By Martin Heinig

Digital technology advancements in augmented and virtual reality as well as in artificial intelligence (AI) over the last decade have provided an incredible ability to capture and hold our collective imaginations. These technologies have transcended beyond the hype by offering immediately clear and convincing use cases for enterprises that bridge the physical and digital divide.

For example, AI-powered digital twins could provide incredible future-focused insights with simulations to anticipate and prevent supply chain disruptions. Employee onboarding could be individually tailored and optimized to deepen human connection in a hybrid world.

Immersive technologies are a broad umbrella that includes extended reality — virtual, augmented, mixed– 3D displays, spatial audio, gesture recognition, spatial sensing, speech recognition, haptics, and the metaverse. With the metaverse , these continuums of experiences and technologies have the potential to shape how customers and employees engage with businesses. That鈥檚 why organizations are increasingly turning to 麻豆原创 and its partners to help them completely transform their business.

The 麻豆原创 and Accenture Partnership

To support our mutual customers, 麻豆原创 and Accenture have teamed up to create immersive experiences and business models that are built on (麻豆原创 BTP), which offers future-ready interfaces contextualized with business data and processes. Combining immersive services on 麻豆原创 BTP with Accenture鈥檚 technology vision, proven methodologies, industry experiences, and skilled practitioners, organizations could pilot and scale solutions with trusted partners.

With these services, organizations can offer digital experiences that can enrich employees鈥� onboarding, attract digital native talent, and empower users to operate more collaboratively and unlock efficiencies like never before.

Immersive services on 麻豆原创 BTP could support customers to leverage their 麻豆原创 business capabilities and data to capture value through differentiated business models and experiences. Accenture鈥檚 expertise in immersive application development, industry expertise, and innovation methodologies will help customers realize and scale end-to-end immersive applications in every industry.

Watch to learn more about the 麻豆原创 and Accenture partnership:

Click the button below to load the content from YouTube.

Always allow YouTube

As the two companies continue their collaboration, customers can benefit from this partnership by exploring the following high-value use cases.

Hybrid Business Steering

Hybrid business steering empowers enterprises to manage and optimize their business collaboratively by enabling analytics, outcome simulations, and next-gen human-computer interactions on digital twins across the entire company business landscape. The intent of the is to enable users to:

• Interact with data more intuitively and operate assets safely in an immersive and engaging digital experience
• Proactively monitor asset health and predict potential asset downtime
• Visualize the movement of goods through a supply chain network in real time, zoom in on specific data points, and manipulate data using virtual tools and interfaces
• Simulate different scenarios and assess the impact of business decisions before implementing them in the real world

The hybrid business steering use case demonstrates how customers could consume 麻豆原创 data more easily and leverage their existing 麻豆原创 landscape for immersive business applications.

Digital twins are increasingly being used in a wide range of asset intensive industries, including industrial manufacturing, automotive, energy, aerospace, and construction. They are an important tool for developing and testing new products and systems before they are built — saving time and money while reducing risk.

Augmented Employee Experience

Bridging the physical and digital world is what makes employee experiences like onboarding and mergers and acquisitions strong use cases for immersive technologies. Organizations with a strong onboarding process average . Despite these benefits, only say their company does a 鈥済ood job鈥� of onboarding. The helps employees to:

• Experience the company culture, mission, organizational structure, and team
• Tour office facilities in the digital campus
• Learn from leaders with role-specific questions
• Upskill on new products and projects with self-paced immersive learning
• Meet colleagues in a fun way

Importantly, employees can move at their pace. As part of their hyper-personalized and contextualized onboarding experience, they can learn and re-learn, ask as many questions as needed until they are familiar — all in a fascinating virtual environment that can be configured to suit their personal needs.

Organizations benefit from making it easier to onboard employees, reducing onboarding time and costs. The impact continues as existing employees grow, get promoted, and transfer between departments. This also helps businesses retain valuable and experienced talent within the organization and during mergers and acquisitions.

The augmented employee experience use case shows how employees could explore an organization, meet colleagues, and learn role-based skills in a safe environment while saving time and costs and increasing employee health and safety.

