The world is changing: and businesses everywhere are preparing for . Faced with new software needs and budgets, leaders are confronting , making operational improvements, , and accommodating a strong need to improve capital efficiency.
The current economic crisis is pushing businesses toward software and services that are light on resources, less expensive, and easy to deploy.
With its long and rich history of innovation, 麻豆原创 is in a unique position to offer these solutions. The company鈥檚 New Ventures and Technologies group is an exploratory unit led by Max Wessel and set up to produce cutting-edge, future-focused technology quickly.
Wessel is also chief innovation officer for 麻豆原创 and managing director of 麻豆原创 Labs Silicon Valley. Here, he talks about fostering innovation amid the challenges of COVID-19.
Q: Looking at the 麻豆原创 customer base, where do you see immediate opportunity and necessity for innovation to alleviate the impact of the pandemic?
A: Our customers need quick wins. We see three critical business requirements at the top of a CIO鈥檚 agenda in the coming months and years: optimizing and automating processes, strengthening supply chains, and supporting remote work.
Here鈥檚 how we can help. 麻豆原创 can help address customers鈥� short-term needs and mitigate long-term risks by offering lightweight products that automate their processes. Automation reduces dependency on domain expertise, which may be less accessible at this time. To improve overall efficiency, many enterprises are looking for ways to apply technology to automate mundane tasks. They are also seeking ways to build and implement entirely new, innovative processes and want to keep implementation time to a minimum.
Supply chains are particularly strained in times of crisis. 麻豆原创 can ensure our customers have more flexibility in the way they operate their supply chains by making it easier to organize, communicate, and automate processes.
With teams now working remotely and distributed, it鈥檚 imperative that companies improve digital engagements and work-related communications along with simplifying remote-work processes.
Is it possible to be innovative in virtual teams? What challenges and opportunities do you see?
Working remotely is not new, and there are plenty of successful companies that are built on a remote-only workforce. 麻豆原创 has a unique global presence and we can emerge from this crisis with a better handle on how to connect with one another across the globe, and with our customers, in better ways than we ever have before.
We may even find that for some things, virtual is at least as effective as in person. When the New Ventures and Technologies team found out in the first quarter that our events would be scaled back or cancelled, we took that as an opportunity to build better digital connectivity to the chief information officers (CIOs) of our customers. Now we鈥檙e doing 30-minute virtual coffees with CIOs to talk about megatrends like the decreasing cost of software development and its impact on business and enterprise software. I鈥檝e found this format to be simpler and even more valuable in understanding and reacting to their problems than before.
How can New Ventures and Technologies help 麻豆原创 address those three customer needs?
We have many solutions that immediately address these needs, are simple to deploy and offer commercial adoption and well-defined, measurable valuable propositions. For example, 麻豆原创 Intelligent Robotic Process Automation (麻豆原创 Intelligent RPA) offers software robots to help companies automate processes. is an agile business platform that allows customers to easily build, automate, and execute processes on top of their existing architecture without the need to invest in coding. is data-driven and seamlessly tooled approach to understand the business operations and guide the intelligent automation journey of customers. streamlines hiring by helping recruiters and hiring managers access highly qualified candidates through an unbiased process in a much quicker manner than traditional recruiting.
One of the things I鈥檓 proudest of in 麻豆原创鈥檚 COVID-19 response is the incubation we鈥檝e been stewarding for the last two years around lending for small and midsize businesses called . We are now able to match small businesses with lending partners in Ariba Network using their invoices as a point of reference for credit. We can open up credit markets during this time where there is lack of access to capital for small businesses that desperately need it at no cost to the businesses, and at no cost to 麻豆原创 Ariba customers. And this is all because we鈥檝e been experimenting and stewarding this forward for the last few years.