At this year's SAP Sapphire & ASUG Annual Conference, SAP laid out its vision for how enterprises can operate in, adapt to, and thrive despite widespread volatility.
In a session led by Eric van Rossum, Chief Product Officer and CMO of the SAP Business Suite, and Stephan de Barse, President of the SAP Business Suite Organization, SAP specifically focused on illuminating how its suite of business applications—collectively known as SAP Business Suite—can help companies to manage risk, optimize operations, and enhance data-driven decision-making.
“Today, we are undoubtedly living in a time of uncertainty across every industry,” said van Rossum. “Rules are getting rewritten. Business models are changing, and industry lines are blurring.”
Reflecting on how customer and market demands have informed SAP's strategy for SAP Business Suite, van Rossum and de Barse showcased how SAP can bring together applications, data, and AI in ways designed to meet the moment and align with shifts in how today's businesses operate.
“This new reality really is driving three powerful shifts, which [are] prevalent in every single industry," van Rossum said. "This is the need for connected agility, continuous innovation, and a rapid scale."
Strategic Shifts and a Unified Response
Connected agility demands seamless coordination across departments. Innovation, once assessed across years, now takes effect in weeks. And scale, no longer a growth-phase concern, must be engineered into operations from the outset.
“Technology resilience is the competitive edge. Scaling isn’t just about growing fast; it’s about growing smart,” emphasized van Rossum.
To address such demands, SAP has centered its strategy on three foundational elements.
The “SAP Business Suite strategy is about bringing applications, data, and AI together,” he said, stressing that this strategy of unification differentiates SAP from others in the market. “Now, some firms do one or two of those really well, but SAP uniquely integrates all three.”
He also stressed that SAP’s approach to AI isn’t about incremental efficiency. It's about enabling transformation. “At the heart of this transformation are AI and systems of agents,” he explained. “Imagine a finance agent working together with a supply chain engine agent to reroute logistics, which triggers a workforce agent to replan and shifts to deal with the changes within your logistics.”
And yet, he cautioned, AI alone can’t deliver value at scale: “The full potential can only come to life based on a solid foundation. That foundation begins with robust, mission-critical applications at its core—then the data coming from those applications that is unified, trusted, and enriched to offer clear insights to make decisions.”
Architecture in Action
SAP applications span processes such as lead-to-report, hire-to-retire, procure-to-pay, and design-to-operate. These systems are extensible, industry-specific, and designed to work alongside non-SAP applications. They are also built on five decades of industry best practices, reflecting SAP’s long-standing process expertise.
To make real-time orchestration possible, SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) harmonizes fragmented data sources into a shared semantic layer.
Built on that unified data foundation, SAP Business AI introduces a new way of working. It is powered by agents that collaborate across functions and operate dynamically across business lines. These include purpose-built agents for finance, supply chain, analytics, customer experience, and spend management.
SAP is positioning Business AI as the “new UI,” per van Rossum—a prompt-driven, conversational interface designed to make intelligent automation accessible across all levels of the organization, from executives to frontline employees.
All of this is supported by the SAP Business Technology Platform, which enables integration, extensibility, and accelerated AI deployment.
Together, these components form a virtuous cycle, he said. Applications generate mission-critical data. That data, when enriched and integrated with external inputs, creates actionable insights. Insights flow into AI agents and automated workflows, which trigger further application behaviors. The result is a continuous, self-reinforcing loop where action, intelligence, and improvement feed one another in real time.
A Real-Time Demonstration: SAP Business Suite in Action
To bring the strategy to life, de Barse walked through a live demo in which a global high-tech manufacturer must navigate operational complexity using their SAP Business Suite.
A typical week begins as the CFO opens a dashboard of data-driven insights—noting as well as a few red flags served up by that dashboard. The company's cash conversion cycle—measuring in days how long it takes the company to convert its investment in inventory and accounts receivable into cash from sales—has increased from the low 50s to the high 80s. A €30 million liquidity gap has emerged. Excess inventory is building up. Customer complaints have spiked by 45%.
Joule, SAP's digital-AI copilot, gathers data from various sources and analyzes its findings to identify the root cause: shortages of critical components. It recommends engaging the COO to address this further.
On the manufacturing side, the COO sees that capacity is nearing its limit and inventory is misaligned. There is too little of what’s needed and too much of what isn’t. Joule suggests a range of options, including machine optimization, expanding the assembly robotics fleet, or introducing a third shift. The COO moves forward with both robotics and shift expansion and escalates the issue to procurement.
The CPO reviews supplier relationships and confirms over-reliance on single sources for critical components. Joule runs a fragmentation analysis and activates an RFP via the SAP Business Network, utilized by 2.7 million vendors. Procurement policies are updated to curb the overbuying of common components.
Increased production requires new workforce planning. The HR team runs a skill gap analysis and uncovers a deficiency in robotics programming. Joule finds no internal supply and recommends external hiring, estimating a 29-day timeline. For demand forecasting, where hiring would take 56 days, a contingent workforce is proposed as a more immediate option.
Commercial leaders assess the downstream impact. Shortages are resolving, lead times are improving, and the sales pipeline is growing. Still, customer retention and revenue remain under pressure. Joule flags the company’s top-selling SKU and recommends a targeted campaign to drive volume through high-value customer channels.
The scenario comes full circle as the CFO revisits the dashboard. Forecasts now show improvement. The cash conversion cycle drops to 53 days, the liquidity gap narrows to €5 million, and excess inventory stabilizes. Achieving this will require an incremental €5 million in manufacturing and distribution costs.
De Barse concluded by articulating the greater purpose behind the suite’s design: “A lot of the decisions today are very siloed. But what we want to do with the Business Suite is give the critical personas in an organization the insights... and then work in a seamless end-to-end experience to solve those business problems and deliver better business outcomes.”
Connected Processes and Intelligence
In a world where complexity is constant and delays are costly, SAP’s strength lies in helping businesses act as one, turning integrated intelligence into decisive action and disruption into momentum.
While many solutions generate signals, few can carry decisions through to resolution with the same level of embedded process knowledge and contextual orchestration.
SAP Business Suite is an operating model designed for cohesion, resilience, and intelligent scale. By uniting applications, data, and AI into a single architectural core, the suite enables organizations not just to surface insights but to execute them in real time across functions.
Those registered for SAP Sapphire & ASUG Annual Conference can watch the full session replay here.