The first TrustRadius Best Software List, which comprises goods catering to the changing market and offering end users products and service to satisfy their business needs, included five SAP solutions to the list. Topping both the For Mid-Sized and Overall Best Software Lists, SAP SuccessFactors, SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP HANA Cloud, SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, and SAP Analytics Cloud received badges. The For Enterprise List also recognised SAP SuccessFactors, SAP S/4HANA Cloud, and SAP HANA Cloud.

Here are a handful of the customers' evaluations of the five products listed on the Best Software List.

The SAP Business Technology Platform's SAP Analytics Cloud combines analytics and planning with a special connectivity to SAP applications and easy access to diverse data sources.

The multisource business intelligence service of the SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, offers data modelling, networking, virtualization, and access throughout the company.

With a single database-as-a-service (DBaaS) foundation for modern analytics and applications among all enterprise data, SAP HANA Cloud enables security, privacy, and anonymization with demonstrated enterprise reliability, giving businesses access to trustworthy actionable information from a single solution.

With the help of AI and analytics, SAP S/4HANA Cloud is a fully modular cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution created for every business need. It enables companies to run mission-critical operations in real time from any location, introduce new industry business models, and grow internationally.

Including basic HR and payroll, talent management, HR analytics and workforce planning, and employee experience management, SAP SuccessFactors offers a comprehensive, international suite of HR solutions.

Source: https://news.sap.com/2022/11/sap-earns-trustradius-best-software-list/

The landscape of purchasing digital solutions is changing, with a greater concentration on speed, ease, and transparency in purchases. According to a new SAP internal study, 79% of SAP customers would like to make further purchases through an easy, quick e-commerce process for the cloud solutions they are already using.

In July 2022, SAP developed a self-service indirect digital upgrade solution that enables speedy repurchasing of cloud products to further simplify this procedure. The remedy can be found on the current SAP for Me customer portal on SAP Store for clients and partners, our customer portal designed to streamline customer product portfolios.

The respective self-service platform enables to electronically repurchase current cloud solutions within the conditions and terms of their original purchase, drastically cutting the time to repurchase and streamlining the repurchasing process, and ultimately facilitating faster and easier digital transformation, a global trend that is on the rise. Additionally, it makes it simpler for partners to manage their current SAP cloud software subscriptions, improving their ability to interact with clients and identify their needs as they develop.

Advantages for the Partners

With SAP for Me, SAP partners will profit because it allows them to easily extend client contracts and purchase licences online. While allowing partners to add new users to active client contracts, utilising already existing reductions and terms, partners can manage "carts" for consumers with current products visible at once.

Benefits for the Customers

This new partner functionality replicates the digital upsell motion that was introduced for all client segments in 2021 and expands on SAP for Me's current features.

Customers don't need to go through a protracted procedure or complicated preparation to swiftly and easily purchase more SAP products that their employees are already utilising.

Digital transformation is an effective choice for businesses wishing to continuously grow and update their services since customers can extend and update services in the cloud more quickly than they can with on-premises upgrades.

Additionally, teams can align new licences with previous contracts and receive the same or better agreed pricing for current SAP systems.

The average sales time is cut in half, from six hours to six minutes, giving customers more resources and time to focus on the more complicated deals, more sales conversations with SAP, and other needs as they emerge.

Finally, this new method enables clients to prevent copies of a solution within their company, conserving priceless resources and removing the worry of unintentional purchases.

Source: https://news.sap.com/2022/11/sap-for-me-on-sap-store-cloud-software-repurchases/

Prior to investing in the services of a software platform or partner, business executives often put in a lot of time and effort to make sure they will get the service quality and performance they require. Since such technical certification is thought of as a direct mark of approval, accreditation swiftly communicates that proof of expertise.

Getting new clients is one thing; keeping them is quite another. In both situations, being up to date on the newest certifications—from hot issues to specific skills—reassures clients and motivates them to initiate contact and return visits. According to IDC, certified consultants perform projects with less rework and more client satisfaction than their noncertified counterparts. They also accelerate implementation timeframes by up to 15%.

The capacity to draw in, nurture, and maintain the excellent talent pool that clients demand is another benefit of certification. According to a global survey by Pearson VUE of more than 10,000 IT professionals, certification in this field is more valuable than simple training. Benefits include a culture that encourages self-assurance in one's talents, improved job satisfaction, increased respect among co-workers, more autonomy and independence at work, opportunities for promotion and progress, and higher pay and earnings.

A Framework of Competencies for Competitive Certification

Fast access to the learning materials required to get certified comes as an added bonus for partners working with SAP. In addition, they receive a graphic badge that they can display on their websites and in their marketing materials.

