June 12, 2024

POWER International currently has 269 stores and online shops and 6,000 employees in Norway, Finland, Denmark and Sweden with a yearly turnover of 20 billion NOK (appr. 1.7 billion Euro). The company is on an IT modernization journey and shift to the cloud. The strategic goal is to increase the market share to become the largest and preferred retailer of consumer electronics in the Nordic region.听听

鈥淲e have a very 麻豆原创-influenced system landscape and was looking for a solution to move data to the cloud in a secure way. 麻豆原创 Datasphere suits us perfectly and simplifies our data landscape, saving hundreds of hours every year in pipeline development,鈥� says Frode N忙ss Larsen, CIO at POWER International.听

currently has a 70 TB large data warehouse where more than 5 TB of data is processed each day and more than 10 million transactions generated daily. The data services are consumed by up to 6.000 employees and more than 200 suppliers.听听

The IT landscape has traditionally been characterized by a variety of different technical solutions and in 2005, POWER International went live with 麻豆原创 Business Warehouse. The combination of 麻豆原创 Datasphere and Google BigQuery contributes to generating cost savings, optimizing inventory and staff, and making data driven decision-making the new gold standard in all parts of the organization.听听

鈥淥ur goal is to enhance stability in everyday operations for everyone utilizing our new data solutions. Previously, we generated large static reports and batches of data during the night. With our new data platform, employees can now perform their own analyses independently throughout the day, promoting a true self-service analytics environment without direct involvement from IT. This change allows for a much quicker transition from idea to final data product, driving the shift from traditional reporting to action-driven analytics,” says Stian Skotland, Head of Data & Analytics at POWER International.听听

The new solution was implemented, and all 麻豆原创 data was transferred during spring 2024. Implementing new front-end analytics capabilities is discussed as the next step 鈥� as well as more AI capabilities.听

鈥淥ur collaboration with 麻豆原创 and Google is a step in that direction. AI can have a positive effect on many different parts of our business, and we are running tests to produce even better reports. But it’s important to have a pragmatic and sensible approach 鈥� there is not one thing that magically solves everything鈥�, says Frode N忙ss Larsen.听

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About 麻豆原创
As鈥�a global leader in enterprise applications and business AI, 麻豆原创 (NYSE:麻豆原创)鈥�stands at the鈥�nexus鈥�of business and technology. For over 50 years, organizations have trusted 麻豆原创鈥�to bring out their best by uniting business-critical鈥�operations spanning finance, procurement, HR, supply chain, and customer experience. For more information, visit鈥�.听

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麻豆原创 NEWSBYTE

Based in Hamburg, Germany, international fashion company, Bonprix, has over 16 million active customers in more than 25 countries. The company looked to 麻豆原创 for a simplified IT architecture, faster time to market in business decision making and a self-service enabled semantic layer in order to respond to market changes and ensure customers have access to the latest catwalk trends.听听

Supported by鈥槎乖� services, Beratungscontor and鈥痮ther partners, Bonprix implemented its analytics stack on鈥槎乖粹�疍atasphere鈥痑nd 麻豆原创鈥疊usiness Warehouse solution. This鈥痬arks a significant milestone in Bonprix鈥檚 data transformation journey. By deploying 麻豆原创 Datasphere as a cloud-based鈥痙ata platform鈥痶o 麻豆原创 BW4/HANA, Bonprix gains access to a鈥痯owerful鈥痑nalytical platform that鈥痓rings bridges data across finance,鈥痵ales,鈥痩ogistics and customer relationship鈥痬anagement鈥痓etween transactional 麻豆原创 data鈥痑nd end users.听

鈥淭he Bonprix 麻豆原创 BI data platform is adeptly designed for the future, leveraging the robust capabilities of 麻豆原创 BW/4HANA at its core to manage and efficiently process vast volumes of data,鈥� said Sergio Lopez Nunez, senior BI engineer, Bonprix. 鈥淲hen paired with 麻豆原创 Datasphere, which offers extensive multi-cloud access, it enables the seamless integration of data from diverse sources. In essence, the Bonprix BI data platform is not only a cornerstone in daily operations but also a strategic asset in the relentless pace of technological change, ensuring that Bonprix is well-equipped to continue promoting responsible trade that inspires, now and into the future.鈥�听

