ERP Strategy and Planning

The ERP Today Awards 2025 Playbook

Get prepared for the ERP Today Awards 2026! A practical story framework for finding, shaping, and nominating transformation work that deserves recognition in 2026. Download our awards playbook to get nomination-ready for the ERP Today Awards 2026.

SAP AI budget discipline for hiring and travel

After SAP’s Leadership Reorg, AI Overhaul Places New Scrutiny on Hiring and Travel

SAP is reallocating its operating budget by tightening hiring, limiting travel, and reviewing supplier spending to prioritize investments in AI capabilities and technologies, signaling a strategic shift towards enhancing its AI-driven products and services while managing operational costs.

ERP Strategy and Planning

Winding Down Support: The Other 2027 Deadline ERP Teams Can’t Afford to Miss

SAP ECC is not the only 2027 deadline ERP teams need to manage. SAP Solution Manager—the tool most SAP organizations rely on for change control, ITSM, monitoring, and audit trails—is also winding down its support in 2027. With SAP Cloud ALM not offering a direct like-for-like replacement for SolMan's ChaRM functionality in on-premise scenarios, ERP teams face a hidden compliance and governance gap that requires urgent planning.

Enterprise AI sprawl and invisible AI governance concept

ERP Strategy and Planning

Workday Says AI Agents Belong Closer to the Systems They Could Break

Workday is drawing a clear line in the enterprise AI agent debate: for high-stakes workflows in HR, payroll, and finance, the safest place for AI inference and orchestration is inside the system of record, not on neutral third-party platforms. Through its controlled openness model—open APIs and MCP for developers, proprietary governance within Workday—the company argues that context, business logic, and security controls are a competitive moat that cannot be safely externalized.

Financial Management

BlackLine Is Giving CFOs a Control Room for Finance AI

BlackLine’s Finance Control Console preview turns its Agentic Financial Operations Platform into a control room for AI agents, giving CFOs visibility, policy enforcement, and audit‑ready evidence across record‑to‑report, invoice‑to‑cash, and other finance workflows.

ERP AI readiness gap after S/4HANA migration - digital brain with question mark on enterprise data dashboard

Analytics and AI

ERP AI Readiness FAQ: Why SAP S/4HANA Migration Alone Will Not Get You There

Most ERP teams treat S/4HANA go-live as the finish line for transformation—but it is only the starting line for AI readiness. This FAQ explores why migration alone is not enough, what data and cloud foundations are missing, and how ERP leaders can build the architecture required to move AI from pilot to production.

INPEX energy transformation SAP Cloud ERP Private modernization for energy transition

Cloud Platform and Technology

INPEX Rebuilds Its SAP Core for a More Volatile Energy Market

Japanese energy company INPEX has gone live on SAP Cloud ERP Private, replacing its 2008-era IBOS system as part of INPEX Vision 2035—a strategy to build a more agile, data-driven management foundation capable of supporting energy transition into hydrogen, ammonia, carbon capture, and renewables. Partnering with ABeam Consulting and using a fit-to-standard SAP approach, INPEX is laying the groundwork for AI-driven operational efficiency across its global operations.

ERP Strategy and Planning

ERP Replace: A Structured Path to Modern ERP

This solution brief presents ERP Replace as a structured way to move from legacy ERP to a modern, cloud-based platform, focusing on speed, risk reduction, and predictable outcomes. It explains how preconfigured baselines, implementation accelerators, and stage-gated governance help organisations manage data, processes, and change more effectively during ERP replacement programmes

ERP Strategy and Planning

ERP Unlocked: De-Risking and Accelerating Transformation

This article explores how ERP leaders can rethink transformation to both de-risk delivery and accelerate time to value, rather than treating ERP as a slow, high-stakes rebuild. It outlines practical ways to use preconfigured industry baselines, data and integration accelerators, and stage-gated governance so decisions are transparent, auditable, and tied directly to business outcomes.

ERP Strategy and Planning

WEINIG Group Unifies Global ERP on Dynamics 365

WEINIG Group, a leading manufacturer in the wood processing industry, partnered with Hitachi Solutions to consolidate a highly decentralised ERP landscape into one global Microsoft Dynamics 365 solution hosted on Azure. By moving from more than 80 separate ERP systems to a unified platform, WEINIG gained shared financial services, better inventory visibility, and common processes and data to support informed decision-making across its international operations

ERP Strategy and Planning

Marabu Builds a Global ERP and CRM Platform on Dynamics 365

Marabu, a leading manufacturer of printing and hobby inks, partnered with Hitachi Solutions to replace fragmented legacy systems with a unified Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform for ERP and CRM. Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, Finance, and Supply Chain are being rolled out across multiple countries, harmonising processes, improving data quality, and creating a scalable foundation for Marabu’s international growth.

ERP Strategy and Planning

Why Unit4 Keeps Showing Up on the ERP Shortlist

Unit4’s latest ERPx moves show why the vendor keeps appearing in shortlists for service-centric organizations. Success4U, DataHub, and FIX sharpen its pitch around deployment predictability, governed analytics, and ERP built for people- and project-driven operations.

Analytics and AI

Gatekeeping Enterprise AI? Workday Redraws the Build-vs-Buy Line for AI Agents

Workday’s DevCon 2026 announcements show how enterprise AI agent strategy is moving beyond build-versus-buy and toward governed access to HR, finance, business process, and audit controls.

