The IT Nerd

New SAP Concur data reveals that employees are increasingly likely to decline business travel if it does not fit around their personal schedules. Blended travel or bleisure, the trend of combining leisure and business travel, has gained popularity among business travellers, but recent cost-saving measures by companies threaten this balance. 

While working from anywhere or combining holidays with business trips may seem straightforward for employees, the reality for companies is more complex. As a result, company concerns about costs and sustainability can limit employees’ ability to fully embrace their flexible lifestyle. 

1. Employee sentiment

• 46% of Canadian business travellers report that their company is focused on meeting employees’ needs for flexible travel options above other priorities. However, around 30% indicated that their company is more focused on cutting travel costs. 
• More than 30% of Canadian companies are reducing the ability for employees to work remotely, while travelling for pleasure or combining personal travel with business trips.
• While a majority (66%) of Canadian business travellers stated that travel is critical for their career advancement, 20% of employees would decline a business trip if they couldn’t extend it for personal travel, and 24% would also refuse if they couldn’t make adjustments outside of company policy.

2. The need for better travel policies 

• Businesses have also reduced comfort-focused requests such as: 28% staying overnight to avoid long travel days, 25% paying more for non-stop flights, 27% using business or premium class, and opting for taxis or ride-shares instead of public transportation (29%).
• These changes have resulted in 82% of business travellers booking extra time for their trip to prepare for unexpected travel disruptions — either at the beginning of their trip (38%), at the end of it (11%), or at both ends of the trip (32%) — which underscores the need for better travel policies.  

3. The toss-up between sustainability and costs The balancing act between sustainability and cost management

• 92% of Canadian business travellers have observed their companies cutting back on flexible travel allowances, including 68% whose companies have shifted away from allowing employees to pay to use more sustainable travel options. 
• When it comes to business travel, companies are equally pursuing three priorities. Increased use of sustainable travel options is a top focus for 32% of travel managers, while meeting employees’ demands for flexible travel options is the top priority for 37% and cutting back on travel costs for 31%. This represents increased pressure on travel managers to handle multiple pressure points from the business and employees. 
• Around 25% of travellers say their company prioritizes sustainable travel options, but 1 in 3 travel managers face difficulty booking travel as they are expected to provide more sustainable travel options without an adequate travel budget.

The full new SAP Concur research with all the findings is available here. 

Today SAP Concur announced the results of its review into the costs of business expenses for the 23/24 financial year, which showed a 34 per cent increase in the cost of the average expense transaction compared to pre-pandemic levels in 2019, likely driven by rising inflation.

This is more than four times the 8.1 per cent inflationary rate at the peak of Canadian inflation in June 2022. This demonstrates that Canada, in particular, has been hit harder than average by inflationary increases compared to the rest of the world. Using SAP Concur data from thousands of businesses across Canada, the company has been able to pinpoint some of the main areas where businesses face rising costs and paint a clearer picture on where inflation is damaging profits.

The biggest culprits for rising costs came from gas, car hire and ground transportation which rose 40 percent, 36 per cent and 35 per cent respectively. Similarly, the cost of entertainment also saw a large inflationary rise, coming in at a 35 per cent increase. But the cost of train transportation took the top spot as the biggest expense for businesses, amassing 85 per cent of the total expense amount.

Through SAP Concur’s analysis, it’s clear that businesses across the board are facing real increments in their additional costs. Most of which are often unseen or unaccounted for early on in the financial planning process. Chris Juneau, head of market strategy at SAP Concur said “For all businesses, the costs of operating in the current global market has become trickier with time and the 23/24 financial year was no exception. As the end of the year approaches, now is the time that finance managers and business leaders need to be analysing their outgoings, forecasting for the next financial year and re-evaluating policies to deliver a more robust year ahead.”

To ensure the smooth management of finances in 24/25, finance leaders need to take advantage of every spending moment to navigate times of change. Through the implementation of expense management systems, businesses need to look at ways in which they can better control expenditure. Whether that’s through greater monitoring of expense compliance, improving visibility or improving data driven decision making, finance leaders can take active steps to gain better control for the new financial year.

You can have a look at their write up on this topic here.