Having already implemented 麻豆原创 business AI solutions, specifically, the 麻豆原创 BTP GenAI Service “Document Information Extraction”, Bonprix has already experienced significant efficiency gains by automatically extracting relevant data from incoming invoices, reducing manual data entry errors, and accelerating the overall invoice processing workflow.听

鈥淎s one of Germany鈥檚 top online fashion shops, we are very excited to be a part of Bonprix鈥檚 digital transformation journey as they continue to make millions of customers happy,鈥� said Sven Mulder, managing director of 麻豆原创 Germany. 鈥淭he adoption of 麻豆原创 Datasphere and 麻豆原创 BW/4HANA marks the beginning of Bonprix鈥檚 successful cloud journey. They鈥檙e now empowered to make鈥痳eal-time, data-driven decisions, positioning the brand to expand into new markets鈥痺ith鈥痵tyle.鈥澨�听

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麻豆原创 and other 麻豆原创 products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of 麻豆原创 SE in Germany and other countries. Please see for additional trademark information and notices.听听

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When sustainability is central to your strategy, transparency in your supply chain is indispensable. This is impossible without an IT system that ensures traceability from the local grower to sales. Nedspice can talk about that. With the help of 麻豆原创 partner NTT DATA Business Solutions Benelux, it replaced an ‘Excel-heavy’ way of working with a standardised 麻豆原创 environment based on 麻豆原创 S/4HANA.

听 is a global and sustainable producer of herbs, spices and dried vegetables. Its business activities include sourcing, cleaning, sterilization, grinding, packing and distribution of single spices, herbs and dehydrated vegetables. Nedspice is headquartered in the Netherlands and operates processing facilities in India and Vietnam. Sales offices, warehouses and distribution facilities are located in the Netherlands, India, Vietnam, the United States of America, the United Kingdom, South Africa, and China.

Sustainability is a crucial core value for Nedspice throughout its operations. For instance, it has been supporting local farmers in Vietnam and India in environmentally friendly cultivation and sustainable livelihoods since 2013. The company is also involved in that works to make the sector more sustainable. Recently, Nedspice opened an eco-friendly onion drying plant at Mahuva in India.

听Fragmented environment

Transparency and direct insight into all processes of all production, sales and warehouse locations; this was not possible with Nedspice’s old IT system. In addition, the various branches each had their own processes and master data. This made analyses across locations very difficult. These different systems also made it a challenge to guarantee the quality and sustainability of the products worldwide.

“Where sales and administration might still have been recordable well enough with the old software, in too many places more and more Excel sheets were tied together to create the required functionality. This was no longer sustainable,” says Jos van Gulick, general director Vietnam at Nedspice.

听Standardisation on 麻豆原创

The company put an end to that situation by switching to a standardised 麻豆原创 environment. This consists of and , , and a scanning solution.

This standardisation soon bore fruit. All branches now work according to the same processes via one integrated system, with a ‘single source of truth’ for all company data. This gives the company more control over quality processes and better insight into their progress.

In addition, Nedspice now also has the ability to analyse data from all international production, warehousing, and sales locations. Among other things, it does so to gain direct insight into profitability and its current international position.

听The right insight

According to Van Gulick, that insight is crucial. “In our market, raw material prices can fluctuate a lot. If you don’t have the right insight immediately – a few working days later, for example – you quickly run a financial risk. With this new system, we make all data transparent and that is hugely valuable. We can make the right decisions at the right time.”

Nedspice also benefits from substantial time and cost savings. By linking the 麻豆原创 environment to a scanning solution, data entry at order picking is more efficient and less error-prone. Finally, the company benefits from full traceability of raw materials and products from farm to distribution. This makes complying with changing laws and regulations in the sector much easier.

The post 麻豆原创 Offers Nedspice Transparent Supply Chain for Sustainable Growth appeared first on 麻豆原创 Africa News Center.

For companies seeking to counteract the disruptive effects of the pandemic and its ripple effects on global supply chains, hyperautomation can ease the burden that repetitive processes and legacy infrastructure place on organisations.

Hyperautomation is used by businesses to identify, vet and automate as many business and IT processes as possible. It involves the orchestrated use of multiple technologies, tools and platforms, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotic process automation, business process management suites, low-code/no-code tools, and a broad range of other process and task automation tools.

Listed by Gartner as , hyperautomation is used by innovation-led organisations to drive operational efficiency, improve decision-making, and shift to a more prescriptive or predictive state.

