“During the COVID-19 pandemic, we have shown how special the SAP community is. Only together will we get through this crisis,” SAP CEO Christian Klein said during the first keynote kicking off SAP Sapphire Now. This quote really set the tone for the rest of the event. Klein’s core message? “No business does business alone. We win together as a community.”
This is reflected in SAP’s recent announcement to create the world’s largest business network with SAP Business Network, which will bring together Ariba Network, SAP Logistics Business Network and SAP Asset Intelligence Network. Over 5.5 million organizations will supposedly benefit from being members of this connected community. “COVID-19 has shown us how crucial it is to have real-time transparency across your entire supply chain,” Christian Klein emphasized during the keynote on June 2, 2021. “The value comes from the network and the interconnections it facilitates in real time. We believe that business will be revolutionized if businesses become a community.”
SAP also doubled down on its commitment to low-code/no-code solutions. “We have enhanced our low-code/no-code capabilities on the SAP Business Technology Platform to enable citizen developers to create new solutions and support their businesses,” said Juergen Mueller, SAP CTO, during the keynote on June 7, 2021. “We are also launching the SAP Data Marketplace to make data exchange easy.” During a press event, he also teased a new announcement coming sometime soon, “We will continue to invest in the low-code/no-code area, for sure. There will soon be a big announcement regarding low-code/no-code in S/4 Hana, so stay tuned.”
RISE with SAP
According to SAP, RISE with SAP has been a breakout success, with 100 customers already having adopted it in Q1. “There is a very high interest of partners in the offering. You will see many complementary offerings built around RISE with SAP in the near future,” Christian Klein said during a press event, and his board member colleague Julia White, SAP’s Chief Marketing and Solutions Officer, added, “But we’re not stopping there. Because SAP knows best that every industry has its own specific requirements, we are launching RISE with SAP for Industries.”
RISE with SAP for Industries consists of industry packages that will allow customers to extend their RISE offering. It is supposed to come with flexible offerings to address specific business needs: Cloud applications supporting best practices, business process intelligence to analyze and optimize business processes, and services to design and execute individual transformation programs. The packages are already available for five initial industries: Automotive, retail, consumer products, industrial machinery and components (IM&C), and utilities.
Sustainability
SAP has made it clear that sustainability is and will continue to be a focal point in future products. “For almost 50 years now, our solutions have been measuring productivity, efficiency, anything. But one dimension was missing: Sustainability,” Christian Klein explained during a press event. “Companies need to act, but they often don’t know how to start.” SAP’s CFO Luka Mucic also doubled down on this sentiment during one of the keynotes on June 10, 2021, “Sustainability is a great opportunity and must be a core part of our strategy. I’m very glad that SAP has recognized this need. Sustainability is a key driver to enter the next phase of digital transformation, and SAP is in a unique position to help our customers become more sustainable.”
To accomplish its goal of helping customers become more sustainable, SAP announced its Product Footprint Management solution. SAP Product Footprint Management captures the environmental footprint of products across the value chain, from beginning of prechain until end of product life, enabling customers to evaluate and assess their product footprints at scale. It also announced a solution to enable sustainability reports. With the SAP Responsible Design and Production solution, the company enables compliance reporting for sustainability management for global organizations. As with other compliance reports, sustainability reports are enabled using SAP solutions for advanced compliance reporting. These sustainability reports complement SAP’s existing, ready-to-use legal reports across domains such as taxation, audit, and financial statements for over 51 countries.
Christian Klein concluded, “Together with you, we can transform how business is done. We can reinvent how the world runs, making sustainability profitable and profitability sustainable. This will help us make our vision a reality: To help the world run better.”
For more information on announcements made at Sapphire Now 2021, please visit the Sapphire Now Innovation News Guide.
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