Empowerment overall: Promoting procurement transformation with SAP ISBN
Empowerment overall: Promoting procurement transformation with SAP ISBN
ISBN
We welcome senior executives from SAP in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region to dive into the transformative potential of procurement innovation, data, AI and wielding best-of-breed ecosystems at SAP Ariba.
For companies around the world, the procurement and supply chain functions of their business thrum at the core of their operations.
hey are the engines driving growth, profitability and progress towards strategic initiatives such as transformation projects, ESG and much more besides.
With 107,000 employees and 156 countries around the world, SAP’s goal is to be the global leader in enterprise application software, helping companies great and small in all industries to thrive and succeed by redefining their ERP.
Today, we are diving into how SAP is empowering its customers and partners to transform supply chain and procurement capabilities worldwide.
Joining us today are key members of the SAP team supporting this effort: Thomas Kaspersen, Chief Revenue Officer, Intelligent Spend & Business Network (EMEA); Vicky Revis, Head of ISBN CoE and Go to Market (EMEA); and Mo Ahmad, Head of Procurement and Ecosystem GTM & Strategy (EMEA).
We’ll be diving into the key trends for procurement and supply chain
professionals striving to succeed in a dynamic, ever-evolving landscape. We then turn our attention to the opportunities and obstacles they encounter as they embark upon transformation journeys. As we develop our discussion, we explore some of the specific innovations and technologies SAP offers to empower its customers and partners in light of these contextual factors.
Launching our conversation, Thomas Kaspersen paints a picture of the current state of play for procurement professionals today – and emphasises the importance of procurement transformation as an essential priority for the C-suite agenda.
“The procurement function, by default, has changed tremendously in the past twenty years,” begins Thomas. “Back in 2004, we were more concerned about making sure that invoices had the corresponding PO and moving beyond Excel spreadsheets. But if you look at the state of play today, procurement is so much more.
From left to right: Mo Ahmad, Head of Procurement and Ecosystem GTM & Strategy (EMEA), Vicky Revis, Head of ISBN CoE and Go to Market (EMEA) and Thomas Kaspersen, Chief Revenue Officer, Intelligent Spend & Business Network (EMEA)
“I think the Chief Procurement Officer (CPO) function has evolved into a custodian of the brand. If something happens around the business, it is probably correlated back to supplier risk and sourcing activities. So if you look at the CPO community and their function, they have evolved at an unprecedented rate. It’s about looking at the bottom line, the supply landscape, the risks facing the business and how to evolve the company or form a competitive advantage.
“Ultimately, procurement is not a back-office job anymore. In fact, to be quite honest, I think it's probably the heart and core of any organisation because it now encapsulates the entire value chain of a company. But this means procurement professionals have to ask themselves how they control the value chain and also make the right decisions on behalf of the company.”
According to Thomas, SAP Ariba is leaning into this procurement revolution, aligning itself with the rapid pace of change in the industry to empower its customers and partners as it unfolds.
“At the end of the day, at SAP we are the enablers,” explains Thomas. “We know that every company has their own IP, but at SAP, what we are truly proud of is the supply chain and procurement technology that we can give our customers, empowering them to consistently transform and be best in class.
“When it comes to procurement specifically, Gartner says 59% of procurement leaders believe that having up-to-date technology will have a significant impact on procurement performance. So how do we forefront relevant technology for business leaders to take the right decision at the right time for that specific business to be successful?
“At the end of the day, it’s all about people. The more you empower your people within the organisation, the more you foster accountability, which ultimately dictates the success of the business. What we pride ourselves on is keeping that best-of-breed technology at the fingertips of all employees –
with the right guidelines, the right empowerment, the right mandate –for everybody to do their job as they should be doing it, in line with the company’s goals and growth in mind.
“And that’s really what we do at SAP: we are enabling companies to be the best-performing businesses in the world.”
However, as Vicky Revis explains, there are several opportunities and obstacles companies face as they embark upon their supply chain and procurement transformation journey.
“I think with any transformation or digital transformation journey,
whether it's within procurement or the wider supply chain, the opportunities are tremendous,” says Vicky. “With new technology and the rise of AI, the prospects for integrating and creating un-siloed applications alongside unsiloed business processes are huge. In the 2024 PwC Digital Procurement Survey, the expectation is that the digitalisation rate will go from 43% to 69%.
“But there are numerous obstacles that organisations need to navigate in order to get there. These might include guiding people along the transformation journey, anticipating change fatigue, as well as macroeconomic obstacles or other
factors that are outside of their control.
