SAP - April 2024

SAP’s Head of Channel Sales

SAP’S HEAD OF CHANNEL DRIVING S/4HANA INNOVATION

WRITTEN BY:

TOM SWALLOW, SEAN ASHCROFT

PRODUCED BY:

LEWIS VAUGHAN

CHANNEL SALES INNOVATION

Jordan Ruting, Head of Channel Sales for SAP America, outlines S/4HANA updates and key partners leveraging its SaaS model for efficiency and sustainability

Gone are the days when organisations had to use the same solutions and determine the best practises for using software in their business operations. With softwaredriven solutions and the integration of artificial intelligence (AI), users are now able to take a system and customise it to meet their specific needs in alignment with key working principles.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) enables businesses to seamlessly manage their operations to align with the inner functions of their suppliers and customers to make processes more efficient and encourage better collaboration between teams.

One of the veterans in the ERP space, supporting the likes of global powerhouses Bain & Company, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Pitney Bowes, Western Sugar, Topcon, and Ascend Elements, SAP provides an industryleading solution. As explained by the team’s Head of Channel Sales Jordan Ruting, “our cloud ERP delivers the latest industry best practices and continuous innovation, by applying pre-configured processes that are ready to go”.

He refers to SAP’s S/4HANA Public Cloud Edition, which allows its customers to “build their breakthroughs by reshaping business models and refining the work they do on the fly”. This cloud-based ERP is a proprietary software that he is well-acquainted with.

Ruting first leveraged S/4HANA in his role at IBM where he became an expert in the product and was a key component of the business development role for the company. Recognised as an implementation authority, he was sought out by SAP to on-board more clients with the ERP and take it to new levels.

S/4HANA Cloud, Public Edition is one of SAP’s greatest offerings to date and enables the company to further its mission to help the world run better and improve peoples’ lives. By streamlining relationships between businesses, this can allow more collaborative effort to drive great partner engagements, resulting in high-quality, more efficient business backed by Public Cloud.

Hitting the ground running with S/4HANA, Public Edition implementation “Since I joined the organisation, it’s all been about embracing agility at scale,” says Ruting who joined the firm two years ago. He also outlines how the mission remains a critical part of the strategy, and it shows through the achievements it has had in engaging customers with their value chains and embedding sustainability into their processes to facilitate a wider adoption of responsibility among suppliers and customers.

Highlighting some of the key features of S/4HANA, Ruting shows his knowledge of the product as a must-have for running their operations.

“SAP S/4HANA Public Edition is a readyto-run cloud ERP that delivers the latest industry best practices and continuous

JORDAN RUTING

TITLE: HEAD OF CHANNEL SALES, SAP AMERICA

Jordan Ruting currently holds the position of Head of Channel Sales, Public Cloud, and Midmarket Growth at SAP America, leveraging more than a decade of experience in business development and alliances management. In his current capacity, he plays a strategic role in devising and implementing sales strategies, fine-tuning SAP ecosystem channels for optimal effectiveness.

Jordan’s emphasis lies in driving robust demand generation through inventive marketing approaches, aligning with partners, and defining crucial performance metrics. With a wellestablished history of leadership and successful acquisition of new customers, Jordan significantly contributes to the vibrant expansion of SAP America’s presence.

innovation. What that means, though, is customers get proven best practices, fast time-to-value automated and continual updates, in the form of continuous innovation, security, compliance and scalability, all with an open and extensible background,” says Ruting.

“Since I joined the organisation, it’s all been about embracing agility at scale”

JORDAN RUTING HEAD OF CHANNEL SALES, SAP AMERICA

“ S/4HANA enables businesses to gain visibility and also engage with stakeholders to reduce carbon emissions”

JORDAN RUTING HEAD OF CHANNEL SALES, SAP AMERICA

“Fundamentally, it gives our customers the ability to innovate at scale and gives them the flexibility to achieve all their desired goals in their organisation.”

This functionality is coupled with AI and machine learning to enhance the usability and efficiency of the experience, making S/4HANA a reliable daily system. Ruting refers to this as the “backbone” of a business, further highlighting how the ERP becomes a staple for day-to-day activities. Leveraging the cloud puts customers in a position to simplify transparency of data sharing, which also plays into corporate sustainability strategy.