How much do employees dread the expense report? In a past SAP Concur Global Business Travel Survey, nearly one out of four business travellers said they’d rather have a cavity filled at the dentist than fill out an expense report.  

The expense reconciliation process can be lengthy, especially when organizations rely on manual processes. Nearly all travel decision makers say that rising complexity in the travel and expense (T&E) landscape requires new processes and mindsets, according to a Mastercard survey. This is creating a shift in how businesses approach T&E, with 90 per cent of surveyed travel decision makers predicting that the future of T&E is the convergence of payment and expense management. Concur can help businesses reimagine their expense management process and use technology to make their employees’ lives easier.   

SAP is announcing a new partnership with Mastercard, a global technology company in the payments industry, to simplify the expense process. Through a new integration, purchases made on Mastercard corporate cards are captured and automatically populated in Concur Expense; users are alerted immediately if additional information is needed. With real-time spend data, customers can achieve compliance while users can enjoy an improved experience with automated expense creation. What’s more, customers can continue banking with preferred partners and utilizing existing card programs.   

The integration will be available to select customers globally starting in the second quarter 2024. As part of the new partnership, SAP is also working with Mastercard to provide travel and finance managers with the power to set spending controls and restrictions to help encourage expense policy compliance.  

SAP today announced transformative data innovations that will help customers harness the full power of their data to drive deeper insights, faster growth and more efficiency in the era of AI. New capabilities in the SAP Datasphere solution, including new generative-AI features, transform enterprise planning through simplified data landscapes and more-intuitive data interaction.

At the heart of these announcements is the business data fabric, an architecture that helps ensure data is not just an asset but also the core underpinning of strategic initiatives. The innovations and partnership announced today equip organizations to deliver meaningful data to data consumers – with business context and logic intact.

Today’s SAP Datasphere innovations help customers achieve a unified data view that simplifies their data landscapes while retaining context and logic – enabling them to adapt faster to market changes and make more-efficient decisions. From new copilot and vector database capabilities that help ensure business context remains constant in generative AI outputs to a new knowledge graph that helps uncover insights and patterns in complex data, SAP’s data innovations help ensure customers have the full power of their data at their fingertips.

Today’s key innovations include:

Generative-AI Copilot and AI Governance

SAP’s generative-AI assistant, the Joule copilot, is now coming to the SAP Analytics Cloud solution to automate the creation and development of reports, dashboards, plans and more. This automation is enabled by the SAP HANA Cloud vector engine capabilities, which combine the power of large language models with the relevant data of your organization – helping ensure business context is a constant for generative-AI outputs. 

Incorporating generative AI across the business isn’t possible without trusted and governed data. To provide organizations with a solution to govern the policies, processes and practices of AI, SAP is announcing an expansion of our partnership with Collibra to integrate Collibra’s AI Governance with SAP data assets. This can help provide transparency and accountability for organizations and help ensure regulatory, compliance and privacy policies are met.

Discover Hidden Insights and Patterns with Knowledge Graph

With the new SAP Datasphere knowledge graph, organizations can discover hidden insights and patterns across their applications and systems. This enables both technical and business users to deeply understand the relationships between data, metadata and business processes, as well as boost the effectiveness of machine learning and large language models.

Unified and Advanced Planning and Analytics

The new SAP Datasphere integration with SAP Analytics Cloud offers a single data management system and advanced analytics to power cross-organizational planning. Planners can leverage a single flexible model to break down silos between planning using one tool for data preparation, modeling and planning.

Additionally, business users can use the new compass capability in SAP Analytics Cloud to realize better outcomes in planning and analytics through data-driven simulation. It enables organizations to run complex simulations using a chat interface to evaluate predictive outcomes and continually adjust controllable variables to find the optimal plan.

This supports customers to transform their planning by unifying financial, operational, supply chain and workforce planning with native connection to SAP applications and third-party data.

To learn more, please read: Unleashing the Latest SAP Data and Analytics Innovations.

