This year’s SAP Sapphire in-person conference kicked off in Orlando, Florida, simultaneously with the ASUG Annual Conference on May 16 to 17, 2023. The succeeding live events will be held in Barcelona on May 23 to 24, 2023, and in Sao Paulo on June 1 to 2, 2023.
The global SAP community witnessed another groundbreaking live and virtual SAP Sapphire conference this week headlined by SAP experts, cross-industry leaders, and keynote speakers. The in-person flagship event held at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida unveiled sensational innovations and solutions designed to future-proof businesses in the era of AI and green ledger.
During their keynote, the German tech giant’s Executive Board Members Thomas Saueressig, head of SAP Product Engineering, and CTO Juergen Mueller shared insights on how the enterprise software multinational is driving innovation around AI and doubling down on sustainability to future-proof customers’ business operations.
“Fifty years ago SAP built the first ERP system, 30 years ago we made real-time a reality, and 10 years ago we entered the cloud,” Saueressig said. “Today, we are actually innovating together with all of you to redefine enterprise software and future-proof your business entering the era of AI. We’ve been alongside you, your businesses, and your industries with continuous improvement and continuous innovation.”
With focus on future-proofing your business, SAP CEO Christian Klein wrote on LinkedIn:
“Our vision is focused on our customers’ needs – to become an agile and intelligent enterprise, to build resilient supply chains, and to run sustainably. Over the last few years, we’ve helped our customers unfold opportunities and tackle challenges with confidence. That’s why we continue to see robust demand even during these uncertain times. But we never rest. At Sapphire, we’re announcing exciting new innovations across our entire portfolio, including in Generative AI, SAP Business Network, and carbon accounting. And we’re building on the strength of our ecosystem with significant new and expanded partnerships that further strengthen the value of our solutions.”
Future-proofing your business with AI
The SAP Sapphire conference unveiled several initiatives that highlighted the central role of AI along with sustainability and business integration to empower customers as they propel for progress and growth with confidence and agility. With AI at the center of innovation, SAP launched new AI-enabled functionalities in SAP Business AI– from an intuitive procurement process to a more bespoke customer engagement– to drive visibility, productivity, and results.
Available in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, one of the new AI capabilities is intelligent collections, which supports the role of collection specialists in forecasting the risk of late payments and prioritizing customer follow-ups. To improve the sales team’s customer engagement, SAP announced the sales order auto-completion capability to be made available later this year to drive automation in complex sales order documents and streamline order processing.
An intelligent slotting capability in the SAP Extended Warehouse Management and the application of generative AI in the SAP Transportation Management were also announced during the Sapphire event. Among the many enhancements in SAP solutions’ AI capabilities, the ERP company also launched an enhanced total workforce management functionality across SAP SuccessFactors solutions, SAP Fieldglass solutions, and SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
On leveraging enterprise-ready generative AI, SAP announced another collaborative partnership with Microsoft to help customers navigate the most fundamental business challenges. Aside from Microsoft, Mueller shared during his keynote other AI-focused collaborations with Aleph Alpha and IBM. He stressed:
“But our key differentiator for you is how we use those technologies and embed these AI capabilities to reimagine business processes across all SAP solutions.”
“There’s no doubt SAP is an AI company and SAP AI is built into our systems that power your business,” Saueressig commented.
Introducing the Green Ledger Concept
As an exemplar of championing technology innovation while integrating sustainability across business initiatives, SAP strengthens its commitment to supporting intelligent, sustainable enterprises by introducing the green ledger concept during the SAP Sapphire in Orlando. Executive Board Members Julia White, Christian Klein, and Dominik Asam explained the implication of future-proofing your business, including embracing the new green ledger initiative.
The green ledger concept will work on cloud ERP and natively integrates financial and environmental data to enable leaders make more informed and effective decisions. It will be embedded into RISE with SAP and GROW with SAP for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, with new capabilities in every release such as a new way to embed carbon data that would cover significant scope categories into product-level costing.
Aside from the green ledger concept, fundamental to SAP’s approach to transactional carbon accounting is the launch of SAP Sustainability Footprint Management in June 2023 and SAP Sustainability Data Exchange‘s beta version in Q3 2023.
