Busi­ness lead­ers today face a num­ber of press­ing chal­lenges: eco­nom­ic insta­bil­i­ty, on-going sup­ply chain volatil­i­ty, and even the speed at which new tech­nolo­gies advance. To address these top­ics, the mod­ern enter­prise requires sup­ply chains that are trans­par­ent, resilient, seam­less, and sustainable. 

ASUG recent­ly sat down with Sven Deneck­en, SVP & Chief Mar­ket­ing and Solu­tions Offi­cer for SAP Indus­tries Group. Tasked with lead­ing solu­tion man­age­ment and prod­uct mar­ket­ing for all SAP indus­tries, Deneck­en has also assumed respon­si­bil­i­ty for the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence line-of-busi­ness portfolio. 

At SAP Sap­phire in Orlan­do announced SAP Busi­ness Net­work for Indus­try, which com­bines the ben­e­fits of net­worked sup­ply chains with SAP’s indus­try exper­tise to help cus­tomers across mul­ti­ple indus­tries, includ­ing con­sumer prod­ucts, high tech, indus­tri­al man­u­fac­tur­ing, and life sci­ences, with cre­at­ing more resilient sup­ply chains. Deneck­en believes such indus­try-spe­cif­ic prod­ucts are essen­tial to the suc­cess of the mod­ern intel­li­gent enterprise.

In our inter­view, we dis­cussed how SAP helps busi­ness­es meet indus­try-spe­cif­ic require­ments, break down the silos that sti­fle col­lab­o­ra­tion, and lever­age emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies like arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI).

This inter­view has been edit­ed and condensed.

Q. As SAP mod­ern­izes its offer­ings, how are you get­ting more strate­gic with indus­tries and focus­ing on indus­try-spe­cif­ic requirements? 

A. We believe the indus­tries our cus­tomers oper­ate with­in define their core busi­ness. That’s why SAP enhances solu­tions across dif­fer­ent indus­try needs, which allows orga­ni­za­tions to con­fig­ure, adopt, and deliv­er val­ue to their business. 

We take a best-prac­tices approach and deliv­er spe­cif­ic func­tion­al­i­ty tai­lored to indus­tries. Fifty years of expe­ri­ence went into SAP’s indus­try cloud solu­tions, which we launched in June 2020. It’s impor­tant to remem­ber that all of these devel­op­ments are indus­try-spe­cif­ic, built on SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form (BTP). 80% of them were built with the part­ner ecosys­tem. We address indus­try-spe­cif­ic require­ments in a mod­u­lar, cloud-based approach that embraces the part­ner ecosystem. 

Q. In the past, many enter­pris­es have oper­at­ed in silos. How are emerg­ing solu­tions from SAP sup­port­ing efforts to inte­grate and opti­mize resources across depart­ments to accom­plish busi­ness trans­for­ma­tion objectives? 

A. We, as a ven­dor, have an oblig­a­tion to under­stand the busi­ness process end-to-end. I’ll give a very con­crete exam­ple. Either in B2B or B2C, if I want to cre­ate a good cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, it starts from the first touch­point. That’s truer than ever in retail, where you have an omnichan­nel expe­ri­ence. It’s true in any busi­ness where lead­ers ask them­selves, ​“Can we deliv­er with a scarci­ty of goods? Can we deliv­er with sup­ply chain dis­rup­tions? Can we deliv­er at a cer­tain price point?” 

This is why capa­bil­i­ties that pro­vide data about both how a busi­ness is chang­ing and vis­i­bil­i­ty into end-to-end process­es are so crit­i­cal. Busi­ness­es need an indus­try-tai­lored cus­tomer-expe­ri­ence prod­uct, which is tight­ly inte­grat­ed and appeals to spe­cif­ic indus­try needs.

Anoth­er impor­tant trend we’re watch­ing is indus­try con­ver­gence. For exam­ple, if you run a charg­ing sta­tion for elec­tric cars but you also have petrol cars, you’re sup­ply­ing oil, gas, and util­i­ties, but tru­ly you are a retail­er. The expe­ri­ence of how I bring cus­tomers to my busi­ness changes. 

We heard this sen­ti­ment from many of our Amer­i­can cus­tomers at the Nation­al Retail Forum in Jan­u­ary, where we saw right away that retail busi­ness lead­ers must build a full end-to-end process. 

Q. There appears to be a range of options asso­ci­at­ed with SAP mod­ern­iza­tion, from lift­ing and shift­ing cur­rent work­loads into cloud plat­forms to adopt­ing new cloud native ser­vices. How can dif­fer­ent indus­try seg­ments best access and man­age the finan­cial and eco­nom­ic impli­ca­tions of com­plex SAP mod­ern­iza­tion initiatives? 

A. If we look at a cus­tomer who’s deeply engaged in man­u­fac­tur­ing and needs to cre­ate an IoT dig­i­tal point — which sounds like tech­nol­o­gy, but it’s not — you need to build up man­u­fac­tur­ing com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent­ly. And you don’t have the lux­u­ry of build­ing up such plans, pro­duc­tion, and sup­ply chains over 10 years. You need it to be [func­tion­al] now, so you could have a dig­i­tal twin, where the demand and flow and sup­pli­er con­nec­tions to the busi­ness net­work are auto­mat­i­cal­ly built in.

