SAPinsider 2024 Research Agenda
Financial Management | ERP, Platform & Cybersecurity | Application Development & Integration Security | Analytics & AI |Our Methodology
Financial Management
Finance Process Automation – February 2024 
Last year, our research found accelerating demand among SAPinsiders for digital solutions that enable automation across finance operations. This research examines trends in finance automation drivers, requirements, and technology across SAP environments. It offers insight into the impact of Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning (ML) on leading strategies. This SAPinsider report will benchmark the trends and progress of SAP customers in automating processes, identify the tools they use and plan to use, and highlight the challenges and targeted benefits of financial process automation.
Finance Transformation and SAP S/4HANA – April 2024 
SAP S/4HANA Finance now plays a pivotal role beyond a technical upgrade event, offering a foundation for finance function process redesign and overall business transformation. This research explores the adoption trends and benefits of SAP S/4HANA Finance for organizations, as well as robust capabilities such as real-time data and centralized financial reporting functionalities. Additionally, it addresses deployment options and migration barriers while highlighting options, like SAP S/4HANA for Central Finance, and those provided by SAP partners that support successful implementations and enable complex ones.
Global Tax Management – June 2024 
As businesses expand their global footprint via cross-border transactions, ensuring compliance and optimizing tax management becomes increasingly crucial. While more SAPinsider organizations plan to adopt third-party tax engines, the seamless integration with SAP and other applications remains a stumbling block, impeding utilization and alignment of tax management with business systems. This report examines the challenges SAP organizations face in managing global tax obligations amid growing indirect tax mandates. Building on previous findings, the research provides SAPinsiders with best practices to streamline tax processes.
Cash Management and Cash Visibility – August 2024 
Two years of research in this area confirm cash management and financial visibility as significant pain points for SAPinsiders. This research examines various strategies and technologies organizations employ to automate cash management processes and related core business flows (O2C, P2P) to improve cash flows, optimize working capital, and ensure liquidity. The report will delve into the latest trends and best practices in achieving financial visibility and provide practical recommendations to unlock the full potential of cash management within the SAP ecosystem.
Financial Close and Record-to-Report – September 2024 
Cloud finance deployments for SAP organizations are experiencing significant momentum, offering opportunities and challenges in adopting cloud-based solutions for finance operations. Solutions like SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), RISE with SAP, and GROW with SAP are among the key enablers of this transformation. This report identifies prominent trends propelling the shift toward cloud finance, such as enhanced scalability, accessibility, and cost-effectiveness. Additionally, the research addresses potential challenges and presents strategies that enable seamless cloud finance deployments by leveraging SAP partner solutions on SAP BTP. By evaluating key strategies of leading organizations, the research offers valuable guidance to finance and IT leaders seeking to harness the potential of these cloud-based solutions.
Automating AP Invoice Management – December 2024 
This research explores automation strategies and pain points of SAPinsiders across Accounts Payable (AP) invoice management. It examines the benefits of streamlining invoice processing, reducing manual efforts, and enhancing accuracy. Additionally, the report analyzes potential barriers and showcases innovative SAP partner solutions that leverage automation technologies. By outlining key trends and offering actionable insights, the report guides organizations toward achieving optimal efficiency and compliance in their AP invoice management processes.
ERP, Platform & Cybersecurity
SAP Infrastructure and Landscape Trends – February 2024 
SAP workloads continue to move to the cloud at an accelerating pace. Related to this move a significant proportion of SAP organizations have indicated that they are planning on updating the infrastructure on which their SAP landscape is running. This report will examine the infrastructure and landscape trends during 2023 and into 2024. Are organizations moving more workloads to the public cloud? Are they staying with their usual hosting partners? How much are operational expenditure based internal landscapes being adopted? How is SAP’s focus on RISE with SAP impacting the traditional on-premise landscape that has been the foundation of the organization’s success over the last 30 years? And what role is sustainability playing in these plans?
SAP S/4HANA Migration – March 2024
Around a third of SAP’s existing enterprise ERP base has now licensed SAP S/4HANA, though many are still undecided about what their plans will be. Most existing customers are concerned about the complexity of the move and have a desire to remain with perpetual licenses, but SAP is pushing their cloud ERP strategy that focuses on RISE with SAP and SAP S/4HANA Cloud. This report will examine the adoption trends for SAP S/4HANA over the last five years, the version of the solution that organizations are deploying, the challenges that they are encountering with the move, as well as the benefits that those whthat have already moved to SAP S/4HANA are experiencing.
Data, Integration, and SAP BTP – June 2024 
Few SAP organizations today are running homogeneous SAP environments with most running a combination of SAP and non-SAP systems across their enterprise. This creates challenges from a data and integration perspective, especially for business users that are demanding data from multiple sources in their analytics applications and that have workflows that span multiple applications both in the cloud and on-premise. IT departments are deploying technologies that will help enable seamless integration and harmonization, while SAP has released SAP Datasphere to maintaining the context and logic of that data. But this is only one solution in play in the data and integration space. This research will explore the drivers, actions, requirements, and technologies around data and integration in this more connected SAP world.