Customers and partners interested in early access can contact icn@sap.com.

Martin Heinig is head of 麻豆原创 New Ventures & Technologies.

Accenture and 麻豆原创 Collaborate to Deliver Transparent, Resilient and Sustainable Supply Chains on 麻豆原创 Business Network

By Sankar Kaliaperumal and Muhammad Alam

Accenture and 麻豆原创 have expanded their strategic relationship to focus on the accelerated delivery of transparent, resilient, and sustainable supply chains across key industries on . The collaboration aims to offer customers increased transparency and visibility across assets and inventory, as well as faster value realization with 麻豆原创 Business Network.

Ongoing disruption has taken its toll on the global supply chain. In response, organizations have invested heavily to boost inventory, processes, and capacity. In fact, reveals that 61% of chief supply chain officers say they鈥檝e been applying new technologies, ways of working, and AI in order to reinvent core processes, And 60% say they will be reinvesting in these areas over the next two years.

The opportunity now is to create synergies and efficiencies between processes and stakeholders and to unify all the points of interaction and integration. By doing so, organizations can collaborate, connect, transact, and partner on shared processes and information with trading partners across the supply chain.

With this in mind, Accenture and 麻豆原创 are helping extend the power of the 麻豆原创 Business Network with new capabilities, assets, and accelerators for:

• Logistics: Capabilities to collaborate with carriers, track goods in transit, and capture and validate data related to emissions and product genealogy help to ensure that trading partners are operating in a sustainable way
• Procurement: Responsible sourcing capabilities monitor for suppliers鈥� compliance with metrics and values in the network
• Supply Chain: Business to business (B2B) integrations support cross-industry supply chain processes and create specialized solutions for supply chain planning, purchase order collaboration, and quality management processes
• Asset Management: Intelligent capabilities optimize asset performance by using data in a central repository that shares information with equipment, asset operators, manufacturers/OEMs, and suppliers, which increases trust and collaboration between parties and results in faster completion of maintenance and repairs with fewer errors, improving the availability of the asset

鈥淪upply chains of the future require , enabled by data and a strong digital core,鈥� said Caspar Borggreve, senior managing director and lead of the Accenture 麻豆原创 Business Group. 鈥淎ccenture鈥檚 deep expertise in supply chain management, 麻豆原创 Business Network capabilities, transformation strategies, and leading industry practices can help our clients realize value faster with future-ready supplier networks that bring new into operations, increase agility, and reduce sustainability risk.鈥�

One organization that realized value faster from increased supply chain resiliency and its ambitious procurement transformation is , an energy technology company that provides solutions to energy and industrial companies worldwide.

鈥淏aker Hughes鈥� partnership and collaboration with Accenture and 麻豆原创 played a big part in the successful transformation of our procurement operations and supplier enablement in 120 countries,鈥� said Sharad Mantri, senior director and global IT leader at Baker Hughes Company. 鈥淎ccenture helped us establish a modern and integrated technology infrastructure to simplify procurement processes and increase supply chain transparency and resiliency.鈥�

Customers like Baker Hughes benefit from Accenture and 麻豆原创鈥檚 combined knowledge, resources, global presence, and unique ability to scale with multiple and parallel projects going live simultaneously. For supply chain transformations, Accenture and 麻豆原创 leverage a wide range of capabilities, use cases, assets, custom prototypes, preconfigured solutions, and purpose-built accelerators for focused industries in consumer packaged goods, high-tech, and manufacturing.

Sustainability and resiliency are top of mind for companies across all industries, which is creating a sense of urgency for a solution like 麻豆原创 Business Network. Working together with Accenture, 麻豆原创 is helping customers address common industry-specific needs and challenges with the largest and most comprehensive business network, trusted by millions of companies around the world.

Accenture was recently honored with the 2023 麻豆原创 Pinnacle Award for Cloud Business Transformation 鈥� Sales Success and 麻豆原创 Global Intelligent Spend and Business Network Partner Excellence Award 2022聽 for Sales Success 鈥� Large Enterprise.