In fact, Gartner believes hyperautomation is shifting from a nice-to-have to a condition of survival for many organisations. This is partly because, at its core, hyperautomation holds the promise of eliminating outdated work processes which are often cited by companies as a top workforce issue.

Shifting the needle on hyperautomation maturity

The precise manner of how hyperautomation is adopted within the organisation depends on which stage the business is at in its automation journey.

At the lower end of the spectrum are companies with mostly ad-hoc, manual and often paper-based processes. Here, tools such as low-code/no-code, digital forms, process modelling and analytics may be used to unlock immediate benefits. For example, a prototype developed at the 麻豆原创 Co-Innovation Lab would help South African cities reduce the pressure on call centres through a simple self-service app that allows residents to report service issues via their mobile phones.

Companies can move to the next stage of automation maturity by integrating their disparate data and processes to deliver integrated experiences. Here, companies may identify repetitive actions and deploy tools such as AI to automate responses, extend their channels of engagement with customers and reduce the workload on service teams. Aspects such as enterprise integration, multi-channel experiences and the use of bots come into play during this stage.

Integration can be hugely beneficial. One found that, while 57% of organisations that are involved with enterprise integration projects hoped to achieve improved data visibility, 90% actually reported improved data visibility when the project was complete. And while 56% hoped for greater business agility, 86% reported real gains in business agility following their integration project.

As companies standardise their end-to-end processes and adopt automation best practices, they may utilise process exploration, big data and process monitoring to identify loopholes for automation. This could take the form of simplification of key business processes.

For example, a company may choose to leverage structured and unstructured big data to better understand customer preferences prior to a sales engagement, identifying patterns or trends, identifying products of interest, reducing preparation time and delivering a more personalised experience.

Toward seamless automated processes and experiences

When automation capabilities mature, companies may move closer to the ideal of seamless automation that blends human-led and digital experiences.

Here, aspects such as robotic process automation come into play, with companies leveraging prebuilt content via process flows, forms, business rules and process visibility dashboards to trigger tasks autonomously and automate complex tasks.

This frees up vital internal resources and eliminates the need for inefficient manual processes, leaving workers to focus on higher-value tasks that drive greater customer satisfaction, operational efficiency and bottom-line results.

While few companies can claim this level of automation maturity, any company that is ready to leverage automation can drive continuous intelligence and enable a culture of predictive working.

Companies that are at the aspirational stage of their automation journeys can benefit from prioritising certain key activities, including:

• Leveraging process excellence;
• Shifting the company culture to one of exception-based working;
• Adopting predictive insights to improve decision-making;
• Improving the accuracy of their planning while also improving operational execution;
• Achieving a shift in mindset throughout the organisation to one of ‘automate-first’; and
• Elevating the value of human roles by eliminating lower-impact, manually-intensive work and allowing skilled resources to focus on value-generating activities.

All companies with aspirations of becoming an intelligent enterprise can benefit from investment in hyperautomation. Partnering with an expert tech provider can also ease the process of discovering, designing and delivering an effective hyperautomation strategy that can unlock greater efficiency, improved customer experiences, more accurate decision-making and increased competitiveness.

The post Hyperautomation the New Frontier of Competitive Advantage appeared first on 麻豆原创 Africa News Center.

It employs advanced technologies such as analytics, artificial intelligence, automation, and machine learning to create tailored value propositions that are relevant and appealing to individual customer needs and wants.

Hyper-personalisation is the key to delivering exceptional customer service.

It enables businesses to be hyper-intuitive, connecting with customers at the right time and with the right information.

According to听, brands that provide a superior customer experience generate 5.7 times more revenue than their competitors

For example, a customer of听, an American pet food retailer, lost both of her pets in the space of one week.

When she contacted Chewy about returning unused pet food, they not only processed a full refund and picked up the food right away, but they also sent the customer a bouquet of flowers a few days later with a personalized note of condolences for her loss.

Another example is听, which generates more than 35% of its revenue by curating customer experiences through hyper-personalization; for example, on their Kindle platform, where they recommend new books to customers based on previous purchases on their e-commerce platform.

So, what do Chewy, and Amazon have in common?

They connect the dots and use existing data to create tailored value propositions that are relevant and appealing to the needs and wants of individual customers.

What distinguishes Chewy and Amazon from their competitors is their ability to connect with their customers at the right time.

