The initial meeting of the new group completed a broad agenda of the AUSAPE Working Groups during the month of March, from Human Resources to Customer Experience, going through Finance, Licensing and SAP S/4 HANA. Sustainability is one of the topics of the time, for the general public and for organizations. This interest on the part of technological and non-technological companies and managers has led AUSAPE to form a new Sustainability Working Group, coordinated by Ignacio Vicente, IT Business Manager at Grupo Varma. The group began its journey on March 23 with an online session dedicated to the sustainable development goals (SDG) for 2030 and the role of companies in sustainability.Mario Izquierdo, coordinator of the ASUGMEX Sustainability Group and head of the Center for Development of Sustainability and ESG of Stratesys, recalled in the first place that companies today have a series of obligations and commitments in terms of sustainability that must be audited, both in the face of regulators and supervisors as well as stakeholders. Among these commitments that companies face, Izquierdo pointed out that at the beginning of 2025 the new CSRD 2025 sustainability reporting directive will come into force in Spain, which will join other legal requirements: sustainability report, integrated report, taxonomy, actions to reduce the footprint of carbon or wage gap… When establishing a sustainability strategy, the company must define compliance, manage and prevent risks and, from there, innovate in sustainability by going beyond compliance. This will give the organization more maturity and provide it with a competitive and reputational advantage. Izquierdo cited the well-known “SDG Compass guide” as an example, which outlines five steps to define a sustainability strategy: knowing the SDG objectives and compliance, defining priorities Based on an initial assessment of its impact, define the SDGs aligning them with those of the company, integrate them into the organization’s activity, and report progress in achieving those goals to people and stakeholders. To achieve all these goals, Izquierdo recalled the importance of having technological tools that help govern data: emissions, financial factors, etc.

A broad agenda of meetings in March

The first session of the Sustainability group completed the intense agenda of meetings of the AUSAPE Working Groups during the month of March, which included sessions on Human Resources, Finance, Licensing, Customer Experience and SAP S/4 HANA. To these must be added the participation of the association’s executives in the SAP BTP Customer Forum and the webinar “The role of women in the ICT world”, organized by Byte on the occasion of March 8 and in which Sandra Isart intervened, member of Women and Technology, Training and Employment of the association. The SAP BTP Customer Forum, held in Madrid on March 14, brought together clients and SAP experts to work on the role of the Business Technology Platform as a business operating platform and facilitator of innovation and digital transformation, developing new applications and implementing them quickly and safely. David Ruiz Badía, coordinator of the AUSAPE BTP Working Group, presented the first presentation of the day, in which he explained to the attendees the history, pillars and function of the association, and explained how the group that coordinates helps customers to better understand the BTP to get the most out of it, thanks to its technical sessions.

The AUSAPE Sustainability Working Group begins its activity with a session on the role of companies

The AUSAPE Human Resources Working Group organized a session with double content on March 8, presented by José Domingo Mouriz and Miguel Ángel Gámez, coordinators of the group in Barcelona and Madrid. The first part of the webinar corresponded to Óscar Velasco and Guido Olomudzski, managing partner and director of Transformation and Change at Olivia, a firm specialized in accompanying companies in their change processes, who showed the success story in the implementation and, above all , the adoption of Success Factors in the Argentine operator Telecom. In the second part, Rafael Schiavoni and the SAP HCM Development Team commented on the main legal changes in Personal Income Tax and Social Security since the beginning of the year. On the same day, the 8th, the Financial Working Group webinar was held, which was presented by Sara Antuñano, coordinator of the group, and registered a massive attendance: 196 people. Javier Hurtado, director of the Department of Financial and Tax Inspection, dedicated his presentation to the control decree of computer systems that produce documents with tax relevance, which must be certified by means of a responsible declaration from the manufacturer or developer as of July 1 Next year. José Borja Tomé, director of the AEAT Tax Information Department, for his part, commented on the progress towards mandatory electronic invoicing for B2B operations and the AEAT project to integrate the different electronic invoice exchange platforms. Migration scenarios a RISE with SAP, specifically the key aspects to consider when evaluating the cost of SAP licensing in a migration, were the focus of the Licensing Working Group session on March 9. Ricard García, coordinator of the group, presented a session in which Fernando Aguilar, Managing Partner of MatchPoint, and Francisco Hansen, COO of Voquz Labs, reviewed the main advantages and disadvantages of the RISE and S/4HANA on-premise models. Both recommended carrying out a functional analysis and a detailed economic analysis (total cost of ownership or TCO and business case) comparable for the different scenarios, before deciding on one or the other model. For its part, the Customer Experience Working Group prepared a session on March 14 at the SAP offices in Madrid, coordinated by Iciar Balza, group manager, and Paolo Duci, Solution Advisor at SAP Customer Experience. SAP experts explained the characteristics of ecommerce and marketplaces, as well as the processes that a company faces when entering the world of the marketplace, with examples such as WOW stores. The solutions offered by SAP in this area were also shown: SAP ONE Office, SAP Commerce Cloud and the integration of Mirakl as a management platform. Regarding the SAP S/4HANA Working Group, on March 23 it organized its first session of the year, presented by Gerard Pasán, coordinator of the group. The meeting began with a review of the market strategy for SAP S/4HANA in 2023, so that Javier Gimeno, Digital Transformation Senior Executive at SAP, would then review the main aspects of the “journey to RISE with SAP”: the contractual model, the packages included in the Private Edition of RISE (Signavio, BTP credits, Build…) and the services included in it. In addition, he presented a transition project to RISE with SAP in four steps: analyze the system with SAP Readiness Check, convert on-premise engines to cloud engines, validate the future landscape and, finally, require the SAP Technical Assessment.