SAP SE today announced key data innovations and partnerships that give customers access to mission-critical data, enabling faster time to insights and better business decision-making. SAP announced SAP Datasphere solution, the next generation of its data management portfolio, which give customers easy access to business-ready data across the data landscape. SAP also introduced strategic partnerships with industry-leading data and AI companies – Collibra NV, Confluent Inc., Databricks Inc. and DataRobot Inc. – to enrich SAP Datasphere and allow organizations to create a unified data architecture that securely combines SAP software data and non-SAP data.

Until today, accessing and using data located in disparate systems and locations – across cloud providers, data vendors and on-premise systems – has been a complex challenge. Customers have had to extract data from original sources and export it to a central location, losing critical business context along the way and recapturing it only through ongoing, dedicated IT projects and manual effort. With today’s announcements, SAP Datasphere helps eliminate this hidden data tax, enabling customers to build a business data fabric architecture that quickly delivers meaningful data with business context and logic intact.

SAP Datasphere

Available today, SAP Datasphere is the next generation of the SAP Data Warehouse Cloud solution. It enables data professionals to deliver scalable access to mission-critical business data. With a unified experience for data integration, data cataloging, semantic modeling, data warehousing, data federation and data virtualization, SAP Datasphere enables data professionals to help distribute mission-critical business data – with business context and logic preserved – across their organization’s data landscape. SAP Datasphere is built on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), which includes strong enterprise security capabilities, such as database security, encryption and governance.

No additional steps or migrations are required for existing customers of SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, who will benefit from new SAP Datasphere functionality in their product environment. New functionality includes data cataloging that automatically discovers, manages and governs data; simplified data replication to deliver data and its constant updates in real-time; and enhanced data modeling that preserves the rich business context of data in SAP applications. Additional application integration capabilities that link data and metadata from cloud solutions from SAP to SAP Datasphere are planned.

Messer Americas, a leading industrial and medical gas company in North and South America, needed simple and secure access to data from SAP and non-SAP solutions within the company to strengthen data-driven decision-making and free up IT resources to focus on other strategic tasks. With SAP Datasphere, Messer Americas was able to build a modern data architecture that maintained the context of its enterprise data.

Strategic Partnerships

SAP and its new open-data partners will help hundreds of millions of users across the world make informed business-critical decisions rooted in massive amounts of data. SAP’s strategic partners provide the unique strengths of their ecosystems and enable customers to combine all their data like never before. 

Initial partners include:

• Collibra plans to have a tailored integration with SAP, enabling customers to achieve an enterprise governance strategy by building a complete data catalog with lineage across their entire data landscape – both SAP and non-SAP data. Collibra makes trusted data discoverable across any organization. 
• Confluent plans to connect its data streaming platform, empowering companies to unlock valuable business data and connect it with external applications in real time. Confluent’s cloud-native offering is the foundational platform for data in motion – permitting the uninhibited flow of real-time data from various sources across an organization.
• Databricks customers can integrate their Data Lakehouse with SAP software so data can be shared with semantics preserved, helping customers simplify their data landscape.
• DataRobot enables customers to leverage multimodal automated machine learning capabilities on top of SAP Datasphere and bring it directly into their business data fabric on whichever cloud platform it resides.

For more information, visit the Announcement Blog.

SAP Labs Canada has announced the appointment of Christine Vukusic as its new Chief Operating Officer (COO). Christine will be operating, managing, and executing the strategic vision and mission of SAP Labs Canada by developing and implementing the operational plan for the organization and promote SAP’s award-winning company culture.

Labs Canada is one of seven SAP Global Research Hubs, which represent SAP’s most significant R&D locations, in terms of size and delivery of best-in-class solutions across the many SAP product portfolios. Based in Vancouver, Christine brings her over 15-year tenure with SAP to this new role. In her previous role, her passion for innovation with internal processes was her focus, as the manager of the SAP Language Experience North America team. Here she led a multi-functional team of developers, project managers, and language quality engineers providing industry-leading translation technology and processes across SAP. She joined SAP with a decade of tech industry expertise in growing teams and businesses.

The SAP Labs Canada team has been a big supporter of creating innovative outlets for its employees such as its sustainability and green technology expertise, the d-Shop technology makerspace, volunteer programs to support students and girls in STEM, and its valuable Internship Program. With the breadth and depth of her years of experience, Christine is ready for new challenges, inspiring ideas, and aims to showcase Labs Canada operations as an innovative gold standard.

