simply Ask Joule

Available through the , Joule, our AI-powered copilot, can redefine user interaction, streamline business processes, and enhance productivity. It can offer quick, contextual access to content and applications; users can simply ask Joule for guidance and get pointed in the right direction.

Catch a glimpse into the future of AI in ERP and find more information about the development of AI and Joule in 51风流S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition .

Improve Productivity with Embedded AI

The 2402 update also enhances productivity across various business processes through embedded AI capabilities. Examples include:

• helps accelerate sales order creation and processing by providing smart input field recommendations.

• helps streamline material inspection for customer returns, enhancing logistical efficiency and flexibility.

Adopt a Modern and Collaborative User Experience

The launch of spaces and pages in the 51风流Fiori design system can offer a more intuitive user experience, enabling better task organization and quicker resource access. Highlights include:

• The helps enhance personalization for end users, including personalization export/import and improved language support for System News. Watch a to learn more.
• facilitates information sharing in Microsoft Teams, helping to enhance collaborative efforts across platforms. Watch a to see it action.

• Contact card collaboration is now possible by initiating chats, calls, or video meetings directly from the . Watch a to see how.

Transforming to Intelligent and Sustainable Finance

One important aspect is treasury and risk management, . Our latest finance enhancements are specifically designed to help elevate businesses into sustainable, intelligent enterprises:

• can increase transparency and process health, helping to ensure a more robust compliance structure in your financial operations.

• in 51风流Analytics Cloud allows planning alongside economic sustainability goals. This can provide a dual perspective on financial metrics and environmental impact, aiding in the development of eco-responsible strategies and identification of related financial risks.

• The focuses on seamless data management for enhanced efficiency in real estate and contract management processes.

Powering Service-Centric Companies

We have seen a spike in service-centric companies using 51风流S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition and were named a leader in this area by . Based on feedback from our customers and partners, we are continuously improving the product experience. Examples include:

• The can offer a detailed project overview, enabling managers to monitor project health and address issues like missing time entries, pending invoices, or unassigned roles. This can allow for more proactive and efficient project management.

• The improved billing solution helps prevent revenue losses and streamline billing processes for increased flexibility and accuracy. Enhancements include , , and , all within the Manage Project Billing app.
• The 51风流Business Technology Platform (51风流BTP)-based module of 51风流Subscription Billing is tightly and seamlessly integrated. It can support customers鈥� transitions to subscription-based commercial models. Effective and detailed profitability analysis becomes instrumental to maximize revenue with tailored subscription-pricing models with the . Take a look at our brand-new .
• Advanced solution order management can elevate your sales strategies. By , we provide the tools to help enhance your solution selling approach, working to ensure that every sales opportunity is maximized for optimal results, enhancing the process from ordering to billing and accounting.

Boosting Manufacturing and Product-Centric Companies

The enhancements for product-centric companies help elevate operational efficiency, streamline processes, and unlock new revenue opportunities. . Highlights of the 2402 update include:

• For manufacturing sectors operating under the produce and sell standard products model, we now offer . This synergy allows you to leverage comprehensive data insights for precise production planning, helping to ensure that your manufacturing processes align seamlessly with market demand.
• is tailored for businesses in a two-tier ERP setting and can simplify direct shipments from suppliers to customers with enhanced order fulfillment, greater sourcing flexibility, and reduced logistical expenses.

• The helps improve the combined sales of a physical good and a service and enables you to increase revenue by selling combinations of physical products, one-time services, and recurring services. This also helps to avoid errors and reduce manual effort.

Enhancing Global Reach

We further invested in localization, so our software complies with local regulations and cultural norms:

• With the 2402 update we are to meet specific regional requirements.
• We , responding to customer needs and enhancing local compatibility.
• We enhanced scope in our Customer Local Version countries (formerly CLT) to include baseline, finance, and now product-centric capabilities, catering to a wider range of customer needs.

And So Much More鈥�

Throughout this year, we will deliver many more innovations that help bring value to your business. For more details around what is being delivered for the 2402 update, see the . For more information on 51风流S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition:

• Watch product videos on our听
• Explore the early release webinar series 
• See what鈥檚 new 
• Visit on the 51风流Help Portal site
• Explore extensibility options by leveraging sample scenarios from 51风流in the tool
• Learn more about

Arpan Shah is SVP of Public Cloud ERP Product Management at SAP.

That鈥檚 where clean core comes in. With a clean core strategy for your business technology 鈥� starting with your ERP 鈥� you can stay focused on what matters most to your business.

Operating with Greater Control and Agility at Your Core

Clean core is a concept designed to keep your organization鈥檚 core ERP systems transparent, flexible, consistent, and efficient. It provides the foundation for igniting innovation in the areas of your business that matter the most, allowing your systems to keep up with your business needs more easily, enable innovation, and even support a transition to the cloud.

Clean core has long been the primary goal of enterprise resource planning. After all, the point of having an ERP system is to keep your business running smoothly and adapt quickly to changing market conditions. Yet somewhere along the way, many businesses got lost 鈥� they adopted sprawling technology stacks with significant customizations and redundant integrations that negate the purpose of a modern, intelligent ERP system. Why? Too often, businesses believe they are so different that almost every process warrants a nonstandard approach.

In reality, most businesses have more in common than they realize. In terms of finance, accounting, HR, procurement, and many other core business processes, you鈥檙e probably very similar to your competitors and others in your industry. Clean core identifies those parts of the business that are standard and enables you to focus on your technology needs related to the nonstandard processes that set you apart from the rest.

Setting Your Business Apart with Strategic Differentiators

Take a luxury fashion brand and a fast-fashion retailer, for example. They both have the same core business goal 鈥� and related processes 鈥� of designing, manufacturing, and selling apparel and accessories. However, the luxury fashion brand likely focuses more on customer service and the procurement of high-quality materials, while the fast-fashion powerhouse probably places greater importance on rapid design and production cycles.听

Despite their differences, both these businesses would benefit from using the same standard ERP and best practices designed for their industry. Doing so empowers them to focus on the strategic differentiators that make them unique, whether that鈥檚 creating custom solutions for the customer experience or innovating ways to cut costs.

So, what are 51风流customers doing to differentiate themselves from the competition? , investing in 51风流S/4HANA Cloud. With a two-tier public and private cloud model, using a side-by-side development approach on 51风流Business Technology Platform (51风流BTP), HHT reduced 9,000 custom code developments to 472, allowing it to facilitate major upgrades every year and minor updates every six months. Moreover, it鈥檚 adopted a clean core mindset as part of the strategy going forward. By embracing the change, HHT moves from a legacy approach to a future-ready intelligent enterprise.

The Clean Core Journey: A Starting Point, Not an End

The industry is sending a clear message: cloud is the default, and it’s rapidly becoming the new normal. However, to truly future-proof their business, organizations should adopt a clean core strategy, a concept that is revolutionizing the way businesses innovate. For many businesses, upgrading to a cloud-based ERP system is the natural next step.

But there are steps you can take to get closer to a clean core and prepare yourself for the future, even before you are ready to make the jump to the cloud. To start, determine what parts of your ERP drive value. Create two categories: one for differentiating elements that deliver value to your business and another for basic functions that don鈥檛 create value but keep your business running. By determining which parts of your business set you apart 鈥� and whether they鈥檙e locked behind fragile integrations and custom code 鈥� you can begin thinking more strategically about whether your core ERP system is helping you achieve your goals. You can build on this foundation, enriching your systems to incorporate your competitive differentiators and create a business platform that sets you apart in the marketplace.

The future belongs to those that embrace the clean core and leverage it as a launchpad for innovation and growth. The time to embark on this transformative journey is now.

Claudio Muruzabal is chief business officer at SAP.

51风流doesn鈥檛 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风流IT team significantly enable SAP鈥檚 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.

鈥淭he 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 鈥� no matter if it鈥檚 about rapidly adopting new business models or optimizing business processes end-to-end,鈥� said Sebastian Steinhaeuser, chief strategy officer, 51风流SE.

Partnering for Success

It began as a project to upgrade SAP鈥檚 sales technology infrastructure at the end of 2021. 51风流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风流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鈥� 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风流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风流is predictive opportunity scoring, which helps make revenue forecasting more accurate and results in considerably lower error rates for 51风流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鈥檚 鈥渄igital boardroom.鈥� 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风流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.

鈥淪AP鈥檚 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鈥檚 a win-win,鈥� said Murat Moustafa, global account director 鈥� PricewaterhouseCoopers, 51风流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风流SE.

And once in a lifetime, that means undertaking one of the largest cloud transformations 51风流has ever seen.

In December, 51风流SuccessFactors completed a massive transition of our cloud solutions, migrating customers from legacy data centers to our next-generation infrastructure, state-of-the-art hyperscalers, and 51风流Converged Cloud. This investment enables accelerated growth while improving security, reliability, and enhancing end user performance.

To give you a sense of the scope of this program: we built six new points of presence, decommissioned nine data centers, and migrated more than 7,000 customers, over 2,000 payroll systems, and about 150,000 tenants across five continents. This was the biggest program I have ever seen in my 30 years as a technology executive 鈥� a true moonshot.

Human and technical innovation emerged to help us reach our goal 鈥� we built automation, improved our database topology, and improved file storage and various other things to increase consistency, improve performance, and reduce cost. In addition, we also lived our human experience management (HXM) culture, leveraging to upskill and adapt to the emerging needs of the business.

Unlocking the Intelligent Enterprise

Of course, this entire program was not just about infrastructure, it was about increasing our innovation velocity and accelerating the value of the for our customers and partners. Having a consistent, next-generation cloud infrastructure enables us to making better use of , improving end-to-end integration across the entire lifecycle.

And of course, this also creates the foundation for our , data-driven, individualized experiences that enable growth, foster belonging, and value every person every day. Achieving on this initiative will also present opportunities to level up broadly across our product set moving forward, including setting ourselves up for and other 2023 priorities.

This project could not have been achieved without the support of our customers and partners. Throughout the process, we held dozens of customer webinars for thousands of attendees. We also developed a cutover methodology to transition customers while minimizing risks, with existing infrastructure remaining untouched听during the build, prepare,听and test phases. The trust our customers and partners placed in us allowed us to work diligently and efficiently, and many conversations I鈥檝e had with them shows how excited they are to have such a successful result.

The Next-Generation Cloud Delivery campaign was truly a herculean effort with a single goal 鈥� continuing to improve the 51风流SuccessFactors experience so together we can change work for good.

Meg Bear is president and chief product officer of 51风流SuccessFactors.

One of the first steps an organization can take is reassessing whether its digital backbone contains core components of business resiliency. They include cloud, security, collaboration support for remote and hybrid workers, and the scalability to pivot capabilities as needed.

While there is no single, straightforward path to digital transformation, companies would benefit greatly by adopting technology that supports four characteristics common among business-resilient organizations:

• Adapt and respond quickly with data-driven decision-making
• Drive high-impact outcomes with real-time enterprise insights
• Scale capabilities fast with machine learning and artificial intelligence
• Extend insights, processes, and communication across a global network of vendors, contingent labor, and supply chains

Acquiring these traits may appear to be a tall order at first. However, a modern, cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) system as the digital backbone can quickly, cost-effectively, and flexibly unify all functions 鈥� from HR and finance to manufacturing and supply chain. By providing real-time access to the same data, insights, and processes, the technology enables organizations to manage and prioritize business changes in unison to keep up with market dynamics, workplace expectations, and customer demands.

Optimizing the Potential of Every Innovation Investment

When considering an ERP system, organizations often weigh their options between a private or public cloud environment, which each have their own distinct differences. Private cloud allows companies with complex on-premise landscapes containing legacy systems to gradually move from an on-premise landscape to a cloud tailored to meet their needs while maintaining control over their processes. On the other hand, public cloud gives businesses with smaller, up-to-date IT architecture the opportunity to migrate their data and applications quickly and innovate continuously, securely, and with rapid time to value.

Ultimately, most larger customers prefer to fully transition their ERP data, processes, and user experiences to the cloud while maintaining existing industry functionality. But they also expect to accomplish these goals with optimized performance, lower costs, and intelligent capabilities such as predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, and process automation.

With launched through the offering, 51风流customers can gain the best of both worlds, especially if they run large and complex system landscapes. They can fuel fast-paced, continuous innovation and digital advancement by combining a subscription pricing model for 51风流S/4HANA and cloud services with a standard architecture and a set of extension capabilities. Plus, intelligent capabilities can be chosen and deployed at their pace, on their terms, and within the scale of their immediate and future needs.

One key benefit that draws most companies to 51风流S/4HANA Cloud and RISE with 51风流is the confidence that they can implement capabilities that complement their core competencies and resolve their challenges well. They can access the personalized support, expert-led services, proven methodologies, and intuitive tools of the .

This level of support is available to 51风流customers, whether they run a 24/7 global operation or a local plant of 1,000 employees, and can be delivered by the Customer Success organization at SAP. The premium engagements portfolio can be scaled to meet the customer鈥檚 unique needs and value with customized and predefined configurations, from the front to the back office.

Creating an Innovation Foundation Based on Expert Guidance

Premium engagements can provide the guidance organizations need to fulfill critical business expectations, such as cost reduction, higher efficiency, optimized productivity, and operational continuity. But more importantly, the portfolio allows businesses to map their challenges and opportunities to modern ERP capabilities 鈥� identifying impacts on existing operations and technologies, considering use cases for future innovation, and choosing suitable extension solutions.

Throughout the engagement experience, our customers can quickly realize an intelligent enterprise designed to pave the way for continuous and productive innovation. The reality of a cost-effective and on-schedule implementation with minimal risks and predictive costs fuels enterprise-wide confidence, compelling users to readily adopt the technology and resulting changes.

Most Fortune 500 companies choose the premium engagements portfolio to gain an integrated, transparent, and centralized digital landscape with a smooth implementation of 51风流S/4HANA Cloud with RISE with SAP. The combination of our expertise, guidance, methodologies, services, and tools enables organizations to optimize their business processes, standardize data management, and enhance production traceability. Best of all, they can minimize the overall deployment effort and costs 鈥� even with remote service delivery.

