SAP Spend Connect Live: Highlights From Day 2

Day 2 of SAP Spend Connect Live in Las Vegas featured a variety of insightful presentations, engaging panel discussions and customer success stories. 

SAP has used the 2024 edition of its annual conference to unveil numerous exciting updates to its spend management solutions, aimed at helping companies collaborate strategically, increase productivity and manage compliance effortlessly.

Building stronger supply chains

Proceedings on Day 2 got under way with a presentation from Doug DeLuca, SAP Business Network Product Marketing, who revealed how companies can build stronger supply chains with SAP Business Network. 

Doug discussed SAP Business Network’s capacity to support a wide range of business processes, from procurement, supply chain and logistics to asset collaboration and finance. 

“SAP Business Network is a recognised leader across the globe and across industries, with a wide range of business process and operational area coverage – all on the same platform,” explained Doug.

“With AI and intelligent business rules covering digital document and transaction exchange, SAP Business Network closes the gap between you and your trading partners.”

SAP aids Microsoft’s procurement transformation

Elsewhere, Sundar Shanmugam, Head of Digital Transformation for Microsoft's Cloud Operations, revealed how SAP solutions aided its procurement transformation. 

Sundar explained how SAP solutions successfully introduce standardisation and controls – while empowering users with creative, flexible functionality to enhance engagement and outcomes.

Microsoft's data centre infrastructure is growing at a rapid rate, with hundreds of data centres across more than 20 countries in at least 60 regions. This network includes 190+ network Points of Presence and approximately 442,000 kilometres of network. 

The transformation project was aimed at overcoming several hurdles, including the need for business process evolution and dealing with global-scale complexities. Prior to the implementation, processes were largely manual and siloed, with contracts created in Word documents and data scattered across various systems.

"We started a stakeholder engagement process early in the game,” said Sundar. “The change management was much smoother and the adoption became much easier because we were able to walk along with them.”

SAP leads on innovation

Later in the day, Valerie Blatt, Chief Revenue Officer for SAP Business Network, discussed SAP’s position at the forefront of innovation in the spend management space.

“Twenty-five, maybe 30 years ago, Ariba really innovated everything that we see today in the spend management and procurement space,” she said. 

“Becoming a partner and being integrated into SAP has only allowed us to innovate that much faster and become closer to those really critical business processes that our customers talk about in their direct spend supply chains.

It’s really exciting to see what we can do with Ariba, the Business Network and SAP together. It’s our competitive differentiator and our customers feel that as well. And the amazing part is you don’t have to boil the ocean – you can land where you need to land in your business processes and grow from there.”

Spend ‘critical’ for SAP

Day 2 and the event concluded with a hand worthy of winning any poker game.

SAP leadership figures who took to the stage during a packed final session included Jeff Collier, Chief Revenue Officer for SAP Intelligent Spend and Business Network, Valerie Blatt, Chief Revenue Officer for SAP Business Network, and Etosha Thurman, Chief Marketing Officer for Intelligent Spend and Business Network at SAP.

Etosha was joined by Muhammad Alam, Member of the Executive Board for SAP Product Engineering, and asked for his take on procurement and spend management in the context of the wider SAP landscape.

“Spend continues to be a pretty critical area for SAP and I think there’s many reasons for it,” Muhammad said.

“If you think about the portfolio we have in spend, it's one of the widest and broadest portfolios that exists – with the right level of depth – from a feature and capability perspective.

“We have a large number of customers that bet on us for this strategic function. Because it's important to them, it's important to us.”

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