Deployment Approaches for SAP S/4HANA – July 2024
The steady adoption of SAP S/4HANA continues and, as an increasing number of existing customers start to plan for their deployment more are planning for selective data transitions that involve a scaled-up deployment. This is especially relevant as many organizations look to create a single, centralized SAP S/4HANA instance. This report will continue to track the deployment plans for those moving to SAP S/4HANA, what they intend to use for infrastructure, how much RISE with SAP is impacting those plans, how long respondents expect their move to take, and the factors impacting those timelines.
Enterprise Cloud – September 2024
Even though organizations started the move to the cloud more than ten years ago, most are still in the process of moving their core enterprise workloads to the cloud even though they are already leveraging the environment for some solutions. But as these workloads move to the cloud there is an increased need to ensure that they are properly protected and connected to other critical systems. In this year’s report we will continue to track where key SAP workloads are running, how they are moving to the cloud, the timeline for those changes, and the most important factors behind that move.
RISE with SAP – November 2024
RISE with SAP remains the primary method for organizations to engage with SAP’s cloud ERP strategy and is seeing increasing engagement as organizations look to move to SAP S/4HANA before the 2027 deadline. But, while more organizations are looking at RISE with SAP, there are still areas where SAP can continue to educate their audience. This research will examine the ongoing interest in RISE with SAP, adoption trends, hosting partners being selected by those planning on using the solution, as well as identifying challenges that organizations have with the solution and how they plan to measure the success of their RISE with SAP initiatives.
Security
Cybersecurity Threats and Challenges for SAP Systems – May 2024 
For the last two years ransomware and malware attacks were identified as the two biggest threats for SAP systems. But the biggest challenge in securing SAP systems is unpatched systems. With the ever-increasing frequency of cyberattacks, keeping systems up to date is crucial to preventing cyberattacks and keeping systems available. 2023 also saw increased adoption of technologies that provided information about new threats or helped reveal attacks in progress. This research will explore the year over year trends in the cybersecurity space, what organizations perceive as the biggest threats to their systems, the challenges they face addressing those threats, and examining trends over the last three years of similar research.
SAP Cybersecurity Priorities – October 2024
SAPinsiders continue to focus on protecting the data in their SAP systems as the most important task when it comes to cybersecurity. But to successfully achieve these goals they must make decisions and prioritize the actions that will provide the most benefit. This includes a need to support an expanding attack surface, pressure to respond to the increasing sophistication and frequency of cyber-attacks but must be balanced against the pressure to limit disruption while ensuring the continuity and resilience of business operations. This year’s research will look at what SAP teams are prioritizing from a security perspective, the biggest cybersecurity priorities for their organizations, the types of security they intend to put in place, and where they are prioritizing cybersecurity investments.
Application Development & Integration
SAP Data Management/Strategies and SAP HANA- April 2024
Many organizations are now leveraging SAP HANA either with another SAP application or as a data lake within their organization. But with this move SAP customers must plan for how to manage, maintain and utilize SAP data for analytics and automation. how to handle legacy data, especially for greenfield SAP S/4HANA projects, and how to manage data on the cloud. Balancing the risks, compliance needs, and costs of data management in multiple venues including the cloud while also providing reliable, secure data to the organization is increasingly important to the business. This research will examine the approaches and the technologies SAP customers are taking for where to host data and the factors driving the decisions.
Analytics and AI
Process Automation and SAP S/4HANA – April 2024
SAPinsiders have consistently indicated that leveraging process automation and process Intelligence platforms will enable them to digitalize, discover, understand, and manage business process execution more effectively.
About the SAPinsider DART Methodology
SAPinsider has rewritten the rules of research to provide demonstrable insights from its fact-based approach. The DART methodology serves as the very foundation on which SAPinsider educates end users to act, creates market awareness, drives demand, empowers sales forces, and validates return on investments. It’s no wonder that organizations worldwide turn to SAPinsider for research with results. The DART methodology provides actionable insights including:
- Drivers – These are macro level events that are impacting an organization. They can be both external and internal and require the implementation of strategic plans, people, processes and systems.
- Actions – These are strategies that companies can implement to address the drivers impact on the business. These are the integration of people, process and technology. The should be business first but fully leverage technology enabled solutions to be relevant for our focus.
- Requirements – These are business and process level requirements to support the strategies. These tend to be end-to-end for a business process.
- Technology – There are technology and systems related requirements that enable the business requirements and support the overall strategies that the company is taking, they must consider the current technology architecture and provide for the adoption of new and innovative technology enabled capabilities
How SAPinsiders Participate in the Research
The SAPinsider research process is an invitation-only quantitative survey and a qualitative interview-based methodology that is focused on the voice of the more than 600,000+ global SAPinsider community members. During the course of a year, we survey and interview several thousand SAPinsiders and synthesize their insights. This peer best practices-led benchmarking research process extracts intricate knowledge of SAP and related ecosystem solutions, migration paths, roadmap and other insights in relation to the business drivers, strategic actions and requirements of end users. The ultimate objective of our research is to enable SAP users adopt and upgrade technology efficiently, based on sound decisions, performance parameters and business value.