Hyper-personalisation is all about connecting with customers at the right time and with the right information to either identify an upsell opportunity or improve customer experience, fostering stronger relationships, and developing customers for life.

Many pundits have dubbed data the 鈥渘ew oil鈥� of the 21st century, but only a few businesses are truly leveraging it to create unique customer experiences and new revenue streams.

The collection of customer data by businesses will only grow in the future.

Consider Domino鈥檚 Pizza, which allows customers to place orders from up to 12 channels via its听听approach.

Customers can place orders for pizza via traditional channels such as the phone, as well as newer social media platforms and messaging apps such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Alexa, and Slack.

As a result, businesses are finding it increasingly difficult to ingest, consolidate, and use large amounts of customer data from multiple sources in a meaningful way that benefits both the customer and the company.

Building a 360-degree view of the customer by consolidating many data sources and engaging with customers in real-time and in a highly personalized manner is even more challenging.

Customer Data Platform, also known as CDP, is the solution to this challenge.

At its most basic, CDP is a piece of software that unifies and organizes customer data from various sources and touchpoints and uses it to drive 1-to-1 personalized customer engagement.

If data is the new oil that businesses can use to generate new customer value, then CDP is the engine that drives hyper-personalized customer engagements.

According to S&P Global Market Intelligence, hyper-personalization influences $87.5 billion in sales through personalized offers that lead to consumers making purchases they did not intend to make when they began the purchasing process.

Customer-centric and data-driven marketing is the key to gaining a long-term competitive advantage, and hyper-personalization is at the heart of it.

This can be a powerful differentiator against competitors and a sure-fire way to create new revenue streams and increase Customer Lifetime Value.

The post The Age of Hyper-personalisation and Data-driven Marketing appeared first on 麻豆原创 Africa News Center.

Most modern cars now have a feature called CarPlay, which allows you to connect your Apple or Android phone to your vehicle. CarPlay creates a platform for your car to interact with various applications on your phone, allowing you to do things like make calls and play music without having to physically interact with your phone.

For example, you can launch Google Maps from the CarPlay function via your car’s touch screen or select a new location using voice prompts. In this case, your car interacts with Siri on your phone and executes the instruction via the CarPlay platform.

A Business Technology Platform is like CarPlay for enterprises.

A Business Technology Platform is defined by four domains, namely Database & Data Management, Analytics, Application Development, and Intelligent Technologies. These four domain areas can be viewed as the primary applications on your CarPlay, allowing businesses to interact with data, for example predictive analytics to make predictions about the future state of the business to plan more effectively.

The Business Technology Platform serves as the foundation for all 麻豆原创 applications and enables the end-to-end integration of applications and business processes.

In the same way CarPlay ensures a seamless integration of your phone with your car, improving the driving experience and enhancing usability, businesses can use the Business Technology Platform to keep their core ERP system “clean,” and then perform extensive customisation and integration using the Business Technology Platform’s application development and integration capabilities.

What are the benefits of the Business Technology Platform to companies?

A Business Technology Platform unlocks significant benefits for companies by improving the ease at which they can optimise core business processes and better integrate their most important business applications.

For example, every company needs analytics. Using the Business Technology Platform, companies can provide dashboards, real-time reporting, and predictive analytics to their employees and suppliers using embedded analytics capabilities, allowing them to have a forward-looking view of their business operations.

In financial planning, the Business Technology Platform gives companies the ability to 鈥榤ap out鈥� their financial journey. Think of financial planning as planning a trip using Google Maps: companies can leverage the Business Technology Platform to receive continuous and real-time information on the financial equivalent of traffic patterns and alternative routes.

Many companies are grappling with database and data management, which relates to how data is stored as well as how different types of data from various sources can be seamlessly integrated. The Business Technology Platform enables companies to integrate and process data from various sources without physically moving the data, much like CarPlay allows you to integrate with your mobile phone’s address book without physically moving your contacts to your car.

Finally, many companies are seeking to unlock the benefits of intelligent technology solutions. In some industries, such as manufacturing, the use of sensors to collect data and automate certain decisions in real-time has become a business imperative and a must-have for success. A manufacturing plant, for example, can completely automate the plant maintenance schedule, where sensors monitor the various pieces of machinery and compare this data to their output to determine and predict when the various machines will fail and when they need to be serviced.

In this regard, the Business Technology Platform enables companies to automate these processes to improve quality, efficiencies, and production output.

