“We are now faster in generating sales, order, stocking and pricing data, and can process purchase orders quicker,鈥� says Mike McCormick, Chief Information Officer at Vivo Energy. 鈥淭he time needed for our account reconciliation process has also been reduced from days to hours, and our end-to-end order process time has been sped up.”

However, achieving these gains required a large and far-reaching digital transformation program to replace outdated legacy systems that could not support Vivo Energy鈥檚 ambitious growth path and make use of intelligent technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT).

Legacy systems insufficient to support growth

“We had multiple internal departments all running disparate systems, which caused complications with data management, left us blind to deeper operational insights, and made the process of making data-driven decisions near-impossible,” explains McCormick. “We needed a powerful technology platform that would support the business as we deliver our vision of becoming Africa鈥檚 most respected energy business.”

Vivo Energy is a rapidly growing energy business that distributes and markets Shell and Engen-branded fuels and lubricants to retail and commercial customers in 23 countries across Africa. The company has a growing network of more than 2,400 service stations that sell more than ten billion litres of fuel every year, servicing around a million customers a day.

“Our legacy systems could not provide the much-needed insight and analysis that would support our growth,” says McCormick. “We made a decision to embark on a large and far-reaching digital transformation process on an extremely ambitious timeline of under two years.”

Vivo Energy chose 麻豆原创 S/4HANA as a replacement for its legacy systems. “With S/4HANA, we are not simply upgrading our technology. The solution is helping us transform our business to meet the needs of our rapidly expanding marketplace and customer base,” explains McCormick.

Partners help unlock the intelligent enterprise

Working closely with implementation partner IBM, McCormick and his team became one of the first energy companies of its size to deploy the full suite of S/4HANA applications alongside 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors, 麻豆原创 Cloud for Customer, and 麻豆原创 Integrated Business Planning in one integrated, end-to-end business platform. In addition to the implementation, IBM also provided robust server and storage infrastructure to support the business and systems integration.

The implementation was completed on time and within budget, with McCormick and IBM opting for a ‘big-bang’ approach involving more than 40 application components being enabled simultaneously.

“This was a large-scale business transformation program, not just a software implementation,” says Vinod Goyal, Associate Services Partner at IBM. “This has an impact on the entire organisation, across finance, logistics, supply chain, customer relationship management, HR, customers, partners and suppliers. Every part of the organisation is touched as part of this program.”

In addition to transforming core business processes, Vivo Energy, supported by partner AdaptIT, adopted intelligent technologies through the implementation of 麻豆原创 IoT to transform the way the business engages with service station owners and customers, while ensuring the highest fuel quality and uninterrupted flow of products to customers.

“Our IoT capabilities provide constant monitoring of tank gauges and pump conditions, with automatic monitoring of fuel volume and quality at our service stations,” explains McCormick. “A custom front-end gives us an aggregated visualisation of tank data combined with other site information, equipping our decision-making teams with deep operational insights and real-time data at a country and service station level.”

Following the implementation, Vivo Energy has unlocked a broad range of business benefits, including:

• in-depth monitoring of performance across every aspect of the business, enabling improved decision-making;
• automation of administrative tasks and workflows, helping reduce data input errors and enabling staff to focus on value-adding activities;
• the ability to leverage new technologies to ensure the highest fuel quality and optimised delivery of products to customers; and
• real-time distribution of data to regional decision-makers which enables data-driven decisions that reduce time-to-market and time-to-value.

According to Pedro Guerreiro, Managing Director for Central Africa at 麻豆原创, the implementation marks a quantum leap in Vivo Energy鈥檚 race to acquire intelligent enterprise capabilities. 鈥淒riven by an ambitious vision and supported by a superb implementation partner, Vivo Energy has completely transformed its daily operations and decision-making capabilities while establishing a powerful platform for further innovation and growth. With its industry-leading digital core powering its business processes, Vivo Energy is set to establish itself as an industry leader that seamlessly blends innovative technologies and optimised business processes to gain a healthy competitive edge over its peers.鈥�

The post Vivo Energy Fuels Expansion, Operational Excellence with Transformative Tech Deployment appeared first on 麻豆原创 Africa News Center.