Additionally, by certifying a certain number of their consultants and developers, SAP partners can acquire competences and specialisations using the recently unveiled Competency Framework, allowing them to achieve essential, progressed, or expert competency categories. In order to assist potential clients in making well-informed partner selections based on the necessary solution knowledge, these competences and associated specialties are subsequently made public on SAP Partner Finder.

For partners to develop specialised skill sets and provide highly specialised advising and implementation services, SAP offers a wide range of certifications. A vast array of skills and knowledge levels are covered by more than 100 certifications for a variety of SAP systems and services. In reality, the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) offers eight specialised certifications, including ones for the SAP Integration Suite, SAP Extension Suite, SAP HANA Cloud database, SAP Analytics Cloud solution, and low- and no-code development apps and automation tools.

The SAP Learning website offers free access to learning materials for certification tests for SAP BTP. Additionally, as SAP technology solutions as SAP BTP—continue to advance and add new features, partners can maintain their skill sets through ongoing certification training and examinations that are updated to incorporate each new SAP cloud release.

True Transformation Is Driven by Proven Competence

Technology is developing at a rapid rate. People of all levels of experience must adapt to this reality by expanding their knowledge and considering how these new talents may be used to increase production and efficiency, address current problems, and achieve transformative results.

Source: https://news.sap.com/2022/11/sap-partners-invest-in-certifications/

Organizational executives are aware that they must act to operate more sustainably, yet many focus simply on regulatory compliance and forego taking the necessary measures for a more profound business transformation. Businesses claim that their inability to advance their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) plans is due to insufficient technologies. In order to grow positive impact, they now require greater data transparency and collaboration.

According to a SAP Insights report, approximately 70% of CEOs find it difficult to evaluate ESG data throughout their value chains. Because data is frequently run manually or separately from enterprise planning and management software, this measurement is challenging. Many firms rely on estimated data, which hinders operational decision-making and comprehensive strategy planning. It is hardly surprising that businesses are finding it difficult to incorporate sustainability into their operations given the lack of data transparency.

Businesses need regulatory reporting that is quick, dependable, and compliant, and SAP and its network of partners are aware of this. In order to assist clients in establishing confidence and transparency in their ESG reporting, SAP has created cutting-edge solutions and forged a wide range of collaborations. SAP is a pioneer in integrating integrated sustainability and ESG practises in our own business.

Collaborating to advance sustainable business

Sustainability is a major objective that SAP and the community of partners share. SAP’s vision for a sustainable business includes key aspects of corporate ESG management, such as responsible and inclusive value chain management, carbon accounting, waste management, and design for circular economy operations.

The analytics and data management teams of SAP’s strategic partners, who provide sustainability advice, have the knowledge and experience to link and integrate data sources and indicators. With regard to developing and implementing sustainability efforts, internal data management, and external disclosures to various frameworks and regulations, this provides clients with a holistic view to assist them in moving from strategy to action.

Furthermore, utilising the SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), more than 23,000 SAP partners can create a wide range of rewarding for SAP Cloud for Sustainable Enterprises, tackling particular innovation opportunities such as industry clouds, content collaborations, or pre-configured packages for regulatory and reporting requirements.

Capgemini: 

“Capgemini aspires to assist its clients in saving at least 10 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent by 2030 in addition to lowering its own carbon emissions. With Capgemini's "Green Core with SAP Solutions" service, the SAP S/4HANA core system's sustainability data may be tracked to measure environmental information, social statistics, and other ESG KPIs along the value chain. For supply chain-intensive industries like manufacturing, automotive, consumer goods, and retail, it is the ideal illustration of how our sustainable goal is being realised. The addition of SAP Sustainability Control Tower to analytics and dashboards that offer effective, client-specific sustainability data, suited to specific industry demands, and intended to align results with enterprise-defined sustainability aspirations will be made possible. In order to fulfil our commitment to jointly create a more sustainable future, SAP Sustainability Control Tower.”
- Benjamin Alleau, executive vice president, group offer leader for sustainability at Capgemini, and leader of the company's sustainability business services group.

Source: CSRWire - SAP Partnerships Accelerate Sustainable Business

SAP Digital Manufacturing Cloud

The SAP Digital Manufacturing Cloud is a shop floor manufacturing solution that helps production managers and employees with their daily tasks live on the factory floor. It has a close integration with SAP S/4 HANA or SAP ERP, which is where production orders are scheduled, where inventory is supplied, and where following supply chain operations are started and completed.