The Business Technology Platform is an enterprise-grade platform that allows companies to interact with data through applications and integrate their applications with business processes. It enables companies to leverage听data in a coordinated, efficient, and cost-effective manner, while also ensuring the seamless integration of various data sources and business processes.

It lends an uncertain and often difficult business journey a sense of predictability and control, and enables decision-makers to better orchestrate how the business responds to emerging challenges and opportunities.

In an unpredictable and ever-changing world, the Business Technology Platform gives businesses an advantage by allowing them to be more agile, mitigate risk, and capitalise on emerging opportunities.

听

The post What is the Business Technology Platform and What Does it Mean for Businesses? appeared first on 麻豆原创 Africa News Center.

Globally, local and national governments continue to gain access to ever more powerful technologies for collecting, storing, processing and applying data.

As cities improve their capacity for collecting and analysing data, and continue to gather more of it, an opportunity for open collaboration emerges. Many of the risks we face – rapid urbanisation, the impacts of climate change, effective management of scarce resources such as water – are shared among South Africa鈥檚 cities.

Leveraging shared data and analytics could help identify risks more quickly, drive the development of solutions to common challenges and greatly improve the delivery of services to citizens, thereby fostering trust and building greater social cohesion.

With the volume of operational and experience data growing at a rapid pace, cities could 鈥� with the correct investment into intelligent technologies 鈥� seamlessly merge data sets to produce real-time insights that can guide decision-making at every step of the citizen journey.

Building greater e-government capacity

In a recent UN e-government study, in the e-government development index, an indicator of digital government services maturity. This put the country in the top 100 countries worldwide and above the global average, although still well behind countries in Europe, North America and Asia.

According to the OECD, within African cities. Considering the parlous state of finances in some of South Africa鈥檚 cities, the improved use of data could help bring greater transparency to public spending and help ensure critical financial resources are applied where they can make the greatest difference to citizens.

For example, an open data policy, where cities make important data visible and accessible to citizens, could improve oversight over how governments make important decisions, how public funds are spent versus what the budget priorities are, and how well different government departments are functioning in providing essential services to citizens.

According to the UN, the number of countries that have set up open government data portals continues to increase, .

SA cities strive for smart

Locally, cities such as Cape Town have established open data portals that encourage citizen participation in local government decision-making processes. The City of Cape Town offers nearly 86 data sets for downloading by the public, with stakeholders such as universities, laboratories and non-profit organisations using the data to drive local research and innovation.

Cape Town’s Emergency Policing and Incident Command (EPIC) program, which went live in 2016 and is a first of its kind in South Africa, provides a centralised emergency control platform for the preparation, mitigation, response and quick resolution of all public safety incidents in the city. The platform is built on powerful intelligent technologies with comprehensive reporting capabilities that provide real-time access to incident data which informs broader planning and response strategies.

Johannesburg is accelerating its plans to become a smart city by mobilising its enviable community of start-ups and innovators through a city-wide smart city innovation challenge. In addition, President Ramaphosa’s vision for building a brand new smart city on the outskirts of Johannesburg could foster a new era of innovation.

Relying on renewable energy and built with a focus on non-motorised transport, the planned smart city could accommodate up to half a million residents by the end of the decade and transform the economic and employment prospects for millions living in the region.

Unlocking intelligent public enterprises

Improved use of data within SA鈥檚 cities could also foster new business models that are built on data-driven innovation and real-time insights. By improving the use of data as a vital public resource, cities could achieve:

1. Improved governance through evidence-based policy making, outcomes-based contracting for key public works programmes, and community budgeting that increases citizen engagement with vital budgetary processes to help ensure optimal use of public funds;

2. Better mobility through the integration of ride-hailing and demand-based transit services into public transport networks, improved e-mobility, and the establishment of network logistic hubs;

3. Superior citizen experiences through the improved delivery of e-government services, better experience management to remove pain points from citizen interactions with government services, and predictive public safety initiatives;

4. Cleaner environment through the establishment of infrastructure and services enabling a circular economy, and empowering citizens to become digital prosumers; and

5. Stronger economy through improved public-private partnerships, access to more accurate city data to drive economic development, and intelligent revenue collection.

However, cities need to invest in intelligent technologies that enable the seamless collection, processing, storing and application of a broad range of data. A business technology platform that can easily integrate new technologies and provide a single source of truth to policy-makers can help optimise decision-making and ensure citizens remain at the centre of city plans, initiatives and interventions.