While lowering operating expenses is important, it is just one part of achieving holistic operational excellence. Insurers are also facing pressure from new government regulations designed to increase reporting transparency. These new reporting standards must be met quickly without compromising other innovation initiatives. Recent global economic uncertainty has further underscored the need for swift operational transformation and the creation of an intelligent enterprise 鈥� time is of the essence.

Unlocking Productivity and Accelerating Innovation

True change occurs when insurance companies become partners in their customers鈥� lives. To achieve this, insurers must reimagine operational excellence with new business models that not only lower costs but accelerate innovation cycles and unlock productivity. These include automated, streamlined, and integrated processes that employees can access from anywhere.

Benefits of Operational Excellence Solutions

The right operational excellence solutions will help your organization sell the right insurance products faster to the right customers while providing a consistent, loyalty-building service experience in a multichannel environment. Key benefits of installing operational excellence solutions include:

• Serving customers better by anticipating needs and delivering the right service at the right moment
• Unlocking business value from the explosion of data available through advanced digital technology
• Streamlining processes, including quoting, offering, and application management

How the 麻豆原创 Cloud for Insurance Solution Will Transform Your Operations

麻豆原创 Cloud for Insurance helps organizations reimagine key areas of their business to achieve a higher level of operational efficiency. Leaders are empowered to deploy digital processes that improve both the employee and customer experiences. 麻豆原创’s industry cloud makes it easier to deploy specialized applications that address specific insurance industry needs.

With end-to-end solutions, your organization can choose to flexibly purchase and deploy different solutions as needed. No matter which you choose, all your solutions will fully integrate. These solutions also can harness the power of next-generation technologies, like machine learning, robotic process automation (RBA), and insurtech integration.

Operational excellence solutions from 麻豆原创 can help your organization:

• Accelerate quoting, offering, and application management while driving efficient underwriting.
• Streamline the development of products and policies by capturing and analyzing experience and operational data for real-time insights and actively designing experiences that customers desire.
• Optimize the claims lifecycle by capturing claim data through subrogation and recovery, managing disbursements, automatically detecting fraud, and continuously evaluating claims performance.
• Manage the reinsurance lifecycle with a full view of operations and customers, which can help accelerate period close cycles by up to 300% and improve data quality.
• Quickly process billing and payments by increasing the efficiency and accuracy of billing and settlement processes using a single, integrated, and automated operational subledger.

Reimagine what鈥檚 possible for your insurance organization. Download the solution brief 鈥�.鈥�

This article was written by Joseph Pacor and first appeared on the 麻豆原创 Global News Center.

The post Transforming Operational Excellence for Insurance appeared first on 麻豆原创 Africa News Center.

The economic situation is forcing us all to think outside the box, define new business models and new processes, and accelerate innovation and digital transformation so we can operate in a much more dynamic and agile fashion.

Intelligent Enterprises Need to Be Integrated Enterprises

In response to the business requirements for increased agility, savvy organizations are bringing on more and more solutions and innovation at a pace that鈥檚 faster than any time in their histories. And why is that? Because intelligent enterprises put innovation and technology to work in as many parts and processes of their businesses as possible. And intelligent enterprises know that business agility requires that all those parts and processes work together. They need to be integrated.

Together, 麻豆原创 and our partners — including global service partners as well as implementation, reseller, and software partners — are bringing this innovation, technology, and integration to businesses around the world. This article examines what our customers are facing as they look forward, and explores how providing connected business technology and improving our partner experience can help us better deliver on customer needs.

