SAP Business ByDesign is a cloud ERP for mid-sized companies and for the subsidiaries of larger groups. It covers financials, procurement, supply chain, project management, customer service and human resources in one suite. Project-based firms, engineering services and fast-growing companies use it to run several legal entities without a heavy IT team. The data is broad, but finding an answer can still take many work centres and saved queries.
Agentic CMMS links ByDesign with the agents your staff open every day. A project manager, a buyer or a finance lead asks Claude or ChatGPT a question and gets the answer from live ByDesign data. They do not need to know which work centre or report holds it. Finance gets fewer ad hoc report requests, and the people on site get their answer while the question still matters.
What your AI agent can do with SAP Business ByDesign
- Check project health. "Which of our customer projects are over budget on hours this month?" The agent compares planned and actual effort per project.
- Follow a purchase order. "Has the supplier confirmed the delivery date for our spare drive motors?"
- Review service tickets. "Show open service tickets for the HVAC units we installed at Rowan Park, with their priority."
- Read supplier invoices. "Which supplier invoices are on hold, and why?"
- Compare entities. "How do open purchase orders compare between our UK and Dutch companies this quarter?"
- Look up a product. "What is the stock of part 88-114 in each site, and what is already reserved?"
- Record a project update. "Add a task to the Harbourside fit-out project for the second commissioning visit." With write access, the agent adds the task to the plan.
- Summarise receivables. "Which customers in the services business owe more than 60 days?"
SAP Business ByDesign with your other systems
ByDesign often sits beside specialist tools. Connect them and one request covers all of them:
- Check a subsidiary's numbers in ByDesign against the group view in SAP S/4HANA before month-end.
- Match an opportunity in Salesforce with the ByDesign project it turned into, and compare the sold and actual hours.
- Combine maintenance jobs from eMaint with ByDesign supplier invoices to see what a building contract really costs.
- Find the signed handover documents in Google Drive for a project that is about to close in ByDesign.
Made for project and service businesses
Many ByDesign customers sell time and expertise, so the useful questions are about hours, milestones and margins. An agent answers these quickly and lets your project leads spend less time in reports. Project leads approve their own agents one by one, and owners and admins grant each tool only to the roles that need it, so cost rates stay with the people who should see them. The activity log holds a complete trail.