Here’s my new overview of SAP, our customers, and technology explaining how SAP solutions can help you become an intelligent, sustainable enterprise — and full of real-world examples of organizations like yours who have already taken the plunge.
And if you’d rather not listen to all that, here’s a full transcript:
Enabling your success
Hello Everyone! My name is Timo Elliott and I’m an Innovation Evangelist for SAP. I’d like to give you an overview of SAP, our customers, our technology, and how we can help you become an intelligent, sustainable enterprise.
Our purpose
Our purpose is to help the world run better and improve people’s lives. Now… I know that might sound glib, but let’s face it… digital technologies are transforming entire industries and they’re at the heart of helping us all address some the world’s biggest challenges. Our focus is enabling you with the innovation you need to achieve your purpose.
Customer imperatives
These are the three biggest issues we see our customers facing worldwide.
First, business transformation in the cloud. Everybody I talk to is trying to develop new business models, unlock new growth, and innovate in order to stay ahead of the competition. We’d like to help. We’ve long been in the business of business transformation, not just technical migrations. We can help you be more flexible when faced with uncertain environments, increase automation through intelligent technologies, and adapt to new ways of selling. And we have over 400,000 customers across at least 25 different industries, so whatever business you’re in, we can help you with not just with technology, but also knowledge of how things should be done, with benchmarks and best practices.
Second, if you’ve been watching the news, you’ll have seen that we all need to work on more resilient supply chains. The SAP Business Network is the largest B2B network in the cloud. Think of it as the LinkedIn of the business-to-business world, a network of connected, intelligent enterprises across the whole supply chain so that everyone can respond to any disruptions in real time.
Third, we’d like to help you become a more sustainable enterprise. I really hope that’s something you already care about today. But even if you don’t, you almost certainly will in the future. Because that’s what today’s customers, employees, and investors are demanding, and governments have already promised to put in place all the sticks and the carrots to make it worth your while.
Because of our history, we help run many the most mission-critical and energy-intense processes around the world. Which means that we’re really well placed to help you do as much as possible for the planet with the biggest upsides, and least effort, cost, and disruption to your business. And to make that real, we have a portfolio of solutions to turn sustainability from a set of vague promises to a series of transparent and concrete steps, putting sustainability into the heart of your business processes.
Growing the top line and bottom line while being sustainable is not easy, but it is essential, so that you can achieve the sustainable outcomes the world needs. It’s a journey and one we want to be on with you.
Our vision
Here at SAP, we enable our customers to become Intelligent, Sustainable Enterprises by having connected business processes spanning the enterprise, including areas such as record to report, design to operate, hire to retire, order to cash, and many more.
But, we know business processes span outside the enterprise and that’s why we can also offer you the world’s largest business network, to connect everybody on the end-to-end supply chain.
And, most importantly, we bring our wisdom — from 50 years of running and measuring all facets of organization — to the challenge we all collectively face: creating a sustainable world together.
Customer examples
Let’s look at some examples of see what intelligent, sustainable enterprises, powered by SAP look like…
Roche is committed to driving ground-breaking scientific and technological advances that have the potential to transform the lives of patients worldwide. With a goal to optimize end-to-end processes and accelerate the organization’s digital journey, they looked for more efficient ways to execute all the manual and time-consuming financial forecasting process across their decentralized R&D business units.
With SAP, Roche used the predictive planning capabilities offered by the SAP Analytics Cloud solution, and implemented S/4HANA, allowing years of historical data to be leveraged to enable more accurate and harmonized forecasting in a matter of hours rather than weeks. Overall, they were able to accelerate transformation and start new ways of working — with more efficient collaboration between IT, business units, and finance centers of excellence.
Mercedes wanted to integrate business solutions so they could run business operations better while staying competitive. SAP S/4HANA cloud enabled financial controls that are driving efficiency across their global supply chain. SAP integration suite helps measure the teams’ performance against sustainable development goals, and experience management solutions like Qualtrics provide insights needed to deliver the ultimate fan experience.
Sephora was faced with the need to improve the employee and candidate experience within their organization. To do this, they wanted to replace disparate on-premise systems with a single, cloud-based Human Resources system to ultimately reduce the burden on their store managers as they onboard approximately 15,000 new employees each year.
To support this, they chose SAP Success Factors Solutions to digitalize HR processes and increase efficiency. This enabled store managers and in-store employees to focus on the business instead of administrative tasks, and improved the overall employee experience.
Vodafone wanted to increase their process automation and standardization to deliver an improved user experience and better data insights for their 100,000 employees. They transitioned to SAP S/4HANA, integrated with SAP solutions in the cloud, to establish a single version of truth across the business. Vodafone was able to fully integrate automation and intelligence into its end-to-end business processes.
