SAP The Inside Track: The Fresh Perspectives, Fresh Opportunities Issue Q2 2024

InsideTrack THE

The Essential Update for SAP Partners

The View from Here with Nazia Pillay

AI Update with Jesper Schleimann and Peter Matejka

The Midmarket Opportunity with Pablo Signorelli

Spotlight… on Midmarket

Pablo Signorelli, Senior VP

Midmarket EMEA, on why partner packaged intellectual property is the opportunity for partner success in the Midmarket.

The View from Here

Nazia Pillay, CPO MEA South talks to The Inside Track about what makes her region stand out.

Network News

The latest updates and diary dates from across SAP.

The EMEA Partner View

Peter Matejka, AI Lead for EMEA partner organisation, says partners in the region are: “already embracing AI by activating Joule for their customers, by switching on new AI functionality – which is embedded within SAP solutions – and by developing business-ready AI use-cases using the AI Foundation on SAP BTP.”

BLUESTONEX REDUCES PAPERWORK

AppHaus partner Bluestonex has launched Documait, to cut down on time-consuming, error-prone but essential, document processing.

Aimed at people working in finance, supply chain or admin, Documait delivers automatic document extraction, an easy-touse interface, stimulates SAP transactions, offers intelligent exception handling using GenAI powered responses, and featured an integrated approval step. Combining AI, SAP BTP and Bluestonex’s own expertise, Documait’s no-code configuration can be tailored to each customer.

EY STREAMLINES RETURNS MANAGEMENT

Partner EY has built a number of prototypes, including one that has smart dispute management, which is designed to streamline the entire process. By seamlessly integrating Microsoft Outlook with SAP’s Dispute Management application, it reduces manual effort and minimises errors. The prototype employs advanced AI technology to intelligently interpret text communications, further automating the workflow and enhancing efficiency.

IBM REVOLUTIONISING CLINICAL TRIALS

IBM is using SAP Business AI to power its new app called Patient Engagement. It’s designed to address the challenges faced by the life sciences industry during clinical trials, from patient engagement to the management of volunteers. This brand-new solution uses SAP Business AI capabilities including Generative AI Hub, AI Business Services and SAP Build Code to create a clean core application that runs on SAP BTP.

IBM has committed to create 100 Business AI use cases as part of the Value Generation partnership.

Sapphire Barcelona 2024

Three days, eighty-two countries, thousands of companies and hundreds of different sessions between SAP, partners and customers. Plus an array of brand-new announcements on what to expect for the remainder of 2024, and beyond.

Here, The Inside Track brings you all the key headlines.

Business AI

A sweep of new integrations to SAP’s natural language generative AI co-pilot –Joule – was one of the key announcements this year, along with the introduction of new business AI capabilities across the entire business application portfolio.

Joule has so far been added to SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Start, the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition and Private Edition, as well as across products including SAP Customer Data Platform, SAP BTP Cockpit, SAP Build, SAP Build Code and the SAP Integration Suite.

But by the end of 2024, Joule is also due to be available in SAP Ariba, SAP Analytics Cloud and in the various supply chain management solutions. Plus it will be integrated across SAP’s enterprise portfolio supporting ERP and Finance, Human Resources, Industries, IT and Platform, Sourcing and Procurement and Supply Chain.

What’s more, Joule will be able to understand and respond to queries across a growing number of languages – including German, Spanish, French and Portuguese – making it a much more useful tool for global organisations.

Meanwhile, business AI capabilities will be embedded across SAP’s portfolio of business apps such as SAP Sales Cloud

which will offer up predictive forecasting capabilities, predictive product and people recommendations and AI account summaries and lead boosters.

In HR, employees will be able to use a new generative AI writing assistant across the SAP SuccessFactors HCM suite to help them to write faster, more effectively and more consistently when it comes to drafting performance and development goals and feedback reports.

here to read more

SAP Business Technology Platform

New enhancements to SAP BTP will help customers to innovate thanks to improved data quality and insights, streamlined, updated, processes, and the use of AI to tap into SAP’s business process knowledge.

First up, new enhancements to SAP Analytics Cloud extend how and where it can be used, including within Microsoft PowerPoint, following the launch of a new add-in which will be available before the year is out. The add-in can intuitively connect to an SAP Analytics Cloud tenant

Click

and find user-created content, from stories – in which business-users communicate information using a mix of data and visuals (like a heat map of North Africa to illustrate where a company is over and or underperforming) – to ‘widgets’, or visual elements used to help tell stories, such as charts, tables or buttons.