Investing in intelligent technologies such as IoT and experience management tools can give cities access to broader data sets, which can be mined for insights using AI and advanced analytics. And using cloud technologies can help provide ready access to critical services even during times of heightened disruption, while offering opportunities for scaling services to new citizens or regions as needed.

The post Can Data Drive the Success of SA’s Cities? appeared first on 麻豆原创 Africa News Center.

The speed with which the business world has changed 鈥� especially over the past year as the Covid-19 pandemic swept across the globe 鈥� has been nothing short of astonishing. From enabling remote work on a previously unprecedented scale to adapting to disruptions in the global supply chain and ensuring business continuity in the midst of a once-in-a-generation crisis, business leaders have had their hands full.

McKinsey argues that speed has been a fundamental aspect of the pandemic and will likely be a central feature of how businesses adapt to an uncertain future. By unlocking greater speed, organisations could accelerate decision-making, execute on new business opportunities more quickly, and improve their chances at overcoming the immense challenges created by the pandemic.

While speed is undeniably a vital capability in organisations鈥� arsenal, the prevailing disruption and continued volatility calls for more. To remain successful in our current business environment, business leaders need certainty.

It is fair to say the听 complexity of the modern business environment makes it impossible to consistently make good business decisions based purely on intuition. Business leaders have to make quick, accurate decisions over aspects such as supply chain, human capital management, customer experience, new product innovation, and financial performance on a near-constant basis.

To make good decisions, business leaders need accurate sources of data, and the tools to turn that data into insights that can guide decision-making in real time.

For example, responding well to changing customer demands is nearly impossible without knowing what those demands are. Having access to customer experience management tools that can track customer expectations in real time and guide how the business responds to those expectations removes much of the trial and error of manual decision-making.

Integrating the customer experience management tool with an automation layer further increases both the speed and accuracy of that response.

The impact of the pandemic means most organisations are operating on a fragmented basis. Teams are working from home, making in-person methods of employee engagement and performance management almost totally obsolete, at least for the moment.

Without new employee engagement tools that can effectively mobilise and support teams around common business objectives, organisations could see falling productivity and negative effects in aspects such as product development or customer experience.

Data-driven insights

New management tools can provide measurable insights into the employee experience, which can assist managers and leaders with making better decisions over the types of support they need to provide to their teams.

Advances in data and analytics also bring data-driven insights into the boardroom, with technology solutions that connect the top floor with the shop floor to give C-level executives granular insight into the total performance of the business.

To harness data and technology for greater certainty in decision-making, organisations need to put certain building blocks in place. To achieve a single, accurate view over the organisation and empower decision-makers with actionable insights, organisations need to build intelligent enterprise capabilities.

In simple terms, this means using the latest technologies to turn insight into action across every aspect of the business, in real time. Integrated business applications 鈥� such as enterprise resource planning and human capital management solutions 鈥� powered by next-generation technologies, such as artificial intelligence, help transform end-to-end business processes.

Experience management solutions give insight to the sentiment of customers, partners and employees, while business process intelligence and automation enable organisations to immediately act on insights and opportunities.

At the foundation of the intelligent enterprise is the cloud, which gives organisations the ability to simplify and scale their systems landscape without sacrificing performance. Cloud empowers businesses with the certainty of a quicker time-to-value, without the upfront capital outlays required of on-premise deployments.

With cloud-enabled intelligent enterprise capabilities, organisations can achieve the speed needed to stay ahead of competitors and other disrupters while maintaining the certainty of measured, data-driven decision-making.

The post A Post-Covid World will Feel the Need for Speed 鈥� and Analytics appeared first on 麻豆原创 Africa News Center.

Most organizations have spent the last several years deploying new technologies in a legacy infrastructure to deliver high-demand capabilities such as personalized experiences, process automation, and predictive maintenance.

While these digital investments fulfill well-defined business needs, they rarely lead to a data architecture that is simplified enough to accelerate future innovation and help ensure the integrity of every artificial intelligence (AI) model. Unfortunately, current market dynamics are not compatible with companies that cannot pivot, adapt, and respond to change quickly.

Businesses must align their processes with customer experiences and analyze those connections for deep insights that lead to confident, trusted decisions and actions. Only then can organizations drive continuous innovation.

