Businesses today are navigating an era of constant change, intense competition, and increasing sustainability demands. To thrive in this dynamic environment, organizations need technology that sets them apart. The SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition 2502 update is a game changer designed to unlock new levels of efficiency, resilience, and growth for enterprises worldwide.
Redefining Business Operations with AI-Driven Productivity
The 2502 update includes advanced AI capabilities, empowering organizations to operate smarter and faster. By automating tasks, providing actionable insights, and enabling better decision-making, the update helps boost productivity.
At the heart of this is Joule, SAP’s cutting-edge AI copilot, which is now generally available and fully integrated into SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. Joule is the AI copilot that can understand your business with these latest innovations:
- Enhanced context and insights: Instead of just identifying problems, Joule can provide detailed context, helping users understand root causes and potential impacts, such as proactive Situation Handling.
- Effortless navigation: Joule helps guide users to the most relevant apps and tools for follow-up actions, working to simplify workflows and ensure nothing falls through the cracks.

The Future of Business, Today
The 2502 update is a strategic investment that combines advanced AI with powerful enterprise management tools. Whether scaling your business, enhancing productivity, or building sustainable operations, its capabilities help support a more agile and resilient future.
- Facilitate easier understanding and interpretation of financial data with insights from cost center reviews* and explanations of fixed-asset depreciation keys.*

- The easy filter* and smart summarization* features in SAP Fiori allow for efficient, natural language filtering of business data and seamless summarization capabilities, enabling users to quickly extract relevant information and jump-start subsequent collaboration.
- AI-generated recommendations for Situation Handling can provide context-specific, actionable solution recommendations tailored to users’ responsibilities.**

Modern and Collaborative User Experience
Enhanced user experiences help revolutionize workflows by providing immediate access to key applications and enabling smart decision-making:
- Notifications for workflow items in Microsoft Teams allow direct actions from the My Inbox application.

- AI-assisted, easy enterprise search enables searches for business objects across the solution.**

- AI-embedded error explanations can enable better understanding of errors in elements-based SAP Fiori apps and initial resolution recommendations.**

Intelligent and Sustainable Finance
Optimize cash flow and unlock liquidity through instant receivables sales and virtual card payments while gaining insights into payment behavior via integration between SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition and Taulia solutions.

SAP Green Ledger offers various methods to collect carbon data, including automatic creation of carbon collections for material movements and importing of corporate financial master data.

The new financial review booklet helps enhance group-level analysis of accounting data, provide real-time reporting, simplify group reporting submissions, and improve root-cause analysis.

The SAP Risk and Assurance Management application can enable effective corporate risk management by offering qualitative risk assessments, enhancing control management through a central risk catalog, increasing transparency, and providing comprehensive, customer-specific reporting.

Expanding SaaS ERP to Be Tailored Your Industry
We are introducing the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition, retail, fashion, and vertical business solution, which is tailored to retail complexities from merchandising to store operations and supply chains. It helps tackle key customer challenges and leverages our flexible public cloud architecture to help unify industry processes, data, and AI and offer seamless integrations.
Powering Service-Centric Companies
The SAP Project and Resource Management solution now offers centralized and AI-assisted staffing for professional services and enterprise projects. This can enable businesses to maximize the use of their talent across all project-related scenarios.
The SAP Fiori app “Project Control – Professional Services Projects” has been enhanced with additional facets. It can provide a unified and flexible entry point for project managers, now also covering work package insights, financial KPIs, and purchasing data.

New service contract management features help simplify daily tasks, reduce maintenance efforts, and deliver data-driven insights on customer behavior, including enhanced change capabilities for the mass update application for service contracts and the ability to customize cancellation reasons.
Price management can be faster and more flexible, enabling companies to offer competitive pricing with flexible definitions of pricing models for solution bundles and the ability to manage price agreements in sales contracts.

Subscription billing analytics can offer actionable analytical insights for customers with subscription-based revenue streams.
Boosting Manufacturing and Product-Centric Companies
The outbound delivery order split can enable ad-hoc adjustments to initial transportation plans by splitting handling units that do not fit on the truck into a new delivery order.

The lean customer returns (BDD) feature in warehouse management allows for the direct receipt of customer returns and inbound deliveries, supporting additional process variants like consignment pickup.
The new SAP Fiori app “Display Product Availability” shows date-specific product availability across multiple locations and material planning areas, allowing users to toggle between plant and storage views and evaluate CO2 footprints.

Establishing a Solid SaaS Foundation
The introduction of identity and access management (IAM) apps for app authorization enables flexible role design and can improve the understanding of restriction types and apps.

Reach a wider customer base, simplify marketing and sales processes, and monitor add-on versions for smoother deployment with a scalable delivery scenario for developing and deploying ABAP Cloud model extensions.
An enhanced user experience of the widely-used Manage Journal Entries app allows business users to access both standard and country-specific fields.
Industry scope has been made available for retail, real estate, and public sector solutions in additional countries across the EMEA, APJ, and LAC regions.
More Information on SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition
For more details on what is being delivered in the 2502 update, see the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition release info.
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition on SAP Community
- Latest SAP S/4HANA Cloud release blog posts and previous release highlights
- YouTube playlist: Product videos on SAP S/4HANA Cloud
- Early Release webinar series
- What’s New
- SAP Help Portal product page
- Read more about Joule in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition
- SAP Business AI
- Discover SAP Business AI features and their benefits, pricing, and resources
- Explore extensibility options by leveraging sample scenarios from SAP in SAP Extensibility Explorer
*Sign up for these features through the limited promotion for AI-assisted features for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition.
**Available for beta testing. Sign up here.
Lawrence Martin is SVP and chief product officer for Public Cloud ERP at SAP.