The primary system for master data such as material, BOM, or routing that will be migrated to SAP Digital Manufacturing Cloud is SAP S/4HANA or SAP ER

To give global visibility across all plants while coordinating implementation and monitoring production activities down to the individual work centre, SAP Digital Manufacturing Cloud links shop floor equipment to top floor business platforms.

Using a number of open APIs and a selection of extensibility options provided by SAP Digital Manufacturing Cloud, partners and clients can customise the solution to meet their own specific needs.

Extensions

With the Digital Manufacturing Cloud, a variety of expansion options is provided.

Business Process Extensions

Every production is unique to each customer. Some processes require further development, such as the ability to link and interface with external systems in order to post or enrich data. Although those external processes or applications have their own logic, they nevertheless need to obtain the business context from DMC, for example, which resource is now being used? and which material is created. After processing the logic, the extension must be able to send the outcome back to DMC for additional processing.

Business procedures can be improved by:

Calls to third-party web services, calls to SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (SAP MII) transactions (new with DMC 2011), and calls to production processes created using the Design Production Processes app within the SAP Digital Manufacturing Cloud itself are all examples of extensions and applications created by customers and partners using SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) (new with DMC 2011)

UI Extensions

The worker's interaction with the system is particularly important during manufacturing. For instance, he needs large touchscreen buttons since he is wearing gloves, scanner assistance, or he constantly needs to search up specific product-related information from an external system. SAP Digital Manufacturing offers a variety of choices to give our customers freedom and the greatest user experience possible:

1. POD (\Production Operator Dashboard, user interface for the worker) configuration using the POD Designer App. The production engineer can customise the pre-delivered DMC standard plugins, such as the Data Collection plugin, SFC worklist, etc., to the needs of the worker using the POD Designer.

2. For specific requirements, such as to display additional unique data sent from ERP, create own custom plugins. Once they are enrolled in the Manage Service Registry App, those plugins may be configured and integrated into the POD using the POD Designer. They can be created using any UI technology of choice.

3. Creating a complete SAPUI5 custom application using the public APIs from the SAP API Business Hub in the customer's or partner's PaaS tenant.

Machine Learning Extensions

One of the main goals of the new AI/ML scenario for Visual Inspection was to make it easier to integrate a new machine learning model into the business process in a matter of minutes rather than weeks. Without writing a single line of code, Visual Inspection in SAP Digital Manufacturing Cloud enables you to upload a trained machine learning model (also known as Bring Your Own Model) and activate it for use on the shop floor.

But that's not all; SAP Digital Manufacturing Cloud also helps collect data quickly and automatically for machine learning model training.

Source: SAP Digital Manufacturing Cloud – Ready for Extensions | SAP Blogs 

Manchester Airports Group, also known as MAG operating in Manchester, London Stansted and East Midlands airports, has implemented SAP’s Rise service on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

SAP already has MAG as a client. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, 60 million passengers travelled through its three airports in 2019. It had more than 40,000 employees working there at the time.

In a joint statement, SAP and MAG said that when the economy began to recover following the pandemic, the company made the decision to invest in technology as part of a corporate drive internally known as Project Build Back Smarter.

The firm chose to have SAP's S/4 Hana enterprise resource planning (ERP) system provided via the cloud, with AWS serving as the cloud infrastructure provider. This system served as the foundation of the group's technology initiative.

Furthermore, Rise is a service built on S4, an ERP system built on SAP's Hana columnar, in-memory database, which combines managed cloud infrastructure and managed services into a single contract. It was introduce in January 2021.

Asda, the logistics company Unipart, Twinings Ovaltine, the process engineering firm Briggs of Burton, the London-based automotive sector company Inchcape, the gas station and food retailer EG Group, and MAG are among the UK businesses that have joined Rise.

According to reports, the first step in MAG's transition to Rise is a "lift and shift" of its current SAP ECC estate into the cloud. Additionally, the business wants to make the most of its use of the SAP Ariba and SAP SuccessFactors human resources systems.

"We're thrilled to be assisting Manchester Airports Group as it embarks on its road towards full digital transformation," said Michiel Verhoeven, UK & Ireland managing director at SAP. The tourist sector has been severely impacted over the past few years, but as MAG grows more adaptable, automated, and insight-driven, it is positioning itself to thrive when international limitations loosen.

According to the statement, SAP and MAG collaborated to gain a deeper understanding of MAG's HR problems, including personnel reductions brought on by ongoing furlough programmes. In March 2022, MAG went online on Rise, beginning a five-year makeover.

Source: https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252522043/Manchester-Airports-Group-taps-Rise-with-SAP-service-to-speed-recovery 

SAP announced its earnings for the third quarter of 2022 on October 25, citing a strong cloud quarter and increasing momentum across all indicators. Cloud revenue worldwide increased by 38% to €3.29 billion, or 25% at constant currency rates, driven by double-digit growth across the SaaS and PaaS portfolios.