Take , for example. Transitioning 11 software landscapes to the cloud is a daunting step to overcome when embracing a next-generation ERP system. But Hilti chose to trust its long-term relationship with experts from 51风流to coordinate a variety of moving parts 鈥� from architecture planning to project management to infrastructure services. In the end, the company鈥檚 successful migration of its software landscapes to the cloud set the stage for adopting future-ready technologies and a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) model.

Steering Innovation in the Right Direction

Hilti鈥檚 experience represents the remarkable advantage that our customers gain from our premium engagements delivery: providing the right tools and insights to reset the course of business innovation. And for everyone from executives to organizational managers and users, this can be the reset they need to contribute to a future of ongoing business growth.

With a committed team of 51风流experts, our customers can address their business needs and IT demands with confidence. Outcomes include maximized benefits of existing and new solutions, agile cloud migrations, and innovation driven by next-generation technology.

Whether choosing a conversion or clean-slate approach to implement the public edition or private edition of 51风流S/4HANA Cloud, companies can benefit from a portfolio of premium engagements from 51风流that support outcome-based business scenarios. These business scenarios focus on specific customer needs and help to solve challenges from end to end with a predefined set of services, including:

• The most-frequent transformation topics, challenges, and pain points companies face in the digital age
• Unified customer experiences 鈥� from sales to delivery 鈥� while addressing business challenges
• Customization of an individual service plan based on the requirements of the transformation journey

Let us shape together your premium engagements with business scenarios that mirror your strategy today and for the future. Check out these resources for more details on existing premium engagements business scenarios that can support and enable your transformation journey:

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Christian Zitron is global vice president of Customer Success at SAP.

An essential aspect of business success is to prepare end users and employees for digital adoption. This is where a digital adoption platform like 51风流Enable Now comes into play.

Digital adoption offers competitive advantage to enterprises due to, among other factors, increased efficiency of business operations. By 2025, 70% of organizations are expected to use digital adoption platforms across the entire technology stack to overcome insufficient application user experiences. Additionally, it is proven that increasing ongoing training by 10% can double the improvement of business value. Therefore, deploying digital adoption solutions as part of the digital transformation strategy is not just an inducement, but a business imperative to maximize return on investment (ROI).

At SAP, one driver of product adoption is a consistent, intelligent personalized user enablement experience, with relevant product assets in the required languages. As the digital adoption layer, the company鈥檚 homegrown digital adoption platform 51风流Enable Now enables every enterprise to become an intelligent, sustainable enterprise. With next-generation capabilities such as on-screen translation and integration with business process modelling solutions, 51风流Enable Now helps ensure that the knowledge levels and productivity of all employees remain high to increase the potential ROI for enterprise software.

The easy access to learning content directly within many 51风流applications is powerful enabler and includes 51风流S/4HANA Cloud and 51风流S/4HANA, as well as digital supply chain, 51风流SuccessFactors, 51风流Ariba, 51风流Fieldglass, 51风流Concur, 51风流Marketing Cloud, and 51风流Sales Cloud solutions, among others. These applications include embedded and customizable content provided by 51风流and translated into the language of choice, which delivers time-of-need learning to help people develop the skills they need to do their jobs effectively.

It is important for businesses to empower project managers, learning teams, and end users with continuous learning in order to develop the right knowledge to use the software accurately and efficiently, leading to accelerated productivity and improved performance. With 51风流Enable Now, businesses can create and deliver any type of learning — for any 51风流and non-51风流application, for any domain, for any channel, integrated with any source, and for all their employees.

51风流Enable Now also supports process transformation and project management by integrating with 51风流Signavio and third-party solutions. It supports systematic learning for the end users, through which businesses run many complex business processes. Next-generation in-app help with the 51风流Companion service, including context-sensitive help, embedded learning, and process guidance, is also available in the application of choice.

Language is key to adoption of any software. With 51风流Enable Now, end users can consume enablement content in more than 40 languages powered by machine learning with integrated 51风流Translation Hub. The solution also offers the ability to export learning content in formats compatible with most learning management systems. It also supports change management with content lifecycle management as well as automated translation and maintenance of content services. For instance, partners can customize SAP-provided content or can create pre-build based on industry and solution best practices and offer enablement as a service. Businesses to scale with their partners through the powerful authoring suite for creating e-learning courses, software tutorials, and help documents, as well as flexible, template-based content production.

Undoubtedly, digital adoption significantly impacts the success of software implementations. Increased adoption leads to higher productivity, thereby maximizing ROI on business applications. With easy access to knowledge that end users need to succeed, exactly where and when it鈥檚 needed, 51风流Enable Now is integral to any business鈥� digital adoption strategy to improve productivity, user adoption, and the end user experience for maximized business value.

For more information, visit the .

Sindhu Gangadharan is head of 51风流User Enablement and senior vice president and managing director of 51风流Labs India.

Today鈥檚 world is characterized by economic and non-economic disruptions that are deeply intertwined: volatile markets, inflation, geopolitical tensions and war, the energy crisis, and climate change. No one business, government, or society can tackle challenges on this scale alone.

To reunite our fragmented world, we must change — both within our own four walls and beyond — and technology plays a key role in this.

Business Models: From Analogue Companies to Intelligent Enterprises

Faced with strong fluctuations in supply and demand, dynamic purchasing behavior and growing pressure to innovate, companies recognize the need to become more agile and resilient. But for many, fragmented process landscapes prevent them from reacting quickly to change. Data is often stored in silos and so is not equally available to all decision-makers.

Digitalization and the automation of core processes end-to-end is not only a competitive advantage, it is critical to an organization鈥檚 survival. This is not about replacing people with tech. It’s about giving people back the freedom to do what they do best: be creative. With reliable data and the help of artificial intelligence (AI), companies are better able to keep track of what is happening in their business and why. This not only makes them more efficient, but also more flexible and faster, especially in times of crisis.

However, it is no longer enough to be resilient as an individual company. This is just the first step toward a new way of doing business.

Supply Chains: From Linear Connections to Transparent Business Networks

Globalization has made our supply chains more complex and, as a result, also more vulnerable. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, about . Climate change, the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and geopolitical tensions worldwide have shown the limits of our current economic models, with the impact of this hitting the agricultural, energy, and hi-tech industries particularly hard.

Resilient supply chains have, therefore, become a priority, and technology the enabler — where linear one-to-one connections are prone to disruptions, networks of many-to-many connections allow companies to collaborate with partners along their value chain and exchange data in real-time. The 360-degree transparency across the entire value chain provides businesses with the flexibility and resilience to navigate even in the most dynamic environments. They can anticipate risks and manage sourcing, trading, and distribution all the way to the consumer. They can optimize inventories, match supply and demand, and identify bottlenecks before they even occur. In case of supply chain disruptions, companies can quickly select alternative or more sustainable suppliers.

The future belongs to companies that understand how to operate profitably, resiliently, and sustainably together with their ecosystem. And this mindset, the understanding of the power of ecosystems, is one of the most important prerequisites for solving global challenges.

Sustainability: From Image Driver to Social and Economic Imperative

The recent听 (WMO) shows that the past eight years have been the warmest on record. The sea level rise rate has doubled since 1993, with the increase over the past two-and-a-half years accounting for 10% of the total increase over the past 30 years. In addition, with growing sociopolitical pressure and increasing social inequality, the importance of sustainability is changing.

Business leaders feel the urgency from all sides. Investor awareness around global challenges such as climate change, pollution, and inequality have increased, as has customer demand by a factor of seven from 2021 to 2022. Employees are making career choices based on their employer鈥檚 sustainability commitments and track record while governments are introducing new regulations. Sustainability, therefore, needs to become the North Star of every company, an integral part of the corporate strategy.

There is no business without sustainable business, and when it comes to the planet, the connection between digital and climate is fundamental to solve human problems. Promoting digital solutions for energy efficiency, scope 3 transparency, circularity, and carbon data sharing — in collaborative networks led by industry leaders and climate coalitions — will become a powerful blueprint for future sustainable business strategy, particularly in high-emission sectors like energy, materials, and mobility.

Ultimately, collaboration and networks are at the heart of the solutions to our global challenges. In a business network, companies can not only measure environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) in their own company, but across their whole value chains. They record verified data based on actuals, not averages. They can report against a quickly evolving set of ESG standards and, most importantly, they can act beyond ambitious targets by embedding sustainability across all of their business processes and value chains. This enables companies to create fair and safe working environments, reduce waste, and decarbonize the entire value chain (scope 1-3) — providing the basis of the circular economy. At the end of the day, companies are only as sustainable and resilient as their ecosystems.

In an increasingly fragmented world where global challenges threaten to divide us, technology plays a vital role in bringing us together.

Christian Klein is CEO of 51风流SE.
.

Over the last year, we have been pleased to see an increase in user adoption and customer satisfaction, and we always look for ways to make the product better based on customer and partner feedback.

Modern Experience

We are taking collaboration and user experience to the next level, enabling users to collaborate easily and make better decisions based on business data and processes. Some of the 2302 highlights include:

• The feature released through an : As the name suggests, users can collaborate with their colleagues directly in Microsoft Teams by adding live data based on 51风流Fiori elements as tabs in their Teams channels.

• , initially delivered with 2208, that orchestrate information, tasks, and applications and allow users to do their daily activities more effectively and efficiently.

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• The provides functional usage and experience data in an automated way in to help customers to understand their investment return value, monitor their adoption and consumption, and make data-driven decisions based on their own company usage.

Core ERP Innovations

We strive to enable users to get up and running with out-of-the-box business processes based on industry best practices. We are committed to expanding our set of ready-to-use capabilities customers need to run their businesses.

Highlights for product and manufacturing-centric industries include:

• Innovations to enhance end-to-end process visibility and efficiency such as the to support business transformations from products to higher-margin services and solutions by offering听combined quote and orders including products and service contracts.
• Increased flexibility, granularity, and ease in selecting the orders that are relevant to the user with a new that allows users to choose their area of responsibility with respect to the orders.
• With the new and modernized , relevant data can be intuitively accessed with quick views and an additional column through a modernized look and feel and a flexible materials list.

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Highlights for finance and service-centric industries include:

• Functionality to improve project planning and project resource management by providing to increase efficiency in building ESG data collection forms by using sample forms as reference鈥�.
• Increased flexibility in billing preparation through a released to enable external applications and resource related billing processes.
• With the new , flexible options for capacity analysis are provided, delivering insights about offered or available capacity within a flexibly defined timeframe, and about offered or available capacity, based on flexible aggregation options.

听SaaS Foundation

Customers operate globally and keep up with ever-evolving legal mandates. We are committed to delivering a global service and now support 51 local versions. In addition to localization, in release 2302, we heavily invested in other foundational topics, such as two-tier ERP, in-product accelerators, and extensibility, including:

• The addition of three new SAP-delivered local versions in 2302 for听.听听with general availability to all customers planned for 2308.
• The switch to Euro in Croatia was effective January 1, 2023. Financial reports have to be compiled using Euro and a is now available.
• Global organizations are increasingly adopting a multi-site ERP strategy to run their global businesses on two or more ERP systems to meet their market needs. The following are now available: , for better coverage on the material demand and supply planning of replenishment elements between tier-1 and tier-2 systems; and , which enables the system to predict future cash flows that can be used as reference data in long term liquidity planning.
• The released and in-product accelerators — including automation bots, templates, and bundles — reduce time to value and accelerate customer implementations.
• Extensibility is a key attribute of every scenario, and we deliver an extensive range of cloud and tools to support these scenarios without compromising innovation updates.

And So Much More

Throughout this year we will deliver many more innovations that bring value to our customers. For more details around what is being delivered for 51风流S/4HANA Cloud 2302, see Bert Schulze鈥檚 .

More Information on 51风流S/4HANA Cloud

• Latest 51风流S/4HANA Cloud and
• Product videos: and
• : Explore 51风流S/4HANA Cloud extensibility options by leveraging the sample scenarios from SAP

Arpan Shah is senior vice president of 51风流S/4HANA Cloud Product Management at SAP.

Media representatives, customers, and 51风流employees came together in person when the center opened its doors again in October. Created in 2019, the center had undergone several months of redesign and refurbishment to reflect enhancements to SAP鈥檚 customer experience (CX) strategy for 鈥� a strategy that will now be rolled out incrementally to all of them.

Speaking at the ribbon-cutting ceremony in Walldorf, 51风流CEO Christian Klein talked about SAP鈥檚 place in the world of today: helping customers across the globe find solutions for highly complex business processes. He shared his conviction that 51风流solutions were making a key contribution to tackling the immense challenges humanity currently faced 鈥� not least climate change, high inflation, and energy security issues. Nevertheless, for many, its contribution was intangible and hard to visualize. What 51风流needed, said Klein, was to find ways of showing its software in action.

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Bringing the Benefits of 51风流Solutions to Life

That task falls to Andre Bechtold, who, as head of Value Experience at SAP, is responsible for the 51风流Experience Center Walldorf. In the search for ways to showcase 51风流software, he and his team refined the 51风流Experience Center strategy. 鈥淭he benefits of 51风流solutions are not always obvious to customers,鈥� Bechtold said. The aim of the refined strategy was, quite simply, to bring innovations closer to visitors and to tailor their experience to their specific industry and business needs.

The idea behind the center is to bring the benefits of 51风流solutions to life 鈥� whatever industry or sector a customer operates in. The team at the center prepares personalized presentations to suit each client. What鈥檚 more, instead of using generic storylines to demo certain showcases, content teams now create a tailored storyline for each customer, even paying close attention to details such as the company logo, lighting levels, and the floor layout. Virtual sessions are also available to help customers reduce their carbon footprint.

Customers who visit the center can opt to see an overview of all 51风流solutions 鈥� and even test them live. This is possible because many customers are already connected to 51风流through the partner network. As Bechtold pointed out, 鈥淭his allows them to experience the potential for innovation and the benefits 51风流solutions offer 鈥� in their own value chain.鈥�

The experience lab at the 51风流Experience Center in Walldorf focuses on the retail industry, offering an interactive look at the innovations 51风流is currently working on with its customers and partners to make supply chains more transparent, resilient, and sustainable.