Analytics and AI

ERP’s AI Skills Gap Is Becoming the Real Transformation Bottleneck

ERP vendors like SAP are shipping AI features faster than teams can absorb them. The SAP AI skills gap—with 91% of organizations using AI but only 17% embedding it in core workflows—is now the defining bottleneck to real ERP transformation.

ERP Strategy and Planning

Enabling The Royal Mint’s Sustainable Precious Metals Programme with Dynamics 365

The Royal Mint partnered with Hitachi Solutions to design and implement a new cloud-based Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management platform to power its world-first Sustainable Precious Metals programme. The ERP solution tracks e-waste from intake through processing to finished products, supporting circular economy goals while improving agility, data management, and security.

ERP Strategy and Planning

Rotork Transforms Global ERP and Customer Operations with Microsoft Dynamics 365

Hitachi Solutions has been recognised as the 2025 Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance Partner of the Year, highlighting its leadership in delivering innovative ERP and finance transformations on the Microsoft cloud. This recognition showcases the company’s proven expertise in helping customers modernise financial operations, optimise business performance, and realise greater value from Dynamics 365 Finance.

ERP Strategy and Planning

Hitachi Solutions Named 2025 Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance Partner of the Year

Analytics and AI

Nokia’s ERP Overhaul Shows Why AI Ambitions Are Moving to the Hyperscaler Layer

Nokia has signed a multi-year RISE with SAP agreement to consolidate multiple ERP systems into a unified SAP S/4HANA landscape hosted on Microsoft Azure, using clean-core principles and SAP's transformation methodology to prepare its global business backbone for embedded AI, operational resilience, and continuous cloud innovation.

AI process mining Enterprise AI context layer

Analytics and AI

Celonis Acquires Ikigai, Launches Context Model to Give AI Agents Operational Intelligence

Celonis’ Context Model and Ikigai Labs acquisition position process intelligence as a context layer for enterprise AI agents that need to understand real workflows before they recommend or act.

ERP Strategy and Planning

SAP Announced Product Leadership Reorganizations Around AI and the Autonomous Suite

SAP is reorganizing product and engineering leadership around the SAP Business AI Platform and Autonomous Suite—a structural shift that puts AI delivery accountability at the center of its cloud ERP roadmap and signals the end of siloed product development.

Supply Chain Management

IFS Is Building the Operations Layer Around Industrial AI

IFS’s Softeon acquisition is only one part of a broader push to connect warehouse execution, logistics optimization, MRO, asset management, and ERP around Industrial AI.

Manufacturing Systems and Automation

Why Food ERP Still Needs More Than Generic Dynamics 365

Aptean’s food and beverage ERP footprint on Microsoft Dynamics 365 shows why food, beverage, fresh, and agribusiness companies still need vertical ERP logic for traceability, quality, production, pricing, and compliance.

Analytics and AI

GenAI in ERP Needs a Smaller Starting Point and a Harder Business Proposition

Enterprise leaders, while ambitious in their generative AI strategies, face a significant gap between their AI aspirations and actual production adoption, as illustrated by Mukesh Kumar's insights on targeted automation in ERP systems addressing specific, high-impact problems.

Top ERP Today stories and H1 2026 enterprise technology trends across AI, cloud, SAP, robotics, and infrastructure

ERP Strategy and Planning

10 Stories That Defined Enterprise Tech in H1 2026 and What They Say About the ERP Market

ERP Today’s most-read stories in the first half of 2026 reveal a market moving from AI enthusiasm into harder questions about pricing, governance, infrastructure, cloud costs, and operational execution.

Secure enterprise corridor representing Microsoft Power Platform governance and AI agent access

Governance, Risk, and Compliance

Microsoft Power Platform Narrows the Access Gap for ERP Agents

Microsoft's June 2026 Power Platform updates introduce Advanced Connector Policies that govern AI agent access to SAP systems at the action and MCP server level. ERP leaders must understand what the new controls mean for low-code automation, connector visibility, and enterprise AI compliance.

Application Development and Integration

Can AI Break the ERP Change-Order Cycle? Tessera Labs Just Raised $60M to Try

Tessera Labs’ $60 million funding round puts a spotlight on AI-native ERP modernization, raising a new question for CIOs: how much of the migration, data, code, and documentation work that once required large consulting teams can now be automated without weakening governance?

ERP Strategy and Planning

IHH Healthcare System Standardization Shows the Hard Part of a Multi-Country ERP Transformation

IHH Healthcare has selected Infosys for a multi-year, enterprise-wide ERP transformation using the Infosys Topaz AI-first platform to standardize business processes across Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore, covering finance, procurement, supply chain, HCM, and enterprise performance management.

Cloud Platform and Technology

Ontario Health Centre Shows Why Nonprofits Are Outgrowing Legacy ERP

An Ontario Community Health Centre migrated from Sage 300 to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central with Dynamics Square Canada, automating vendor invoice capture and employee expense management to free a lean two-person finance team from manual workarounds and improve financial visibility across locations.

Human Capital Management

Oracle Takes On the Federal Government’s HR Patchwork

The US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has awarded Oracle a $395.8 million Federal HRIT Modernization contract to deliver the federal government's first government-wide HR platform using Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM, designed to replace more than 100 separate agency systems and consolidate workforce management for 2 million civilian employees.

Enterprise Architecture

Who Governs AI Agents When Workflows Cross Platforms?

As AI agents expand across ERP, cloud, and workflow platforms, enterprise leaders face a critical governance challenge: who owns accountability when data, models, and audit trails are fragmented across multiple systems. This analysis explores the control plane problem and what ERP teams must do to prevent agent sprawl.