“Thomas likes to use a phrase: ‘We control the controllable.’ At SAP Intelligence Spend and Business Networks (ISBN), we can absolutely help our customers do that. But try doing that as a CPO in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Suez Canal crisis, or escalating inflation: navigating these challenges and hitting the bottom line while doing so is fundamental.
“Technology is table stakes, quite frankly. Organisations need to have automation to drive forward their standard business processes to thrive. But that's not simple in a lot of cases.
“Companies historically took software, then developed and customised that software based on their business practices or needs. At SAP, we now turn this on its head and bring them best-in-class technology. We bring all of the optimisations around what a user journey should look like. Take this in the context of an organisation that has its own business practices, and the source and target applications that you're integrating with, and suddenly you’ve got a conflict of process.
“You've then got a pressing need to change. And one of the things that we can do at SAP, over and above just providing the technology, is bring what it means to adopt technology successfully to our customers, along with the key success tactics and
criteria that enable the successful adoption.”
But as Vicky explains, there can be several detractors hindering successful adoption or transformation – be this geopolitical factors, economics, internal resistance or capacity. Yet, she insists, by starting with the why behind the new approach companies can overcome these obstacles.
“It starts fundamentally with the motivation for change, avoiding tunnel vision on a single solution, specific technology or features and functionality,” says Vicky. “Yes, they’re important. But they must be able to achieve business objectives that have been set out, that’s critical. These business objectives need to be set out before seeking the matching features and functionality which help towards them. So it’s really got to start with the why, and that why has to be present all the way through the journey and beyond.”
According to Vicky, this sustained focus is imperative for companies embarking on a phased approach to SAPempowered projects like procurement transformation, as opposed to the ‘Big Bang’ style methodology for change.
“Can an organisation totally transform with a ‘Big Bang’ approach across the suite of solutions that we provide? If you look at it from a supply chain and procurement landscape, from the upstream to the downstream applications, from the depth of
“At SAP, what we are truly proud of is the supply chain and procurement technology that we can give our customers”
Thomas Kaspersen
categories that we can address, could any organisation take that transformation all at once? I don’t personally think we'd ever be setting up a customer for success if we said that they could do that.
“So for me, it’s about making sure that customers also treat that technology in the right way, with the cloud-first mindset, and conceptualise that SAP technology is the enabler. This really has to be accompanied by a very well-thought-out change programme that is enabled by the right stakeholders. This body of stakeholders goes beyond just the procurement function, it's about bringing in the right people: IT, HR, finance, risk, compliance and more.
“Procurement applications are so fundamental to the operations of the entire business. The elevation of the CPO function, from the historical place of being the creators of purchase orders and making sure invoices were paid on time, into a truly strategic role as part of the C suite today, is only enabled by the table stakes of technology, taken alongside a very clear roadmap of, then, how you’re going to enhance that technology into added value for the business.
“Procurement transformation has to be a journey mapped to business outcomes.”
So how do the comprehensive offerings across the SAP ISBN software suite empower companies
“Procurement transformation has to be a journey mapped to business outcomes”
Vicky Revis
to address these dynamics as they embrace their journey of procurement transformation?
“The ISBN suite is a consolidation of solutions that we have under our portfolio, and SAP, for me, is so well positioned to be able to address organisations’ challenges across industries and geographies as the marketplace leaders,” says Vicky. “So the suite really does look holistically at procurement and supply chain outcomes, across categories and across the point of the process – whether it's strategic sourcing, operational procurement and downstream activities, looking at your supply chain risk that you're exposed to, or a real elevation of the data.
“Fundamentally, it’s data that will drive AI which in turn will then drive the ability to make decisions when you feed in certain scenarios. The criticality of being able to pull together the suite, enriched by our ecosystem application, removes the prospect of having to look at siloed solutions.
“Take Asset Management as an example. Managing assets goes beyond internal processes – the network and your supply chain are critical here. With SAP’s ability to bring together Asset Management, the supplier network and services management, SAP can transform and automate the maintenance schedules for heavy machinery and assets core to operations. These solutions will bring change to processes and people day to day but can be truly
“At SAP Ariba, we are doing a tremendous amount of innovation ourselves on multiple fronts”
Mo Ahmad
transformational to business outcomes and efficiency.
“It is also fundamentally important that we nurture a long-term vision and partnership with our customers. We don’t want to be a supplier to our customers. We are a partner in their business outcomes. So it’s crucial that we understand their goals, drivers and KPIs – so that we can match the solution roadmap with them, building the outcome roadmap across our ISBN software suite.