Moreover, in Q3 of 2022, SAP's cloud revenue increased by 27%, reaching 411 million Euros in Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ).When compared to the same period in 2021, total APJ Q3 2022 revenue increased by 5% to 1.1 billion Euros.
Also. new RISE with SAP customers in APJ comprised RICOH CO., LTD., Fonterra, Nikon Corporation, and Dabur India Ltd. Additionally, Wipro and Birlasoft went live with RISE with SAP S/4HANA.

Based on SAP S/4HANA Cloud's complete vision and ability to execute in the cloud ERP market, SAP was named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises in September. This indicates that SAP's cloud strategy continues to demonstrate global momentum. In July, SAP was recognized by Gartner as a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Service-Centric Enterprises.

"Businesses are realizing the value of our flexible, extendable, and innovative set of business tools in the cloud – building on SAP's strength in connecting organizations and improving processes," stated Paul Marriott, president of SAP APJ. From cloud-based business transformation to strengthening supply chain resilience and integrating sustainability into the core of business, our cloud-centric strategy and best-in-suite portfolio are assisting customers across APJ in addressing their most pressing challenges.

Source: https://news.sap.com/sea/2022/10/sap-announces-q3-2022-results-asia-pacific-and-japan-view/

Viva Sales uses artificial intelligence to take notes, automate data entry and handle other repetitive tasks. Another example of how CRM is evolving to improve the sales experience.

CRM editors claim that their tools improve the work of salespeople. The more critical view of some analysts is that CRM is above all a tool for supervising, or even monitoring, salespeople, and a means of centralizing customer data - primarily the address books of salespeople. As a result, CRMs do not necessarily facilitate the daily work of sales forces. But things seem to be changing.

There are several examples of this at Oracle, HubSpot or Salesforce. And today at Microsoft with Viva Sales, which will be released on October 3rd.

What is Viva Sales?

Viva Sales is a CRM automation tool. Its artificial intelligence (AI)-infused features handle tasks such as data entry into the CRM or note-taking during calls. The AI relies on Microsoft's NLP, speech recognition and machine learning to, for example, track actions in Teams or leverage data in emails and calendar related to a business case.

On the market, HubSpot's "Operations Hub" already offers AI tools to auto-populate and cleanse CRM data. Salesforce, meanwhile, acquired Troops.ai earlier this year to build "Slackbots" that could resemble some of Viva Sales' features, but in the Slack environment.

For Dan Gottlieb, a senior director at Gartner, these tools are signs of a long-awaited movement toward improving the sales experience.

"We're clearly seeing the beginning of a significant investment in end-user applications," Dan Gottlieb believes. "This is an example of what I think we're going to see a lot of in the next wave of CRM."

Automate manual, routine, non-value-added tasks

AI that helps salespeople reduce the number of clicks on a screen and switches between applications in their typically complex daily workflows is very good news for them, Dan Gottlieb concludes.

Viva Sales' ability to dip into Outlook calendar data and use AI to determine whether or not it should be imported into the CRM could save sales teams a lot of time anyway.

Any automation that takes away the need to take notes, summarize calls or manually schedule follow-ups will make CRMs more efficient, adds Kate Leggett, VP and analyst at Forrester Research, for her part.

"This allows salespeople to focus more on the negotiation ... instead of taking notes for reports, which are often done at the end of the day, [which can be] a source of errors and oversights," she says.

As for Viva Sales, the tool integrates with Outlook and Teams-which has 13 times more users than Slack (Salesforce). Nevertheless, Salesforce users are far more numerous than Dynamics 365 CRM users. The challenge for Microsoft will therefore be to convince Salesforce customers who also use Office 365 to take out a subscription to Viva Sales

The new demands of customer experience (CX) are reshaping the contours of CRM. Larger, more operational and more data-intensive, CRM is becoming a strategic platform for managing the entire sales relationship, far beyond sales force automation.

Purchasing habits are changing. The crisis (which has accelerated the development of e-commerce), the advent of new communication channels (mobile, social networks), regulatory changes (end of cookies, RGPD, etc.) have major consequences on the commercial strategy of companies, and in turn on CRM.

 In this context, the offers of the major market makers are changing radically.

