Let me describe three big examples of innovation developed to make your lives easier: continuous updates that are no longer disruptive to the business; artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning that produce more precise search results; and real-time support at your fingertips that is built into your application.

Continuous Updates That Are No Longer Disruptive

System updates are important as they provide new or improved functionality, enhance stability and security, and enrich the user experience. However, what鈥檚 been a challenge in the past for on-premise software is the downtime, test efforts, and spike in system issues that often followed a bigger release cycle. For cloud solutions, you should 鈥� and already can 鈥� expect ready-to-use, manageable updates with minimum disruption.

With the , our application lifecycle management platform developed on 麻豆原创 Business Technology Platform (麻豆原创 BTP), we solved that issue by introducing 鈥渄eploy with confidence鈥� as a new way of how we develop this solution. Deploy with confidence works to increase developer productivity and helps ensure high quality while delivering daily system updates. From a technical side, it incorporates many development tools to help automate the daily deliveries of multi-microservice software-as-a-service applications like 麻豆原创 Cloud ALM.

All this allows us to provide regular feature updates to 麻豆原创 Cloud ALM with daily deployment and enables a robust lifecycle without disruption or downtime. Additionally, as our teams are in continuous exchange with customers using 麻豆原创 Cloud ALM, we can quickly bring their feedback into the solution to further improve our software quality. Introducing deploy with confidence as the development method for 麻豆原创 Cloud ALM is a great example where we as a team leveraged innovation to increase productivity and quality while at the same time lifting customer experience to a whole new level.

AI and Machine Learning: More Precise Search Results

Continuous updates are one thing. What about using technology to get answers faster? With companies working in a faster-paced digital world, making decisions and finding answers also need to move faster. This is also the case when business processes aren鈥檛 running as expected.

Think about yourself and if you are someone who prefers to find answers on your own and not wait on support to respond. You鈥檒l be happy to know we have various ways to help you find the right answer. When you search in or 鈥�,鈥� you can get an increasingly personalized search experience that considers the topics most relevant for you. As this applies machine learning to improve search relevance and we are continually optimizing our knowledge base for better discoverability, you鈥檙e more likely to get the needed answer instantaneously 鈥� listed as a proposed solution within the first bunch of search results.

When you actually contact 麻豆原创 support directly, your request and all of its context, such as system and product information, text input, and soon even attachment data, are evaluated in real time by a highly optimized, AI-powered algorithm to provide you with precise solution recommendations. This Incident Solution Matching algorithm helps to make sure you are shown the best available solutions even before you send a ticket to 麻豆原创 or start an Expert Chat session. This helps reduce your effort to solve the problem.

Real-Time Support and Answers at Your Fingertips

It鈥檚 definitely an advantage to tap into modern technology for finding the answers you need. How about the convenience behind it and having answers at your fingertips? One of the things we鈥檝e learned from research and talking with customers is how annoying it can be when you must drop everything you were doing and leave your IT workspace to raise a ticket in a central support portal. This meant you would need to rethink what you were doing when the issue came up and where it happened. Plus, you needed to enter all the contextual information the portal doesn鈥檛 have, such as the system where it happened or the application you were using when running into problems.

We鈥檝e made this obsolete and convenient: is available in many of our cloud solutions and can be used right away, if needed. It鈥檚 a click of a button to ask a question, search for solutions, get tailored recommendations for your problem, or to just report an issue. Built-In Support knows where you were working when the issue came up and what you were doing when you got the error message. Through the usage of AI and machine learning technologies, the tool either already finds possible answers while you are typing in your issue, or it pulls together the necessary information for the support engineer. This is a more personalized support experience tailored to your specific situation. How convenient to not need to post a ticket elsewhere or explain your situation.

And even better, this click can get you connected in a or a scheduled appointment with a support expert. You can more quickly describe and resolve your question or problem 鈥� avoiding the ping-pong back-and-forth happening through a traditional ticket resolution. Talk about a way to free up time and resources to focus on the business.

On top of this, Built-In Support will evolve towards bi-directional communication: if there鈥檚 a brand-new solution to a critical issue in the application you are currently working with, why not get it shared with you right away? And if there is supporting information around a new or changed feature in the app you might have questions about, why not see it published proactively before you run into problems? This is exactly the future-looking direction of Built-In Support. Tailored to every screen of your application, it can proactively provide you answers and solutions and not wait until you run in to a problem and need to report it. Built-In Support is ending the one-way communication. If we know a customer has a problem but isn鈥檛 yet aware of it, we鈥檒l proactively take care of it.