Achieving such an interconnected landscape of systems, processes, and data requires an agile digital backbone infused with intelligence to redefine and create new business models and processes in a more dynamic fashion. And a majority of executives seem to be getting the message: 65 percent of organizations surveyed by听听indicated plans for aggressive modernization of legacy systems with extensive new technology platform investments through 2023.

Setting the Foundation for Real-Time Data Organization and Access

Searching for a platform that can quickly organize data and enable access is easier said than done. It’s true that a wide variety of platform technologies promise to consolidate and harmonize data into one architecture. However, those that are comprehensive and scalable enough to support requirements that range from basic analytics to sophisticated data intelligence and algorithms provide the foundation businesses need to become genuinely data centric. This approach is what we call “one data platform.”

The one data platform approach integrates heterogeneous solution components into a cohesive fit-for-purpose data management environment. This design delivers business-centric platform services that converge with common systems and leverage cloud concepts 鈥� all while lowering IT costs.

The platform’s architecture groups technologies into four decipherable layers: data analytics, data integration, data ingestion pipelines, and source systems. This tactic is not meant to provide a one-size-fits-all structure. Instead, it should encourage IT architects to consider the distinct functions of each layer to create an environment that scales with the business as market dynamics and customer expectations evolve.

Layer #1: Data Analytics听

Users can choose to leverage standardized dashboards with guided navigation and storytelling or customize their view for ad hoc analysis.

The data science behind this layer turns information mining into new information models that can be extended with enterprise-scale data. Furthermore, organizations can blend and manage Big Data from multiple sources and apply statistical methods, algorithms, and analytic engines to tease out relevant, in-the-moment insights that help improve the bottom line.

Layer #2: Data Integration听

As a data integration hub, this layer moves the needle on data-driven business transformation by getting data assets out from siloed sources, exposing them for different applications and systems to consume, and accelerating opportunities for self-service analytics.

Within this layer, a multi-node production system enables mission-critical data warehousing functions for several business domains and across divisions. A near-line storage solution is also available for archiving and accessing massive data volumes cost effectively.

Meanwhile, containerized data systems increase the computing power by providing self-contained modular technical areas that cater to specific business domains and requirements, such as country-specific reporting. Ingested data sets are then confined within a container, allowing analytical data models to be flexibly and independently deployed.

Layer #3: Data Ingestion Pipelines听

This layer provides transformation, filtering, and integrated data type mapping capabilities. It enables agile data delivery and feeds insights into business processes through continuous data provisioning across a wide range of sources. More importantly, streaming data can be handled to support use cases that require real-time data management 鈥� from capture and processing to analysis, reporting, and decision-making.

Layer #4: Source Systems

This area houses the entire ecosystem of existing technology. Internal and external packaged applications, homegrown solutions, systems of record, and enterprise data repositories are brought together to create a centralized intelligence core that accurately reflects every stakeholder’s needs.

Smoothing the Road to a Hybrid, Multi-Cloud Landscape

In addition to reassessing the harmonization of their IT architecture, organizations are upgrading their global data center strategy as the pace of change continues to accelerate. With the assistance of , many 麻豆原创 customers have even taken steps toward fully transitioning their data platform to public and private cloud infrastructures to rapidly deploy the latest data-driven innovations at scale.

For example, some of our customers consider cloud-based infrastructure as a service (IaaS). An IaaS strategy enables organizations to replace on-premise infrastructure with elastic pay-per-use infrastructure that can scale up or down rapidly on demand. Efforts related to this transformation help businesses adapt to broader analytical requirements and manage rising data volumes while avoiding significant capital expenditure investments and lowering operating costs.

The target infrastructure design includes integration enablement and connectivity within and across clouds to support cross-application analytical requirements. In broad terms, migration planning considers factors such as:

• Migration approaches for various 麻豆原创 and third-party solutions
• Scalability, stability, performance, reliability, and cost reduction
• Compliance and security
• Testing and validation strategies
• Monitoring and operations
• Application lifecycle management
• Alignment of the IT organizational structure to the new IaaS engagement model

Another option that other 麻豆原创 customers pick is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) strategy focused on pushing their transformation into a data-driven enterprise even further. In this case, executives are interested in expanding their data warehousing capabilities to realize more business benefits from the cloud with relative ease and without creating large-scale disruptions often associated with uprooting the mission-critical enterprise data backbone.