With an Intelligent, Sustainable Enterprise approach, Organizations like yours, all around the globe, are becoming more agile and efficient businesses for their employees, customers, and partners.
Our solutions
We can enable you to become an intelligent, sustainable enterprises by bringing together our comprehensive portfolio of solutions and technology, to cover all your process needs.
It starts with our platform technology that provides the foundation of application integration, extensions including a robust ecosystem of solutions, and data, analytics, and artificial intelligence Then our industry-leading business applications work together, spanning front-end and back-end systems in a way that only SAP can provide. This all comes together to provide you with the end-to-end, industry-specific business processes you need to run as an intelligent, sustainable enterprise.
Customer example
We also know your business processes extend beyond your enterprise and into your entire supply chain. This is certainly true for Velux, a Danish company that provides an extensive line of premium skylights for customers around the world — their slogan is “bringing light to life” They needed to streamline and integrate supplier collaboration to fulfill their digital supply chain transformation. With SAP Ariba solutions and Ariba Network, Velux was able to digitize, integrate and simplify supplier collaboration, improve procurement efficiency, and reduce replanning and cancellations. They were also to reduce their supplier onboarding times by over 40%.
Our business network
With our consistent focus and investment over many years, SAP now has over five and a half million companies participating in our business network across 190 countries. We know that industries will be revolutionized when businesses turn into communities. That’s why we have created the world’s largest business network, converging procurement, logistics, asset and industry-specific networks. This enables the path toward a network economy across every industry.
And now let’s imagine for a second what we can achieve when we extend this power beyond just accelerated growth and productivity and into sustainability.
Sustainability examples
Let’s look at what a truly sustainable business approach looks like.
AllBirds prides themselves on being a comfortable and sustainable shoe brand. They have put sustainability at the core of all that they do. Every item from AllBirds is labeled with the carbon footprint of that specific product, bringing the full transparency all the way through the supply chain to the end customers.
To provide this level of transparency and accuracy, AllBirds adopted SAP’s ERP solution as their business foundation. With this solution they can also better manage their inventory and continually trim waste, moving towards a zero waste model. For AllBirds, sustainability is their differentiator and why their customers love them. SAP proudly enables their purpose.
Vestas leads the world in wind turbine manufacturing and servicing. We know the world needs to move rapidly to clean energy options and Vestas is helping on this mission. To scale quality, sustainability, and efficient supplier collaboration, they turned to SAP procurement and business network solutions.
Vestas, like many companies, wants to measure every aspect of their carbon footprint, so again they turned to SAP to share real-time data and insights with suppliers and build a comprehensive sustainability dashboard to run their business more effectively.
Create a sustainable world together
Today, SAP solutions are managing the most mission-critical economic, social, and environmental data spanning businesses and organizations across the globe. This provides us a unique opportunity to help you bring sustainability into the core of your business, rather than as a separate initiative or approach.
From our ERP and business applications to our sustainability-specific solutions, SAP has a comprehensive approach to helping you drive sustainable practices inside your organization and across the entire value chain. Together, we aspire to enable every organization to achieve zero emissions, zero waste, and zero inequality.
Trusted by customers
Speaking of our customers, we are incredibly proud to be trusted by 92% of the Forbes Global 2000 Companies to run their most mission critical systems. We know the privilege and the opportunity for SAP to run at the heart of so many enterprises across the globe and in every industry. Ultimately, our goal is to enable you you be successful, and helping you get to a cloud model across you business applications is a big part of that.
Global partners
Another big aspect of why we can help you be successful is our more than 20,000 partners who are helping our customers transform and adopt cloud technology. We have partners standing ready to help you across the globe.
Industry leadership
And we’re fortunate to be recognized as a leader by the analyst community in every category we serve including enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, procurement, Human capital management, customer relationship management and analytics – all because we are uniquely equipped to support true business transformation through our technology.
Sustainability leadership
Finally, we are very proud to have earned sustainability leadership across multiple benchmarks for over a decade. For example, we have been the #1 software company in the Dow Jones sustainability index for many years in a row. And, we have set a stake in the ground to become net zero by 2023. We have been on our own sustainability journey for over a decade and it has become a core business priority for SAP.
RISE with SAP
We’d like to help you on your unique business innovation journey. And that’s what RISE with SAP is all about. It brings together the best of SAP and our ecosystem on your behalf.
RISE with SAP offers a cloud ERP for literally every business need, coupled with industry-next practices and business process intelligence. And all of this is delivered as a trusted partnership with you, to help drive business innovation together, helping you become an intelligent, sustainable enterprise.
Thank you!
For more information, please visit sap.com, and I wish you the very best of luck with your business transformation projects. Goodbye!