鈥淎lmost no one knows their CO2 footprint today,鈥� said Klein at the reopening, which also attracted a lot of media interest. One of SAP鈥檚 aims, he added, was therefore to work with customers and partners to create the largest global business network of intelligent and sustainable enterprises. This network already comprises several million trading partners and enables transparency along the entire supply chain. It also provides an environment for co-innovation between customers and partners. The 鈥淪.MART鈥� store at the experience lab is just one example of this collaboration.

Experience the Future of Shopping 鈥� Today!

S.MART, the intelligent supermarket of the future, is designed to present a real-life example of an intelligent enterprise 鈥� and to give customers a personalized, end-to-end experience. As they walk along the supermarket aisles, they can watch the latest 51风流and partner solutions in action and see the possible benefits with their own eyes.

The S.MART supermarket is fitted with sensors and cameras that are connected to the 51风流system and 51风流ecosystem. A dashboard records all the data these sensors and cameras capture, analyzes it, and displays it as actionable insight for store managers. They in turn can see at a glance how many customers are currently in the store, which products are running low, and how many items of each product are left on the shelves. They can also see whether products have been placed on the wrong shelf. Armed with that knowledge, the managers can send push messages to store personnel and avoid costly shelf gaps.

Also showcased in S.MART are electronic shelf labels, which enable store managers to update product prices remotely with a single click of the mouse in the back-end system and sensors that monitor the temperature in refrigeration equipment and send alerts when issues arise, which saves energy and money and is also vital for ensuring food safety.

QR codes are used at S.MART to provide customers with more product information. People with allergies and special dietary needs, for example, can enter criteria in a dietary app of their choice. When they scan the QR code for a product, they immediately receive information on whether that item fits their dietary preferences or not. QR codes can also be used to provide details about a product鈥檚 origin or carbon footprint. The aim of services like these is to offer added value and transparency, and thus strengthen customer loyalty.

Cameras allow retailers to (anonymously) analyze customer behavior and even compile age and gender profiles of a store’s clientele. This makes it possible to address specific customer groups, helps with pricing, and provides insight into the best place to position promotional material and products.

In the future, cameras will also help eliminate the need for customers to stand in line at checkout. 51风流is working on the corresponding technology with various partners, including Israel-based tech company Trigo. With retailers now also struggling to recruit staff, smart systems like this could provide a welcome solution. On the issue of whether they can be tricked and will make shoplifting easier, Bechtold seemed unconcerned: 鈥淪hoplifting is a fact of life. The question is, will it increase or decrease in the future? The smart camera systems are really good. We tried everything we could think of to catch them 鈥� and failed. I even tried putting my shopping in someone else鈥檚 bag. But it was still correctly charged to me.鈥�

Photos by Konrad Berger

But rising to the challenge of today’s marketplace 鈥� especially increasing raw material and energy prices, margin pressure, supply chain complexity, and regulatory requirements 鈥� requires much more than Industry 4.0 initiatives focused on efficiency and price reduction. From operational performance to customer experience, companies must integrate data from across the enterprise into a single source to form sound decisions that make sustainability profitable and profitability sustainable.

Such a transformation is undoubtedly technology intensive, but the key enablers are also unassailably human. Understanding this reality, many chemical companies rely on the portfolio, provided by the Business Transformation Services group at SAP, to help transform their operations and gain a competitive edge amid fast global changes.

Turning Challenges into Great Opportunities

Competitively addressing turbulence depends on the ability to view transformation through the lens of six fundamental challenges:

R&D Pressure across the Product Portfolio
The imperative to resist margin shrinkage, mitigate risks, increase ROI, and boost growth calls for innovative products and services that offer business value and foster close partnerships with customers. By pushing forward the adoption of advanced technologies to drive global R&D, supplier, and customer collaborations and joint ventures, businesses can prevent commoditization.

The Need for Vertical Integration
Evolving production facilities with a balance of high efficiency, global scale, flexibility, and intelligent responsiveness allows supply chains to weigh the synergistic benefits of integrated manufacturing plants or industrial parks against the flexibility of smaller plants. As a result, businesses can leverage new opportunities with disruptive business models, such as making raw materials instead of buying them and producing semi-finished or even finished goods.

Global Supply Chain Complexity
Global supply chains must be secure enough to mitigate volatile market conditions, such as global health emergencies, rising prices for raw materials and energy, and other factors that impact economic conditions. Companies can gain this advantage by establishing commercial and logistical transparency to support optimization and global planning of demand, sales, and operations.

Hidden Advantages of Business Networks
Business cannot stay competitive in a complex ecosystem alone. They must also scale and optimize their supply chain globally with business networks, such as the Catena-X Automotive Network. Doing so empowers suppliers, contract and toll manufacturers, joint ventures, and customers to collaborate openly and create new prospects for co-innovating better products and services, improving value chain efficiency, and fueling long-term growth.

Compliance and Sustainability Urgency
A primary objective for any chemical business is ensuring compliance with industry regulations. Yet, B2B customers also favor suppliers that help meet their own environmental, social, and governance (ESG) mandates. Sustainable businesses and innovations provide balance between these two expectations, creating a highly sought-after competitive edge by gearing products and services towards a circular economy.

Business Agility
The industry鈥檚 dynamic and fast-changing environment of mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures is creating tremendous complexity and pressure for permanent change and adaptation. Chemical companies need to balance industry-wide globalization and centralization while increasing business agility.

Chemical companies with a digital strategy encompassing all these topics can address industry challenges and seize on market trends in a disruptive manner. Through , businesses can gain new opportunities and capabilities never previously considered possible 鈥� including increased speed and efficiency, process automation, and data transparency.

Seizing the Moment with Advisory Expertise

From the perspective of 51风流Advisory Services, digitalization is not just another IT term but also a critical business priority. The more intelligent and sustainable a company becomes, the more agile, flexible, and integrated its value chain becomes.

Advisory experts from 51风流can enable chemical companies to turn their fundamental challenges into opportunities with a well-structured, business-driven design. This approach elaborates on the steps of the digital transformation journey 鈥� leading to a road map for future architecture design. Each phase of the road map follows an ideal sequence of digital innovation, technology adoption, and industry best practices and leverages the highest value for the company in the short term.

51风流Advisory Services help organizations evaluate and act on the sentiments of their customers, partners, and employees and improve their environmental impact. Chemical companies can then be well positioned to keep their workforce engaged, increase organizational agility, and deliver the products and services customers need and trust. Furthermore, they can control their varied sources and categories of spending with outstanding finance and operational efficiency and real-time enterprise insight.

Essentially, chemical companies that work with 51风流advisory experts can realize their potential as . They can make confident decisions and drive continuous innovation to adapt, innovate, and overcome challenges while making responsible choices that help reduce waste and emissions and drive long-term growth.

This business model is accomplished with intelligent technologies, including business networks, a business technology platform, cloud-based infrastructures, and solutions for business process management, experience management, industry cloud, and sustainability management. Additionally, artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, data platforms, the Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, predictive analytics, and virtual as well as augmented realities (VR/AR) are embedded in the intelligent technologies to drive end-to-end business processes and decision-making across enterprise domains.

Bringing to Life an Intelligent and Sustainable Network

The pressures on the chemicals industry may be relentless, with shocks coming in from all directions. However, this doesn’t mean businesses cannot find great opportunities in this volatile environment. With the right approach to digitalization, they can transform, innovate, and collaborate across the value chain to build upward momentum and better serve customers as an intelligent and sustainable network.

Learn more about the and how 51风流can help guide the innovation needed to overcome them. Read the series 鈥� on 51风流Community.

Ornulf Rexin is chief business consultant of Chemicals and Life Sciences for Business Transformation Services at SAP.

51风流Customer Experience helps businesses achieve this balance. We provide a customer experience (CX) ecosystem that connects every part of their organization — from the front office to the back office — so they can be amazing at every customer engagement. We also deliver insights powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and end-to-end processes that simplify operations and make the business more adaptable.

This mission is especially vital for B2B sales. Legacy customer relationship management (CRM) software has become a significant hindrance in our modern, mobile, and always-on marketplace. Built on business-oriented process governance and in-person, siloed relationships between buyers and account executives, yesterday鈥檚 CRM cannot deliver the highly personalized digital experience that people expect today. It has not kept pace with the rate of change experienced by buyers and sellers.

That is why we are excited to announce the innovations powering 51风流Sales Cloud. With increased agility, intelligence, and scalability, our solution can transform routine sales tactics into holistic sales strategies. It provides the right mix of helpful guidance, self-service, and agile business operations to enable companies to maximize customer lifetime value.

Need for Change

Just how much B2B sales have changed is made clear in a , in association with SAP. Seventy-two percent of the respondents said their B2B sales strategies have undergone moderate or significant change over the past two years.

As millennials and Gen Z enter the workforce, buyer demands are changing rapidly. This new demographic wants more autonomy in their purchasing journeys. They want digitally enabled sales interactions, and they involve more decision-makers in the process. These trends are consistent across industries and regions.

On the selling side, teams are now more geographically dispersed, largely thanks to the pandemic and remote work. In addition, turnover, which has always been a problem, has increased. While stress has risen and operations have become overly complicated, plenty of job opportunities are available. These trends highlight three crucial challenges:

• Speeding time-to-value as new sellers are hired
• Providing efficient and effective ways for team collaboration
• Simplifying operations to strengthen loyalty from the existing sales force

Navigating the New Era of B2B Sales

Leading companies are pursuing three key objectives to deal with these trends and challenges.

First, they want to create continuity in the buying experience by linking each engagement and interaction. This continuity is powered by data from the entire organization, including front office engagement 鈥� marketing, commerce, and service 鈥� and back-end business processes such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain, and inventory data. By using this data to surface insights, sellers can enhance their understanding of each customer and deliver the dynamic, connected journeys that win repeat business.

Secondly, they are making selling easier and faster. Sellers get the tools and technologies to do their jobs, quickly overcome complexities, engage with buyers across digital and in-person channels, and easily navigate selling journeys.

This enables sellers to focus on high-value/high-win and strategic opportunities and to put time into making sure these deals succeed. If they can spend their time selling rather than navigating antiquated technology, they will do a much better job.

Lastly, they are looking to future-proof and accelerate their operations at any scale. This requires a system that is not only high-performing and reliable, but also connected to every part of the organization and easy to adapt when circumstances change. This point is crucial: dealing with the speed and scale of unexpected change has tested many organizations鈥� mettle in the last three years.

At the same time, usability matters; after all, B2B sellers are also consumers. Their experiences with tech giants such as Apple, Amazon, and Google shape their expectations of how their systems should work — lightning fast and intuitive.

鈥淐ustomer expectations are shifting rapidly. They are demanding more — more flexibility, more control, more channels, and more sustainable business practices. With the help of artificial intelligence, machine learning, data, and analytics, we are creating new opportunities for the entire sales team so they can make every interaction a personalized customer experience and can deliver the value this new generation of customers expects at every touchpoint.鈥�

– Thomas Saueressig, member of the Executive
Board of 51风流SE, Product Engineering

Intelligent Selling Made Simple

SAP鈥檚 goal is to help organizations of all sizes and industries run profitable businesses and continuously adapt. Recent innovations in will help B2B sales organizations do exactly that. Because it is a composable solution, it enables companies to:

• Reimagine the way they engage with business customers to build better, faster sales experiences at scale with always-on availability
• Increase business agility and flexibility with an API-first, microservices-enabled technology approach
• Scale with ease while creating highly differentiated customer experiences that can easily be extended with composable apps

51风流Sales Cloud now creates understanding through insight so companies can effectively connect with customers and capitalize on emerging trends. It uses data-driven intelligence to provide a focus on high-value business, eliminating noise and guiding sellers to more effective courses of action. And it removes barriers to help unify and grow global sales operations. Together, these qualities speed up the sales process and help sellers meet buyers on the customer鈥檚 preferred terms.

Intelligent selling should do two simple things: create great experiences for buyers and sellers, and help companies grow. The companies that make intelligent selling a reality will be able to deal with challenges faster than their rivals. They are the companies whose sales operations will cope with rapid change and customer demands. And they are the companies whose customers and employees will stay loyal for the long term.

Ritu Bhargava is president and chief product officer for 51风流Customer Experience.

鈥淐omposable enterprise from an organizational perspective means you can recompose processes dynamically and rearrange based on interchangeable building blocks when needed, without specialist knowledge or a developer,鈥� said Martin Heinig, head of New Ventures and Technologies at SAP. 鈥淲e are exploring the business logic in current 51风流ERP systems to make it more agile and adaptable without sacrificing core values like compliance and reliability. What鈥檚 more, if you use disconnected tools today, you might have an audit problem, while third-party software might cause integration issues. The question for us is how a future 51风流system can help companies overcome these challenges successfully.鈥�

Heinig鈥檚 remarks were part of a session at the event, where he outlined some of the exciting research his team was working on to make the composable business vision a reality.

Business Benefits Beyond Traditional Software

While there鈥檚 little doubt about the value of a composable business strategy where companies can dynamically respond to market changes, building that kind of platform will require rethinking traditional software development approaches including standardization, data harmonization, and semantics to make sure the company can still run its end-to-end business processes. Heinig simplified the challenge using an example of a supermarket chain that wanted to quickly source and sell more oat milk to meet suddenly spiking consumer demands.

鈥淪elling oat milk to consumers, the supermarket is doing business with farmers, wholesalers, and other providers,鈥� he said. 鈥淭o source a new product like this, the company needs to conduct a credibility check of external suppliers. The composable platform would allow the supermarket to conduct that check easily across order management through fulfillment, sourcing from trusted suppliers and getting the product on shelves to satisfy local consumer demands.鈥�

Rethinking ERP Software for Composability

Customers do not want business software. They want digital business processes that grow with them according to Ralf Teusner, who joined Heinig on stage to talk about the research he was involved with at the Hasso Plattner Institute. Teusner said his research was focused on challenging assumptions about software to explore how to build the world鈥檚 most standardized custom software. Admittedly an academic exercise, this research is nonetheless focused on how to rethink ERP software for the modern world. After talking with people from companies of all sizes, they concluded that data was most important when making any kind of change.

