My new book is now available to buy here in print version, and for pre-order in the Kindle version (will be released on Friday). As with my earlier books, I am excerpting roughly 10% of the 400 page book in a series of posts on my two blogs.
Chapter 3 contains 5 examples of customers doing stuff with SAP that made me go “You did what?!” Companies are reversing decisions and going back to SAP. Others are looking at SAP not just for out-of-the-box ERP solutions, and several of them did not fit SAP’s historical industry or business process strengths.
Costco
"To grapple with the wastage issue, the company launched a ML pilot at one of their San Jose, CA, stores, focused on the bakery division where wastage was an especially serious problem. Starting at 5 a.m., employees would enter damaged, destroyed and on-hand items on a tablet, and SAP generated a production run for them."
" As it gets developed even further, we should be able to factor a multi-vendor mailer in three weeks that we didn’t have last year. The system should tell us whether we’re going to increase warehouse or build traffic. And if we increase traffic, we’re going to sell more of this, this and this — because historically, that’s what happened. Then we can develop a good game plan; we can bring staff in for the appropriate hours, and we can make sure we produce the right items."
Pregis
"My team has deep SAP experience, but some of us have memories of SAP from two decades ago when implementations took years instead of weeks or months. SAP has worked with us to stand up a prototype that was basically full-functioning, connecting the Leonardo platform to our field services system, our HANA database and the SAP Analytics Cloud. They did it in three weeks!"
Rainforest Connection
"White’s group takes donated smartphones, surrounds them with seven solar panels (also recycled from industrial by-products), each of which has three photovoltaic strips. The panels power the phones even when hung on tall trees in the low sunlight of dense forests. The devices function as acoustic monitoring devices. They use a simple application that analyzes the live audio stream from the mobile device and isolates the sound of a chainsaw or gunshot from other noises."
Louisiana-Pacific
"The IBP early adopter input has really come through SAP. I’ve been very fortunate to become involved with a focus group of about 30 companies. Through that group, we’ve been able to see, learn, discuss, and understand what each of our companies is doing. I have called specific participants to talk through various topics or decisions. That’s proven invaluable to us and our implementation efforts. We were an early adopter of IBP based on how and when we implemented S&OP, Supply, IO and Demand in a combined solution. But, there are other companies that are far larger than us that have already crossed the bridge on some of the, “How do you scale?” questions."
" The customers showcased exhibit a remarkable diversity in industries and use cases. They represent a very different SAP than I have seen over the last 30 years. It is an SAP which is not just pitching out-of-the-box ERP or HANA."
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