Yesterday, at SAP Connect, my colleague Natalia Emelianova – head of our SAP IT project team, shared the story and learnings of SAP's ESM global deployment to date. The transformation and approach are powerful and I want to share my perspective and key points from the session.
The setup
Running shared services at enterprise scale is genuinely hard. With 110,000+ employees, 500,000+ customers, and operations spanning 157 countries, the complexity behind the scenes compounds quietly, year over year, until the tools you built for one version of the business are struggling to keep up with the next.
What it means at the business level
For operations, HR, and finance leaders, shared services has always been a lever for margin improvement. What we've seen as we've moved to SAP Enterprise Service Management is that when the platform is right, the efficiency gains tend to emerge across several dimensions at once: cycle times compress, cases resolve on first contact more often, and the volume of work that requires specialist intervention starts to shrink.
A 22-42% reduction in case cycle time and 30% case deflection for HR services are meaningful indicators, but perhaps more telling is the 85% customer satisfaction score across the platform. When people find it easier to get what they need, the numbers tend to follow.
The ERP integration advantage
One of the things we've found most valuable, and something partners in this space understand well, is how much the native integration with the broader SAP landscape changes what's possible. Running ESM connected to SAP Business Suite, SAP Business AI, SAP Analytics Cloud, and Signavio-based process intelligence means the service layer is working from the same data that drives the business, rather than operating alongside it.
In SAP's Global Finance team, that's already translating into meaningful change across Order-to-Cash, Cash Collection, and Procurement processes. And as autonomous assistants come online for recurring receivables and dispute resolution, the integration becomes even more central allowing an AI-driven action to be grounded in real transaction context, not just a ticket summary.
The everyday experience
Beyond the business case, the more immediate impact is on the people doing the work every day. A finance team processing over 700,000 supplier invoices annually, or an HR organization managing 500,000 support tickets a year, experiences ESM differently than an executive reviewing a quarterly dashboard.
What we hear most from teams on the platform is that the work feels more manageable. Not only are the volume of cases reduced, but the cases that do come through are more complete. They arrive with context already gathered, routing is more accurate, and the tools they're using feel built for the complexity they're actually dealing with. That shift in day-to-day experience is harder to quantify but, in our view, equally important to the efficiency metrics.
Three starting points worth considering
For partners supporting customers through ESM implementations, and for organizations exploring what this kind of transformation could look like, these are the three principles that made the most difference in our own journey:
Process before platform. The technology is ready, but automating a process that isn't well-designed first tends to accelerate the wrong outcomes. Taking time to separate cases from service requests and redesign workflows before going live is where the real foundation gets built.
One line of business proves the model. Starting where the business pain is highest and stakeholder readiness is strongest creates a success story the rest of the organization can see. A phased approach isn't a slower path — it's a more reliable one.
Organizational change management is the implementation. User adoption is ultimately what determines whether the investment delivers. Teams that budget for OCM at the same level as the technical deployment consistently see better outcomes from the start.
In closing
We're grateful to everyone who joined the session and for the conversations that followed. The journey we shared is still in progress, and some of the most valuable thinking we've taken away from SAP Connect has come from partners and customers who are navigating similar challenges in their own organizations.
If you're working through any of these questions — whether you're early in an ESM evaluation or already mid-deployment — we'd genuinely welcome the conversation.
Thank you, Natalia, for providing your insights and delivering such a powerful session!
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