An Interview with Hana Součková (SAP) and Jan Kratochvil (Aimtec): AI is giving firms room for decisions with more added value

• SAP S/4HANA
• Interview

How can you harmonise the stability of centralised IT with manufacturing’s pressure for speed and flexibility – and today’s rise of AI? SAP Czech Republic’s Managing Director Hana Součková and Aimtec’s Jan Kratochvil joined us to explain why AI is more than a fashion trend – it saves time and creates room for higher-added-value decisions – and why companies need not just the right technology but, above all, a partner that understands real-world operations.

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At SAP, artificial intelligence is hardly something new. How, specifically, does it help firms use SAP?

Součková: Large language models are a big topic today, but SAP has already been integrating advanced technologies such as machine learning, predictive analyses, the blockchain and other tools directly into its solutions for years.

We want to create an on-board assistant: an intelligent agent that grasps context as well as circumstances. Users don’t have to do busywork and can focus on the things with greater benefits. When I was discussing this with our Brno development team, they summed it up well: “AI will eliminate complexity by connecting the system’s parts in context, without users having to know the parts or how to use them.”

In the past you did have to know specific transactions, SAP codes and system structure. Today you can just ask the agent: “Show me delayed orders.” And it gets what you want without any need to know transaction codes.

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Have you received feedback on whether and how companies use the AI within SAP in practice?

Součková: When it comes to practical use by customers, the quickest uptake is currently in finance, where the data structure is very well defined. AI is already helping today to predict cash flow, detect fraudulent transactions and optimise payments. We can also see a significant shift in HR, for example to optimise hiring processes.

In manufacturing, the most frequent use for now is in anomaly detection. Where yesterday an experienced foreman heard a machine change its sound and predicted a problem, today AI uses large volumes of data – on vibration, temperature and operating conditions – to detect potential issues early and very precisely. And we see a huge future potential right here.

Kratochvil: It’s interesting to look at who most frequently requests AI: companies’ management. That’s because leaders see AI as a tool that can significantly aid decision-making. Its main benefit is that it lets leaders access data in its original, unchanged form.

Previously, data was processed by the process experts. They exported it, readied it in Excel and only then passed it to managers. Today management has direct access to current, unskewed information. And that is, I’d say, a fundamental shift. AI helps them better understand what’s really happening in the company, with no filter or spin.

While AI is the talk of today, just a few years ago, another key word was similarly topical – the cloud. How are medium-sized enterprises managing the shift to the cloud and the digitalisation and data processing that come with it?

Kratochvil: For medium-sized firms, costs play a large role – what they can afford, the size of their IT teams and what know-how those teams actually have. They’re often very capable people, but in small numbers, limiting what they can do with the data. Cloud services and AI tools begin to be truly fundamental. With no need for a large analytical team, companies can effectively use the data they’ve been collecting for years but haven’t been able to fully harness.

For example, we’re now developing a project where we’re building production controlling that lets a company give its headquarters in Japan performance evaluation documents that will then go all the way to the stock exchange. And that wasn’t realistically doable in the original R/3 system at all.

Součková: A partner that can guide companies through this change is key. Medium-sized companies often adopt risk-averse stances such as: “We’ve always done it this way, so why change it?” Often their systems were highly customised, and these firms are afraid that by moving to a new system, they’ll lose flexibility. And for them, flexibility is a prime competitive advantage. We saw a case where, during a SAP S/4HANA transition, a customer found they would have to change some internal processes, for example their approval workflow, because their bespoke build could not be maintained unchanged in the new system.

This is where I see the main challenge: finding the right balance. Knowing where historical customisation truly brings added value and uniqueness, and where instead it’s better to switch to a standard solution. In other words: seeing when it makes sense to stick to your know-how, and when there’s no longer a point in reinventing the wheel.

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What’s the way out of the “corporate dilemma” – the constant conflict between the IT and business ends?

Kratochvil: We feel this tension and have been facing it for over ten years. On the one side you have central IT with their logical efforts for a unified, manageable, long-term sustainable system. On the other side are local managers, who have to respond flexibly to customer requirements and quickly change processes in manufacturing and logistics. That’s why we developed our own add-on, which is also available in the public cloud and the SAP Store. Thanks to it, we tell customers: “Keep a clean system core and don’t meddle with it, but let’s add flexibility wherever it’s key.”

Real physical flows or production lines can’t be tuned to software. It’s the opposite – the system must be able to reflect reality. And I see this as our competitive advantage. We see success with medium-sized manufacturers precisely because we can offer them a scalable solution that respects their specifics and gives operational flexibility while also being ready for future development.

Součková: Yes, and this completely matches the long-term strategy at SAP – the direction we’re taking right now. Within the S/4HANA product line, or more precisely within our SAP First, AI First and Business Suite First strategy, we’re deliberately coming back to the Business Suite concept. We believe SAP's role lies precisely in creating a strong and consistent core that joins processes end-to-end and enables further innovation built upon them.

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What’s your stance on customisations to a company’s SAP system? Can they be a sustainable strategy?

Součková: Our ambition is to keep the system core pure – with no Z-codes and historical edits written in ABAP. I often say, half-joking, that when you’re switching to SAP S/4HANA after twenty years, that is when you first start using SAP. Because there have been companies where customisations made up a full 60% of their system. But without a unified data foundation, you can’t build good AI or advanced analytics. If the same material has a different name each time, no artificial intelligence is going to help you. Because of this, SAP is opening up and, instead of the closed ABAP environment, today it supports a broader ecosystem and cooperates for example with the Databricks platform and various language models.

And that brings us to the absolutely key role of partners. We don’t want SAP to be the party leading these projects – entirely the opposite. We want our partners to be the people in touch with customers every day, the ones who understand their specific needs and do the real work of adapting the system to their environment. Especially in manufacturing or logistics, it often isn’t possible to adapt reality to the system – the system has to reflect the real world.

Leave the core clean, but build what brings specific value on top of it. Putting a standard in place is quick today – and it can bring visible results.

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