In Summary

All this sounds smart, right? Let me summarize my key messages to you. You鈥檝e learned that 麻豆原创 system updates are important as they bring you new functionality, but they don鈥檛 need to be disruptive. Finding answers to your support problems is just as quick as what you know from a regular Web search. And finally, you鈥檒l experience the convenience of having support at your fingertips and getting your support questions and issues quickly worked out without needing to leave the application you are working in.

I hope I got you excited about some of the existing support innovations that will further improve your support experience. And we鈥檙e not stopping there. We鈥檙e already working on more great things.

Andreas Heckmann is executive vice president of Product Engineering and head of Customer Solution Support and Innovation at 麻豆原创. Follow him on and .

Industry innovation has been a fascinating topic over the last few years. It鈥檚 impossible to ignore how companies create new offerings and experiences that dramatically shift how an industry 鈥� or in some cases, multiple industries 鈥� operates and how people live. Such groundbreaking changes are usually built with an appreciation of existing data and technologies and through a desire to do things better in terms of product safety, supply chain optimization, and business finances.

I鈥檝e been very fortunate to experience the power of such industry innovation through the Customer Innovation & Maintenance team as part of the Customer Solution Support & Innovation organization at 麻豆原创. For years, we have worked with various organizations to navigate existing crises, address emerging challenges, and deliver new opportunities for the world. In this article, I will discuss three of our latest projects.

Saving People鈥檚 Lives by Reducing Counterfeit Drugs

One prime example of our efforts is tackling a global menace that impacts the entire world: counterfeit pharmaceuticals. Many falsified or substandard medicines contain dangerous ingredients, such as heavy metals, highway paint, and rat poison, that worsen people鈥檚 health conditions and create new diseases. As a result, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that more than yearly from these snake oil cures.

For years, governments have initiated legislation and regulations to criminalize and control the production and distribution of counterfeit drugs. However, my team discovered that the lack of a rigorous, universal network makes it difficult to curtail the problem often hidden within complex supply chains and sophisticated packaging.

Based on input from 麻豆原创 customers in the life sciences industry and working with 麻豆原创 industry experts on this international challenge, we developed . The industry network hub enables pharmaceutical firms to share product information for traceability and verification across the supply network and with government regulators. Running on and leveraging 麻豆原创 Blockchain Business Services, it is the first public-cloud, industry-specific business network used by more than 45 pharmaceutical firms, over 1,500 trading partners, and 80% of COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers.

But our contribution to the fight against counterfeit drugs is far from over. We are working toward adding aid workers from organizations 鈥� such as the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders 鈥� to the hub so they can verify critical medicines and vaccines on the fly in low- to middle-income countries. This innovation is accomplished by integrating the hub into the application.

Accelerating the Development of Lifesaving Therapies

Another barrier to delivering large quantities of medical therapies quickly, efficiently, and safely is the structure of the traditional clinical supply chain. During the COVID-19 pandemic, supply chain resilience was highlighted as a critical requirement for providing lifesaving vaccines, prophylactics, and therapies created through industry-wide collaboration and a patient-centric focus.

To accelerate clinical R&D and time to value, my team worked with Roche, Tenthpin, and more than 25 additional customers and vendors connected to the pharmaceutical sector. Together, we reimagined clinical supply operations and brought to life a digital transformation of the entire life sciences ecosystem by developing the solution.

This next-generation cloud solution enables faster clinical supply cycle times, fewer inventory overages, and better-informed decision-making by providing accurate insights into forecasted demand and clinical site stock levels. It is also a milestone in the industry鈥檚 adoption of the cloud, facilitating end-to-end process operations and visibility to plan, source, manufacture, distribute, and reconcile supplies for clinical R&D. In addition, the solution helps address the blinding and randomization needs of clinical trials during the manufacturing, packaging, labeling, and shipment of clinical supplies to hospitals and clinics.

Meeting Financing Needs to Boost Growth

In addition to counterfeit drugs and the need for resilience, supply chain volatility and turbulence is providing the impetus for innovation. This reality is prompting capital investments including end-to-end due diligence and product tracing services; machines and plant setups that improve environmental impacts; and networks for finding, vetting, and onboarding new suppliers quickly.

Incorporating all these innovations into business operations 鈥� regardless of ecosystem size and geographic reach 鈥� requires money that many companies may not have immediately on hand. But to meet those finance needs, businesses and banks need to connect with each other smoothly, quickly, and securely without introducing more work and complexity to finance and treasury processes.

By delivering the solution, we play a key role in increasing the reliability of relationships between companies and their banks. Built on top of 麻豆原创 Business Technology Platform, the solution creates a multi-bank, digital channel between each party鈥檚 enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to embed Electronic Banking Internet Communication Standard (EBICS) and SWIFT connectivity into the remote data transfer of payment transactions.

In return, treasury operations can be refined and simplified by updating payment status and cash positions in real time across business and bank ERP systems. 麻豆原创 Multi-Bank Connectivity can automate manual, error-prone steps associated with the execution and reconciliation of payments, order-to-cash applications, and order entry documents 鈥� helping to increase control, efficiency, and transparency.

Helping the World Run Better 鈥� One Innovation at a Time

The news headlines running across our screens every day prove that industry innovation is far from done. Unfortunately, no person, organization, or business carries the ultimate wisdom to solve every problem single-handedly. But if industry practitioners, business and technology experts, thought leaders, and inspired problem-solvers collaborate toward a common goal, a better future can be possible for everyone.

It is this vision that guides my leadership of Customer Solution Support & Innovation. My team of experts continuously looks for opportunities to do better for our customers, business, and global neighbors. And with the feedback and knowledge shared during every interaction, we look forward to working side by side with our customers and partners to provide the digital capabilities they need to make the world a better place 鈥� today and in the future.

Andreas Heckmann is executive vice president of Product Engineering and head of Customer Solution Support and Innovation at 麻豆原创. Follow him on and .

Breakthroughs happen less often than most people are inclined to believe. Instead, I often find that most innovations are incremental in nature. Admittedly, a slow-building approach doesn’t grab the spotlight like more daring alternatives do. Still, it’s no less important 鈥� driving countless small improvements that add up to massive transformations and huge gains down the line.

One prime example of incremental innovation鈥檚 impact is the continuous development of mobile devices. The first handheld cellular phone launched nearly 40 years ago. Since then, each new release introduced different sizes 鈥� some smaller and some larger 鈥� and functionalities such as texting, Internet access, context-driven command, touch screens, tracking and tracing, and many more capabilities now considered standard. In essence, mobile device providers allow themselves to experiment with new ideas while generating revenue that is then reinvested into making the product鈥檚 design and purpose more impactful and game-changing in the near future.

Ideas Are Only the Beginning

Ideas are only the start of an innovation journey, no matter how new, novel, or useful. It takes creativity and domain expertise to bring them to life and evolve them gradually by applying the latest lessons learned and scaling capabilities or user experiences to deliver more meaningful value.

As part of 麻豆原创鈥檚 鈥渞einvent鈥� strategy, my team of customer innovation and maintenance experts from within the Customer Solution Support & Innovation organization at 麻豆原创 focuses on turning ideas into valuable solutions for critical challenges. Working with various industries, including agriculture and life sciences, allows us to innovate and deliver sustainable solutions that accelerate business success 鈥� from idea inception and proof of concept to implementation and maintenance.

Customer Solution Support & Innovation offers tremendous industry expertise that can enrich our customers’ growth areas, drive continuous innovation, and deliver prototypes faster to support their transformation into intelligent enterprises. And from our experience, innovations best realize their full value when scaled to add value while they are maintained and developed further to help the world run better and improve people’s lives.

Outcomes Are the Heart of Good Innovation

Our contributions in helping to overcome the impacts of the global COVID-19 pandemic were one of those moments where we revealed the true value of incremental innovation. Developing innovations in partnership under unprecedented conditions, we designed and rolled out numerous digital solutions more quickly and securely for millions of people.

A prime example is the . In only two months development time, we innovated a digital gateway with T-Systems that provides a standard for valid vaccine certification across the European Union and currently supports 600 million users. By removing the risk of falsified documentation, the introduction of this digital certificate represents an important step toward normalizing the freedom of movement within the eurozone and, as a result, stimulating the economy.

In addition, our team worked with Deutsche Telekom AG and Germany’s Federal Ministry of Health to develop the Corona-Warn-App to help identify infections quickly and notify people of their potential exposure. The mobile app, available for iOS and Android, was developed in open-source mode, and the program code was continuously visible to the public on the development platform 鈥� all without violating data privacy rights.

While the pandemic marked a significant era of innovation for businesses worldwide, our team has produced innovations important for business security. For instance, our work in detecting and preventing security breaches from cyberattacks plays a vital role in many of our customers’ IT infrastructure. Our experts combine the application 鈥� a leading threat detection software 鈥� with 24/7 managed security services. The application is continuously upgraded to help detect cyberattacks in on-premise and cloud solutions from 麻豆原创 as they are happening and analyze the threats quickly enough to neutralize them before severe damage occurs.

More recently, we innovated with climate-focused technology company CHOOOSE to deliver a climate app. As one of the first solution extensions developed with existing capabilities available in and 麻豆原创 Concur solutions, helps neutralize carbon emissions through high-quality compensation projects. As a result, our customers can acquire accurate data from their business flights and discover high-impact ways to offset their carbon footprint 鈥� all in one place.

We are also working on a prototype 鈥� 鈥� that marks the first step toward embracing virtual reality for running business. With the sustainability-focused concept, our experts are experimenting with collaboration with targeted data sharing between competing companies and integrating the virtual environment with open ecosystems such as . In addition, a decentralized peer-to-peer network based on 麻豆原创 Business Technology Platform is being created without requiring central persistence.

Innovation That Delivers High Impact

Most companies make the mistake of looking too narrowly at the overall context of their innovation initiative. At Customer Solution Support & Innovation, we are constantly evaluating the 麻豆原创 solution portfolio to find opportunities to adapt and add functionalities that can increase value in ways that can be quickly applied and scaled to meet our customers’ current and future needs.

Embracing the concept of incremental innovation has empowered us to shape a culture that is full of purpose, ingenuity, and discovery. So instead of dedicating all our resources to years-long projects with uncertain outcomes, 麻豆原创 is committed to driving innovation close to our customers’ everyday environmental, social, and governance challenges 鈥� and we will continue to do so in the years to come.

Andreas Heckmann is executive vice president of Product Engineering and head of Customer Solution Support and Innovation at 麻豆原创. Follow him on and .

At first glance, the photograph above seems unremarkable. by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter back in May, the image displays the craters and gullies common to the Red Planet 鈥� similar to those on the Earth鈥檚 moon. Yet what we see is no ordinary stretch of Martian dirt. It鈥檚 the peak of Olympus Mons, the tallest volcano on Mars. In fact, it鈥檚 the highest elevation in our solar system, towering over the surface at more than twice the size of Everest.

But it looks nothing like a mountain. Or a volcano.

Why not?

The answer emerges with perspective.

The image at top represents a narrow, horizontal sliver of a as viewed from a height of 257 kilometers, or 22 times the altitude of a typical commercial aircraft here on Earth. Still, everywhere within the larger field looks just like the smaller one! There鈥檚 no hint of a volcano anywhere in sight. But by increasing altitude even farther, visibility extends outward 鈥� until, eventually, the familiar caldera structure comes into sharp relief. The glimpsed this spring by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter fits inside the red dot shown below:

For scale, Olympus Mons the area of Poland. Because the volcano is so immense, the slope along most of the surface is extremely modest and, in many places, imperceptible.

Aided by cloud-based technologies, many businesses on Earth 鈥� the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter 鈥� possess acute powers of visibility. But how far outward does that visibility extend? Can a business see with precision only inside its own four walls, or can it see beyond them as well? Can it peer into the interconnected operations of its nearest trading partners? What about those of its trading partners鈥� trading partners? And so on?

Visibility, in business-to-business commerce and astronomy alike, requires not only depth but breadth. If the field of view falls under too narrow a lens 鈥� isolated, for example, from vital yet distant trading partners 鈥� then perception, even when detailed, may be narrow rather than holistic. Absent perspective, the highest point in our solar system can easily be mistaken for undifferentiated terrain pockmarked by undistinguished craters.

Whether in supply chain management or aeronautic science, visibility and resilience are mutually reinforcing. By shielding the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter from solar flares, frigid temperatures, and cosmic debris, thermal have extended the spacecraft鈥檚 lifespan from an expected five years to 17 and counting. Meanwhile, the Orbiter鈥檚 ongoing telemetry reporting equips engineers back on Earth with the data they need to design even more resilient spacecrafts in the future. They also learn from setbacks such as when, in 2018, a planet-wide dust storm the 14-year mission of the Mars Opportunity rover to a sudden, silent standstill.

Disruption, of course, wreaks an equal measure of havoc on supply chains and logistics. To instill resilience across increasingly integrated business processes, organizations and their trading partners turn not to the heavens but to the cloud 鈥� where digital applications harness vast repositories of operational data to manage dispersed assets, deepen mutual visibility, foster multi-tier collaboration, mitigate supply chain risk, and extend competitive advantage. When business leaders draw inspiration from planetary exploration in marshaling the full depth and breadth of the data available to them for analysis and decision-making, the visibility and resilience that follow are as limitless as space itself. Though connected commerce, cloud-based networks send growth and innovation rocketing skyward.

Andreas Heckmann is executive vice president of Product Engineering and head of Customer Solution Support & Innovation at 麻豆原创.

Top photo: NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory Caltech/University of Arizona. Scale: 1 cm = 185 m.

First a runny nose sets in with your source of raw materials, then a sore throat grabs hold of your logistics partner, and pretty soon entire industries grapple with fragmented supply chains, logjammed seaports, and mismatched labor markets. But what if the human respiratory system鈥檚 own natural defenses point the way toward remedying afflicted supply chains? What can the humble sneeze or cough teach us about restoring systemic resilience at a time when an airborne contagion disrupts not only the flow of oxygen but that of global commerce as well?

Some analysts fault the modern supply chain for its length, sometimes crisscrossing oceans from sourcing to processing to manufacturing to shipping. Others say its weakness lies in its complexity. But consider the average pair of lungs, whose airways 2,400 kilometers in total length and whose surface area that of a tennis court. Lungs, after all, a vast network of 480 million air sacs, also called alveoli. Clearly, length and complexity alone, which characterize even the healthiest lungs, fall short of explaining pulmonary dysfunction. Difficulties with breathing, not unlike those with supply chains, tend to arise from external factors. The culprit may be a wayward dust particle. Or it could be the outbreak of war that throws off established patterns of commerce between buyers and suppliers.

Nature鈥檚 response to obstruction is the sneeze or the cough, a remarkably efficient reflex to cleanse respiratory passageways. Hair-like receptors trigger the medulla, located in the brain, to expel the irritant with a forceful thrust of air. After the perfunctory 鈥淏less you!鈥� from courteous passersby, all is well! The body鈥檚 processes for regulating the exchange of carbon dioxide for oxygen return to normal.

In contrast, nature holds little recourse for clogged supply chains. Organizations instead rely on cloud-based . When uncertainty looms over the sourcing of critical materials or volatility undermines the demand for goods and services, businesses turn increasingly to integrated digital platforms to gain visibility into the interconnected operations of trading partners 鈥� spanning procurement, supply chain, logistics, and asset maintenance. Serving as a central nervous system for these and other core business processes, cloud-based networks lend organizations the data-driven insights they need to anticipate backed-up supply chains or logistics pathways 鈥� and to decongest them.

Unfortunately for many businesses, by the time congestion sets in, relief can be hard to come by. They are lacking a fast and effective reflex to the situation. But other firms are well prepared since they adopted the cloud-based solutions necessary to counter disruption, instill resilience, and mitigate risk. Only with the aid of 360-degree visibility both within an organization鈥檚 four walls and beyond them can it collaborate with trading partners, achieve mutually beneficial sustainability objectives, and lay the foundation for new digital ecosystems within which partner relationships thrive and customer value accelerates.

As cloud-based networks yield actionable insights from massive troves of operational data connecting organizations with their trading partners, they increasingly look toward 鈥� not unlike the brain signals responsible for triggering the familiar sneeze or cough. When businesses automate previously manual procurement and supply chain processes, they free up their professionals to redirect their time and talents to more strategic pursuits, such as collaborating with customers, shoring up partner relationships, and fostering joint innovation.

Where are integrated digital business networks headed in the future? Toward systems that can carry out end-to-end operational processes within guidelines set and supervised by humans. These cloud-based solutions are bringing organizations closer to an era of automated decision support, in which digital transformation helps to prevent businesses from coughing, sneezing, or even coming down with the hiccups 鈥� long before contagion can take root.

Through integrated digital networks and the competitive advantage they extend, businesses and their trading partners can, despite the headwinds of ongoing disruption, breathe easier.

Andreas Heckmann is executive vice president of Product Engineering and head of Customer Solution Support & Innovation at 麻豆原创.