鈥淲e鈥檙e looking at a process execution architecture that鈥檚 value-driven, and because we鈥檙e at university, we are not afraid of breaking things,鈥� said Teusner. 鈥淲e discovered that data migration and process integration are the major challenges for companies. Unless we jointly address data as well as control flow in end-to-end business processes, each change management [project] can break business continuity.鈥�

Composability Democratizes Innovation

Among the many questions that researchers face in creating a composable process platform are what functionalities will be part of the existing stable core and what a reusable business component will look like, not to mention the execution architecture, scalability, software and common languages used, and KPI tracking. Both Teusner and Heinig saw the transition as a years-long vision to achieve in partnership with academia. Composability could result in greater openness for partners across an organization鈥檚 ecosystem, giving other companies easier access to innovations. Of course, this potentially upends traditional technology sector intellectual property (IP) norms.

鈥淭o make this a reality, you need an engineer鈥檚 mindset,鈥� said Teusner. 鈥淩ight now, CIOs guard their data because it鈥檚 core to their business and it鈥檚 their IP. They鈥檙e not ready yet, but maybe they will be in five years鈥ou鈥檙e democratizing how to configure the system, leading to adaptability for greater business efficiencies.鈥�

definition of a composable business is 鈥渁n organization that is architected for real-time adaptability and resilience in the face of uncertainty.鈥� In this day and age, there鈥檚 no stronger argument for moving ahead to achieve that vision.

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鈥淢anufacturers can no longer create one product for one set of customers,鈥� said Mike Lackey, global vice president of Solution Management for Digital Manufacturing at SAP. 鈥淭hey have to be agile enough to deliver mass-produced and individualized products at scale. The intelligent factory delivers on highly changeable customer expectations by connecting business data directly with the shop floor for agility based on unexpected events as they arise. Leading manufacturers are digitally transforming to infuse intelligence into every aspect of the business and the factory while controlling costs and quality for a stronger future.鈥�

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Connected Data across Ecosystems Boosts Business Agility

Automating processes on the factory floor was just the first step in modern manufacturing. The next step is gaining intelligence by connecting data from business systems like finance and planning and demand to factories, warehouse distribution, and logistics providers. Information needs to flow securely between customers, suppliers, and other partners. analysts said that due to increased competition for wallet share, 65% of G2000 original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) will integrate customer insights with service work orders to better personalize engagements, increasing satisfaction by 15% by 2025. By next year, analysts expected 30% of manufacturers will share applications with industry ecosystem partners to improve visibility and operational efficiency and ensure safety, security, and quality.

鈥淚ntelligence means that you can鈥檛 look at a single factor or a single factory,鈥� said Lackey. 鈥淭he intelligent factory links together your entire global operation as one entity to become the Intelligent Enterprise. As a manufacturer, your intelligent factory drives your intelligent supply chain that鈥檚 able to adapt quickly moving production lines between facilities when disruptions happen, sourcing alternate materials if supply chains are disrupted, or even switching out production for completely new products should consumer demand suddenly spike.鈥�

Bringing Intelligence Supply Chain-Wide

Technology advances are making yesterday鈥檚 impossibilities everyday realities. By next year, analysts expected 50% of all supply chain forecasts will be automated using artificial intelligence (AI), improving accuracy by five percentage points. By 2025, researchers predicted 30% of G2000 manufacturers will embed connected technologies to increase product reliability using operational insights that ensure uptime and support an optimized maintenance supply chain.

鈥淭he intelligent factory is self-correcting and self-learning,鈥� said Lackey. 鈥淔or example, machine learning builds intelligence into your processes for more robust and continuous improvements in quality control. When you combine business information like market demand drivers, cost structures, inventory, suppliers, and delivery dates with shop floor data, you have the intelligence to reduce inefficiencies and focus on benefits for the greatest competitive advantage. This is how our customers are digitally transforming using .鈥�

Technology Advances Energize Business Transformation

With greater intelligence from digital innovations like AI, machine learning, and the Internet of Things (IoT), manufacturers are using previously unused data to adapt operations and cross industry boundaries for expanded business opportunities. analysts predicted that by 2025, 65% of global manufacturers will invest in edge AI as a part of their IoT-enabled hyper-automation strategy, up from less than 10% today. In just a few years, analysts expected 40% of G2000 organizations will use AI, data governance, and a transformed organization to develop a resilient and distributed operational decision-making framework that drives 25% faster change execution. Products-as-a-service is among the biggest market growth areas. analysts predicted that by 2026, 30% of software development teams will focus on turning traditional products into outcomes-as-a-service.

鈥淭he intelligent factory supports new cloud-based services models as they emerge from board-level strategies,鈥� said Lackey. 鈥淚ntelligence from connected data across factory operations and the business is crucial to deliver on the contract for usage-based services where the manufacturer owns the product throughout its entire life cycle.鈥�

Delivering products against the plan is all well and good, but we live in a world of disruptions. It could be floods and wildfire shutdowns impacting the flow of materials, spiking consumer demands after an influencer鈥檚 social media post goes viral, or ongoing pandemic lockdowns anywhere in the world. In this kind of market, manufacturers have discovered that factory automation alone won鈥檛 build business resilience. As lot sizes decrease and customer expectations rise, Industry 4.0 initiatives are making factories more intelligent for agile business that builds customer loyalty.

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鈥淥ur investment in CX technology has been all about aligning with our business strategy and vision in a customer-centric way,鈥� said Carlson. 鈥淐onnecting data on a centralized platform across the sales team, contact centers, and marketing has resulted in higher sales and close rates, more responsive customer service with faster resolutions, and a competitive advantage for our brands.鈥�

Connected Data Is Foundational to Customer Loyalty

Moen is among the cadre of respected brands that rely on solutions to help deliver innovations for achieving high-growth plans. In fact, the company鈥檚 strategy reflects a market-wide sea change in how CX itself has transformed from a siloed tactic to strategic business must-have. While Moen鈥檚 foundational B2B connections remain strong, similar to many manufacturers, the company has moved closer to customers including retailers, contractors, plumbers and other service providers, as well as consumers. The initial impetus for the company鈥檚 CX investment was focused on sales team digital communication readiness with customers.

鈥淲hile we began by thinking about the selling process alone, we quickly realized that if we can connect all this data 鈥� interactions between sales and service, customer and consumer data, and marketing campaigns 鈥� that would drive our entire business strategy forward to build customer loyalty,鈥� said Carlson. 鈥淔rom an investment perspective, we far exceeded our initial revenue goals for the first three years. Our call agents can handle more calls and have added important cross-selling responsibilities. Marketing-wise, we can better target people who are calling into our contact centers, providing prospects like trade partners with personalized content. Due to our early success, we continue to invest in this strategic platform. We now have loyalty programs driving customers to purchase products that will deliver continuous value to them.鈥�

Digital Innovations Drive Business Opportunity

Moen is a prime example of how leading-edge manufacturers are taking advantage of digitally-fueled growth opportunities. When cloud-based platforms connect information from front-to-back office processes, new business models emerge. For example, Moen has expanded offerings into areas such as smart home technology, introducing new revenue models by monetizing customer data to sell products like scented shower head subscriptions. On a daily basis, service agents have easier access to a digital knowledge base of Moen鈥檚 products, while sales people appreciate a mobile-first experience when they鈥檙e on the road.

鈥淲e took our service agents 100% digital with a knowledge management solution that details SKUs down to the part level,鈥� said Carlson. 鈥淭hey can answer questions faster, even digitally sharing images with customers to help identify parts and products. If customers share a competitor鈥檚 product image, our agents can offer a discount to replace it with a Moen product. We鈥檙e also exploring the best methods of supporting installation and replacement questions, including step-by-step video instructions or referrals to local plumbers for customers who want field service.鈥�

Data Exchange Gets Closer to Customers

With its strong customer partnerships, Carlson said that Moen has a better sense of what鈥檚 selling in specific markets. Online customers can easily find the product they鈥檙e seeking on Moen鈥檚 Web site, along with local retailers that have it in stock. Moen also has dedicated sales agents for e-tailers and retailers, with service agents in select markets to help in-aisle purchasing. Homeowners working with their general contractor can find Moen product information in showrooms, supported by local sales teams who update displays based on sales demand. Minus a direct relationship with consumers, one of the biggest benefits of digitalization has been the continuous exchange of information with retailers.

鈥淣ow that we have the tools and technology, we鈥檙e looking ahead to become more sophisticated in finding out more from retailers how customers are experiencing our products,鈥� said Carlson. 鈥淭hey can provide us with feedback to helps drive some of the service aspects of what we provide or what we should be doing.鈥�

CX Becomes Competitive Advantage

According to Nitin Badjatia, head of Solutions and Marketing for 51风流Service Cloud and 51风流Sales Cloud, customer service can no longer operate as an island, disconnected from the rest of the organization. In an era where products and services are introduced at the pace of innovation, modern customer service is intertwined with the entire value chain.

鈥淢anufacturers are only getting closer to their channel partners and consumers,鈥� said Badjatia. 鈥淭o foster customer loyalty and keep up with fast-changing market demands, organizations need to create meaningful connections throughout the customer life cycle. It鈥檚 why we developed the intelligent 51风流Service Cloud, to provide customer service with fast and accurate insights that will not only help resolve immediate issues, but also protect the brand promise and secure future growth.鈥�

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analysts predicted 80% of worldwide energy suppliers will use digital customer engagement solutions by 2026 to cater to the appetites of millennials and Gen Z, which will make up the majority of the utility industry鈥檚 customer base. A survey of Asia-Pacific city planners found they planned to prioritize initiatives that would manage critical resources like water using smart meters.

Similar to societal norms around sustainability, smart cities as a concept has evolved and expanded. According to James McClelland, senior global director of Industry Marketing for Utilities at SAP, organizations serving every community 鈥� from rural to urban and everything in between 鈥� care about efficiency, sustainability, and the circular economy.

鈥淲hether it鈥檚 water, gas, electricity, or other natural and energy resources, utilities want to become more efficient and reduce waste and lower carbon emissions for a more sustainable environment,鈥� said McClelland. 鈥淭he real power of a smart city comes down to data analytics from innovations like smart meters. With a better understanding of individual usage, utility providers can help customers make sustainable choices based on their household needs, collectively making the world a better place.鈥�

Case in point is American Water, which provides regulated and regulated-like drinking water and wastewater services to an estimated 14 million people in 24 states. Neeru Sharma, the company鈥檚 senior director of Business Partnership and Delivery, said the company distills every major decision into two questions: How will it make our company more efficient? And how will it positively change the customer experience?

I talked with Sharma at the event, where she told me about her company鈥檚 digitalization plans that included a network of smart meters based on the Internet of Things (IoT).

鈥淲e are a purpose-driven, customer-focused business,鈥� said Sharma. 鈥淥ur company vision revolves around efficient operations to deliver a superior customer experience and contribute to a sustainable society with better water consumption management. Going to a cloud-based platform is our first step in becoming an intelligent enterprise.鈥�

Operational Efficiencies from IoT-Based Sensors

American Water is at the vanguard of the utility industry鈥檚 digitalization trend that is fueled by consumer demographics and sustainability mandates.

Sharma equated technology innovation with her company鈥檚 business agility and resilience. Headquartered in New Jersey, American Water is the largest and most geographically diverse U.S. publicly traded water and wastewater utility company.

American Water recently selected to collect real and near real-time data from meters, as well as 听to connect information to billing and other systems. Unlike yesteryear鈥檚 monthly meter readings that relied on resource-intensive truck rolls, sensor-based smart meters automatically capture water usage data more frequently, giving American Water a clearer understanding of actual water consumption levels for billing and planning purposes. Access to real-time and on-demand data will also flag potential problems, helping the company keep meters in peak working condition.

鈥淲e won鈥檛 have to wait until the end of the month for usage data,鈥� said Sharma. 鈥淲e can identify and manage meter read issues, consumption patterns, and potential leak patterns at scale in buildings, and connect it directly to our billing systems. As a water utility, it鈥檚 very important for us to use our own resources to efficiently and better manage water distribution across our communities.鈥�

Analytics Behind Sustainable Business

Of course, sustainable water management does not mean reducing customer access to water. In this case, it translates to analyzing and acting on data from smart meters. For example, an unnatural spike in water consumption beyond typical usage rates could indicate a potential leak or a malfunctioning meter.

鈥淵ou need solutions that will provide up-to-the-minute information, surfacing water consumption trends on a daily basis,鈥� said Sharma. 鈥淎nalyzing that data, we can see if a customer鈥檚 consumption is consistent with or outside of historical norms. Having this on-demand data available can help us conduct proactive maintenance to prevent disruptions.鈥�

Sharma credited technology innovations like smart meters with helping the company meet sustainability objectives and build trusted relationships with customers.

鈥淚t takes a lot of steps to deliver clean water from the source to the customer鈥檚 faucet,鈥� she said. 鈥淭echnology is integral to providing that visibility into our entire process of bringing quality water in compliance with regulations to our customers. We want our customers to be fully aware of their water usage and what they can do for a more sustainable community. Data transparency is just as important to tracking our performance against ESG objectives.鈥�

Smart Communities are the Future

Smart meters are a harbinger of what鈥檚 to come as utilities grapple with managing water, arguably the most finite valuable natural resource on the planet. Leading utility providers are gearing up for major transformation.

analysts predicted that by next year, stricter environmental regulations will have pushed 30% of water utilities to invest in integrated information technology (IT) 听and operational technology (OT) data. Forrester analysts said that by 2024, 40% of energy suppliers will have lifted the core business logic from billing to customer data and experience management, becoming three times more effective at marketing new products.

Between climate change risks and consumer and community demands, water utilities need technology more than ever to boost efficiencies that improve the customer experience, representing the dawn of the next generation of sustainable smart communities.

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With the growing volume, complexity, and velocity of data, it鈥檚 no surprise that businesses often consider only small subsets of what鈥檚 available for analytics. Research suggests that several of today鈥檚 best-of-class application operators are using of their collected data.

Continuously monitoring business data for anomalies helps identify the root cause and respond faster to such hidden events and changing trends. This approach to analytics provides continuous intelligence that helps brands make smart, real-time business decisions.

What Is Continuous Intelligence?