This brings the conversations smoothly onto SAP’s ERP Clean Core strategy, which provides customers the

stability of standardisation with the flexibility to innovate. From this perspective, the key attribute of the ERP is AI integration, which enables greater IT efficiency and reduces risks with a much more concise database. Through this software, SAP provides customers with regular updates with minimal disruption to the business.

“SAP’s clean core strategy can help customers ensure their organisational benefits from the latest release with minimal modifications and cloud compliant extensions and customisations,” says Ruting. “This is the stability and standardisation with the flexibility to innovate. It’s about standardising the process of data underlying ERP operations.”

THE SAP AI PARTNER JOULE

SAP’s AI co-pilot, Joule, marks a revolutionary shift in user experience within SAP S/4HANA. Through the innovative application of generative AI, Joule empowers users by significantly enhancing the efficiency of their everyday tasks. Its capabilities are extensive, encompassing conversational search features, seamless navigation to key applications related to Finance, Procurement, Professional Services, and Sales. Furthermore, Joule caters to specific roles with tailored transactional content, catering to the needs of operational purchasers, cost centre owners, and shipping specialists. By integrating with SAP’s extensive suite of business applications, Joule provides real-time insights into business impact, enabling organisations to make informed decisions. This amalgamation of cutting-edge technology and usercentric design heralds a new era of productivity and ease of use in the realm of enterprise resource planning.

Unleash the Potential of a Cloud-Based ERP

Modern business depends heavily on technology to drive growth, efficiency, and innovation. Having the right technology foundation makes all the difference.

Weighing public vs. private editions, you may be surprised to learn the benefits of going with public cloud ERP.

Learn more

Shifting Customers to Digital with SAP S/4HANA

Brandon Evans and Alex Kashtan from NTT DATA Business Solutions support customers of all sizes to onboard SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition

In a rapidly evolving technology landscape, businesses are moving away from manual processes towards digital solutions, to unlock efficiencies by leveraging data. NTT DATA Business Solutions and SAP are at the forefront of this shift; partners offering comprehensive software solutions to enhance organisational operations worldwide.

Brandon Evans, Vice President of Customer Transformation and Alex Kashtan, Senior Account Executive at NTT DATA Business Solutions, discuss the impactful partnership between NTT DATA Business Solutions and SAP. This collaboration, centred around the SAP S/4HANA solution, aims to transform businesses of all sizes by implementing advanced ERP solutions and more.

Evans emphasises NTT DATA Business Solutions’ 35-year commitment to SAP, stating, “We are the largest service integrator focused exclusively on SAP and its solutions,” underscoring the depth of experience NTT DATA Business Solutions brings to this partnership.

Kashtan highlights the synergy between SAP’s software excellence and NTT DATA Business Solutions’ implementation prowess, saying,

“We partner directly with SAP, focusing on the implementation while SAP delivers on the software. This collaboration ensures that we bring the best value to our clients.”

This approach leverages SAP’s innovative software and NTT DATA Business Solutions’ comprehensive service to deliver tailored solutions that address clients’ unique needs, primarily in ERP.

The collaboration extends to various SAP S/4HANA applications, offering businesses flexibility and innovation. With a futureoriented outlook, both NTT DATA Business Solutions and SAP are investing in data analytics, AI, and machine learning, with Evans pointing to Gen AI as a way to enhance employee experiences and facilitate smarter business decisions. Kashtan also notes a shift towards demonstrating how AI can revolutionise business operations.

This partnership between NTT DATA Business Solutions and SAP blends

SAP’s leading software solutions and NTT DATA Business Solutions’ exceptional implementation expertise, guiding businesses through digital transformation towards innovation, efficiency and growth.

SAP’s Head of Channel Sales details S/4HANA updates for sustainability and operational efficiency

A customer’s business can benefit from more best practices and can customise what they need to differentiate themselves. This allows SAP’s customers to reach new levels of IT efficiency and mitigating their risk to their business all while executing on decision making and actions to improve their data quality. It gives our customers the ability to accelerate their innovation with regular updates and powerful developmental tools all around that clean core basis.

