In seeking to help its customers automate spending processes, simplify procurement, and enhance compliance, SAP continues to invest in innovation across its spend management and business network portfolio.
Leading product strategy in this area is Manoj Swaminathan, President and Chief Product Officer for Intelligent Spend and Business Network at SAP, who joined the company a year ago after previously holding executive-level positions at Amazon and Microsoft.
At SAP Spend Connect Live, held October 14-16 in Las Vegas, Swaminathan unveiled major announcements for the spend management portfolio. These included the launch of SAP Ariba Intake Management; a promote subscription for the SAP Business Network; analytics capabilities for SAP Fieldglass; and integration of SAP’s generative-AI copilot Joule across the portfolio of spend management and business network solutions.
In addressing attendees, Swaminathan also outlined three core pillars of the SAP product strategy for this portfolio: data, intelligence, and suite. In conversation with ASUG during the conference, he elaborated upon these three areas and provided more context on the major announcements.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
You’re coming up on a year in this role at SAP. What are your main priorities in your current position?
Joining SAP was always an aspiration. Since becoming a part of this organization, and managing spend from the SAP Intelligent Spend and Business Network perspective, I started looking at all aspects of that area, including what the technology architecture for the whole spend management application should be from an SAP standpoint. We’ve been able to shape a lot, and that’s what you see in some of the changes we’ve made recently.
I started focusing on four things from a product perspective. First and foremost is what I call ‘fundamentals.’ This is important in anything we try to do from an application perspective, including our applications’ security, compliance, performance, scale, reliability, and resiliency. Every customer using our applications can use them without issues and have peace of mind that they can depend on SAP. That’s our top-of-mind focus.
From a product perspective, there are three areas we’ve been focusing on. One is how we bring the wealth of what SAP has — which is data — together in a form that can be consumed by a typical user on a day-to-day basis.
Second: infusing intelligence. We talked about experiences having intelligence, whether they are embedded experiences or through conversational copilots. We’ve also showcased the SAP Spend Control Tower. How do you infuse intelligence at varying levels?
The third area is how we bring an integrated experience to a customer from an out-of-the-box standpoint — the whole ‘suite’ notion we’re pursuing. We have the breadth of capabilities from a product perspective, but how do we ensure that’s realized as the best value right out of the box instead of customers spending significant money on it?
These three core pillars of data, intelligence, and suite came from direct customer feedback. Could you elaborate on some conversations that set the stage for your recent announcements?
Customers, no matter where they are in terms of their business, are trying to figure out how they can derive value from the information they have and run their business more resiliently than before. Can they get the right sets of information at the right time — proactively, to an extent — so they can make the correct, informed decisions and make their workforce much more productive?
Every customer I’ve spoken with has a level of heterogeneity in how they operate today, with a multitude of systems. Their biggest challenge has always been: How do I bring all these systems together so I can have a much simpler experience from a user perspective?
What this corresponds to is a wealth of data, but customers do not know how to put that data to use to derive meaningful value. That’s why investments toward total spend resonate with customers.
How do we ensure users are delighted with the experience and productive in ways they couldn’t be otherwise? That spans all these investments we’re making around enhancing, reimagining, or simplifying these experiences. The heterogeneity part is something we’re trying to address through solutions like SAP Ariba Intake Management. To that end, all of our announcements have been driven by market insights and customer feedback.
You spent around a decade at Microsoft before SAP. How did your experience there and at Amazon prepare you for this role?
SAP was looking for an outside-in perspective. At Microsoft, I was going through all those changes when Microsoft was predominantly an on-premises product; I was there to see how they went through the journey of embracing the cloud and providing a SaaS-based ERP offering.
That’s the same journey SAP is going through in doing the SAP S/4HANA growth motion, and it’s not just SAP S/4HANA, but every line of business — how do you transform into a true SaaS application? Taking every customer that used to be on-premises and translating them to embrace a full-fledged Microsoft-managed SaaS solution was one of the key aspects of what I was doing there. Customers were giving up control of their own IT and learning to trust Microsoft. That’s the same behavior we want to infuse into SAP.
Amazon, meanwhile, is the world’s largest retailer in e-commerce. The volumes they process mean that even a second of being unable to take orders leads to a substantial loss of customers and business. That’s ingrained in the culture there, of how one thinks about resilient services.
I can bring that perspective to SAP in terms of how we think about providing large scale SaaS solutions. The breadth of what SAP supports in terms of its customer base plays a key role in what we want to transform.
Could you talk about the challenges you’ve observed in the world in global trade and trade finance that necessitated the need for SAP Business Network and set the stage for this “promote” subscription?
No business is operating within only the four walls of their organization. Every business is operating in this connected world; they need to understand who they are doing business with and the possibility of being able to depend on them to deliver what they are looking for. That’s true whether you’re looking at it from the perspective of a supplier providing a certain set of materials, be it direct or direct, or any trading partner like a carrier providing a delivery of goods.
No matter who you do business with, connectivity and visibility are what every organization strives toward. A business network is fundamental in doing that, and it works both ways. I can speak from my perspective as a buyer or customer. But from the perspective of a trading partner, as a supplier, I work with so many different classes of buyers. If I could have one single experience that allows me to work with the entire breadth of buyers I’m working with, that would enable me to do a better set of operations.