Traditionally, dashboards are checked periodically to monitor the most relevant KPIs and manually explore data along pre-defined paths. However, considering only pre-defined indicators and performance metrics leads to a limited perspective and misses information about unknown signals and trends in other parts of the data or at lower granularity.

Keeping track of what is relevant in this very moment is therefore a challenge for businesses across industries. Enter continuous intelligence.

According to Gartner, continuous intelligence 鈥渋s a design pattern in which real-time analytics are integrated within a business operation, processing current and historical data to prescribe actions in response to events. It provides decision automation or decision support.鈥�

The approach uses a variety of technologies such as machine learning, event stream processing, optimization, and business rule management.

Uncover the Unknown with AI

While humans cannot inspect every possible characteristic and combination in the flood of incoming data, machines can.

Complementing analytics that provide precise answers to questions users know to ask, a machine can continuously monitor data in the background to detect unknown correlations and trends that deviate from what would have been expected by the system based on previous observations.

This way, companies can identify hidden, but potentially relevant signals in the data. Gartner predicts that by 2022, more than half of major new business systems will incorporate continuous intelligence capabilities.

By integrating artificial intelligence (AI)-based continuous intelligence into their day-to-day operations, companies can:

• Boost efficiency by spending less time sifting through data from a variety of disparate sources
• Focus on what really matters for their business
• Speed time to action

By automatically inspecting critical business health indicators such as revenue, Web page views, active users, or transaction volume in real time, businesses can accelerate their time to insight and action and better respond to situations before business is impacted.

Putting Continuous Intelligence to Work

is exploring the business potential and requirements of continuous intelligence and developed a prototype of a self-learning cloud service.

This service autonomously discovers patterns in historic data to detect trends in new data that deviate from the expected. Insights are ranked by relevance and proactively provided to the user as comprehensive data stories with full context.

Especially in industries with fast-moving assets such as retail, the service could be critical for quickly adapting to changing buying behavior, trends, and market conditions. It could alert retailers to surging sales of Kate Middleton look-alike dresses, food trends such as avocados and oat milk, or demand for umbrellas due to bad weather.

But more than retailers could benefit. Service ticketing is another area of application that the 51风流Innovation Center Network team is investigating.

With continuous intelligence, service personnel could, for instance, identify hot topics of interests, indicated by an unusually high number of open tickets. Then, they could respond with tailored material for additional information.

Moving at Market Speed

Relying solely on default indicators and monitoring standard KPIs is no longer sufficient when it comes to understanding and responding to the dynamics of complex systems or businesses.

Looking ahead, continuous intelligence is expected to become the norm, as the speed at which businesses must react to rapidly changing market conditions will only increase. It will be a critical component for companies that want to point users to relevant data and trigger actions when it matters most.

Is your business ready to become an intelligent enterprise?

Matthias Uflacker is part of 51风流Innovation Center Network.
This article was originally published on .

That is the very problem that , SAP, and Signavio (prior to acquisition by SAP) have been working on together for the better part of a decade. As technology rapidly evolves to support innovative and dynamic business models and to drive new revenue streams, things just get more complex for IT as businesses leaders creatively leverage their new opportunities.

“It鈥檚 hard to move to a better operating model if you don鈥檛 know what you鈥檙e actually doing or how things work today,鈥� said David Crooks, enterprise architect at Travis Perkins.

For the past nine years, LeanIX and 51风流Signavio shared a common mindset and goal: help create a common language for IT and business leaders. This idea is game-changing because all the transparency and collaboration in the world does not help if one side doesn鈥檛 understand what the other is truly saying. A shared vision for bridging business and IT has guided our product integration and allowed us to serve our customers better, together.

Earlier this month we took that partnership to a new level. LeanIX continues to be a vital partner for SAP, and we see customer demand building rapidly as we help deliver faster ROI in our customers鈥� transformation journeys. The LeanIX flagship product, , has been premium certified by 51风流and is now an 51风流endorsed app.

Visibility into enterprise architecture is a critical ingredient at any stage of a transformation journey, especially when paired with visibility into the end-to-end business processes that architecture supports, so everyone at the table can understand the feedback loop among operational systems and business outcomes. This partnership enables organizations to accelerate their transformation with an eye toward operational excellence and delivering business results 鈥� not just IT milestones 鈥� faster.

The combination of LeanIX and 51风流Signavio offers customers what they need to achieve business and IT collaboration, reduce uncertainty, make better decisions, and ultimately accelerate their transformation agendas.

equip companies of all sizes with actionable insights that help them to realize their road map, based on the 51风流Activate methodology. Combined with LeanIX, customers can achieve an extra layer of insight that spans across their present and future software landscape and relate their technology investments directly to business processes. LeanIX鈥檚 native support for the 51风流Activate methodology is one of many aspects that underpin the spirit of our partnership and how we serve our joint customers with a common approach and aligned methodology and taxonomy.

LeanIX had out-of-the-box integration with Signavio modelling capabilities as a Signavio partner prior to joining with SAP, which adds further value to the partnership. The shared product road map includes:

• Improved integration of LeanIX EAM with 51风流Signavio Process Manager
• A new integration with the upcoming version of 51风流Signavio Journey Modeler
• Automated insights into cloud-based 51风流landscapes based on integration with 51风流Cloud ALM

All these enhancements will help further accelerate our customers transformations, which are literally on the rise thanks to the RISE with 51风流offering.

“Without the support of LeanIX, a cost-efficient and smooth transition from our old landscape to the new 51风流S/4HANA software landscape would not have been possible,” said Oliver Dawid, IT enterprise architect at Marc O鈥橮olo.

This partnership will also add value to the One Process Acceleration Layer package, a repository for 51风流and partner-led best practices and industry-specific processes. Being able to link to these from LeanIX will provide customers the best possible foundation to help plan their business transformation, taking their individual situation of their industry and line of business fully into consideration.

“LeanIX Enterprise Architecture Management enables us to collectively understand the as-is state, for both the 51风流and non-51风流landscape, making it easier to define a plan that gets us to the desired state,鈥� said Jochen Fauser of Partner Technology Strategy & Transformation at Deloitte.

The most humbling part about our elevated partnership is the confirmation we have received from the market through extremely positive feedback from customers and partners alike. In the end, the outcome of a partnership is only measured in one currency: customer success.

To learn more, visit .

Mani Pirouz is chief partner officer at 51风流Signavio.

鈥淲hether it鈥檚 concrete, steel, lumber, or other building materials, inflation and supply chain disruptions have increased the risk every time we submit a project bid,鈥� said Matt Gramblicka, vice president of IT and Enterprise Applications at Graham. 鈥淲e鈥檙e focused on doing things consistently across the board and it starts with solid processes, standards of excellence, and understanding what鈥檚 expected of the people involved in every project. We鈥檙e on a transformational journey with 51风流that will help us connect data for visibility across the business including labor, equipment, material, and subcontractors.鈥�

Connected Data to Become Intelligent Enterprise

Keeping track of construction equipment at any given point in time is a monumental task, especially for a company like Graham. The firm is involved with an ever-increasing range of projects across a large geographical footprint. Typical projects require hundreds and thousands of pieces of equipment from earth-moving excavators, cranes, and scaffolding to generators, tarps, ladders, tools, and more. People are assigned to keep everything in working order as well. With ETM.next, Graham expects greater efficiencies from project start through completion, providing employees with transparency so they know what equipment is available, when, and where. ETM.next is available on and integrated with .

鈥淲e’ve taken care of the back office with 51风流S/4HANA and our workforce with , and now we’re aiming for efficiency gains across our project sites,鈥� said Gramblicka. 鈥淯sing ETM.next, we can better manage our internal supply chain network. We can quickly identify how to get each project up and running efficiently, making sure sites have the required equipment to get the job done. Over time, we鈥檒l keep our utilization up so equipment isn鈥檛 sitting idle anywhere.鈥�

When equipment requests come in, employees will use ETM.next to track availability based on proximity to a site, which will help keep shipping costs down. Collected data will show appropriate information for billing management as well. AI and advanced analytics will help Graham replace manual, paper-based recordkeeping with digitalized and automated processes, increasing efficiencies and real-time visibility into operations.

鈥淲e鈥檒l make sure that we’re getting value out of our capital expenditures on that equipment and that it鈥檚 fully operational for maximum project profitability,鈥� said Gramblicka. 鈥淭racking exact usage times and costs also encourages project leads to return equipment promptly so they’re not paying for something that’s not in use, and we can quickly deploy it to the next site where it鈥檚 needed most.鈥�

Integrated Analytics Yield Business Insights

Having expanded its business with larger projects in new locations during the past years, adding ETM.next is the latest strategic move for Graham in working with SAP.

鈥淲e needed a platform strong enough to manage our growing business, especially connecting our financial core to workforce and payroll, and now equipment,鈥� said Gramblicka. 鈥�51风流has consistently added capabilities that are more user-friendly and efficient process-wise. We needed a fully integrated system where people complete tasks once, and that information flows all the way through to finance, HR, procurement, and the field who can use it for reporting and insights supporting that project and the business overall.鈥�

In many ways, becoming an intelligent, sustainable enterprise is core to every organization鈥檚 ability to grow, managing internal and external supply chains with insights from connected data that drive competitive advantage in an increasingly complex, volatile world.

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What has become clear over the past two years is that exceptions are no longer the exception, they have become the norm. One crisis followed by yet another has forced business leaders to give up the wish to 鈥渞eturn to normal鈥� and instead design business processes with resilience at the core to deal with the next inevitable crisis.

Intelligent, Networked, Sustainable Enterprises Are More Resilient

Reacting and rebounding in the midst of a crisis requires resilience. To help our customers thrive despite uncertainty, 51风流enables them to transform into intelligent, networked, and sustainable enterprises. Intelligence enables businesses to explore multiple scenarios, contingency plans, new business opportunities, models, and strategies based on data 鈥� not merely assumptions. Tapping into of partners and strategic alliances in a rich ecosystem provides agility and the opportunity to experiment with new collaboration models, source new suppliers, discover new resources, and ultimately build more resilient supply chains. And more than ever, businesses are driven by an irreversible evolution toward more and the will to integrate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) impacts.

Our Five Engineering Priorities

Achieving our ambitious vision to transform businesses into intelligent, networked, and sustainable enterprises means we cannot lose sight of the operational steps we ourselves must take to ensure we are adapting to the new normal of constant crisis management. That鈥檚 why, in continuous exchange with our customers to understand their needs, we are investing in five priorities for SAP鈥檚 engineering teams.

Autonomous and Intelligent Business: The Future of ERP Is Autonomous

in everyday technologies like Spotify, Netflix, and Google Maps. They are improving our leisure and personal time, so it鈥檚 easy to see the great potential of AI and machine learning to automate business processes and thereby help end users concentrate more on high-value tasks. We are committed to continuing the strong progress we have made on embedding AI across our solutions. Because the true power of AI to analyze large amounts of data and combine it in meaningful ways for decision-makers is unleashed when it is used across our integrated portfolio. Better data insights translate into better business choices.

Overall, we released more than 120 AI scenarios across our products, and this is just the beginning. With such a powerful technology, however, also comes great responsibility. At SAP, we first defined guidelines for using AI in 2018 and the听51风流Global AI Ethics Policy, which applies to all employees, came into effect in January 2022.

Integration: The Whole Is Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts

Integration is a key strategic priority for customers that are aiming for digital experiences across omnichannel engagements 鈥� connecting people, businesses, and devices in their business networks and ecosystems. . We know this and it is why we have worked hard here and will continue to do so. In 2021 alone, we delivered approximately 450 new integration innovations and our is loaded. Our modular cloud ERP works together across front-end and back-end systems, and we cover crucial business processes end to end: from recruit-to-retire, lead-to-cash, source-to-pay, and design-to-operate. Organizations have options to turn away from executing siloed, one-off application and data integrations by exploring comprehensive integration options like ours.

51风流Business Technology Platform (51风流BTP) is a key part of our integration strategy and brings together data and analytics, AI, application development, and automation in one, unified environment. It is an open platform for the entire 51风流ecosystem, integrating and extending SAP鈥檚 intelligent suite, and it is central to the industry cloud as well as partner applications. With the help of 51风流HANA Cloud, 51风流BTP customers benefit from reduced TCO across integration landscapes, increased project speed, and reduced implementation costs. We continue to keep our eye on the ball here.

Operational Excellence: Customer Trust Is Our Foundation

Our customers trust us with their most mission-critical business processes and data. So it goes without saying that our software availability, security, quality, and compliance remain top priorities. Cloud operational excellence underpins everything we do.

User Experience: The Best Experience Wins

While today鈥檚 business challenges may be complex, the user experience (UX) must be quite the opposite. We continue to prioritize UX to make using our applications effortless and intuitive. To that end, we introduced Horizon, our visual design theme based on five design principles drawn from SAP’s own research into how people want to work in the intelligent enterprise. Creating the best UX is not just about aesthetics; it鈥檚 about great usability, accessibility, performance, and aesthetics across the entire portfolio.

With Horizon, . Customers were asked to provide feedback to a preview, directly in the system through a built-in Qualtrics survey. We continue to iterate on our design, in cooperation with our users, proving that we stand by our mission 鈥� to test, learn, and continuously improve our design. Granted, we have a long road ahead of us, but we are putting one foot in front of the other on the path to setting new standards for enterprise software.

Localization: Empowering Every Customer to Succeed Locally and Globally

More than ever, customers face challenges responding to evolving local, regional, and global regulatory requirements. is a key factor in achieving resilience and a key differentiator for us at SAP. Our enterprise leadership is recognized for enabling digital business scenarios across countries because we have a proven track record in enabling companies to grow globally and succeed locally. We have more than 560 local versions in total across our entire portfolio. For 51风流SuccessFactors Employee Central alone, we offer 102 local versions. In 2021, we delivered more than 1,200 legal changes across 51风流solutions helping to ensure customers comply with the laws of each country in which they operate. Using localized 51风流solutions, customers can rapidly enter new markets, harvest first-mover advantages, and achieve a competitive edge.

Our five priorities ensure that while we stay focused on our vision, we execute on our mission 鈥� in deeply destabilizing times.