Christine is known for always being one to step up to help SAP be stronger together. She has consistently been an advocate for diversity, inclusion, and employee engagement. This includes her role as a member of the Vancouver ELT, being co-chair of the Vancouver Business Women’s Network, sponsor for SAP Canada’s Green team and a steering member of SAP’s Indigenous Inclusion Initiative.

ElectraMeccanica Vehicles Corp. has announced that it has completed its migration to SAP S/4HANA Cloud leveraging the business-transformation-as-a-service, RISE with SAP. The new ERP system integrates the company’s finance, supply chain, manufacturing, sales and distribution operations processes.

ElectraMeccanica collaborated with PwC Canada, a member of the global consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), in the selection and implementation of an ERP system as the digital foundation of the business. SAP S/4HANA Cloud will help ElectraMeccanica support its growth and go-to-market strategy to deliver environmentally-efficient electric vehicles globally. Implemented using automotive industry capabilities and best practices, SAP S/4HANA Cloud features AI, machine learning, RPA, and situation handling across finance, supply chain, manufacturing, sales and distribution processes.

ElectraMeccanica Vehicles Corp.is a Canadian designer and manufacturer of environmentally efficient electric vehicles (EVs). The company’s flagship vehicle is the innovative, purpose-built, single-seat EV called the SOLO. This three-wheeled vehicle will revolutionize the urban driving experience, including commuting, delivery and shared mobility. Engineered for a single occupant, it offers a unique driving experience for the environmentally conscious consumer. The SOLO has a range of 100 miles and a top speed of 80 mph, making it safe for highways. The SOLO also features front and rear crumple zones, side impact protection, roll bar, torque-limiting control as well as power steering, power brakes, air conditioning and a Bluetooth entertainment system. It blends a modern look with safety features at an accessible price point of $18,500. The SOLO is currently available for pre-orders here. InterMeccanica, a subsidiary of ElectraMeccanica, has successfully been building high-end specialty cars for 61 years. For more information, please visit www.electrameccanica.com.

According to a 2021 study funded by SAP and conducted by an alliance of 16 youth social innovation networks around the world, young people are more motivated than ever by the intrinsic desire to improve the lives of others, both locally and globally. This is especially true now as the pandemic has brought issues such as climate change and social inequality even further into the spotlight, while at the same time giving Millennials and Gen Z hope for a better future.  

In order to improve financial security, work-life balance, mental health, and individual growth for young entrepreneurs, SAP is teaming up with Social Shifters, a non-profit global network of next generation leaders, innovators and entrepreneurs, to provide funding and mentorship to young people with world-changing ideas through the Social Shifters Global Innovation Challenge.  

Five regional winners and one global winner were revealed last week at this year’s SEWF Youth Forum. With support from SAP and the Global Innovation Challenge award, Europe and Central Asia award winner, Yaldi, will be bringing to market Wholesome, a pioneering video game that will create meaningful screen time and inspire players to go outside, feel connected to nature, and be happier.  Through this partnership with Social Shifters, SAP is becoming a tech industry leader in providing mentorship, tools and resources for youth to excel with entrepreneurship, and lift them out of the challenges presented by the global pandemic.  

As Canada gets closer to the return of corporate travel, businesses are taking a closer look at how they can safely resume travel programs. SAP Concur, the world’s leading brand for integrated travel, expense, and invoice management solutions, revealed its annual business travel survey which offers powerful insights for organizations to consider as they continue to think about the evolution of their travel programs. Notable highlights of the survey include: 

Career concerns have Canadian business travellers pushing to resume travel.  

• Almost two-thirds of Canadian business travellers (63%) are pushing to resume travel rather than their employers—because their success and happiness is at stake. 
• A shocking 76% fear personal consequences if they do not increase business travel this year. The biggest fears for homebound business travellers include difficulty developing and maintaining business connections (49%), not advancing in their career (33%) and making less money (26%). 

Travel flexibility is moving to the forefront for business travellers, while safety is taking a back seat.  