In addition, SAP Analytics Cloud will let customers connect to Structured Query Language (SQL) data sources as live data connections. This gets rid of the need for direct data replication, therefore resulting in much faster access to real-time data, reduced data storage requirements, more reliable consistency in data sets, improved system performance and lower costs.

Cloud ERP

A series of innovations were unveiled at Sapphire for Cloud ERP, each designed to simplify and speed up a customer’s journey to the cloud while, at the same time, helping them to deliver commitments to sustainability and boosting supply chain resilience.

Leading the charge – particularly from a partner perspective – is the announcement that two new solutions will be added to the GROW with SAP programme, which helps companies of any size to successfully adopt cloud ERP thanks to a complete offering of solutions, adoption acceleration services and access to a wide community of peers and learning resources.

Now, from 15th July, subscribers to GROW with SAP premium will enjoy access to SAP Sales Cloud and Concur Expense. The former helps customers to improve their sales processes, their forecast accuracy and increase the number of business wins. Meanwile, the latter is a ‘world-class’ expense management solution.

Click here for more BTP news

Click here for more Cloud ERP news

Industries & Customer Experience

New AI and data integrations for the public sector, healthcare, retail and manufacturing – among others – were introduced including the addition of budget and grant management business context to Joule. This can help to streamline and improve the user-experience, allowing customers within regulated industries and higher educational, research and the public sector, to navigate their financial systems more efficiently and make better, more strategic, decisions.

Joule can also help to accelerate the extensive training typically required within those sectors to roll-out new financial systems. Instead of searching laboriously through documents for help, users can now ask Joule for definitions, summaries or ‘how-to’ guidance, all designed to save time and reduce workload for IT departments.

Also announced at Sapphire Barcelona, was a new Revenue Growth Management solution which allows for streamlined promotion planning and execution and settlement processes. In turn, this results in enhanced financial controls and greater operational efficiencies to drive revenue growth. Through SAP S/4HANA Cloud integration, this new solution establishes a robust planning and execution system to

serve as the ‘operational backbone’ of a successful business.

Click here to read more

Intelligent Spend and Business Networks

Supply chains remain a crticial topic for customers but enhancements announced at Sapphire help to shore up resilience and improve collaboration thanks to expanded partnerships.

For example, the SAP Business Network portfolio of solutions is now more tightly regulated for supply chain, material traceability and freight collaborations. Improved integration between the SAP Business Network Supply Chain Collaboration and SAP Business Network Material Traceability lets suppliers share product genealogy data to deliver end-toend traceability and compliance, all the way from the raw materials through to the finished products.

SPOTLIGHT ON...

Midmarket

There’s a gap to fill in SAP’s midmarket portfolio with best practice software solutions, representing a huge opportunity for EMEA partners, says

Pablo Signorelli and Rich Phillips.

In support of the move towards a Partner Driven SAP in 2025, Midmarket for EMEA is looking to partners to develop industry best-practice solutions in what is seen as a major opportunity for the ecosystem to win brand-new customers, or to sell new solutions to existing customers.

Solutions with a pre-defined bill of materials (BoM), which are targeted at specific industries and geographies – and developed as a Qualified Partner Packaged Solution (QPPS or packaged intellectual property – IP) – that partners can then lead the sale on, will be more tailored to the needs of the customer and, therefore, deliver greater value.

Pablo is quite clear that QPPS remain the major opportunity for partners to ‘very quickly and simply’ scale.

“Partners will reach more customers and more markets with minimal investment required,” he says. “It’s proven already that the sales cycle is twenty five percent shorter when leveraging a QPPS – so you get to sell more and faster, with fewer resources tied up in the sales cycle.”

QPPS are not a new phenomenon. But the difference for partners in 2024 is the help and support available from SAP.

“We’ll work together with partners, handin-hand, to identify the gaps in the market and the customers they can reach,” Pablo explains.

“Then we help to build out targeted demand generation programmes to make sure each packaged solution will be a success. This includes putting it on the SAP Store as well as committing to promote it and make it visible to customers, that partners can then go and sell to. It’s a true partnership.”

He says that partners will lose market share to competitors that offer up simplified solutions to customers.

“This is about partners investing for the future. Ensure there is commercial viability in any future QPPS and we will help you to take it to market.”

But, cautions Rich, it’s time for partners to move towards developing solutions that have commercial viability and which truly meet the needs of customers.

To help, SAP EMEA PES has launched a reinvigorated QPPS Accelerator programme for 2024 for the region. It uses existing technical services – such as QPPS development support from the Partner Solution Success Team or the Next Level programme – to develop packaged IP.

