In just a few weeks, we’ll gather in Vienna, Austria, for SAP Spend Connect Live 2023. This is an extraordinary opportunity for SAP and its customers to come together to share ideas, experiences, and best practices that are helping businesses succeed.
Personally, I am so excited to attend SAP Spend Connect Live because it’s an opportunity to continue the conversation we started earlier this year at SAP Sapphire about the innovations that will drive the future of procurement. I also love the chance to connect with our customers in open, in-person discussions.
Along with my keynote appearance and a full slate of customer meetings, I’ll join Daniel Holz from Google Cloud to discuss our partnership in one of the largest Google Cloud platform migrations. Attendees will see a demo of how SAP and Google are empowering strategic purchasers in supplier management through generative AI.
Continuing our Conversation
At SAP Sapphire in May, we showed innovations that are transforming the way businesses do procurement. We introduced the buying 360 capability for SAP Ariba Buying, the next evolution of guided buying, which provides an updated user experience and can incorporate intelligence into each step of the purchasing process to help make purchases more sustainable, personalized, and predictable. With this next iteration, users can receive targeted suggestions for goods and services based on their role and the organization’s procurement and sustainability policies. This personalized approach helps make procurement more focused and strategic.
We also introduced SAP Ariba Category Management, which became generally available in August. This solution can empower category managers to use data insights strategically to identify trends, develop and implement strategies, and evaluate success relative to tangible business metrics. Intelligent category management is key to reducing manual processes and focusing energy and resources on strategic initiatives to create and support resilient supply chains.
As we look forward to SAP Spend Connect Live, you can expect new announcements to take procurement to the next level. Of course, you’d have to be living under a very big rock not to notice the hot topic of the day: artificial intelligence (AI). The release of ChatGPT earlier this year has only supercharged this discussion. SAP is a leader in providing AI-powered, end-to-end business processes. And now, with the new generation of AI, we can step into the next horizon for business applications.
With SAP Business AI, transparent, responsible artificial intelligence can help you make every aspect of your business run smoother and more intelligently. We are creating “systems of intelligence” that can enable organizations to preserve their core business processes while also freeing them to adapt, adjust, and uniquely optimize for their needs. With systems of intelligence, processes are self-learning to optimize business outcomes.
At SAP Spend Connect Live, we look forward to demonstrating the ways SAP continues to leverage AI to help procurement teams increase productivity and expand on the strategic value they bring to their organizations. Beyond AI, be ready to hear about all the latest SAP innovations during the keynotes and our full slate of learning sessions.
Procurement Session Highlights
We’ve scheduled more than 35 learning sessions to bring you up-to-date on the very latest in procurement and our procurement solutions. You’ll hear from SAP experts, procurement leaders, and, most importantly, SAP customers who will share their experiences and best practices.
The sessions will cover many areas of interest – including generative AI, sustainable procurement, environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) best practices, and improving supply chain visibility. Of course, we’ll also provide the latest details and demonstrations of new and planned SAP procurement innovations.
Here are some quick links to our procurement sessions:
- Invoice to pay
- Process to order
- Procure to pay
- SAP Ariba Supplier Management
- SAP Ariba Category Management
- SAP strategic sourcing solutions
- Source to contract
To date, we’ve scheduled more than 20 sessions where our customers will share their success stories and best practices. Here are a few of my recommendations:
- Optimize Business Outcomes Through Category-Led Procurement (OMV and Air India)
- Pfizer’s Procurement Journey to the Cloud with SAP
- SAP and Google: Partnering to Shape the Future of Procurement
See the full list of customer success sessions here.
Join Us in Vienna!
SAP Spend Connect Live takes place October 9-11, 2023, at the Messe Wien Congress Center in beautiful Vienna, Austria.
This event is for you. It’s an opportunity to join our community of procurement and supply chain leaders from businesses and industries across the world to share ideas, learn from each other’s success, and discuss best practices.
I look forward to joining you there. Get started by registering here.
Salvatore Lombardo is senior vice president, chief product officer, and head of Engineering for SAP Procurement.