Sankar Kaliaperumal is managing director of the ACN Technology practice and North America 麻豆原创 Ariba Lead at Accenture.
Muhammad Alam is president and chief product officer for Intelligent Spend and Business Network at 麻豆原创.

From startups to multinational corporations, building and leveraging business networks to serve customers in a fast and reliable manner is a key strategy for growth and success. However, many supply chains suffer from siloed operations and lack of open collaboration among partners, which leads to poor visibility in processes and data sharing.

As disruptions in globally connected supply chains become more prominent, we explore opportunities to break down barriers and embrace the power of truly collaborative and agile businesses.

For decades, business collaboration has been the backbone of commerce, connecting various companies, suppliers, and customers in a web of relationships that enable resource and finance flows. These networks have been established over time and are highly optimized in terms of cost, speed, and risk reduction.

Over the last few years, it has become apparent that these networks are highly fragile and can quickly unravel when faced with external shocks. With increasing geopolitical instability and irreversible climate change effects, this scenario is likely to become even more pronounced in the future.

Antifragility in Business: From Resilience to Adaptation

To address this, businesses need to transform the way they operate and become more adaptable. According to author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, it is important for businesses to strive for “,” rather than resiliency. This means that instead of simply bouncing back to their pre-shock state, businesses should learn and grow from shocks, becoming even stronger as a result. Therefore, the transformation we see for business networks, or B2B collaboration platforms, is that they need to become open, flexible, and interoperable in the future.

In essence, any business will need to be able to reassemble business networks dynamically and rearrange and reorient as needed depending on external or internal factors.

We at 麻豆原创 already support our customers in this endeavor. By using long-standing expertise with business processes and technologies such as blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI), and by staying up to date on the latest trends, we help customers with the evaluation and implementation of innovation. By utilizing this expertise, we aim to enable agile collaboration and multi-tier visibility while minimizing business risk. This can result in the opening up of traditional business processes and financial flows, including cross-border payments.

Our ultimate goal is to foster strong business relationships by enabling a new layer of cross-company collaboration and business process orchestration. It could be hybrid or completely based on an open, decentralized network infrastructure bringing all companies on one common platform together — regardless of industry, geography, or size.

Example: Managing Digital Identities Across Networks

One of our most promising initiatives in this context is developing a service for digital identity management.

Identity is key in any business process. But digital identity management has long been a challenge for individuals and businesses alike. Traditional username and password systems are insecure and easily hacked, while social logins leave all personal information under the control of one corporation. The lack of universal standards makes it difficult to ensure the trustworthiness of information and to integrate digital identities across different systems and processes.

This is where self-sovereign identity (SSI) comes in. SSI is the first open standard for digital identity on the web, offering a solution to these issues. With SSI, users have the same convenience as social logins, but also have complete control over their data. This new identity standard applies not only to individuals, but also to corporations and devices such as the Internet of Things (IoT), providing globally unique and interoperable identities. Each identity wallet is established through cryptographically verifiable credentials, anchored on a public, permission-less blockchain network. Using this technology we can create a vendor-neutral network infrastructure that makes it easy to join the network and share trustworthy data.

The impact of SSI will be felt across many software systems, including enterprise suites like 麻豆原创 S/4HANA and master data in particular, where it can provide a single source of truth for master data, making onboarding processes between companies orders of magnitude faster. In the blockchain space, SSI has the potential to bring much-needed credibility to anonymous addresses and transform the industry into a space for reputable business. At 麻豆原创, we are enabling customers, partners, and application developers to build applications using self-sovereign identities on 麻豆原创 Business Technology Platform (麻豆原创 BTP).

But creating a universal identity standard is just one use case. Besides this, we are working on a range of other cutting-edge use cases such as industry-specific business networks, decentralized finance, and collaborative workflows beyond company and system borders. Our focus on innovation in both future business processes and future business decisions is integral to bringing the concept of future business collaboration to fruition.

