SAP has shed a little more light on the ongoing workforce transformation taking place within the company.
As announced in January, SAP plans to eradicate 8,000 roles but retrain many impacted employees and offer them new, AI-centric posts within the business.
Yet, as CX Today reported earlier this month, SAP’s European Workers Council accused the enterprise tech juggernaut of using the "transformation" as a guise for layoffs.
Indeed, in an internal email – first publicized by the German newspaper Handelsblatt – the employee reps council stated:
“[SAP appears to have made decisions] solely or primarily based on costs, and not on the actual value that existing employees, teams, and locations represent for our customers.”
Moreover, they voiced dissatisfaction with SAP’s internal communication regarding the move.
Indeed, the Workers Council claimed that leaders had not justified its business logic or provided precise information about the inefficiencies it strives to push past.
However, during an earnings call on Monday, Christian Klein, CEO of SAP, shared an update on the progress of SAP’s workforce transformation program.
Under questioning from business analysts, he said:
We have identified the job profiles which we either reskill or actually want to reduce also via restructuring.
Already, those reductions have started, with 100 employees reportedly fired in SAP’s Montreal office in Montreal last week – in a move linked to the restructuring.
Yet, there is a long way to go, with SAP accruing €2.2BN for the restructure and, according to Dominik Asam, CFO of SAP: "Very little if anything has been paid already in Q1."
The Next Stage of SAP’s Transformation
After evaluating the future of roles across the company, Klein aims to usher in the next stage of the transformation. He said:
"We bring all the data scientists [and] new capabilities on board across the platform, which we need to capture our future growth opportunity.
In doing so, Klein claims SAP is making "even better progress than expected," bringing in new AI talent and employees in "future-centered" areas. He continued:
