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In a world where sustainability has become the new norm, technology is a key driving force for innovative businesses. Today, companies are looking for sustainable ways to reinvent the entire ecosystem of customers, suppliers, contract manufacturers, logistics service providers, and partners to support their supply chains from product design to operation.

Let’s look at last year’s SAP Innovation Awards (SIA2022) winner cases to see how future-minded companies are harnessing cloud technologies to create economic, social, and environmental impacts to improve people’s lives.

Improve decision-making with real-time planning

The 50th Anniversary Legend of the SIA2022 program, Freudenberg Home and Cleaning Solutions GmbH (FHCS), used different planning approaches and sources, which made it difficult to get a consolidated enterprise-wide view.

FHCS integrated its landscape built on SAP ERP and SAP Business Warehouse with specialized forecasting in SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP). Having a single, centralized source of data enabled the company to generate simulations, planning, and reporting solutions based on SAP Analytics Cloud. It now takes FHCS only two days to create an initial top-down production plan. By standardizing forecasting processes across its consumer products division, Freudenberg achieved 10x faster planning despite larger data volumes and greater granularity.

Agile decision-making is key in volatile business environments. The process involves several factors that create complications. That’s why having a closed-loop planning process based on a single source is essential for companies to plan not only values but also volumes at any level of detail, which helps them avoid discrepancies between financial and operational plans.

Utilize machine learning and artificial intelligence for sustainable logistics

As more and more companies step into the sustainability game, ensuring sustainable logistics processes is now less of a trend and more of a necessity. Companies that realized the importance of moving beyond financial measures have been using artificial intelligence and machine learning for having full visibility into the supply chain operations.

Arpa Industriale, the SIA2022 building products industry social catalyst award winner, needed to respond to explosive growth in demand. The company was looking for a way to optimize and stabilize that production process while meeting ambitious targets for renewable energy use and reduction of waste and resource consumption.

The Italian manufacturer connected all vehicles in the factory warehouse in real time to work autonomously 24/7 with the goal of loading and reloading bar-coded rolls of raw materials. The sales orders in the system automatically update SAP Extended Warehouse Management, SAP Manufacturing Execution, and SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence for raw material provisioning and production-line scheduling.

With real-time data and machine-learning algorithms analyzing every millisecond of their daily operations, the company reduced energy and water consumption by 80%. By using scrap monitoring dashboards in manufacturing operations, Arpa reduced scrap waste by 96% and saved €750,000 in the first year.

Synchronize physical and digital worlds in Metaverse

Imagine a digital world independent of physical conditions in which you can provide real-time information and a collaborative working environment for employees, business partners, and customers all around the world regardless of distance and physical barriers.

Automotive industry leader award owner Martur Fompak created a metaverse that synchronizes a convergence of the physical and digital worlds. The Turkish car manufacturer created digital twins of 45 robotic welding cells and integrated them into the virtual environment to monitor product and process parameters and calculate real-time carbon emission and energy consumption. The digital twins are implemented using two-way IoT connections with the SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence and SAP Manufacturing Execution platform and synchronized with the physical world.

By running real-time analytics, Martur Fompak reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 12%.

Generate renewable energy with predictive maintenance

As one of the most eco-friendly energy sources, solar panels are the cleanest and most abundant renewable energy source that helps companies save time and cost to reach net-zero emission goals.

ENGIE, the utility industry leader and winner of SIA2022, has moved to renewable energy with predictive maintenance in solar farms. The French energy giant utilized 7,600 solar panels in the scope of the digital twin project for maintenance management. This allowed the ENGIE subsidiary in Chile to get an insightful combination of data for optimizing maintenance activities under a cost-benefit evaluation. Generated alerts were 100% reliable, which helped ENGIE reduce the overall cost by 45% for the maintenance of solar panels and inverters.

Focus on end-to-end digitization, not on the problem

Even though companies started their digitization journey a long time ago they can end up with fragmented systems that hinder them to extract meaningful data. Focusing only on the problem area or one aspect may not be the most substantial solution when it comes to digitization.

SIA2022 transformation champion category winner, Fulton County Schools (FCS), is the fourth largest school system in Georgia, with more than 17,600 employees. The school’s existing ERP was more than 12 years old. In addition, the asset management was handled via a third-party solution and not integrated with SAP. Moreover, the system required business users to perform complex manual tasks in multiple disparate systems which increased the risk of human error.