Despite the challenges that crises present, they can be an opportunity to take a step back, reflect, and look at the way we design our business processes. They can be invitations to surpass the challenges we face today and will undoubtedly face tomorrow. The digital transformation we offer for our customers is a secure approach for setting up business to respond with resilience when the next inevitable crisis hits.

Thomas Saueressig is a member of the Executive Board of 51风流SE, leading 51风流Product Engineering.

In this Q&A, Kunad discusses how the demand for in-application help and training capabilities has changed, especially over the past two years with the challenges of a global pandemic and millions of 51风流users working from home. She also explains new functionalities and how customers can benefit even more from this great solution.

Q: In your role as solution owner of 51风流Enable Now, what have been your observations over the past two years, when businesses were struggling with the impact of the pandemic?

A: I noticed several interesting trends during the pandemic. Some businesses had challenges from not being ready to respond in a fast and agile way to the new situation 鈥� for example their entire workforce working from home suddenly or not being ready to boost their digital transformation, enhance their rollouts, or implement new business models within a very short time frame. On the other hand, I observed that some of our customers accelerated their investment in user enablement and training.

The reasons seem obvious. They wanted to make a good use of the time they suddenly had due to the circumstances, time which they would normally have invested in their own customer projects. Instead, some customers decided to kick off long-term projects on user enablement earlier than originally planned. In other cases, we noticed a change in how user enablement is valued. The unpredictable change due to the pandemic and entire workforces suddenly working from home revealed gaps and needs for upskilling. The help system of colleagues at the next desk suddenly fell away. User enablement and upskilling became priority tasks for many. To help customers respond to this in a fast and agile manner, 51风流Enable Now offers a range of possibilities to help overcome those gaps and needs.

Sounds like some businesses managed to turn their challenges into something positive by installing or enhancing the use of 51风流Enable Now. How would you summarize the key features of this in-application help in one sentence?

51风流Enable Now helps customers easily create, maintain, and deliver in-application help, learning materials, and documentation for existing applications as well as for the rollout of new features or solutions.

What is the unique selling proposition for 51风流customers when working with 51风流Enable Now?

There are many good reasons that come to my mind, let me mention a few. 51风流Enable Now is already integrated in many 51风流solutions. For example, RISE with 51风流customers automatically have access to SAP-generated content available via 51风流Companion* in-application help. There are many more with this great help and customers can also enhance it.

The second aspect is that we have a huge volume of ready-to-use content available, which saves our customers time as they will not have to create the content themselves but can basically hit the ground running from day one. 51风流Companion works like a digital assistant for users, aiming to simplify and ease the consumption of our solution. It is available for browser-based solutions, for in-application help for non-browser-based solutions, and even for non-51风流solutions in general. 51风流Enable Now offers many ways to create enablement content 鈥� from interactive quizzes to e-learnings with text-to-speech over customized documents. Finally, I would like to mention that our customers can use 51风流Enable Now across their whole portfolio with just one license per user. This breadth of possibilities has something for every use case.

This all sounds easy to apply, easy to consume, and easy to use. What do you hear from customers about recent enhancements?

What I hear most of the time is 鈥淧lease give us more of this.鈥� Customers love the direction we鈥檙e heading in, and our vision of an intelligent adoption platform resonates. Be it fine-tuning our existing feature set with enhancements like the push help and what鈥檚 new banner configuration or coming up with completely new features like machine translation integration, we seem to have hit a sweet spot, especially with in-app help delivered by 51风流Companion.

With a more flexible approach for new releases, more proactive customer communication, and our lively user enablement community, we continuously listen to our customers to best respond to their needs. This is not just about the features; it鈥檚 also about being a companion for our customers on their way to better adoption and productivity.

You indicated how important user enablement is to fully unfold the benefits of a solution and to help increase the overall performance of users. What are one or two things that you would like customers to be aware of?

First, I would like to point out that customers can use 51风流Enable Now for a huge number of 51风流solutions. It鈥檚 even part of the built-in application help, like with , where they can benefit from the pre-created ready-to-use content.

They can also use 51风流Enable Now for any other kind of enablement and training content they want to create, depending on the individual business needs of an organization or department.

Let鈥檚 say a company runs different 51风流applications, for example 51风流SuccessFactors solutions, plus their own custom-built applications. 51风流Enable Now could be used for all of them.

Often customer departments tend to act in silos when it comes to implementing training and enablement software. HR might consider using 51风流Enable Now for 51风流Success Factors Onboarding, for example, while the procurement department might not be aware that they could also use 51风流Enable Now 鈥� and with the benefit of not having to add additional licenses.

To fully benefit from 51风流Enable Now installations across departments within one organization, we strive to help our customers to close the gaps between departments, teams, and license usage, and to help them make best use of 51风流Enable Now.

Sophia Stolze is integrated communications manager for 51风流Enterprise Adoption at 51风流SE.

*51风流Companion will replace 鈥淲eb assistant鈥� to provide a harmonized and more descriptive name for in-application help channels provided by 51风流Enable Now.

The new offering correlates experience data from user surveys (whether customer, supplier or employee) with underlying IT systems, giving companies the ability to understand how best to optimize their end-to-end business processes for both operational excellence and customer experience. The company also announced that 51风流Signavio will be a brand of SAP, reflecting SAP鈥檚 commitment to this market segment.

With business pressures intensifying as markets become more volatile and consumers become more unpredictable, managing change will be one of the toughest and most important problems businesses face today. While business process management (BPM) solutions provide a starting point for managing change and understanding interconnectivity among operational systems, they often can鈥檛 paint the full picture. By connecting experience data with operations data, our customers can now uncover the impact of process changes on end users and have the tools they need to optimize outcomes.

The journey to process analytics capabilities within 51风流Signavio software recently completed beta testing with over 25 companies globally, with immediate availability to customers through the 51风流Signavio Process Transformation Suite. 51风流Signavio customers can join the early adopter program to get their experience data in 51风流Signavio solutions for the full journey to process analytics functionality.

鈥淲ithout customers, you cannot gather and understand the value of analyzing and improving processes,鈥� said Rashmeer Pahlad, business analyst, NTT Ltd. 鈥淭he outcome of improving processes is to streamline and improve the way we as a business work and, as a result, improve the way operations deliver quality and value to a customer.鈥�

“Connecting internal process flows with customer sentiment can help us understand how customers perceive our operating model and optimize our internal processes accordingly,鈥� said Alexander Roettcher, director, Industries and Markets, Endress+Hauser Group Services.

Based on the success of the recently launched 51风流Signavio Journey Modeler solution, 51风流is expecting significant uptake and will be working closely with its go-to-market partners to meet anticipated demand.

Demand for Business Process Transformation Drives New Growth for 51风流Signavio Solutions

Following the acquisition of Signavio by 51风流in March 2021, the combination of 51风流and Signavio solutions created the most comprehensive business process transformation portfolio on the market. The past year demonstrated that sophisticated, simple process management solutions provide customers a more rapid and robust ROI on their transformation initiatives, leading to strong triple-digit growth for 51风流Signavio solutions. This market uptake has allowed for more than doubling development resources and faster delivery of innovative new technology, including the new journey to process analytics capabilities.

鈥淐onsistent feedback from customers validates our beliefs when we joined with 51风流just over a year ago,鈥� said Gero Decker, a co-founder of Signavio and now co-general manager, 51风流Signavio, SAP. 鈥淥ur business process transformation portfolio is giving organizations a new, data-driven way of identifying touch points where they can remove friction and create delight for employees, suppliers and customers.鈥�

鈥淲ith the availability of journey to process analytics, we are taking the first step in demonstrating the profound effect of bringing Signavio into SAP,鈥� said Rouven Morato, co-general manager, 51风流Signavio, SAP. 鈥淏ringing experience data into the equation gives our customers previously missing insights into how internal operations impact end users. The new 51风流Signavio brand represents our belief that business process transformation is foundational to creating the agility, resilience and responsiveness required in today鈥檚 world.鈥�

51风流Signavio is a key component of the solution, the 51风流offering designed to help every enterprise develop new business models to avoid being disrupted, gain efficiencies to fund innovation and transform mission-critical systems without business risk.

For more information on the journey to process analytics with 51风流Signavio software, please visit .

Visit the 51风流News Center. Follow 51风流on Twitter at .

About SAP

SAP鈥檚 strategy is to help every business run as an intelligent, sustainable enterprise. As a market leader in enterprise application software, we help companies of all sizes and in all industries run at their best: 51风流customers generate 87% of total global commerce. Our machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT), and advanced analytics technologies help turn customers鈥� businesses into intelligent enterprises. 51风流helps give people and organizations deep business insight and fosters collaboration that helps them stay ahead of their competition. We simplify technology for companies so they can consume our software the way they want 鈥� without disruption. Our end-to-end suite of applications and services enables business and public customers across 25 industries globally to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and make a difference. With a global network of customers, partners, employees, and thought leaders, 51风流helps the world run better and improve people鈥檚 lives. For more information, visit .

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To get ahead of rapid shifts in the marketplace, businesses are turning to the cloud, where increasingly integrated digital networks extend visibility and ensure resilience across their operations and those of their interconnected buyers and suppliers.

Offering flexibility, speed, security, and cost-effectiveness, the cloud continues to deliver undeniable value. , 85% of enterprises will adopt a cloud-first strategy by 2025. Doing so allows them to turn their attention to the task of applying cloud-based technologies to run their business, rather than running the technologies themselves.

Growing margins and greater efficiencies are two of the benefits enterprises can enjoy through , a comprehensive cloud offering that helps deliver a strategic approach to digital transformation. The package provides services and functionality to help businesses along their journey to becoming .

RISE with 51风流enables companies to gain insights from across their operations and combine them with those from trading partners to help guide decisions. For example, consider your favorite online apparel retailer. While they may fulfill your order in-house, they will need to engage with an external logistics provider to deliver it.

This is why integrated business networks are so important. To become connected, intelligent enterprises, businesses need strong collaboration with trading partners and full visibility into supply chains to ensure agility and resilience.

— a cloud-based, integrated network of networks spanning procurement, asset management, supply chain, and logistics — provides immediate access and 360-degree visibility into one鈥檚 trading partners. Through a single digital connection, the network can replace messy one-to-one integrations with a tidy many-to-many, inter-company process flow. In doing so, it lends transparency and up-to-the-minute information across all buyers and suppliers, shippers, carriers, operators, and manufacturers so they may identify risks, plan for potential disruption, and collaborate toward innovation. 51风流Business Network helps make it possible to adjust operations as needed or pursue alternative sourcing in real time.

With these capabilities, the benefits can also be transferred to the customer, for example by providing visibility into their purchase from the time an order is placed to when the parcel arrives at the customer鈥檚 door. One of the many advantages of this level of transparency is that when the package is delayed, the retailer can alert the customer, ensuring the trusted relationship remains intact.

With the addition of the 51风流Business Network Starter Pack as part of RISE with SAP, customers can experience a networked ERP to aid their transition to the cloud and drive business transformation.

This enables customers to connect with their suppliers and trading partners from source to settlement through the networks鈥� procurement capabilities; connects their equipment suppliers and services providers to help ensure maximum uptime of critical assets on the production line through the networks鈥� asset intelligence capabilities; and allows customers to work with logistics providers to obtain the best shipping rates and track and trace products and materials using the networks鈥� logistics capabilities.

That鈥檚 the value of 51风流Business Network packaged as part of RISE with SAP: it enables organizations to future-proof their business, not only within their four walls but also beyond them, allowing customers to replace one-to-one connections and fragmented data-sharing with many-to-many collaborations and real-time data sharing.

Paige Cox is senior vice president and global head of 51风流Business Network.

In this exclusive conversation, Zauke talks about the powerful localized process revolution happening behind every digital-first business.

Q: How does the localization of enterprise software applications factor into some of the biggest business challenges companies face in 2022?

A: What鈥檚 exciting is how digitalization 鈥� driven by local government regulations and transformation agendas, rising expectations for sustainability, and technology innovation 鈥� is transforming business models.

Post-pandemic, companies are continuing to source materials from suppliers in different locations to minimize supply chain disruptions. They鈥檙e exploring local production of important products like semi-conductor chips, computer processors, and the ingredients of livesaving medicines. They鈥檙e expanding to the cloud with subscription-based services and growing partner ecosystems.

At the same time, organizations need to prove compliance with increasing and global electronic document exchange regulations such as e-invoicing and tax reporting, as well as local regulations for documenting travel expenses, time management, payroll, and procurement spend. In certain countries, tax reporting timeframes are speeding up from quarterly or yearly to monthly, weekly, or even real time. In addition, some of our customers have to report on worker learning activities. Global workforce management regulations are also changing regarding data protection and privacy. Meantime, local sustainability reporting mandates are on the rise. Companies need to show how they are minimizing their greenhouse gas footprint across product life cycles and operations.

Can you share some examples of how 51风流has helped companies meet these challenges?

With local versions of 51风流solutions, we help global companies gain business value from their investments and meet country-specific mandates. For example, the world’s largest of printing ink and pigments sped up accounts payable by 30% and reduced invoice processing cycle time by 10% using . A facilities management service provider in the Middle East with over 8,800 employees reduced payroll processing times by 98% to meet local mandates and gain business efficiencies. What previously took three days to complete is now accomplished in just 45 minutes.

With the rise of cloud services like subscription- and consumption-based business models, many organizations have turned to . One global media company is using the solution as part of its digital transformation. After replacing legacy systems in North America, APAC, LATAM, and EMEA, it improved revenue recognition and cash reconciliation processes along with the customer experience.

To go global with local versions in 67 countries, our localization services helped support a global cleaning solution provider鈥檚 HR transformation with 51风流SuccessFactors solutions, which will serve 14,500 employees worldwide.

Sustainability is a top priority for enterprises worldwide, which is why 51风流has developed a comprehensive portfolio of solutions designed to help companies achieve zero emissions, zero waste, and zero inequality. One example is that helps our customers monitor and embed circular economy practices into business processes to meet local sustainability regulations. This solution uses 51风流Document Reporting and Compliance to meet local extended producer responsibility (EPR) obligations, tax declarations, and other corporate commitments.

How can companies stay on top of highly changeable and increasingly stringent local mandates and regulations?