“We can deliver outcomes. And the outcome is not just a go-live. A go-live is a point on a timeline. We want to support and empower our customers beyond this stage of the journey.
“Our dream is that our customers can stand there with us, shoulder to shoulder, and say, ‘We were resilient in the face of whatever came along next. We were able to drive this much efficiency and automation as a result of the SAP technology that underpinned our transformation and became our enabler.’”
Here, Thomas clarifies how embracing this role as a closely connected enabler for its customers comes with a deeply entrenched sense of responsibility to them. As Thomas explains, this means SAP enshrines innovation in its operations – especially in the procurement industry since the implications are so expansive.
“We have to be very cognisant that we are the market leader by far with over
27% of the market based upon the Nov 2024 IDC report, and this means that we have huge accountability and responsibility for our customers when it comes to innovation,” insists Thomas. “We have 5,000 developers sitting in the background to make sure that innovation is consistently happening. To be quite honest, it’s not about selling more software. Rather, we are focused on ensuring that the software that we provide is adopted efficiently, driving effective outcomes, but that we are also consistently innovating to support our customers since the business landscape is changing so rapidly.
“Within the procurement function especially, we always have to be on the forefront of innovation. Whether that’s on the direct or indirect side of the business, the contingent workforce, or getting buyers and suppliers to work better together. We have roughly 400 billion transactions on our network annually. Now when you think about the social and economic impacts these entail, it starkly highlights the responsibility that we have as a vendor, but more importantly, the impact our customers have on their own ecosystem.
“The potential for us and our customers to leverage technology, drive sustainability and risk, direct compliance, steer legislation – all while remaining competitive – is astronomical. And this is why when people ask me why I like to work with procurement transformation, for me it’s about leaning into these ever-evolving circumstances, finding the winning
“One of the reasons that we’ve partnered with Scoutbee is the way that they leverage data on suppliers”
combination of tech, leadership, strategy, customer feedback and innovation to empower businesses to thrive – but also have tremendous positive impacts on the global communities they serve.”
Mo Ahmad weighs in to elaborate on how SAP Ariba has been embracing data- and AI-led transformation in the procurement sector, alongside innovation of the ISBN stack, to catalyse benefits for clients and partners alike.
“Everybody’s talking about artificial intelligence, but AI means very little without data as the backbone,” says Mo. “SAP is not only focusing on it because it’s a trend that everybody wants to talk about – what we’ve been really focusing on is how we can deliver robust AI, through what we're terming SAP Business AI, for our customers.
“Data is at the forefront of everything. So SAP Ariba has spent the best part of the last couple of years pulling together a procurement data lake, which harnesses 30 years of information.
“Within the ISBN solutions network, we oversee $6.2tn+ of commerce annually, connected to over 729m interactions with our supplier community. That is a massive data store. But it also represents a tremendous opportunity
in the context of AI, because of the sheer volume of insights available to us. Another exciting layer is we can then also augment this information with additional data sources from our ecosystem, to leverage a data pool that is just incredible in scope.
“With the advent of AI, taken in light of the corresponding need for the procurement sector to transform and evolve, there is enormous potential to tap into: from developing projects to provide better visibility into what’s happening within the business to getting in front of risk or promoting ESG strategy.
“But without data, you cannot embark on any of those initiatives and that is what we strive to help our customers with at SAP Ariba.”
Mo reiterates that SAP Ariba’s partner ecosystem is a key part of its efforts to empower customers’ capacity with data- and AI-led procurement transformation. Mo highlights SAP’s partnerships with Scoutbee and Fairmarkit as demonstrative examples here.
“One of the reasons that we’ve partnered with Scoutbee is the way that they leverage data on suppliers,” shares Mo. “For some time, their
Elevate the strategic role of procurement with faster, smarter supplier discovery
Ben Craske: We’ve been hearing a lot about Scoutbee Discovery. Can you tell us more about the solution and how it works?
Paul Hopton: Scoutbee Discovery is an AI-powered SaaS tool designed to be the go-to scouting solution for procurement teams. It provides a comprehensive view of potential suppliers using AI-driven searches, transforming weeks of manual effort into just a few days or even hours.
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Ben: What are the main use cases where Scoutbee Discovery is proving most valuable?
Paul: Procurement teams use Scoutbee Discovery to address key challenges like risk mitigation, driving product innovation and achieving sustainability goals.
Ben: Can you share an example of a major challenge you helped a customer overcome?
