SAP x Microsoft: How We Simplify Business Collaboration

Rarely a day passes where I am not in contact with customers, partners, or colleagues from around the globe. Whether it's a brief exchange of ideas, a virtual meeting or a quick phone call, efficient communication drives work to success. Particularly with many still working from home, I cannot imagine what daily communication and collaboration would look like without Microsoft Teams – and I think this holds true for much of the business community in a lot of enterprises.

So it came as no surprise that when we announced our new RISE with SAP offering, a highlight for many was Satya Nadella joining me to share his thoughts on how Microsoft and SAP team up to lift collaboration to the next level. One aspect many of you were particularly interested in is how we will integrate SAP solutions with Microsoft Teams, so let’s have a look at some examples:

Putting collaboration into business context

For many companies around the world, remote selling has become a necessity for conducting business. To simplify remote sales processes and allow sales professionals to fully focus on their customer engagements, we will integrate SAP Sales Cloud with Microsoft Teams. Users can easily set up meetings from the SAP system without switching applications. During a customer call, all information will be accessible in Microsoft Teams via an embedded SAP Sales Cloud application. Finally, all information, including meeting recording and notes, will get automatically synced back to SAP Sales Cloud in real time. Check out this demo video to get an idea of what this scenario will look like.

All of us know how much easier business life is when you have everything you need at your fingertips. Thanks to integrating Microsoft Teams with SAP S/4HANA through SAP Conversational AI, end users can seamlessly get all business-relevant information and critical business insights instantly. Chatbots help them identify and reach out to business contacts directly. In a first instance, we will focus on one concrete business persona: the operational purchaser. Over time, we will develop chatbots for more use cases and make the content available to our customers through templates so they can adopt custom-specific adjustments that meet their conversational AI needs.

Many customers use SAP Analytics Cloud in addition to Microsoft Teams for generating data-driven insights into their business. Bringing together SAP Analytics Cloud and Microsoft Teams, we enable users to benefit from both augmented and smart capabilities of SAP Analytics Cloud and Microsoft Teams’ strong collaboration capabilities. Combining the power, we will provide an integrated solution for reporting and planning access with direct utilization of enhanced collaboration functionalities from the daily business workflow.

Time to Explore

To simplify users’ collaboration processes and enhance workplace productivity, we are exploring many more integration scenarios. A lot of SAP’s solutions could form a robust symbiosis with Microsoft Teams, and we will cover a wide range of use cases across lines of business – from procurement to recruiting, talent management, and learning, to travel and expense management.

Take the SAP Business Network as an example: While it helps drive process efficiency through pre-defined messages, documents, and rules that can be shared and processed systematically, Microsoft Teams complements SAP’s solution through collaboration capabilities like online meetings, chats, and more. Together, the solutions would enable users to run business processes efficiently, while being resilient to disruptions.

Or imagine you are a recruiter working with our human experience management solutions, wanting to finalize a contract with a prospective hire. By integrating Microsoft Teams, you could extract the contract from your SAP system, edit it in Microsoft Teams, trigger a call to confirm the changes with the prospect and store the contract back in your SAP system without changing applications.

As you can see, the opportunities are endless! The first integration scenarios are planned to go live throughout this year, with the integrations for SAP Sales Cloud and SAP S/4HANA to come in Q2, and others to follow suit. These will mainly focus on classic use cases such as setting up Microsoft Teams meetings directly via the SAP applications. Next are then even bolder steps as we plan to enable context-based collaboration through SAP systems and Microsoft Teams. This will allow users to access all relevant information about their interaction in Microsoft Teams through their SAP systems or vice versa, anywhere and anytime.

Ultimately, with this, we will step up the employee experience and enable smooth and frictionless interactions across all levels of enterprises and their environment.

Want to learn more? Check out the blog from Thomas Saueressig.