• Nearly 3 in 4 (73%) Canadian business travellers cite flexibility—such as choosing their own transportation or lodging—as a driver for getting them back on the road, ahead of the 65% who cited vaccination requirements. 
• Flexibility is so important that a surprising 30% of business travelers would rather deal with a crying toddler on a flight than give up control of their travel planning. 

Failing to adapt to travellers’ new expectations could spell dire consequences.  

• More than half ofCanadian business travellers (53%) will take action if their company does not implement their must-have changes to policy and procedure, including 37% who would ask to limit their travel.  
• Some business travellers take a failure to adapt more seriously: 15% would look for a new position, spelling out the potential for a disruption wherever business travellers aren’t heard. 

For more information, you can view the complete global study or the Canadian findings. 

Long-time partners SAP and the NHL today unveiled new, significant enhancements to the SAP-NHL Coaching Insights App for iPad. These upgrades stemmed from offseason workshops with all 31 NHL coaching staffs to further simplify the user experience, expand on critical metrics desired by coaches, and extend usability for deeper preparation before and after games.  

The app, which is based on SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) powered by the SAP HANA Cloud database, launched in 2019 and has continued its evolution since inception. This has led to a massive 4x increase in league-wide usage, which further validates its reputation as an important coaching tool throughout the league.   

 Now, coaching staffs for all 31 NHL teams can tap into unique new features in the app such as: 

• “Home Plate” Customization: Every team has their own perspective on where the danger zones are around the net. This feature allows coaches to select one of five different variants of high-chance scoring areas to develop strategies and compare the team versus the opponent. 
• Head-to-Head Faceoff Matchup Planner: Coaches can cycle through potential matchups for each faceoff to isolate the best opportunities to win them. This functionality tracks players’ win/loss rates at different faceoff locations, and against various opposition. There are even specific times during the game (like icing) when a coach will know who the exact opponent will be, the Faceoff Matchup Planner provides coaches with real-time targeted data to assist in rapid decision-making. 
• Enhanced Game Trends/Analytics: Coaches can analyze detailed shot differential from key segments of each game, allowing for game trending capabilities to unlock insights within targeted momentum shifts. 
• Player Speed: NHL clubs will have insights to the total distance a player skates during the game and their top speed, so coaches can manage their player’s ice time throughout the game. Specific to speed and distance, the app can break it down into 10-second increments to help develop optimal shift lengths. 
• 24/7 Access: Now,the app is empowering coaches to better strategize prior to the game, make data-driven adjustments during the game, and analyze performance after the game. Usage data tells us that this expanded access is driving the increased adoption and coaches are watching their next opponent play, thru the app, to help collect information and shape the game plan … even on off days. 

Once Puck Tracking data is fully operational in the Puck and Player Tracking system, the following future enhancements will be integrated into the SAP-NHL Coaching Insights App for iPad: 

• Puck Zone Time: Coaches will be able to display eight different variants of data making it even more accurate to identify puck zone time. Also, coaches will be able to filter by player and periods of games.  
• Virtual Replay: These new animations coming next season visually simplify how coaches can see how the puck enters specific zones, and greater details on the X’s and O’s in terms of how the players either collapsed or prevailed during these pressure moments. Every game will be available to view in real-time or in full-game replay. 

And, when tracking enabled pucks are brought back on to the ice, paired with the NHL’s existing player tracking system, the full data processing capabilities of the SAP HANA Cloud database will be recognized.  

As the processing engine, SAP HANA Cloud will house, update, and translate a tremendous amount of new, actionable data in near real-time to coaching staffs. In the future, as these advanced analytics become more mainstream, it’s reasonable to expect an influx of new statistics for fans to consume on broadcasts, nhl.com/stats, and social media.  

You can predict a large number of unsung heroes – those that have excelled at the little things – to gain some exposure from success in less obvious areas like zone-time effectiveness in offensive/defensive zones, and player +/- in zone-time possessions. As these technologies continue to advance, fans can expect to enjoy deeper insights and new statistical categories to rank, compare, and debate their favorite players in new ways. Not to mention, the enjoyment of watching “the fastest game on ice” … become even faster.  

Check out the Global Sponsorships page to learn more about our sports & entertainment transformations.