Heading to SAP Sapphire in Barcelona this week? Here are some technologies to watch based on last week’s SAP Sapphire Orlando Innovation Keynote, and you can watch the replay for yourself here.
Thomas Saueresig, head of SAP Product Engineering, and CTO Jürgen Müller gave a series of short demos, assisted by two “young talent” employees, Lucy Alexander and Sangeetha Jayakumar.
Sustainability solutions
Thomas and Jürgen highlighted the wide range of SAP sustainability solutions. One of the new innovations is the introduction of green carbon accounting ledgers as part of the cloud ERP offerings RISE with SAP and GROW with SAP. It enables customers to truly measure their carbon footprint by moving from average to actual carbon emissions. “We all know that achieving a low-carbon future requires transparency and visibility throughout the supply chain,” said Thomas.
SAP Business Network helps turn those fragmented supply chains into collaborative sustainable networks, and there was a view that allows companies to see the sustainability of the entire supply chain, with information from partner EcoVadis.
Surfing through the supply chain
Running SAP Business Network Industries on SAP Sapphire is also a key part of the company’s strategy. “We’re working on industry-specific data networks like Catena-X and Manufacturing-X,” Thomas said. “But all these networks are only possible if processes and data are seamlessly integrated.”
Picking up on the theme, Jürgen said that integration allows for entirely new capabilities, such as concurrent planning, which is a closed loop between planning and execution. It is also automated and network aware.
“Our advanced planning and analytics solutions include financial planning, workforce planning and demand planning,” explained Jürgen. This allows SAP customers to see the impact of their decisions across all areas of their business and to plan more holistically.
Powerful integrated, predictive scheduling
SAP data area
To help companies extract and harmonize data from their SAP and non-SAP systems, SAP recently introduced SAP Datasphere.
“With SAP Datasphere, you can create a data model that consumes data from various sources, such as SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP BW/4HANA, and from non-SAP data sources such as Google, BigQuery and so on,” Sangeeta explained during her screening. He added that SAP Datasphere has an excellent graphical modeling feature that helps quickly create a data model with simple drag-and-drop functionality that can then be visualized in the SAP Analytics Cloud dashboard.
A simple SAP Datasphere model that shows how to create a single view across multiple data sources and then use it in SAP Analytics Cloud.
Thomas cited SAP Datasphere as an example of how SAP is opening up more than ever, which is why SAP has seen partnerships announced in this area, including Databricks, DataRobot, Collibra and Confluent, and now Google Cloud. “We really believe in democratizing data,” he said.
business AI examples
Jürgen noted that SAP also recently announced AI partnerships with Aleph Alpha, IBM and Microsoft. “But our key differentiator for you is how we leverage those technologies and embed these AI capabilities to redefine business processes across all SAP solutions,” he said.
“There’s no question that SAP is an AI company, and SAP AI is built into our systems that power your business,” added Thomas. To date, SAP has shipped more than 130 embedded AI use cases.
For example, SAP Concur automatically processed 40 million invoices last year and generated more than $366 million in savings for customers. Now, generative AI is at the fore and will have far-reaching implications for a variety of functions, such as job descriptions, interview questions, product descriptions, and analytics queries. SAP is already working on more than 80 use cases for generative AI.
SAP digital assistant chat interface
SAP differentiates itself in the field of artificial intelligence because its models are built on years of business data and are responsive and reliable, Thomas said.
After demonstrating with Lucy and Sangeetha how AI and natural language processing can be integrated into SAP Analytics, Thomas predicted that AI “will be embedded everywhere and enable completely new capabilities in our products.”
Intuitive natural language queries with new AskData functionality embedded in SAP Analytics Cloud
There was also a look at the future of analytics, with a prototype for “continuous intelligence,” where a system automatically tells you about interesting or different data. You can learn more on the SAP Innovation Center Network
Continuous intelligence where the system automatically tells you what to look for
Jürgen then demonstrated a prototype that uses generative AI to develop extensions to the SAP Business Technology Platform. Currently, he noted, many SAP customers use standardized APIs to build future-proof extensions. “But imagine this,” he told the audience. “What if, instead of coding myself, I could just describe what I want and SAP would take care of it? Wouldn’t that be great? And we’re actually making that happen with generative AI.”
Prototype interface showing automatic creation of BTP extensions using GPT technology
But the power of AI actually goes beyond efficiency, according to Thomas, who suggested that we can also use AI to transform the experience between humans and machines; “It’s a duet, not a duel.”
The team then demonstrated easy interfaces for business people with SAP Start, including the ability to perform authorizations via Apple Watch.
The new SAP Start interface gives business people everything they need in a consistent, intuitive interface
You can even accept permissions and more on your Apple Watch.
And there are new opportunities for collaboration within SAP applications using Microsoft Teams
Collaboration directly within SAP using Microsoft Teams (far right)
Automation of business processes
The keynote also included new opportunities to improve and automate business processes using SAP Signavio solutions integrated with SAP Build and SAP Integration Suite.
The use of tools together helps bring the dream of “automation of automation” closer. “SAP enables enterprise automation because we know you’re under a lot of pressure when it comes to the efficiency of your organizations, so you can continuously identify and improve processes. Jurgen said.
And a huge library of content is already available from SAP and partners, such as the SAP Business Accelerator Hub site at api.sap.com.
And finally there was a quick introduction to the SAP Business Technology Platform and a demo of SAP Build. The executives explained the important role of SAP BTP in RISE with SAP and GROW with SAP, helping customers keep their code clean but still able to extend their business processes and benefit from all the goodies, updates and innovations of SAP: as part of us. standard applications.