With SAP S/4HANA, FCS created the foundation for a centralized asset data repository, work order management, and equipment tracking to increase overall equipment effectiveness, reliability, and audibility. And with SAP Intelligent Asset Management, the school could identify items that it needed to order and capture while having insights into on-hand assets.

By focusing on transforming the entire organization, FCS is now able to proactively make decisions based on real-time actionable data. This enabled FCS to achieve 52% more accuracy and insights into invoices related to vendors and suppliers while increasing real-time reporting and analytics by 23%.

Discover how future-oriented business leaders embed sustainability within operations to accelerate advancements in both sustainability and operational outcomes: IDC Spotlight: Integrated Supply Chain Planning.

Cloud Computing

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Live shopping is one of the most exciting retail experiences in a long time. As shoppers become increasingly eager to buy via live shopping on social platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, retailers face new challenges: How to capture the shoppers’ attention on social media when the urge to buy hits? How can retailers create seamlessly interactive and immersive experiences that prompt consumers to hit the “buy button” during the live stream?

While retailers see the opportunity to pounce on this new trend, the hurdles they face are immense:

Connecting social commerce touchpoints like TikTok and Instagram, as well as built-in chat, video and voice functions, to commerce experiences is a must for seamless omnichannel experiences. Still, it’s not always easy to deploy new features and channels in their current commerce platform.Autoscaling traffic peaks from the live shopping experience is necessary, so consumers don’t face slowdowns or crashes when buying a product. When shoppers see a 404 error page, they’re not likely to come back. Unfortunately, most retailers still face scalability problems during sudden traffic spikes. Experimenting with new touchpoints enables brands and retailers to be ahead of changing customer demands now and in the future. Yet, experimentation is challenging to achieve in today’s IT environment.

These challenges stem from the rigid and monolithic nature of commerce platforms most retailers and brands still use today. These solutions, built for the desktop eCommerce era, lack the flexibility and scalability needed for spontaneous and high-volume sales powered by live shopping.

Flexible, scalable, agile: modern commerce starts with MACH

What’s the alternative for retailers looking at live shopping and beyond? As customer demands and market conditions change quickly, retailers and brands must move faster to capitalise on new ways to sell, such as omnichannel commerce, digital clienteling and personalisation. This means adapting customer experiences on the fly by adding new touchpoints, products, features, locales, currencies and every aspect of commerce without hassle.

This maximum flexibility and scalability philosophy is powered by the principles of MACH (Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native and Headless). In a nutshell, MACH-based architecture breaks down functionalities — such as integrating Instagram as a commerce channel — into modular pieces that can be easily customized, deployed, scaled and managed over time. In contrast to all-in-one legacy platforms, retailers using MACH can experiment, scale, change and adapt any functions at any time without disrupting their commerce backend or customer-facing storefronts. As 81% and 88% of adults under 55 years of age in Australia and New Zealand respectively shop online, and nine in 10 retail dollars spent offline during Australian peak season were influenced by digital, retailers are urged to rethink their digital commerce infrastructure to succeed in this new landscape.

For example, the Canadian menswear retail chain, Harry Rosen, implemented digital clienteling that sparked online traffic peaks. With MACH, the company had 0% downtime even as page views per session increased by 150%, coping with a three-fold increase in online sales without disruption.

Australian retail giant Kmart opted for MACH-based infrastructure to elevate personalisation and product categorisation, as well as autoscaling capabilities. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Kmart handled three times the online volume compared to pre-pandemic levels, and still, their eCommerce infrastructure was twice as fast. The company doubled the conversion rate and, just as importantly, operated at a third of its previous infrastructure costs.

Lastly, fashion retailer Express saw online traffic spikes that were three times higher than the busiest hour of Black Friday after a sales promotion went viral. Thanks to MACH, the company could avoid downtime and slowdowns to its webshop, fully capitalising on the sudden surge in sales.

Many retailers are shifting to MACH-based platforms to cope with traffic spikes from digital shopping. With modern commerce, retailers can add new touchpoints and experiment with new ways of reaching customers without constraints to the commerce infrastructure. 

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