Customers Struggle with Cloud Complexity

As organizations shift to the cloud, decision-making has become more decentralized and individual lines of business are able to deploy point solutions without IT oversight, which creates silos of data that span fragmented business process flows. The statistics below emphasize the that organizations face today:

• Large enterprises are already using more than 200 software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications
• The unique number of SaaS applications in use per company is up approximately 30% year over year
• Duplicate subscriptions have increased by 80%
• Orphaned application subscriptions are up almost 100%
• Enterprise companies must manage an average of 21,580 people-to-application connections
• Sixty percent of the SaaS stack is changing every two years

All of this has also led to increase security risks and costs:

• Twenty-seven percent of cloud computing budget is
• Nearly two-thirds of organizations see
• Security breaches are on the increase; the FBI reported that compared to the previous quarter

In fact, that the goal of making operational enhancements and modernizing their IT systems was to improve information flow. So it is no wonder that IT is overtaxed and searching for a way to help ensure systems and data remain holistic, secure, and connected.

Business Process Extension and Integration Is Critical

Managing data has always been a critical part of our collaboration with customers. Over time, as the 麻豆原创 portfolio has grown, the data our solutions manage has also increased. Today, .

That鈥檚 a fact that is both humbling and inspiring. It also highlights the opportunity we have with our partners to bring more value to all the different processes and functions within our customers鈥� businesses.

Because of that reach, a partner building on, integrating with, or extending an 麻豆原创 platform, has the opportunity to help customers by developing solutions that span hybrid landscapes, connecting lines of business and tapping into data domains from finance, assets, and products to customers, vendors, employees, and more.

Let鈥檚 take a closer look at how this works and why this is important.

As described, a critical aspect of the Intelligent Enterprise is the connected nature of its business processes. The more connected and intelligent these processes are, the more responsive, resilient, and efficient an organization can be. 麻豆原创 has mapped several business processes that reach across traditional domains and system silos to cover the key needs of most companies. These include design to operate, lead to cash, source to pay, and recruit to retire.

These business processes can each be broken down further into specific components or sub-processes.

Looking at the design-to-operate business process 鈥� and specifically the supplier management sub-process 鈥� there is an opportunity to tap into multiple master data sets to turn data into business value for customers. For example, within supplier management, we have identified four solutions for the 麻豆原创 offerings:鈥�

• 鈥婼upplier info
• Supplier life cycle
• Supplier performance
• Risk management

Each of these solutions touch various master data domains such as employees, finance, assets, and products 鈥� enriching the business process and ultimately increasing the value and impact that each sub-process brings to an organization. Partner extensions, integrations, and applications are essential in driving this value, as they expand 麻豆原创 offerings and answer unique and critical customer requirements. Today, within the design-to-operate business process, partners are adding value with solutions that extend the core 麻豆原创 offering, including supplier certification, sustainability ratings, and search and data lookup.

Solutions in these areas can also benefit from tapping into multiple data sources — across cloud, on premise, and hybrid landscapes — providing a holistic supplier view and extending the value they deliver through the design-to-operate business process.

Multiplying that value across all processes and sub-processes shows that the potential for partners and customers is virtually limitless.

Eliminating Complexity

By working even closer with partners, and with commitment to a unified technology platform, 麻豆原创 can equip our customers to connect their data and business processes to win this battle over fragmentation. We can help customers overcome many of the challenges they face. We can also bring much-needed relief to IT teams, strengthening the value of what we offer while earning the loyalty and trust of our customers. 鈥�

鈥婽o achieve this, 麻豆原创 launched a unifying technology foundation: . The platform includes capabilities and services that connect data, applications, processes, people, and devices. Two central elements of the platform鈥檚 capabilities are 麻豆原创 Integration Suite and 麻豆原创 Extension Suite, which simplify application integration and extension development, helping partners realize faster time to value with lower development risks.

麻豆原创 Business Technology Platform is supported with a simplified partner experience, demonstrating an increased commitment to partners, which grows as dedication to 麻豆原创 technology grows, so that 麻豆原创 and partners can more effectively chart a new path forward together. .

These two topics are important goals and will be the focus of a follow-up article 鈥� stay tuned. In the meantime, explore 麻豆原创’s software partner program at .

Jagdish Sahasrabudhe is CTO of the Global Partner Organization at 麻豆原创.

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

The post How Partners Enable Customer Success Through a Unified Technology Platform appeared first on 麻豆原创 Africa News Center.