SAP Sapphire 2024: What’s new for SAP’s Cloud ERP, Supply Chain and Procurement and more

While Business AI and the WalkMe acquisition took centre stage at this year’s SAP Sapphire conference in Orlando, SAP also unveiled new offerings for Cloud ERP and SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). 

RISE with SAP customers will now have a dedicated enterprise architect – including both new and existing customers – aimed to guide them through the RISE with SAP Methodology across the whole lifecycle. 

SAP CEO Christian Klein called this addition the “next evolution of RISE”. “Consider this enterprise architect your new best friend in business,” he said.  

Some examples Klein gave on how the enterprise architect will help include teaming up on process simplification in the early stages and ensuring that SAP BTP is being used as the standard integration platform during the migration process. 

RISE now also comes with an integrated set of tools, including aligned SAP and non-SAP application architecture via LeanIX; business process management through SAP Signavio and Cloud Application Lifecycle Manager (ALM) to oversee the entire lifecycle of applications. 

SAP also introduced RISE with SAP Validated Partner Designation, which verifies an SAP partner’s adherence to RISE with SAP Methodology. This aims to assist customers find partners with the expertise and experience in large, complex or multi-country RISE with SAP implementations. 

GROW with SAP premium customers will now have access to SAP Sales Cloud and Concur Expense for no extra cost starting July 2024. 

SAP Sales Cloud automates parts of the sales process and provides insights from collecting customer information and transactions. Concur Expense provides real time visibility of cash flow and automates invoice, expense and travel processes. 

“So, whether it’s managing your finances, your sales pipeline and your expenses, GROW with SAP has you covered,” SAP Chief Marketing and Solutions Officer Julia White said. 

Business AI in supply chain and procurement 

Ahead of Mastering SAP Connect later this year, SAP has also infused Business AI and the Joule copilot into its supply chain and procurement product offerings. 

SAP Transportation Management will use AI to expedite freight verification and documentation by automatically extracting, posting and checking critical information from delivery notes. 

SAP AI copilot Joule will be integrated with SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain to provide customers with detailed analyses of planning runs. Joule will identify root causes of order delays and provide suggestions for corrective measures. 

SAP Quality Issue Resolution will also leverage AI to address recurring issues faster by bundling similar quality incidents and identifying any remedies. 

Another area getting an AI boost is SAP Asset Performance Management, where visual inspectors can more easily annotate, display and compile images collected from inspections to help with maintenance decision-making. 

SAP Ariba Category Management will turn to AI to help reduce onboarding time for new category managers and accelerate category strategy and planning development. 

AI will enable hiring managers using SAP Fieldglass to generate and maintain job descriptions faster to streamline recruitment of external workers, while project managers can deliver detailed statements of work faster. 

For buyers, the buying 360 capability in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition now allows customers to bundle products and services into a single transaction via generative AI. 

Joule will also be integrated into SAP Ariba Sourcing to give sourcing managers product and supplier recommendations to create requests for proposals. These recommendations will consider cost-effectiveness, carbon footprint impact, local compliance regulations and past transactions. 

SAP’s Business AI partnerships 

SAP highlighted how its solutions have been contributing to the trillion-dollar (US$) club of companies – NVIDIA, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft. 

Microsoft and SAP will bring its two AI copilots together, Co-Pilot for Microsoft 365 and Joule, where customers can use both simultaneously for their work. 

“Microsoft and SAP are committed to providing world-class solutions to help our customers solve their most fundamental business challenges,” Microsoft Executive Vice President of Cloud + AI Scott Guthrie said. 

“The integration of Microsoft Copilot and Joule brings together the power of generative AI to unlock greater employee productivity and will enable enterprises to accelerate customer-centric innovation in a unified experience.” 

NVIDIA and SAP teamed up in a cross-product partnership to embed the former’s AI models, accelerated infrastructure and Omniverse Cloud API into SAP’s enterprise business applications. 

“One of the most amazing breakthroughs in large language models and generative AI is that we’ve managed to learn the representation of almost any language,” NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang said. 

“In our company, the most valuable language is CUDA. At SAP, the most valuable language is ABAP.” 

Apple has leaned on SAP for each product it ships and for several aspects of its business operations. The company also uses SAP BTP for new integrations and app use cases. 

Several organisations within Amazon like Twitch and Zappos rely on SAP for mission-critical workloads, but more recently Amazon’s worldwide broadband access initiative Project Kuiper has chosen RISE with SAP.   

New clean core, master data enhancements on SAP BTP 

SAP BTP has added new generative AI features to its SAP Build low-code and pro-code tools and in ABAP Cloud aimed to maintain a clean core strategy. 

SAP’s Business AI copilot Joule now allows developers to write ABAP code using generative AI to create ABAP business objects within SAP BTP. This feature is available in beta and is planned for general availability in the second half of 2024, with more capabilities set to launch early 2025. 

SAP Build Code will also use Joule to enable customers to build Fiori front ends to their SAP S/4HANA Cloud systems. SAP Build Work Zone also includes guided experiences for developers to create step-by-step line-of-business workflows, automating business processes without custom code. 

SAP Build will also be accessed directly from SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition starting from the second half of 2024, aimed to create an integrated SAP Build experience for developers. 

SAP Master Data Governance, cloud edition now includes a feature to assist customers in organising their legal relationships with customers, vendors and partners into a data hierarchy consistent across all software applications. This data hierarchy will also be replicated across business and analytical applications like SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Ariba Supplier Lifecycle and Performance. 

A new Microsoft partnership sees SAP Analytics Cloud content now able to natively integrate with Microsoft PowerPoint through a new add-in set to launch later in 2024, enabling users to connect to an SAP Analytics Cloud tenant and find user-created content. 

Customers can also connect SQL data sources as live data connections in SAP Analytics Cloud, improving access to real-time data, reducing data storage requirements, providing more reliable data consistency, improving system performance and lowering costs. 

SAP Signavio will also get the Business AI treatment, with Process AI, a collection of generative AI capabilities trained on a large language model comprised of business process knowledge and more than 5,000 SAP best practices. 

This will be launched in two main features – a process recommender feature in H2 2024, and a prompt-based process mining feature later in 2024. 

New sustainability capabilities 

The SAP Cloud ERP portfolio also features a new set of sustainability tracking, monitoring and reporting capabilities. 

SAP Sustainability Control Tower now allows customers to automatically report on their available environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data. SAP Sustainability Footprint Management bolstered its carbon footprint calculation capabilities with automated emission factor mapping recommendations. 

Both solutions also feature a new carbon calculator engine that allows customers to align their emissions reporting with universally accepted carbon accounting practices by making data collection requirements in one data set. 

SAP Green Ledger will also have accounting of greenhouse gas emissions available “later” in 2024. 

SAP also extended its partnership with Everstream Analytics to integrate dedicated supply chain risk scores and information into SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain, aiming to identify risks and plan for a risk-aware supply chain for customers. 

This aims to provide customers with real-time insights about events, risks and opportunities across their end-to-end supply chain processes, as well as anticipate any impact of disruptions while optimising planning strategies to keep organisations running.