Paul: Absolutely. Earlier this year, Siemens Energy had two key challenges: sourcing suppliers for photovoltaic installations on
industrial rooftops and finding hydrogen dryer suppliers in the US – a less familiar market for them.
With Scoutbee Discovery, they quickly identified 80 potential suppliers for photovoltaics, narrowing it down to three highquality candidates. For hydrogen dryers, while no supplier fully met their experience needs, the search provided valuable market insights.
The biggest win for Siemens Energy’s procurement team was that this new way of working with Scoutbee made them a strategic partner for R&D. They also started integrating supplier expertise into R&D processes early on and the role of procurement within the entire organisation was elevated.
Ben: And finally, you’re an SAPendorsed app?
Paul: Yes, Scoutbee Discovery integrates seamlessly with SAP Ariba Sourcing. It extends supplier searches beyond the SAP Business Network, with no IT integration required.
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Paul Hopton CTO, Scoutbee
Ben Craske Senior Editor, iThink Media
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“With somebody like Fairmarkit, they also use data incredibly well. Farimarkit provides excellent service related to strategic versus unmanaged spend”
whole piece has been around helping customers, through data, find suppliers for the creation of a product or the management of a service. They were a natural partner for us to use as an extension of our strategic sourcing capability.
“It takes a long time to source new partners or suppliers. Organisations might have specific compliance, sustainability, quality or certification needs.
“If you’re trying to do that manually, it’s very difficult. But Scoutbee wields data, through the lens of AI, to do the hard work for their customers. And more than this, it’s done in an integrated way – with SAP Ariba.”
“With somebody like Fairmarkit, they also use data incredibly well. Farimarkit provides excellent service related to strategic versus unmanaged spend. For businesses that might not have the capacity to dial in on the latter, Fairmarkit helps them to avoid leaking money – not through bad intentions, but because it can be challenging to wrap your arms around it as a company by yourself.
“Fairmarkit can help their customers pick up that unmanaged spend
and manage it for them through AI, renegotiating some of those expenditures and helping to harmonise that spend to reduce the leakage –impacting their customers’ bottom line in the process. That data then comes back into SAP to be analysed for continuous improvement.”
Procurement is an incredibly complex process, but at SAP Ariba the goal is to take the ideas of interconnection, visibility and collaboration and wield them effectively for the ultimate benefit of its customers and partners. Within this, Mo explains, the concept of the Procurement Triple Crown is a guiding principle.
“A lot of what SAP Ariba has been doing through the creation of our nextgen solutions is taking the latest and greatest procurement technology, and catalysing drastic improvements in user experience,” says Mo. “But to loop back to the conversation of data and AI, the truly powerful innovation lies in creating solutions that balance the technology, UX, data and AI – holistically, as a connected process.
“So for instance, we’ve just launched a powerful spend analysis tool called Spend Control Tower. It integrates various SAP and non-SAP solutions, extracts the data, and then provides users with insights through the use of AI-enhanced insights and benchmarking where we’ve been able to use the procurement data lake I referenced earlier in a very powerful fashion. This is the number one priority for CPOs for 2025 according to Gartner, SpendMatters and CPO reports from the Big Four.
“But the Procurement Triple Crown concept adds a new dynamic by asking how we can take those insights and provide something more: actionable intelligence, which can then be taken into category management in an integrated form that flows from one process to another, avoiding silos, and ultimately offering robust strategy planning potential across the board.
“So that's the Procurement Triple Crown principle: it’s insight, plan, action; or put another way, Spend Control Tower, category management and then sourcing execution.”
“Our partners like Archlet enable that capability through an integrated approach, while also deploying Gen AI”
“SAP Ariba doesn’t want you to leave any spend untouched,” notes Mo. “Allowing you to create your strategic plan and/or actions you’ve executed in category management, and you can then kick off as an activity directly within guided sourcing.
“But the best thing about that is, depending on the type of activity that you want to initiate, you can then use guided sourcing as a hub. So there are lots of things within guided sourcing that you can do: RFx, auctions, reverse auctions, to name but a few. However, there are other types of sourcing that our broader SAP ecosystem helps with alongside this, in an integrated fashion, factoring in other software service providers you might work with too.
“For instance, a customer might work with one of our partners like Archlet, where that customer could have more of a need to do sourcing optimisation, which basically means you have a more detailed set of criteria that you want to use in order to award the business, and you require the flexibility to change, add, and manipulate those rules based upon your business needs, to then run that RFx scenario through the optimisation process, so that what you get out of it is much more catered for what your business is asking for, within that particular category.