Espe­cial­ly in such envi­ron­ments, automa­tion and data con­nec­tiv­i­ty play big roles. In March 2023, we held a vir­tu­al event, SAP Data Unleashed, that show­cased sig­nif­i­cant data inno­va­tions and col­lab­o­ra­tions to make it eas­i­er for busi­ness­es to access con­text-rich, mis­sion-crit­i­cal data to shape their strate­gies for the future. This is how data ecosys­tems can inter­act and uti­lize process opti­miza­tion and automa­tion, all the way down to AI or gen­er­a­tive AI.

Q. What role do you see emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies — such as AI, ML, and big data ana­lyt­ics — play in help­ing dif­fer­ent indus­try seg­ments secure more val­ue from SAP tech­nol­o­gy investments?

A. In our offer­ings that uti­lize AI, there are dif­fer­ences — robot­ic process automa­tion, machine learn­ing, AI, deep learn­ing, gen­er­a­tive AI — but we have built-in AI capa­bil­i­ties from the get-go. The beau­ty is, from an indus­try per­spec­tive, we can lever­age those direct­ly from SAP BTP. Not only do we have our own tech­nol­o­gy, but we also use part­ner technology.

From an indus­try per­spec­tive, we define how a busi­ness, or part of the busi­ness process, might look. Then we use the AI tech­nolo­gies avail­able in BTP in that indus­try con­text. We’ve been inte­grat­ing AI into our prod­ucts from Day 1, from a busi­ness per­spec­tive. The dif­fer­ence for SAP is we make it built-in, not bolt-on. It’s not an after­thought. It’s not a fan­cy tech­nol­o­gy you need to rethink. When it comes to how we lever­age tech­nol­o­gy, it needs to deliv­er busi­ness val­ue based on the data. We have data, and that data resides with deep indus­try and process exper­tise. It’s impor­tant that peo­ple under­stand — and this was rein­forced at SAP Sap­phire — many new use cas­es will involve gen­er­a­tive AI because the tech­nol­o­gy advances so fast. 

Q. What effect is this hav­ing with­in industries? 

A. In the last few years, indus­tries have been com­plete­ly dis­rupt­ed. Take life sci­ences, for exam­ple. We built SAP Intel­li­gent Clin­i­cal Sup­ply Man­age­ment, and it brought togeth­er play­ers from the indus­try onto one new plat­form, a data ecosys­tem, where con­nec­tions can be hyper-auto­mat­ed even though the play­ers all have very dif­fer­ent sys­tems. That’s why we used SAP stan­dard solu­tions to start with; we built it with indus­try-spe­cif­ic exten­sions and brought AI in from the get-go. It’s designed to help life sci­ences opti­mize the vis­i­bil­i­ty of clin­i­cal tri­als, from man­u­fac­tur­ing all the way to pack­ag­ing, label­ing, and ship­ping. This is how we need to look at tech­nol­o­gy for the indus­try: not just as a fea­ture func­tion set, but as tech­nol­o­gy that makes the data flow and the process flows happen.

Q. You talked about AI as a built-in tech­nol­o­gy ver­sus a bolt-on tech­nol­o­gy. What are the ben­e­fits to your customers? 

A. First of all, it’s already part of the offer­ing. It’s not about a tool or a capa­bil­i­ty that’s added so you then change your busi­ness process­es. We design the busi­ness process­es right away by lever­ag­ing robot­ic process automa­tion or machine learn­ing; that’s enough for cer­tain processes. 

But if you think about AI, and specif­i­cal­ly gen­er­a­tive AI, that’s a new ball­game. Under­stand­ing busi­ness data and data seman­tics makes a dif­fer­ence. It’s not some­thing you can eas­i­ly abstract. Why AI is built into our solu­tion and built into the busi­ness process data, with deep indus­try knowl­edge, is that it makes learn­ing from that tech­nol­o­gy faster. You can’t just extract things from SAP and think gen­er­a­tive AI will do the trick. You need to keep it in con­text, and data seman­tics are often forgotten. 

We have data ecosys­tems that start­ed in the auto­mo­tive indus­try, like Catena‑X or Manufacturing‑X, recent­ly launched at the Hanover Fair in Ger­many. I see that those capa­bil­i­ties are built on a net­work of pro­duc­ers — BMW, GM, and oth­ers — that togeth­er with the sup­pli­ers will be the future. That ​“net­work notion” of con­stituents is how we define it in one indus­try and will see it in oth­er industries. 

Q. Inte­gra­tion is a top area of inter­est for ASUG mem­bers, as uncov­ered in our most recent Pulse of the SAP Cus­tomer research find­ings. How do you approach this top­ic with­in your role, and how would you dis­cuss the impor­tance of inte­gra­tion to dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion and the matu­ri­ty of SAP customers? 

A. Inte­gra­tion is not only SAP to SAP. Inte­gra­tion goes hand-in-hand with open­ness. We’re of course all in on inte­gra­tion inside SAP; every­one knows there have been improve­ments on the user expe­ri­ence side, on the inte­gra­tion side, and on the data ecosys­tem that usu­al­ly lies under­neath. But I think inte­gra­tion is just one side of the coin. The oth­er part is open­ness. That’s why the SAP Inte­gra­tion Suite is part of SAP BTP. We want part­ners to use the same tech­nol­o­gy. We want them to extend the tech­nol­o­gy, on the right terms, with a whitelist­ed API, because then they can build a lot of IP on top. That’s why inte­gra­tion goes with openness.