Explains Rich: “The QPPS/IP Accelerator front ends the exiting process with a regularly executed commercial market assessment that allows SAP to validate whether a proposed solution has a viable market. SAP will choose to accelerate only those solutions that are viable.

“The SAP QPPS programme has been a game changer for us in terms of opening new markets and scaling our SAP business. It’s not only a way to demonstrate our industry knowledge, but also a way to open the customer’s door and accelerate the sales cycle with a fixedscope, fixed-price, fixed-delivery time value proposition.

David Bayón Global SAP Go-to-market Director INETUM (Spain)

Solution development uses the existing programme to create the solution which is then followed by a monetisation phase. SAP has developed a set of commercial templates that partners can take advantage of, including sales battlecards, customer information documents, video scripts and social media posts.”

QPPS:

Additionally, on a regular basis, SAP will host ‘blitz days’ to publicise partner solutions to SAP sellers and develop an immediate pipeline for both SAP and partners to work on together. Sellers will lead with packaged solutions ‘where they are developed to address specific, identified need’, he adds.

The View from Here SPECIAL FEATURE

A new feature for The Inside Track, The View from Here turns the focus on a specific Market Unit in each edition, getting beneath the skin of what makes it tick, where the opportunities for partners lie and what the trends are.

This time around, it’s the turn of Nazia Pillay to talk about MEA South – one of the most diverse of all the regions in EMEA.

Inside Track: Hi, Nazia, thanks for joining us. Which territories do you cover in your role as CPO of MEA South?

Nazia Pillay: I cover four distinct territories: Southern Africa, Emerging Africa – which includes Portuguese speaking African nations, East Africa and West Africa –through to the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The fourth, which we call Fast Growth Markets, has key markets which include Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Oman & Qatar. So, MEA South houses multiple languages, cultures, diverse political systems and currencies, and very complex environments. As a result, we need to be focused on where we put our efforts and how we grow our business.

Inside Track: Can you explain a little about what the partner ecosystem is like?

Nazia Pillay: We have a well established partner ecosystem in the UAE and Southern Africa and we’re working with those partners to ensure their cloud readiness, and customer engagement through the adoption and consumption of software. By contrast, FGM and Emerging Africa are maturing markets and we’re focused on recruiting and closely reengaging our FGM and Emerging Africa partner ecosystems.

Inside Track: Across such a varied region, where do the opportunities lie for your partners?

“Customers will be looking to our partners on how to use AI, how it relates to them, and where they can find examples of relatable AI implementations.”

Nazia Pillay: Because the territories, markets and customers are so diverse across MEA South, so are the solutions that we offer our customers through our partner network. What works well in FGM and Emerging Africa may not work in Southern Africa or the UAE, so it wouldn’t be accurate to pin point one sector or opportunity over another. Suffice to say there is a wealth of opportunity across both the public & private sectors.

Another opportunity is in innovation. The case for cloud is now well and truly understood by our partners. Partners know how to position cloud and help customers transition. So it’s time to up the ante around innovation, especially in more mature markets, where partners need to

innovate on top of BTP, and establish AI alignment.

Customers will be looking to our partners on how to use AI, how it relates to them, and where they can find examples of relatable AI implementations. So, our partners have the opportunity to level up, and adopt innovation, including AI, that will pay off in dividends in years to come. This of course brings one of the biggest challenges facing all of us: we need resources that think in a different, more innovative, way to adapt to this paradigm shift.

public cloud readiness and successful delivery is key to establishing customer references in this space. Currently, we have the added advantage that localisation is not available in every country. This allows partners the opportunity to create localised templates of their own and create bespoke packages in each market.

Inside Track: How will SAP MEA South help to support partners?

Nazia Pillay: We will remain close to our partners to support them in helping customers to move to public cloud. And we will achieve this through training, enablement and communication.

“Our partners have the opportunity to level up, and adopt innovation, including AI, that will pay off in dividends in years to come.”

We’re in the process of refining our MEA South enablement plan, including public cloud boot camps and help in creating IP packaging. We’ll be in contact with our partners directly about what’s planned but they can also speak to their Partner Business Managers.

SAP continues to focus on S/4HANA public cloud, which is predominately focused on our Net New Name (NNN) customers.

Our partners continue to play a key role in accessing these NNN customers. As such,

We’ve also had two BTP forums, in South Africa & the UAE, where we’ve focused on both the traditional BTP offer and AI, in terms of what it means, and how to use it. When it comes to demand generation, there will be a real focus in 2024/2025 on how we support our partners to deliver their own demand generation campaigns.

Network News

The

news updates for partners from across the region and SAP.

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