SAP is integrating its generative AI copilot, Joule, across its spend management solutions SAP Ariba, SAP Business Network, and SAP Fieldglass to help customers automate their spending processes while enhancing productivity and compliance.
SAP Business Network, meanwhile, will launch a new “promote” subscription for suppliers to improve their visibility on the platform, attract new buyers, and grow their businesses.
SAP Fieldglass is gaining an analytics add-on, equipped with AI capabilities. SAP Spend Control Tower, announced last year as a command center for enterprise-wide spend analysis, is now available for all businesses.
Finally, SAP Ariba Intake Management, a new solution built on SAP Business Technology Platform, will automate procurement request creation and improve process orchestration, aligning processes across heterogeneous landscapes and solutions into a central location through which to view status updates and requests.
The announcements were made at SAP Spend Connect Live, the company’s annual spend management conference, held Oct. 14-16 in Las Vegas.
Embedding Joule Across Spend Management and Business Network Solutions
As SAP aims to embed its generative AI copilot across its entire suite of cloud solutions, the company plans to deliver Joule capabilities for SAP Ariba, SAP Business Network, and SAP Fieldglass, starting in the fourth quarter of 2024.
In SAP Ariba solutions for direct and indirect spend, users can lean on generative-AI capabilities to create requests for proposals (RFPs), also leveraging Joule for help with routine inquiries, buying recommendations, and supplier summaries. SAP Ariba will also provide users with “sustainability scorecards” to help them align their spend management with environmental, social, and governance (ESG) objectives.
In SAP Fieldglass solutions for external workforce management, Joule will offer template recommendations to help generate job postings and SOWs with pre-filled information such as start date and number of workers needed, allowing users to speed up time-consuming processes while requesting assistance in natural language and guidance informed by SAP Help portal resources.
Joule will also help to automate logistics and asset management processes within SAP Business Network, helping users via a natural language interface to address and navigate status requests and queries, invoice disputes, work orders, freight orders, and more. The cost of resolving exceptions will be reduced by Joule’s ability to identify errors while analyzing, categorizing, and providing insights into invoice rejections.
Suppliers Benefit from SAP Business Network Enhancements
Beginning in the first quarter of 2025, suppliers on SAP Business Network will benefit from a “promote” subscription option that will help them to differentiate themselves and build better brand visibility to buyers on the platform.
Through the promote subscription, suppliers will receive recommendations to improve discoverability, explore advanced search results, verify their supplier profiles, and make use of network catalog APIs, according to SAP.
With SAP Business Network gaining generative-AI capabilities, suppliers will also be able to speed up the highly manual work of filling out RFPs and related spend paperwork, loading all their available offerings into the network catalog, and optimizing product descriptions and summaries.
Suppliers can gain insights into how they appear in searches, update keywords to reflect trending topics, evaluate their geographical reach, apply sustainability ratings via EcoVadis, and track their overall visibility in the platform. Buyers, meanwhile, can view supplier profiles and filter by various criteria, including how active suppliers are on SAP Business Network, in order to bring up those best matched to their needs.
With nearly $6 trillion in commerce flowing through SAP Business Network annually, this is a core area of investment for SAP; the promote subscription will especially allow smaller suppliers to stand out to potential buyers on the network and identify sales opportunities based on regional search data and other such insights.
Centralizing Spend Data Management via SAP Spend Control Tower
Announced at last year’s SAP Spend Connect Live as a centralized expenditure monitoring platform for the company’s cost-control and accountability offerings, SAP Spend Control Tower equips users with various dashboards to assess spend factors such as compliance, opportunity analysis, and sustainability.
Designed to drive visibility of cost-saving opportunities while enhancing data quality and simplifying the user experience, SAP Spend Control Tower is intended as “a single location for all spend data,” according to Manoj Swaminathan, President and Chief Product Officer, Intelligent Spend and Business Network, SAP.
Through centralizing data from SAP spend management solutions into one data layer, the platform will allow users to see the big picture of their organizational spend while enabling them to access and analyze specific data within SAP Ariba, SAP Fieldglass, or SAP Concur solutions, he said. Through embedded SAP Business AI solutions, users can analyze spend data while simplifying categories; through centralizing and standardizing spend data within one unified structure, users can also improve data harmonization and enrichment.
“Many organizations feel overwhelmed by the volume of data and don’t know what steps to take to use it for effective decision-making,” Swaminathan told attendees during his opening keynote. “SAP is laser-focused on reducing this type of complexity, and SAP Spend Control Tower—a solution that brings end-to-end spend visibility and insights—is a major milestone in that mission.”
Optimizing Procurement Processes via SAP Ariba Intake Management
With SAP Ariba Intake Management, a new solution built on SAP Business Technology Platform, users can streamline the procurement request process by handling purchase requests, contract processing, and services provider onboarding through one central location for procurement inquiries and status updates.
SAP aims to provide users with one pane of glass through which to handle status updates and requests, enhancing employees’ abilities to adhere to company policies and ensure compliance with existing regulations. The solution, to be available in the first quarter of 2025, will feature out-of-the-box integration with other SAP solutions and connectors for third-party integration.
Enhancing External Workforce Analytics for SAP Fieldglass
With its new analytics add-on, enhanced by generative-AI capabilities, SAP Fieldglass will make it easier to implement multi-channel talent strategies and account for various external talent scenarios.
The analytics add-on for SAP Fieldglass solutions lets users:
- Review performance against over 50 external workforce key performance indicators.
- Access global market intelligence including rates, talent supply and demand, and time-to-hire trends.
- Track sustainability initiatives such as spend with diverse suppliers and worker health and safety, while observing cost overruns, worker fatigue, and on- and offboarding compliance.
Thanks to Joshua Greenbaum, of EAC, and Jon Reed, of Diginomica, for providing additional background context that informed this story.