With so much to see at SAPPHIRE NOW, how do you ensure you see what’s most important to your industry? Of course there are ample sessions that you can attend about your industry, but if you miss the showcase demonstrations just outside the keynote area, you are missing the opportunity to see some of the most innovative end-to-end Industry-centric solutions at the event!
The presentations are visually captivating, delivered on five massive 360 degree pillars that connect to tell the story. The demonstrations focus on a subset of industry areas: Retail, Utilities, and Construction-Services, yet the concepts can be applied more broadly. You’ll find them rotating on an hourly basis throughout the day, so you should be able to fit in a stop to the showcase as part of your Wednesday or Thursday schedule.
Here are a few of today’s many highlights:
The Energy and Natural Resources panel entitled, "Reinvent How Business Is Done with Digital Technology" featured Gary Hayes from CenterPoint Energy, Mike Orr from Murphy Oil, and Michael Stoko from DuPont. The panel was moderated by SAP's Peter Maier. Mike Orr said the challenges in Oil and Gas are an opportunity to look at technology advancements. "With real-time information, we only fix the wells that are most profitable." Mike Stoko said outcome-based collaboration with their customers has changed the game from how they designed products just a few years ago. "There are 570 million farms around the world and 500 million are family-owned. To help improve yield, you need weather data, soil data, etc., combined with value-added services to improve their bottom line". Gary Hayes said the electric grid today is becoming the industrial Internet. Peter Maier summed up by emphasizing the importance of the digital core to these reimagined business processes.
The session entitled, “Design Your Strategy for Digital Transformation with SAP S/4HANA” was led by Dr. Wieland Schreiner from SAP. He proposed that the question is not about business-to-business or business-to-consumer anymore. Rather, the future will be consumer-to-business. In other words: businesses will be driven by the end customers. The entire focus of businesses will shift, improving the experience of the end consumers. Companies will increasingly target segments of one. Behaviors and characteristics of individuals will help companies learn in real time what they want and need.
In the real estate focused session called, “Reinvent the Value Creation Chain for Building Residential Real Estate,” the speaker discussed the challenges within real estate. Labor productivity has been shrinking continuously, and it is hard to differentiate your company in a project-led environment. So Swiss Property AG decided to run differently. They disrupted their business model completely. The idea was to apply lean principles [similar to those applied to the automotive industry] and become more agile. Secondly, they shifted to offering the full property lifecycle including development, building and management - something very unusual in this industry. How did they do it? They digitized everything from physical transaction to virtual ones by applying new technologies like artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, and virtual reality. It was actually S/4HANA that made all this possible. It reduced complexity, has a great UI with SAP Fiori, and most importantly, enabled Swiss Property AG run with live data in real time.
In an inspiring and engaging interactive session with Rockport called “Transforming and revitalizing the Rockport brand with SAP HANA” we heard from Charlene Higgins-Crawford, the IT Director. Rockport has some ambitious growth goals focusing on ecommerce, mens, and an international expansion. “Success" means doubling the business size by 2020. Rockport chose SAP because of SAP’s unique ability to offer equally strong solutions to both the Retail and Wholesale arms of their business. Rockport is adopting Fashion Management System (FMS), Customer Activity Repository (CAR), and HANA and plan to try out Fiori soon. Their BI view will be a custom view that goes on CAR itself. They are utilizing the entire suite of Business Objects with CAR and SMS that they expect to sit on Sybase IQ.
We look forward to seeing you tomorrow on the show floor and online on social media!
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