Co-deployment of a听听and existing digital assets such as a听听may appear plausible because the solutions address very different, yet mission-critical, problems. The cloud-based data warehouse solution consumes data from the business warehouse solution and other source systems with an abstraction or semantic layer, reducing IT complexity and applying much-needed governance and security.

When coupled with cloud data management and virtualization technology, the cloud-based data warehousing solution is well-positioned to provide opportunities for self-service analytics. From this perspective, it is sensible to hedge that the solution can evolve to provision user-facing and domain-based analytical services at an enterprise scale, even with a well-established business warehousing system.

Amplifying Business Value with Flexibility and Scalability

The urgency around innovating data-driven business models, processes, and products and services is not going away anytime soon. So why not strategically respond to that demand with a flexible, scalable, and structured data platform that can distill value from massive volumes of data?

For many 麻豆原创 customers, taking this step is the key to hedging against uncertainty and driving business outcomes that better secure their foothold, profitability, and longer-term viability.

Explore how听 can help your company reveal its true potential as a data-centric business with the one data platform approach.

Christine Lucea is a business enterprise principal consultant in Customer Success at 麻豆原创.

This article first appeared on the 麻豆原创 Global News Center

The post One Data Platform: The Bridge to the Full Promise of Data-Centric Businesses appeared first on 麻豆原创 Africa News Center.

But what does this mean in practice, particularly for small and medium size businesses? One could reasonably argue that their bigger siblings have recognised this and to some extent, managed to leverage the benefits of technology to drive better customer experience, improve efficiency and deliver better business outcomes.

This article explores how SMEs can incorporate augmented analytics into their digital transformation strategies and operations to drive better business outcomes.

What is augmented analytics?

Augmented analytics is the use of technologies such as machine learning, artificial intelligence and natural language processing to assist with data preparation, generating insights and presenting those insights in a way that augments how people explore, analyse and utilise data.

The machine learning component automates the analytics phases of data preparation and the generating of insights. Natural language processing enables business users to get insights from data without a deeper knowledge of the underlying coding languages. As a matter of fact, natural language processing is the technology behind digital assistants such as Siri and Alexa.

Augmented analytics is not intended to substitute humans, but rather to enhance our interpretation capabilities when working with large and complex data sets and facilitates the generation of business insights from cold data.

Augmented analytics in SMEs

A study by Accenture found that 97% of the data that is collected in most companies is never revisited, never used to drive operational efficiencies, and by effect, not being used to improve business outcomes. The same study pointed out that more than 87% of companies have low levels of maturity in terms of their business intelligence and analytics capabilities.

SMEs need to prioritise data and treat it as an asset. They need to leverage both operational (O-data) and customer (experience-, or X-data) to drive better business outcomes and to create sustainable competitive advantages. Through analytics, SMEs can use data, specifically the intelligence and insights it presents as a basis for driving innovation, business agility, reducing operational risks and developing new revenue streams.

In the words of Michael Dell, 鈥渄igital transformation is not about IT 鈥� it is a boardroom conversation, driven by CEOs and line-of-business executives, focused on answering some very big questions: How do you fundamentally reimagine your business? How do you embed sensors, connectivity, and intelligence in products? How do you reshape customer engagement and outcomes?鈥�

The data driven enterprise

Many technology pundits have dubbed data as 鈥渢he new oil鈥�.

The notion is predicated on the fact that raw oil isn鈥檛 as valuable as the final products that are produced after it is processed. In the same way, data isn鈥檛 as valuable as the insights that are generated once it is analysed.

Once analysed and refined, data becomes a valuable decision-making tool, enabling companies to quickly adapt to changing market conditions, identify new markets and opportunities and make their businesses more resilient and less susceptible to market disruptions such as Covid-19.

The future of analytics

Whether looking for something to order on Uber Eats or a movie to watch on Netflix, augmented analytics has become well entrenched and pervasive in our everyday lives.

You do not need to think hard about what to eat or what movie to watch, technology does that for you in a split second. Customers have become accustomed to this level of convenience in their personal lives, and it is only a matter of time before they start demanding the same in their professional lives.

SMEs need to see technology as a crucial cog and enabler in the value creation process.

The emphasis should be on integrating technology, such as augmented analytics into all aspects of the business, especially the value chain and value-creating processes of the company.

This is crucial to ensure that technology supports broader and long-term business imperatives such as innovation and improving operational, business and customer outcomes.

The post What Does Augmented Analytics Mean for Small Businesses? appeared first on 麻豆原创 Africa News Center.