1 - From CRM to a CX platform

The first evolution can be summarized in one formula: CRM is moving to CX. In other words, CRM is no longer simply a sales force automation (or SFA) tool as it has been historically. It is no longer simply a repository of sales contacts, emails sent, calls made, leads identified, and sales made. It still does this, but CRM now extends to customer interactions with the company, upstream and downstream of the purely commercial exchange, to cover the entire "customer experience" (CX). We now speak of "marketing CRM" (marketing automation) and "CRM for services and support". This evolution towards a "CX platform" also aims to unify data and customer knowledge (the "360° view of the customer") with an integrated analytics and BI layer (dashboard, real-time KPIs, etc.). Unification - or deeper integration between these three CRM families - allows, in addition to analytics, better internal collaboration between company departments.

2 - New sales and communication channels to manage

The crisis has been a gas pedal of e-commerce and distance selling. Including for local shops and in B2B.CRM suites are adapting to this and are increasingly offering bricks to create an online store (such as Demandeware/Commerce Cloud from Salesforce and Magento from Adobe), or integrations with specialists in the field (Shopify, etc.). The democratization of mobile shopping (m-commerce) is forcing brands not to limit their initiatives to websites only and to be able to interface with a mobile application if necessary. Another consequence of mobility is that CRM is enriched with an additional piece of data: location, which can become a sales lever. This double evolution is in line with the support of new marketing and distribution channels favored by the new generations: social networks.The "influencers" on these networks - these digital sandwich men and women - are modern sales representatives whose results must be evaluated by CRM (sales, new brand followers, positive and negative interactions, etc.). The same goes for communications on a company's official accounts, and its ads on Facebook or TikTok. Finally, Instagram or YouTube have become real sales channels, sometimes with flash offers and promotions. This major evolution in usage explains the arrival of so-called "social CRM" functionalities, particularly in B2C.

3 - From mass marketing to ultra-personalization

B2C or B2B, it doesn't matter: customers no longer want to be spammed or called three times a week by a company. Instead, they appreciate "reasonable" marketing and, even more, messages that really correspond to them. Marketing has therefore moved from a statistical analysis of markets as a whole to understanding each customer, with their own individual characteristics. In order not to degrade the CX and the brand image, "personalization" must be transformed into "personification". For the record, the former ranges from sending emails with the recipient's name included in the text, to target pages (in "lead gen" campaigns for example) tailored to prospects. It moves marketing from a mass logic to a "one to many" logic. Personification" takes this logic one step further with an extrapolation of the target's profile (based on his or her browsing habits, the data provided - on age, social class, etc.) to refine the segmentation and achieve a true "1 to 1" relationship between the company and the buyer. As a result, data science applied to CRM, DAMs and other headless CMSs are becoming technological "partners" of CX.

To conclude, CRM is today the center of a convergence of all IT tools useful for CX.

Last year, Microsoft and Meta seemed to be the worst of enemies, poised to compete fiercely for the future of work in the Metaverse.

But yesterday, at its Connect 2022 event, Meta announced that it would be partnering with another mega-tech company - Microsoft. It's a surprise partnership that will see Microsoft and Meta combine forces. For starters, Microsoft will bring its core services - Teams, Office, Windows and even Xbox Cloud Gaming - to Meta's Quest VR headsets.

Virtual reality games have become very popular in recent years, and developers are coming up with titles on a regular basis. Some of these games are classics refreshed with added VR capabilities, like "Resident Evil 4," while others are entirely new games designed for VR, like "Bonelabs." Yesterday, Meta announced a few more additions to the Meta Quest library, including "Iron Man VR" and "Among Us VR," allowing players to live out their dreams of being Tony Stark or sneaking into a virtual spaceship while trying not to be exposed as an imposter.

Xbox and virtual reality fans can rejoice, as Xbox Cloud Gaming is entering the Meta Quest ecosystem. This will allow the Xbox Game Pass Ultimate library to be streamed directly into the headset and provide the best gaming experience ever, aside from being Master Chief in a "Halo" game.

More involved and collaborative virtual workplaces?

With the new Microsoft Teams integration, Meta hopes to make virtual workplaces more involved and collaborative than just Zoom calls and Teams messages. In addition to Teams, Meta has announced compatibility with Microsoft 365. There's nothing more exciting than working on a virtual Excel spreadsheet or watching a virtual PowerPoint presentation. "With Windows 365 coming to Quest, you'll have a new way to securely deliver the entire Windows experience, including all custom apps, content and settings to your VR device with all the power of Windows and Windows apps," Nadella said.

Meta hopes that the integration of Microsoft's suite of productivity and business software will make virtual meetings less distant. At best, virtual collaboration in meetings of the future will be a little less isolating. At worst, every office meeting will now be accompanied by the lifeless, computer-generated stare of your virtual colleagues.

This partnership is still in its infancy, and more details on exactly when these experiences will be available in the coming months.