Muhammad Alam President & Ch. Product Officer, SAP Int Spend & Biz Network - SAP Spend Connect 2023
Muhammad Alam, President & Chief. Product Officer, SAP Intelligent Spend & Business Network - speaks at SAP Spend ConnectΒ ...
Lead Product Engineering & Member of Executive Board, Sap
Search every verified Muhammad Al interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote β each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. At the SAP Spend Connect 2023 event, Muhammad Alam, President and Chief Product Officer of SAP Intelligent Spend & Business Network, discussed the launch of SAP's "spend control tower." He described it as a platform that unifies data from travel, expense, indirect and direct spend, and contingent services into a single data model, applying AI to provide dashboards and insights. Alam stated that the tool is designed to give customers visibility into their spending, which he said is necessary for supply chain resiliency. He also noted that the platform can help organizations track scope three emissions, which he said can account for up to 90% of a company's emissions footprint, and that AI can fill data gaps to help set sustainability strategies. Alam mentioned that the architecture has been in development for a long time and that SAP is already working with early customers. He explained that the same platform powers analytics in other SAP applications like Ariba and Fieldglass. He indicated that SAP plans to add more internal and external data sources through partners to drive real-time insights, and that the company's vision for the product extends beyond its current capabilities.
“Fundamentally what control tower does is it allows customers who have bet on SAP as their end-to-end spend management platform to take the data that cuts across travel and expense, indirect and direct spend, as well as contingent and services, bring that together into a unified data model where we apply AI on top of it...”
“This is a big step because a lot of customers are looking for resiliency in their supply chain and operations, and you don't really get resiliency unless you have visibility in terms of what you're doing. This is a big step forward in having full visibility and transparency into your spend that can identify where you h...”
“Spend is a big part of scope three emissions, and scope three generally is a big part of an organization's sustainability footprint, their emissions footprint up to 90% in some cases. It behooves us to have all the spend data in one place where you can then get a view of where your scope three is, so you really know wh...”
“Spend control tower allows you to do that by, if you have the actuals, great; if you don't have the actuals and there's a gap in your data, using AI and generative AI capabilities allows you to use the right industry average to complete the picture so you can start taking tangible actions to be more responsible.”
“This architecture has been a long time making for us, so we're really excited to actually announce it now to the customers. We're already working with some early customers as you heard from one yesterday in the keynote.”
“This is the same platform that, while it's available from an end-to-end spend perspective as spend control tower, it also powers the in-app analytics and dashboards that exist in Ariba, Fieldglass, and others as well, so it serves that dual purpose.”
“In the fullness of time, we will continue to add more data both from internal sources but certainly from external sources as well, with our partners to enrich it to then drive real-time insights to the businesses in terms of what's going on.”
“While it's a huge step forward and organizations today will get a tremendous amount of value from it, our excitement, roadmap, and vision for it is actually much longer than the runway we've covered.”
Muhammad Alam, President & Chief. Product Officer, SAP Intelligent Spend & Business Network - speaks at SAP Spend ConnectΒ ...
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