“Our partners like Archlet enable that capability through an integrated approach, while also deploying Gen AI so you can go into their tool through guided sourcing, using Gen AI to optimise what you're trying to do, build the rule sets, do all of that there, run that scenario – but then it comes back into SAP Ariba.
“The reason that this interconnectedness is so important, and one of the foundational merits of the Procurement Triple Crown concept, is the data goes back in, centralising it and providing continuous insights.”
With the myriad of software solutions available to customers, Mo admits it can be a daunting prospect for customers to manage the various solutions they have within their business that serve their needs. Functions like facilities, IT software, legal and procurement can often have different tools for different processes and this can be daunting for users trying to work out which system to use and when.
“If you look at the most recent Gartner or Spend Matters reports, there is a lot of talk around intake management and process orchestration, and this has come about through the need to help the user navigate what is often a very complex landscape,” says Mo.
“We also have a brilliant ecosystem of partners offering solutions in this space.
One of the leaders here is ORO Labs”
“Oftentimes, especially at large enterprise customers, they have a sea of different solutions before them.
“Within the procurement function, this can be particularly complicated. How do users know where to go? There’s been some progress, but this area has really begun to heat up, becoming a massive part of the user experience.
“So the concept of intake management automatically takes the user on this journey. At SAP we’ve just started talking about how we’re going to help customers navigate this, which we announced at Spend Connect 2024 in Las Vegas.
“But we also have a brilliant ecosystem of partners offering solutions in this space. One of the leaders here is ORO Labs. They have created an excellent solution that is well thought of in the space, which they’ve been working on for the last couple of years. So it made abundant sense for us to integrate with ORO and have them on the marketplace as an option for our customers, whilst we continue our journey at the same time.”
According to Mo, SAP’s go-to-market strategy, deployed in conjunction with its vast global network of partners, is a crucial element in the success of the procurement transformation and innovation it helps facilitate as a company.
“At SAP Ariba, we are doing a tremendous amount of innovation ourselves on multiple fronts,” says Mo. “But we are also focused on offering the best-of-breed ecosystems, building on our own innovative foundations with other leading solutions elsewhere on the market layered on top. And within procurement, that concept has mushroomed in recent years. Customers, especially mature customers, are now looking at how they can leverage some of the excellent bespoke solutions for niche
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processes which have emerged in recent years.
“From an SAP standpoint within this broader trend, we’ve got three key angles: our own innovation with the investment that Thomas outlined; the business technology platform (BTP) which is our framework to allow external parties, whether that be our system integrator community or best-of-breed partners, to leverage that framework to develop additional capability or process-related functionality that is integrated; and finally the third pillar is the marketplace that we have.
“Our marketplace is an important element, and we’ve had it for a while. But now the difference, in terms of the go-to market strategy, is if you look at each procurement process, whether at a modular level or from a customer’s internal needs perspective, where each component might have its own data provider, we’re bringing intrinsic interconnectedness to the fore.
“We’re working closely with our ecosystem to ensure that our customers understand that data can be integrated into their procurement process. You don’t have to operate in silos: we can help them integrate comprehensively, end to end.”
For further information about the supply chain and procurement transformation available through SAP Ariba, visit sap.com.
ADDED VALUE
Vicky
“We run a series of SAP customer events throughout the year, and those, for me, are the highlights of my year,” shares Vicky. “I love having the opportunity to talk to our customers, see what we are able to proudly showcase, but also witness the exciting developments our customers have to share. The discussions we hold at these events help us with that continuous feedback loop to drive us forward in partnership with our customers.”
Thomas
“For me, our biggest success is, by default, our customers,” says Thomas.
“In October I attended our SAP Spend Connect event in Las Vegas and I was thrilled to join so many of my colleagues from the EMEA region there. It was refreshing and energising to meet our customers, engaging with them about the latest innovations and success stories they had to share. Ultimately, they are our true north star for how we evolve so events like this are incredibly rewarding to attend.”
Mo
“I’ve been working in procurement for 24 years,” shares Mo. “Within that
journey, the stories that make me tick are the ones where I’ve been able to go to customers and partners, and contribute to the broader procurement and supply chain community.
“On that note, I was recently involved in creating a series of video blogs for SAP Ariba, which aim to cover topics such as category management,
supplier diversity, compliance and overcoming industry challenges.”
View the first video with Mo here, and tap into SAP Ariba’s broader procurement resources.
For readers interested in the Procurement Triple Crown concept, Mo also recommends diving into a recent SAP Ariba whitepaper on the topic.