By simplifying and de-risking this for SAP customers, they can focus on the benefits, one of which is better visibility of data across business interactions—i.e. Data shared with other companies in the value chain.

“When we look at the clean core, if we start with the clean base where we’ve allowed our customer to leverage best practices, once they have that fundamental

base to be successful within their industry, they can then look for extensibility through BTP or integration of Joule to then level-up themselves into the new era,” says Ruting.

The benefits of an AI-driven programme also deliver great financial resilience as well. Enabling customers to respond faster to market adaptation, the data and insight gained from running S/4HANA enabled them to pivot much faster in the event of changes. “They can run intelligently, highly automated finance processes to unify transactions, analytics, and planning,” says Ruting. “All these processes cover everything from accounting to cost management and enterprise risk and compliance. So really it gives our customers that ability to be dynamic within their finance aspects, so that they can apply that to the world and as they continue to grow in the industry.”

“ Businesses can benefit from more best practices and can customise what they need to differentiate themselves”

JORDAN RUTING HEAD OF CHANNEL SALES, SAP AMERICA

The true sustainability benefits of AI through SAP S/4HANA

With financial performance comes the need to be sustainable, and the majority of companies that come to SAP for support note sustainability as a crucial focus for their implementation of data. Analysis of their climate performance echoes down the line as customer and supplier relationships now encourage greater transparency of emissions and other corporate impacts.

Ruting explains how S/4HANA enables businesses to firstly gain that visibility, and secondly engage with stakeholders to collaborate to reduce their carbon emissions. This is ever more important as consumer sentiments change and environmental, social and governance (ESG) becomes a key characteristic of the products they buy.

Ruting explains: “Consumers are shifting to more sustainable products and services and investors are demanding it. In order for a company to have a good reputation, they must also embrace sustainability, and that’s a prerequisite to attract both new talent, keeping proud and talented employees at their organisation. And so, it’s a fundamental paradigm for all organisations to embrace.”

This has become the driver of sustainability in the corporate agenda and SAP understands the implications this will have for its clients in the long-term. Understanding this early on, the team was able to incorporate sustainability insights into S/4HANA as a standard. However, this is more just a commercial feat as SAP pins the urgency of sustainability high up on its lists of priorities.

“Through our Climate 21 initiative, we support and enable organisations globally to improve their sustainability insights and performance. And the first solution that we really do to help with that process is our SAP product Sustainability Footprint Management,” Ruting explains.

“Effectively the purpose of our product is to focus on carbon emissions that are being produced in production,

marketing and delivering products. And the aim of the application is to calculate CO2 emissions for a single product.”

Taking data from S/4HANA Cloud and third-party sources, the application is able to provide customers the ability to measure their carbon emissions and has been leveraged for sustainability planning.

“ It gives our customers the ability to innovate at scale and the flexibility to achieve their desired goals”

JORDAN RUTING HEAD OF CHANNEL SALES, SAP AMERICA

All of these functions come together in a single, intelligent, comprehensive platform that is currently supported by numerous industry-leading partners, including NTT Data, which has leveraged the platform for both large enterprise and mid-market companies. The organisations are praised for their cloud-adoption mindset—a critical first step to open a world of insight through the SAP solution.

NTT Data is recognised in the conversation as an early adopter of cloud and a champion of SAP’s S/4HANA Public Cloud Edition. In collaboration with NTT DATA, our organisations have worked closely together to bring S/4HANA to life for our customers, making them a key partner in the delivery and extension of the software.

With this, Ruting looks into the future to share how he believes Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) will be critical for business operations and allow companies to truly embrace the power of AI and machine learning to reach their full potential. This includes operational efficiency and environmental impact, which are the two areas highlighted as cloudsupported initiatives.

“It is all based around the strategic approach of the adoption of a set of principles aligned with on-demand, selfservice, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity and measured services,” Ruting concludes.

“The customers that embrace these tenets are seeing instrumental gains in their business, but it requires a shift from traditional models to embrace the flexibility and scalability offered by cloud services.”

POWERED BY: