My new book is now available to buy here in print version, and in the Kindle eBook version. As with my earlier books, I am excerpting roughly 10% of the 400 page book in a series of posts on my two blogs.
In Chapter 5, I introduced a "customer bell curve which approximates the types of customer behavior we saw in researching this book."
" One of the most interesting developments in the SAP customer base is the emergence of a breed of Risk-Takers who are using Leonardo tools, SCP and S/4 in the public cloud. While many of their projects are pilots and one-offs, these customers are showing up in industries and conducting business processes that are not traditional SAP strongholds. We profiled some of these customers in Ch. 3, and include more such customers in this segment."
Here are excerpts from 4 of the 10 case studies in the chapter
Queensland OSR, Australia
Simon McKee and Katherine Love about many of the 46 digital initiatives:
"McKee is particularly excited about the ML projects. One of the key business challenges that OSR faces is the late payment of taxation."
'When OSR was looking to solve this challenge, they first needed to understand the factors that led some some taxpayers to pay on time, whilst others did not and gain better insights into the interventions that work versus those that are less effective.
In 2017, OSR ran an ML proof of concept with SAP teams from Queensland Innovation Centre and Palo Alto, CA. Despite what McKee described as limited internal sourced and not necessarily clean data, the machine predicted with 72% accuracy when land taxpayers would likely default on their payment obligations. McKee anticipates that with more internal and external sources and cleaner data they’ll be able to get that number much higher, aspirationally closer to 100%.
The ML proof of concept highlighted to OSR two groups of taxpayers that do not meet their obligations. The first group has no intention of paying. Predictive technology can help with that group by sending out proactive notifications and campaigns to repeat offenders to encourage them to become compliant. The second group wants to pay, but is unable to do so for a variety of reasons. There is plenty of predictive work that can be done with this group, including reaching out to them with better payment terms or relief in case of natural disasters.'"
Bombardier
Global CIO E. Jeffrey Hutchinson about the massive transformation at this aerospace and train manufacturer:
"Hutchinson describes the company’s approach to becoming an intelligent enterprise — but he makes a clear distinction between SAP’s marketing and Bombardier’s vision."
'We’ve got to be faster, more agile, and we’ve got to make better data-driven business decisions. We have to go from where we are today to becoming an intelligent enterprise. But it’s not the definition that SAP will pitch for an intelligent enterprise, because we see SAP as an enabler to it, as a piece of it. Most companies would call what we are doing a digital transformation program. We purposely don’t use the words “digital transformation.” We have a very narrow definition of the word “digital.” To us, the term is way overused. We refer to digital as taking existing customer-facing processes and creating new products or services. Everything else is automation we should have done 10 years ago.'"
"Most early adopters of S/4 are focused on HQ functions. Yes, they need to standardize their financial requirements, but Bombardier is tackling operational areas first. And there, it is confident enough to implement S/4 out of the box, with limited bolt-on and/or customization. In addition, given the large size of the company, the global dimensions of the program and the innovative licensing and deployment model, Bombardier is in the Risk-Taker segment of our bell curve of SAP customers."
GEBHARDT
Stephan Riemensperger at GEBHARDT Fördertechnik GmbH which builds conveyor systems:
"We looked at the market and compared SAP Leonardo to Siemens MindSphere, Microsoft Azure and some open-source solutions. We have had a very good partnership with SAP for a very long time. We have successfully implemented a number of other SAP solutions. The Leonardo IoT solution and roadmap SAP showed us was powerful and fit into our plans. Finally, the SAP headquarters in Walldorf is very close to ours in Sinsheim — only 20 kilometers away. So, for all these reasons, we decided to go with Leonardo IoT."
"We developed a proof of concept in March 2018 with SAP and demoed it at LogiMAT, the International Trade Fair for Intralogistics Solutions and Process Management in Stuttgart. We branded it Galileo IOT and this YouTube video shows all the scenarios. .. We showed condition monitoring in an application that we built ourselves and continue to improve. The foundation was the IoT services and the application enablement was on the SCP....We also developed our own sensor that tracks various metrics.... We created various predictive maintenance scenarios. This required different algorithms and thresholds in the time-series data. If that exceeded a maximum or minimum value, it created a service ticket in our CRM system. It’s a trigger. We can do other tasks with triggers, but in our scenario, we created a service ticket. That starts a process where a service technician goes to the customer site and helps them with the problem.... We created an augmented reality scenario using HoloLens [Microsoft’s mixed reality glasses]. You wear the glasses, go to our equipment and scan the barcode with the glasses. You can see different controls for attributes like vibration and speed. We also transfer the data from the time series database to the HoloLens glasses — so that becomes the single source of truth.'
"We use the SAP AIN as a customer portal. Our aim is that every customer who buys a conveyor system from GEBHARDT will have access to AIN where they will find manuals, data sheets, maintenance manuals and short animations for changing differ- ent components. We have a nice solution from SAP called 3D Visual Enterprise where we use the CAD model. We can show animations on how to change special parts in this CAD model."
Endeavour Energy
Paul Coetser on the projects at a regulated distributor in Australia which is also pivoting from a "government mindset to a privately owned mindset":
""Our scope includes S/4, Ariba, Concur, SuccessFactors LMS, OpenText, Enable Now, BW and EAM. In terms of the customer-facing area, we have IS-Utility and the Hybris functionality. We’re also using ClickSoftware, a SAP partner, for the field force and work scheduling. We decided not to go with certain aspects of SAP suite, like Fieldglass. We have deprecated some of the Ariba capabilities because we could not see the value proposition to the business. We are using SCP. We’ve got SAP PO, the pro- cess orchestration engine. S/4 will be in a private cloud on Azure. We will own the solution and the extension framework....
This entire SAP footprint is only one of the pillars that we’re busy with. In total, we have about 150 projects."
Given the complexity of the transformation, Endeavour Energy was recognized as the Best Enterprise & IT Architecture in the Utility Industry at the New York ICMG Conference in November 2018. Bettenay and Coetser were also recognized with awards in other categories. Bettenay commented, “[There’s] still a lot of work to go to success- fully deliver but a great way to end the year and a ringing endorsement on the strategy and architecture that we have put in place.”'
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