That’s the fundamental premise of how SAP Business Network started. It started as a procurement-focused network for us, but it’s not limited to procurement anymore. We’re looking at the feasibility of applying network capabilities to every aspect of the business. Supply chain is so important in that equation, because every customer wants to make sure they have a resilient supply chain. Their ability to be able to make sure the flow of goods happens, from the first level of tiered trading partner providing the goods—which may not be my direct supplier, but might be my nth-tier supplier—depends on them having visibility, to be sure they won’t have any risk in terms of getting the materials that they need, so that they’re sure they can deliver what they have committed to their customers.
Visibility is what every customer is looking for — understanding the risk and being able to do something about it. If I have only one supplier for a critical material I’m purchasing, and I need an alternate supplier, how do I discover those? How do I make it easier for a supplier to get discovered and a buyer to find them? SAP Business Network helps customers to do this.
With the promote subscription, as a supplier, I can not only provide a sophisticated catalog but also understand what in my profile enables me to get selected by a buyer. I also can get visibility to see how my business compares with others on the network in the same space. What’s the dollar value of the business happening on the network for the types of materials I sell? Once I gain that insight, I can understand how much of that is coming to my business. If my share is inadequate, I can dig deeper to understand why. Getting recommendations like, “You don’t have compliance,” or “You don’t have sustainability”, allows me the opportunity to address them to better position my business.
On the buyer side, I can get equally valuable visibility. Buyers can see detailed information about verified suppliers with all the certificates and a full-fledged catalog readily available that’s enriched with generative AI for catalog, category and product descriptions. That’s what truly powers the network, embedded within the sourcing and RFP processes, and all the collaborations needed from a downstream perspective.
There’s particular value for buyers in having access to more verifiable data around suppliers. Taulia, which provides working capital management solutions, has been integrated with SAP to streamline the procure-to-pay process. Can you speak a little about how that fits into the SAP Business Network picture?
Taulia supports two streams well. One is providing working capital management, which every company is looking for, and this is how Taulia started. But an offshoot of that is payments. When you think about payments, it’s the actual payment instrument — like purchasing cards and virtual cards — that’s predominantly becoming what everybody’s trying to operate now. The notion of how we could infuse payment as a central payment provider across any context of buy-and-sell that we could streamline centrally, that’s what Taulia does. And Taulia is embedded in the network for all invoicing streams.
We’re also embedding Taulia’s virtual card behavior into SAP Ariba procurement solutions as well. As a result, virtual cards can be used as a means of payment. When you define a supplier’s profile, you can say this supplier can take payments through a virtual card. It’s similar to what we’re enabling for expense payments in SAP Concur, with MasterCard and Visa.
No matter who the buying and selling organizations are, their payment relationships can centrally flow through Taulia. It’s the only interface that works with every financial institution, so there is no need to build additional integrations with banks.
One of the main announcements at this conference is SAP Ariba Intake Management. How does that fit into the data, intelligence, and suite approach you’ve laid out?
Customers are looking to mask the level of heterogeneity within the landscape of applications they have today. Every customer has more than one solution in place to support their business: CRM, ERP systems, and sometimes multiple ERP systems, augmented with proprietary solutions.
“SAP Ariba Intake Management is all about providing a simplified experience with process orchestration.”
Every Procurement team wants to empower employees to submit purchase requests for the items they need to do their jobs in the easiest way possible without sacrificing compliance. Often users are frustrated by having to navigate different systems to submit their requests. Companies are looking to provide a simplified experience with robust process orchestration that takes care of all those complexities masked from the actual user. SAP Ariba Intake Management is all about providing a simplified experience with process orchestration. The user gets all the details about where their request is, and administrators can understand how these processes are being operated across the company.
The notion of data and intelligence comes into play differently. We can start a Joule client from anywhere and ask, “I want to buy software.” The system navigates you, instead of you having to know where to go. A company could have hundreds of such processes — purchase requests, onboarding suppliers, and starting contracts. Then, all you have to do is enter the bare minimum information and the solution takes you through the process.
The second level of intelligence comes in with optimizing these processes based on user actions. It allows customers to have a simplified experience, masking the complexity and simplifying the end-to-end process. As chief procurement officers, they can drive better adoption of what they want to accomplish without sacrificing compliance.
Finally, can you add more context to the role that Joule will play within SAP’s spend management and business network portfolio, given the recent announcements?
Traditionally, in procurement applications, whether you’re doing a particular activity in the user interface (UI) or trying to run a report, the information presented to you is limited. But if information that’s not readily available is needed, the user has to submit an IT request, which then goes through a development process.
Now, with all your data harmonized and brought together, and with Joule available across the entire footprint of our procurement applications — be it sourcing, contracting, category management, or operational procurement like requisitions, purchase orders, invoices —you get the information needed in natural language.
You can interact with the system and, with the underlying power of your data, get the answers that you need. With navigation guidance, you can query a particular order, and receive information about it. The true power comes when you take this information, and with a series of simple natural language inputs an RFP is quickly and easily created.
You could say, ‘Here is the set of suppliers that might be applicable.’ You see those suppliers in the conversational experience, then select and send the RFP to them. You can have transactional experiences through natural language instead of going through different experiences across the procurement landscape.
Last but not least is analytics. I could ask any set of analytical queries that can go across the data, understand the relationships, and provide meaningful analyses of that data to help you make the right decisions. We want to provide that experience directly out of the box through Joule. This becomes a fundamental experience available to your entire procurement staff.