Business leaders need to comply with a raft of increasing local regulatory mandates by country. That鈥檚 why, as part of all 51风流solutions, global and local versions, including 51风流S/4HANA, 51风流SuccessFactors solutions, 51风流Ariba solutions, and 51风流Concur solutions, we provide updates as regulations change.

For resilience in this fast-changing environment, organizations are reinventing how they approach business practice standards. This is especially the case for high-growth organizations that need to scale quickly as they expand worldwide. Leaders have realized they need an integrated view of business processes company-wide 鈥� including finance, sustainability, human experience, supply chain, expenses, and procurement 鈥� so they can apply them appropriately across multiple locations for safe and secure operations.

How do localization services from 51风流Enterprise Adoption align with SAP鈥檚 vision for intelligent, networked, sustainable enterprises?

Customers rely on 51风流to digitalize their business processes, supporting their expansion to new countries and market opportunities while enabling the success of their business locally and globally, their employees, and sustainability commitments that benefit society at-large. Localized, integrated business processes are central to our vision to help every company become an intelligent, networked, sustainable enterprise. The ability to comply with local regulations and standards is fundamental to resilient, high-performing, and sustainable business in the new normal.

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While the concept of the paperless workplace is nothing new, the opportunity to achieve this vision is quickly approaching as businesses advance their transformation strategies. Over the past year, companies have invested in software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud-enabled systems, new methodologies such as process automation, and network-wide collaboration to keep employees productive, update suppliers, and deliver on customer expectations.

Now, some organizations are looking to go even further in their business transformation journey by digitalizing and integrating content with a comprehensive enterprise platform.

According to an IDC whitepaper sponsored by 51风流and OpenText, 鈥�,鈥� implementing solutions 鈥� such as听听鈥� can quickly yield a 288% three-year ROI. And at the center of this effective transformation is fast and efficient document migration, intake, processing, and auditing with fewer errors and higher productivity.

Capturing US$7 Million in Revenue Growth

The benefits of content digitalization, integration, and automation with enterprise content management can be combined to increase revenue by more than $7 million per year. By increasing efficiency, reducing errors, and accelerating processes, organizations surveyed by IDC reported an average gain of 4,794 productive hours each 鈥� a 21% increase in gross user productivity.

This improvement allowed respondents to avoid the hiring of 2.6 full-time employees to accomplish equivalent workloads, resulting in approximately $178,000 in enhanced user productivity value per organization. Additionally, enhanced interdepartmental document sharing and the automation of manual processes boosted profitability even further by driving $3.82 million in savings per one million documents.

Migrating Documents with More Efficiency

Migrating millions of documents that have been created, managed, and stored on paper to digital is a daunting task during any change initiative, especially when moving to a modern enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, such as . However, document-related migration is not just a one-time effort; it鈥檚 a project that can happen as regularly as organizations continue to evolve throughout their digital transformation.

Interviewed organizations that use solutions for enterprise content management cited considerable migration efficiencies and cost reductions. For example, some respondents required 24% fewer full-time employees to complete migration projects, from 128.6 to 97.3 on average. The duration of the migration was also shortened from 12.2 months to only seven months, a 43% improvement. As a result of these efficiencies gain, the cost of document-related migration became 24% more affordable.

As one manufacturing executive noted, 鈥淒oing data migration is easier if you minimize the number of applications. 51风流ECM solutions by OpenText helped us put building blocks in place. Our knowledge has increased, and the learning curve is less steep. We know more about what is required country to country.鈥�

Decreasing Invoice Errors

When the volume of paper invoices increases, manual processes become too time-consuming and risk-prone to maintain. For one of the survey participants, the lack of history tracking, trend analysis, and currency distinction led to 鈧�300,000 lost on paying invoices because the organization missed out on receiving discounts upwards of two percent. And in some cases, IDC reported that many respondents also paid interest and penalties on late payments that they could have avoided.

After automating invoicing tasks with enterprise content management, organizations realized a 35% drop in delayed payments and paid 36% less on penalties and interest. The system immediately validates and approves incoming invoices, improving overall invoice performance and decreasing errors by 43% on average.

A participating executive from an industrial chemicals company remarked on the tremendous value of digitalizing invoice management: 鈥淔rom the moment the organization moved toward less touching, it saw a 70% improvement over paper.鈥�

Boosting Organizational Efficiency

As digital transformation becomes synonymous with business growth, executives must consistently consider new capabilities and enhancements to improve their operations, employees鈥� lives, desired outcomes, and customer experiences. In fact, this mindset is bringing forth a new focus on business efficiency and resiliency.

From invoice intake and processing, accounts payable, and auditing teams to areas outside of finance, solutions for enterprise content management can have an impressive impact on organizational efficiency, ranging from 24% to 41%. This outcome is largely due to allowing multiple users to obtain documents with greater ease. Organizations can work independently of an office location and still have secure access to content from a single centralized environment.

In return, users who work from remote locations can work more effectively, which is a tremendous benefit for businesses with most of their workforce still working from home and in the field. Companies can support employees from more geographic regions and across all process streams and operational areas 鈥� all without shuttling physical documents back and forth in e-mail.

In addition, since their content is archived and stored in a centralized process and database, organizations can stay compliant with regulatory and business requirements with minimal or no effort. A surveyed healthcare executive noted this advantage鈥檚 value: 鈥淲e can see content now, whereas the older way we had to search. We can now look at transactional records, so compliance is handled on the schedule.鈥�

Gaining the Full Potential of Content Management

The deeper companies transform into digital-first enterprises, the closer they get to operate at a level of efficiency, intelligence, and speed that rivals their competitors. And the first place to gain that edge is best found in digitalization through enterprise content management that removes the complexity of siloed information, spreadsheets, data extractions, and manipulations.

Explore the calculated cost savings and business benefits of 51风流enterprise content management solutions by OpenText, which support enterprise content management. Read the IDC whitepaper, 鈥�,鈥� commissioned by 51风流and Open Text.

But my personal favorite is, in fact, an equation, which I believe is credited to Edward Roberts and is taught by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Innovation = invention x commercialization.

The premise is that if either invention or commercialization is missing, there is no value and, consequently, no genuine innovation. So, what does it take to drive innovation in your organization? Here are six core enablers.

Build a Culture of Innovation

Innovation can only blossom in a culture where its leadership encourages ideas from everyone, from junior workers to the director. Financial incentives and gamification can help, but great cultures run deeper. People need the freedom 鈥� and confidence 鈥� to suggest ideas no matter how bold.

Think of those outlandish fashions on the catwalks of Paris, London, and Milan. The outfits that ultimately roll off the production lines and into stores are simpler versions of those concepts. So, be open to the art of the possible 鈥� in the beginning, no idea is a bad idea!

Organizations that make time for their people to learn are simultaneously making time for their people to be creative. Learning leads to imagination and cross-pollination, resulting in action and, eventually, innovation.

Flat management structures can help companies to be more innovative, blended with cross-functional collaboration. If a flat structure and are not in reach right now, consider recruiting a team of innovation champions. Their role is to solicit ideas company-wide and facilitate workshops for brainstorming and debate. When people come together in a safe and empowering space, ideas grow wings and innovation will fly.

Foster Diverse Teams

Research by the Wall Street Journal found that are more innovative than homogeneous teams. Innovation is born from an innate knowledge of your target audience鈥檚 needs. 听As most customer bases are varied, it takes a multifaceted group to understand their pains and desires.

If you want your organization to be more innovative, start with your hiring practices. And in the era of remote working, the talent pool open to you needn鈥檛 be limited to your doorstep.

Never Forget the Humans

In his , Gilchriest says that human-centered innovation is the way out of the proof-of-concept trap. Keeping people at the heart of new solutions is crucial. Gilchriest argues that four factors are fundamental to successful innovation:

• Desirability:听defining the value to the consumer
• Feasibility:听the idea鈥檚 technical and regulatory workability
• Viability:听the commercial case for the idea
• Scalability:听how the concept can be scaled from a business and technology perspective

In too many instances, the innovation process focuses on only one or two of these factors. Taking a human-centered approach ensures that those the technology touches remain central.

Understand those who will interact with or benefit from the innovation 鈥� from internal users to end customers 鈥� and continuously look for ways to delight them.

View Failure Through the Lens of Opportunity听

American entrepreneur Jeff Bezos left a trail of failed ideas in his wake. These included an online auction site, which evolved into zShops. Amid these failures lay the kernels of brilliance that would set the foundation for the e-commerce behemoth Amazon.

Not all concepts will work the first time. Learning from past mistakes and evolving ideas are vital for innovation.

Learn from Your Critics and Detractors

Now, I鈥檓 not suggesting that you should regard your critics and detractors as enemies. I merely quote Tolle to point out that those who speak negatively of your company can be your best teachers. It鈥檚 about having the humility to put aside the (entirely human) tendency to be defensive and honestly answer, ‘Are they right?’

Detach yourself from any emotive narrative and look for ways to prove 鈥� not disprove 鈥� your critics鈥� views. In doing so, you might well pull opportunities to innovate out from the shadows and into the light.

Where do you begin? Social media listening is one way to learn what people are saying about your products or solutions. And finding ways to capture feedback 鈥� both structured and unstructured 鈥� should pay dividends. Make it as easy as possible for customers to tell you what they think. And give those in account management and customer service roles the means to share feedback and anecdotal evidence in the ordinary course of their day.

Know Your Competition

Thriving organizations and entrepreneurs do not function in a vacuum. They are acutely aware of the strengths and weaknesses of their competitors and closely monitor what they are doing.

If your company is not in the top spot, understanding why could help you identify what innovations are necessary to get you there. I鈥檓 not suggesting copying something already in the marketplace and making it better 鈥� that isn鈥檛 innovation. Instead, be inspired by what the competition is doing brilliantly and look for gaps your company could fill.

Spark Alchemy in Your Organization

I hope these enablers of innovation spark alchemy in your organization. But change 鈥� especially change that endures 鈥� requires persistence, perspective, empathy, and no small degree of energy!

My advice is to begin by tackling the 鈥榣ow-hanging fruit.鈥� What small changes can you make today, tomorrow, and next week? An incremental approach is more manageable, and as people begin to see the positive impact, they will be more open to supporting your initiatives. Feel free to and share your thoughts.

Guido Schlief is senior vice president and head of鈥疭ervices鈥痜or鈥疢iddle & Eastern Europe at SAP.

This journey of ups and downs from adapting to optimizing the setup has been published in “. It describes how continuous co-innovation and collaboration with customers has been possible in changing work environments and how other companies and innovators across the globe can learn and benefit from the experience.

The Next WoW: Keeping Up Business in Changing Environments

When the pandemic disrupted the way we collaborated at the beginning of 2020, it wasn鈥檛 an option for the 51风流AppHaus team to stop innovating with customers and partners. Instead, they took the opportunity to grow and learn from the situation. , which combines design thinking and architecture thinking, underlines the importance of collaboration among different stakeholders and end users. To enable efficient virtual meetings, 51风流AppHaus launched the last year. But this was just the beginning.

The 51风流AppHaus Network, with its 21 locations spread across the globe, stands for sustainable co-innovation with customers. With a user-centered approach and as the solid foundation for custom-tailored innovation in the Intelligent Enterprise, the network brings innovation to life. Previously, the process of innovating has been reliant on physical meetings and workshops with all stakeholders attending, but things have changed during the pandemic. The requirements frequently switched from lockdown scenarios to office re-openings, back to social distancing regulations based on the current health situation 鈥� all of which needed spontaneous adaptation.

from on .

In response, a new hybrid setup had to replace on-site meetings, as reflected in “.” The ongoing collaboration adjustments allowed for numerous successful innovation projects with several companies. Among them are: in Italy, in the U.S., in South Korea, in Australia, in Greenland, . Some of these were conducted by 51风流AppHaus and some by 51风流AppHaus Network partners like and .

No doubt, the successful completion of these projects was only possible because the new hybrid collaboration models were thoroughly planned. Applying these principles of collaboration enabled 51风流AppHaus, its sister team 51风流Platform Adoption and Advisory, and other 51风流teams to seamlessly support key 51风流initiatives such as 51风流Discovery Center with its actionable use cases (58 use cases created so far), RISE with SAP, the Intelligent Enterprise, and 51风流Business Technology Platform.

51风流Discovery Center 鈥� a Self-Service for Customers

Recently, 51风流launched a new self-service for customers called . With this low-threshold portal, 51风流can help customers quickly adopt 51风流Business Technology Platform and turn data into real business value. Due to the disruption of many highly relevant business processes during the pandemic, there is an increased need for flexible solutions that can be integrated and scaled easily.

To jump-start the innovation journey, visitors can browse for 鈥渕issions鈥� that represent different innovative business scenarios. Missions include free-of-charge best practices and step-by-step guidance for implementing business use cases, with well-established support provided by the community and mission experts. With their long-term relationships to customers across the globe, the 51风流AppHaus team feeds appropriate innovation scenarios and use cases into this new channel. The knowledge gained, such as technical realization, is turned into a mission and made available for all 51风流customers. Examples of these include the invoice management process of Iren () or the chatbot functionality of ().

Another step towards free accessible knowledge sharing and exchange is the , which allows a free-of-cost version for customers to try out before buying. to try out and test.

RISE with SAP: The Flexibility Needed in Changing Circumstances

Another important 51风流offering is , which offers holistic, on-your-terms, and on-your-timeline transformation support for customers’ journey to the Intelligent Enterprise. This concierge service can provide a tailored path for every customer without any high upfront investments. The offering can remove complexity through a simplified engagement and guided journey into the cloud.

By focusing on 51风流Business Technology Platform projects, 51风流AppHaus, together with the technical experts of the 51风流Platform Adoption & Advisory team, accompany customers鈥� business transformations. Past projects have shown that this journey can be mastered in a hybrid or remote collaboration setup. The can also be found in 51风流Discovery Center.

Learning Never Stops

The approach of continuous knowledge sharing also includes the exchange of experiences with other innovation teams, regionally and globally. The event series 鈥�51风流AppHaus Meets 51风流Labs Munich,鈥� which took place this year, featured 51风流AppHaus colleagues reporting about best practices for storyboarding, leading innovation teams, SAP鈥檚 human-centered approach to innovation, and the Innovation Culture Toolkit. Check out from this event.

Regarding the , the free collection of methods and best practices got a revamp this year and now it鈥檚 even easier to apply and benefit from its resources. With that, a few new assets have been published, like the . The newest kid on the block is the updated material for to support the setup of innovation teams within an organization. It is free, downloadable, and printable to make it possible to run Spectrum workshops on your own.

Straight into 2022

“The Next WoW” whitepaper summarizes the ultimate learning and outcome of all co-innovation efforts the global 51风流AppHaus team has run during the last year. For several months and together with 51风流AppHaus Network and other 51风流colleagues, the AppHaus 2.0 team 鈥� a team focused on the evolution and development of changed working circumstances 鈥� jointly conducted interviews, experiments, and tested new work settings. 鈥淭he Next WoW鈥� whitepaper is the first public share-out representing the starting point for innovative work scenarios in the future. It is supposed to inspire and support other innovators, companies, and organizations on their way to the next way of working. 鈥淭he Next WoW鈥� helps sustain the creative work with customers and partners. In brief, it helps customers be successful.

By the looks of it, the 51风流AppHaus Network teams are well prepared for a new year to come. They look forward to conducting many more interesting and, yes, challenging customer projects. The new work concept is a living one; it evolves and grows with many more co-innovation and collaboration experiences to come.

Svenja Mueller is communications associate at 51风流AppHaus.

With access to more than 90 solutions, over 10,000 organizations 鈥� and 50 million people 鈥� rely on听51风流Solution Extensions听to help advance and realize their full potential as an intelligent enterprise. Sourced from market-leading third parties, these solutions are thoroughly vetted by 51风流to help ensure they meet exacting standards for security, accessibility, functional correctness, performance, and scalability.

Whether you鈥檙e addressing industry- or line-of-business-specific challenges, our solution extensions offer comprehensive services and capabilities that can simplify your intelligent enterprise journey. From retail and utilities to finance and human experience management (HXM), your business鈥� digital transformation can be accelerated with both RISE with 51风流and 51风流Solution Extensions.

Build Your Intelligent Enterprise, Your Way听

By combining RISE with 51风流and 51风流Solution Extensions, you can move from legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) to our modern ERP software 鈥� 51风流S/4HANA Cloud 鈥� on your terms. And in return, your business can accelerate meaningful change without committing to a high up-front investment nor creating additional IT complexity.

Solution extensions are advantageous in two key phases of the journey to 51风流S/4HANA Cloud: technical migration and application lifecycle management. As a result, you can focus on the organizational and people changes needed to enable true business transformation.

Cost-Effective, Lower-Risk Technical Migrations

During the technical migration phase, 51风流Solution Extensions help drive productivity and efficiency while accelerating the implementation and go-live of 51风流S/4HANA Cloud.

Take, for example, the听. This cloud-based application tackles one of the most challenging aspects of digital transformation: data migration. It leverages machine learning to help streamline migrations, drive data integrity, and support the transition into an intelligent enterprise. In addition, you can capture data changes, policies, and other related information, acquire recommendations for next steps, preserve knowledge for future use, and improve decision-making.

Organization-Enabling Application Lifecycle Management

The ability to assess, design, operate, and optimize technology supports an application lifecycle management process that empowers lines of business to evolve as needed. Integrating solution extensions with RISE with 51风流enables to identify high-risk application areas, automate testing, and simulate real-world conditions to test application performance.

For instance, 51风流application testing solutions by Tricentis allow organizations to accelerate solution innovations through cost-effective, simplified, and optimized software-testing processes enabled by artificial intelligence (AI), advanced automation, and risk-based test plans. These activities include听,听 of 51风流and third-party applications,听听of new applications and upgrades, and automated听.

Magnify the Promise of Digital Transformation

51风流brings a lot to the table. But when we combine our technologies with the expertise and ingenuity of our partners, businesses of all industries and sizes can achieve their complete picture of an intelligent enterprise faster and better than ever.

That鈥檚 the beauty of 51风流Solution Extensions. Tightly integrated with 51风流offerings such as RISE with SAP, solution extensions clear the way to a more impactful digital transformation journey 鈥� on your terms.

Find out how you can achieve a holistic business transformation on your terms and timeline in the e-book, 鈥�.鈥�

鈥淚nvisible spheres making funny noises,鈥� Marcus Krug says when asked about the first thing he remembers from the early days of 51风流Innovation Center Potsdam. 鈥淲e were located right underneath the Hasso Plattner Institute鈥檚 D-School and would always hear the HPI students playing funny ice-breaker games to get their creativity going on the lawn outside our windows.鈥� Now the head of 51风流Innovation Center Potsdam, Krug first joined when it was five months old and had just over 20 employees.

51风流Innovation Center Potsdam was founded by the Executive Board of 51风流SE and with the encouragement of Professor Hasso Plattner, chairman of the Supervisory Board of 51风流SE. Today it serves as the nucleus of what has become 51风流Innovation Center Network, which eventually gave rise to the New Ventures and Technologies department with close to 400 innovators within the 51风流Technology and Innovation Board area.

鈥淭he idea was to have a dedicated 51风流unit looking into new technologies and what could be done with them,鈥� Krug says. 鈥淲e didn鈥檛 want to risk missing out on both technical and business opportunities.鈥�

Matthias Uflacker, the first 51风流Innovation Center Potsdam employee at the time, explains why Potsdam was chosen as the first location: 鈥淭he collaboration with the Hasso Plattner Institute helped us identify and try out new things outside of standard 51风流product development. 51风流Innovation Center Potsdam fostered research, providing a platform for the cooperation between 51风流and scientists, with 51风流not only funding but also bringing in relevant questions to solve. And, with its proximity to HPI and the academic hub that is Berlin, it was able to attract a lot of amazing, international talent over the years.鈥�

Technology Vanguard for 51风流

鈥淭he original mission was to transform cutting-edge research into innovation, so obviously from the beginning we’ve had the ambition to explore and use the latest technology in order to find out how it could benefit our customers and SAP,鈥� Krug says.

Working closely with academia was an obvious way to get access to cutting-edge research. The birth of 51风流HANA, for example, was the result of a strong relationship between 51风流and HPI. Experts from both sides were eager to continue working together, with further projects revolving around the application side of 51风流HANA.

鈥淧art of our mission was to explore novel 51风流HANA use cases to see how far we could push what was possible with this new, paradigm-shifting in-memory technology,鈥� Krug says. 鈥淭o do so, we were looking at new applications leveraging data science and machine learning on Big Data sets in a broad range of industries, including healthcare, life sciences, and even gaming. Many of these projects were small and it was a lot of fun to work on them with highly talented colleagues coming from all over the world.鈥�

鈥淗PI student projects had already been an important contribution to the development of 51风流HANA,鈥� Dr. Michael Perscheid, chair representative of Prof. Hasso Plattner at HPI, says. After founding 51风流Innovation Center Potsdam, these types of projects were continued with a strong focus on the application side. 鈥淕ifted students from HPI got to work on a specialized business problem together with 51风流and an industry partner,鈥� he adds. Some of these projects were so successful that they were featured in Plattner鈥檚 SAPPHIRE NOW keynotes.

Strategic Approach to Innovation

51风流Innovation Center Potsdam moved to a building of its own in September 2013, located in an idyllic spot north of Potsdam, near Lake Jungfernsee. Designed for transparency with its open spaces and large glass fronts, the new location in Potsdam is meant to foster communication, exchange of ideas, collaboration, and contemplation of new possibilities. Due to massive hiring, an additional building was opened in May 2016.

In 2013, the leadership of 51风流Innovation Center Potsdam changed to Juergen Mueller, formerly head of Plattner鈥檚 chair at HPI and today member of the Executive Board of 51风流SE and chief technology officer, who was to give 51风流an actual innovation strategy.

鈥�51风流Innovation Center Network, among other things rose from that strategy,鈥� Krug says. 鈥淛uergen brought in the necessary structure and focus for the location to take on increasingly bigger responsibilities within the 51风流family and to get ready to grow the team significantly over the next few years.鈥�

Startup Agility Combined with Corporate Expertise

Inspired by his work with startups and venture capitalists in the Berlin ecosystem, Krug developed the idea of creating an entrepreneurial space within SAP, allowing employees to develop new ventures following the same principles and governance as their non-51风流counterparts. The resulting blueprint for SAP鈥檚 intrapreneurship program made it into Mueller鈥檚 innovation strategy in 2014 and laid the foundation for yet another big step in the evolution of SAP鈥檚 innovation ambitions.

After reaching more than 1,000 employees who submitted more than 400 venture ideas, it was clear that the program struck a chord. Venture capitalists who had been invited to help structure the program by providing outside-in perspective were impressed with the quality of the submissions and the proposal was met with a lot of interest by the executive board. In retrospect, Krug is certain: 鈥淐oming up with this idea, developing it, actually getting the mandate and the freedom to build the program the way we did 鈥� this could only have happened at 51风流Innovation Center Potsdam.鈥�

Working closely with startups also spurred a certain 51风流Innovation Center Potsdam-specific mindset about the development of new ideas. 鈥淭hink big, start small. Fail often, fail early, as a startup would,鈥� Krug sums up. 鈥淭his isn鈥檛 typically possible when you鈥檙e part of a large corporation.鈥�

Using a lean startup approach, design thinking, and first-principles thinking, 51风流Innovation Center Potsdam experts first focus on a business problem when working with 51风流customers. While most big problems have already been addressed one way or another in the market, new technologies often allow for completely rethinking how to approach a problem. Machine learning and blockchain are two prominent examples of technologies that 51风流has been able to adopt to build fundamentally new capabilities after exploring them in 51风流Innovation Center Network.

The setup for 51风流Innovation Center Potsdam鈥檚 innovation projects with customers closely resembles the work of a startup. It starts with a small team and works to demonstrate in an agile way how it will benefit customers. Since 51风流Innovation Center Potsdam typically works in close alignment with SAP鈥檚 lines of business, there is always a realistic chance that a successful solution might eventually become an 51风流standard product.

Outlook into the Future

51风流Innovation Center Potsdam鈥檚 mission, however, still feels fresh and vibrant after 10 years. Now part of the bigger New Ventures and Technologies family, the team continues to tackle big customer problems using the latest technologies, including neurosymbolic artificial intelligence (AI), semantic technologies, and blockchain.

Some of the team鈥檚 biggest bets are on decentralized technologies to build the business network of the future, enabling customers to seamlessly share scope-3 carbon emissions, embedding financial technology into business processes using smart contracts and decentralized finance, as well as new AI-powered simulation and decision-making tools to contextualize business events and augment 51风流S4/HANA Finance users.

鈥淲e don鈥檛 own a fail-proof crystal ball,鈥� Krug says. 鈥淏ut I鈥檓 sure we will hear and see a lot more on the topics of AI-enabled contextualization, human augmentation, smart contracts, tokenization, and tokenomics. Our goal is to drive the change these new capabilities will enable to create a better world and help our customers address their biggest needs.鈥�

As we continue to further develop and explore the needs and opportunities of the new normal, digitalization keeps expanding while the need for businesses to upskill their workforce must be addressed at the same time. Indeed, according to a , 85% of CEOs said that the pandemic significantly accelerated digital transformation plans for their business.

This digital transformation can only become a working reality particularly for businesses operating globally and locally when the implications of operating in a country and across countries are considered and taken into account. Businesses must be able to plan and act holistically wherever they operate. While state-of-the-art enterprise software and solutions are needed to make this happen, adoption significantly supports businesses to generate the full value from these products. It is the key to realizing desired business outcomes.

51风流Enterprise Adoption听helps customers to realize value and business outcomes in three key aspects: resiliency, performance, and sustainability. Those aspects mean something quite specific for successful businesses. Here鈥檚 why adoption matters.

Resiliency

In this context, resiliency means getting the full benefit of 51风流software by adapting to new situations or conditions easily and without disruption. For example, many different countries have enacted different regulations, not only during the COVID-19 pandemic. We are providing those legal changes to our customers, so they can stay focused on their business and compliant with any existing or new regulations. On the other hand, a company opening a subsidiary — for example, in Brazil — would need to feel confident that it could implement its existing software solution while adhering to governmental policies. Operating locally and globally is one aspect, digitalization of business and meeting requirements for e-reporting and e-invoicing the other.

Here, 51风流Document and Reporting Compliance enables companies to comply with local regulations for e-invoicing and e-reporting in a huge number of countries. The solution is fully harmonized across countries and delivers approximately 350 statutory reports and electronic document processing scenarios out of the box and is kept up to date whenever a legal change happens.

This harmonized and standardized approach enables customers to easily for example build up a shared service center and implement new obligations in almost no time. It provides the customer peace of mind doing business in multiple countries, especially when exchanging documents with governments.

Performance

51风流Enterprise Adoption helps customers to increase business innovation and productivity through the rapid adoption and automation of processes for 51风流products and solutions. The most successful companies achieving greater efficiencies are those that balance automation and user performance.

For example, 51风流implemented localization capabilities for tax frameworks for an , leading to a more than 60% efficiency gain in its fiscal department, which runs more than 16,000 tax obligations per year for its 20 million invoice items.

Sustainability

51风流Enterprise Adoption helps customers to optimize the use of resources through transparency on respective regulations as well as through empowered users providing key abilities required for sustained adoption of 51风流solutions.

For example, a needed more than 1,000 users to become productive at the moment of go-live with 51风流S/4HANA. To drive adoption readiness, the company began with the training and upskilling of its workforce four months before go-live, enabling users with embedded contextual help as they completed daily tasks. In addition, the company created e-learning materials, reference guides, and work instructions.

This enablement and upskilling lead to empowerment of the workforce, an increase of motivation, and employee retention.

Resiliency, performance, and sustainability are the key levers of your desired business outcomes and make up what I like to call鈥渢he “whole enchilada” —听 the realization of intelligent, sustainable enterprises as a working reality.

Adoption helps make the digital transformation a success, which is why, as enterprises continue their digital journey, it is essential to aid with adoption and enablement throughout the lifespan of 51风流products, despite whatever future opportunities enterprises may face.

Eva Zauke is senior vice president and global head of 51风流Enterprise Adoption.