The Future of Procurement: 5 Moments from SAP Sapphire 2024

Docusign participated in SAP Sapphire 2024 in Orlando and Barcelona to engage with the leading voices in procurement and spend management about how modern tools can improve their day-to-day work. The biggest takeaway was that new technologies continue to open doors for more intelligent procurement workflows. The modernizations allow procurement teams to innovate faster than ever before.

Docusign and SAP have been partners since 2015, innovating together on solutions that help our joint customers digitally transform their agreement processes across sales, HR, procurement, and more. Sapphire was the perfect stage to share the latest advance in our procurement offering: our new Docusign Connector for SAP Ariba Solutions.

Sapphire provided a valuable look into the future of procurement tools and workflows, showcasing how modern technologies will impact procurement teams. Through engaging conversations and insightful sessions, we gained a deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. Here is a summary of the key moments from Sapphire that will impact the future of procurement.

1. Joule expands and connects with Copilot

An AI copilot is coming to the SAP experience in a big way. SAP announced that their natural language processing assistant, Joule, will become the new front end of their UX and will help any user quickly turn words into action. It will be embedded for all cloud customers and will create a unified experience for Microsoft and SAP customers via a two-way integration with Microsoft Copilot. By the end of the year, SAP estimates that 80% of the most common transactions across SAP business applications will be automated with Joule.

The second half of the year will usher in even further expansion of Joule with integrations to SAP Ariba, various supply chain management solutions, and SAP Analytics Cloud. Those new connections will increase AI offerings to teams working in supply chain management, analytics, and planning solutions.

In addition to English, Joule will also expand to support German, Spanish, French, and Portuguese. With multilingual capabilities spread across the broad SAP portfolio, global organizations can work better to get work done faster and easier.

2. RISE with SAP helps procurement teams move to the cloud

To help on-premises customers transition to a cloud ERP, SAP announced new enhancements to RISE with SAP. Under the RISE program, SAP will assist on-premises customers to move to their Cloud ERP, S/4 HANA. Moving forward, every RISE customer will be assigned an enterprise architect to guide them through their cloud transformation personally. SAP understands that a successful move to the cloud is an important step in future-proof operations, increasing productivity, and increasing business agility.

For procurement professionals using on-premises systems, RISE with SAP allows them to move to a cloud ERP in sync with their collaborating business units. That cross-team standardized implementation ensures that procurement data is integrated with data sources and tools from other teams. By connecting all those teams on the same cloud-based ERP, procurement teams will have better visibility to make long-term decisions. They’ll also get real-time data to help them make more accurate forecasts, analyze spend, and manage suppliers.

3. New additions to the GROW with SAP toolkit

GROW with SAP is a package of tools to help companies of any size succeed in transitioning to a cloud ERP: adoption acceleration services, community, and learning. At Sapphire, SAP announced that it will include SAP Sales Cloud and Concur Expense at no additional charge. Moving more processes to SAP’s cloud ERP is a modern way to simplify everyday activities and grow the business securely.

These new tools give procurement teams at midmarket companies the power to streamline and automate their expense management processes. SAP’s holistic ERP solution connects finance, procurement, and sales in a way that eliminates manual steps from traditional workflows. This connected cloud toolkit is tailored to financial functions at mid-sized businesses. Sharing data across those lines of business is a simple way to increase visibility and accelerate time to value.

4. SAP Clean Core eliminates operational, administrative tasks 

To further incentivize organizations considering a move to a cloud-based ERP, SAP has added a series of tools to S/4HANA to make the environment more robust. The concept of “Clean Core” is that teams using the cloud-based ERP no longer have to worry about updating old technology, modifying their workflows to accommodate one-off use cases, or syncing separate pieces of their stack. The core S/4HANA product is an always-on cloud ERP that SAP maintains for all of its customers so they can focus on productivity.

Procurement teams running on that clean core ERP can remain agile in their work without the time-consuming one-offs and operational customizations that can slow them down. They never have to worry about updating to new technologies and are free to innovate using the powerful out-of-the-box set of tools SAP provides. Moving to this clean core environment is an easy way to futureproof the procurement stack against future advancements and stay current with a fast-evolving market.

5. Docusign and SAP continue to innovate to meet procurement needs

At SAP Sapphire, Docusign and Deloitte cohosted a session to discuss how inefficient, disconnected agreements waste time and money. We call those unnecessary costs the Agreement Trap. Agreements are critical to the work that procurement teams do, but if the technology in those agreement workflows isn’t connected to the other procurement systems, the entire process slows down.

The Docusign connector for SAP Ariba Solutions solves that problem. It connects all the technology used in procurement agreements so the process works as smoothly as possible. The new connector streamlines collaboration across the two systems and opens the door for automated procurement workflows, enhanced data synchronization, and better agreement management.

Companies of any size can use this new connector to scale procurement operations and improve time to value. It’s part of Docusign’s continuing push to develop Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) technology that connects agreement tools to other category-leading business technology. The Docusign IAM portfolio connects all parts of the end-to-end agreement process on a central platform to make agreements easier, faster, and more valuable than ever.

The Docusign connector for SAP Ariba Solutions will be available in September.