麻豆原创 already conducts a significant , with over $4.9 trillion in annual commerce and operations in 190 countries, having handled over 730 million B2B transactions within a 12-month period on the platform.

To help our customers solve the problems of the future, we are combining this advantage with the deep experience 麻豆原创 teams have in technology areas such as blockchain, AI, interoperability, security, and business processes. Our teams are closely collaborating with product development to incorporate our findings into the road maps for our standard products — such as and , which have graduated from being internal company ventures into capabilities — to transform the way resources flow in the circular economy.

Martin Heinig is head of New Ventures and Technologies at 麻豆原创.
.

Sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch: the classic five senses of humans allow us to experience the world around us, with our nervous system receiving and processing huge amounts of information and relaying signals to the brain in order to react with the world. It is almost impossible to say how much data the human brain receives and processes on a daily basis. At best, one can specify a lower limit of perhaps around 1,000 gigabytes.

Humans not only process but also generate data in abundance. How many Instagram Stories did you click through last night before falling asleep in bed? How much time did you spend on different news portals? Just one more episode of 鈥淪tranger Things鈥� on Netflix? The list goes on and on.

Navigating the Data Jungle

Companies struggle with this too and collect and analyze more data than ever before. Not without reason, data is referred to as the new gold. The way to increased profitability and competitive advantage by means of intelligent data usage seems to be a rocky one. Using the sheer amount of data to its full advantage remains a challenge.

At 麻豆原创, we want to help our customers navigate the data jungle, regardless of infrastructure and where the data is saved. For 50 years, 麻豆原创 has been storing, processing, and analyzing innumerable amounts of customer data. Building on these strong data management capabilities, we want customers to be able to base all their decisions on intelligent, data-driven insights with easily accessible business data — when and where they matter the most.

Our ambition is a clear shift from the current state of analytics to the future, which means that we see the future of analytics as autonomous, hence always learning and monitoring; proactive, in order to provide solutions and alternatives to problems that haven’t even been discovered yet; and personalized, meaning that insights are contextualized and can be provided per desired medium or experience preference.

Bringing Future Technologies to Customers Today

While we envision a true system of intelligence in the future, 麻豆原创 is already demonstrating value for customers today. 麻豆原创 Innovation Center Network is exploring multiple key technologies to help customers capitalize more on data and boost productivity to stay competitive in the long run.

Businesses are constantly in motion, and data continues to grow in size, complexity, and velocity. “Laura,” a risk manager at a company that evaluates the potential risks of a business and strategizes preventive measures, needs to be able to monitor standard KPIs via dashboards and constantly adapt them to catch trends and patterns or anomalies — at least it should be that way.

Today, however, autonomous, proactive, and personalized tools are needed to automate business monitoring and proactively identify and report relevant signals in data.

To address this need, we built a prototype of a self-learning, easy-to-integrate cloud service that continuously monitors business data for anomalies and proactively delivers actionable insights to risk managers like Laura in real time. We call this , and by integrating it into her day-to-day operations, Laura can spend less time exploring data and can detect unknown yet critical signals without manual intervention. She can also filter anomalies by relevance to receive critical signals, ultimately helping to get insights faster and react accordingly — before the business is impacted.

With all information at hand, the system can autonomously propose a response in real time, such as, 鈥淗ey Laura, something is going wrong, and here are a few proposals on what you can do.鈥� This is made possible by what-if scenarios enabled by the . It helps her autonomously consider multiple scenarios, simulate their outcomes, and offer recommendations for the next steps. For example, instead of relying on the usual measures, she might be shown alternative approaches that she had not thought of before but that would solve the problem even faster.

By providing holistic impact analysis and autonomous identification of what-if scenarios, Laura can better plan ahead and react quicker to uncertainties with data-driven insights. Optimized recommended actions that are aligned with company priorities and constraints allow her to recognize and mitigate risks early on — and decide on actions with confidence.

Like most of us, Laura is a visual person who processes images much faster than text. No wonder visualizing data in an easy-to-understand form has also become a trend in analytics. Thanks to their length of just a few seconds, short videos have evolved into the dominant format for sharing and receiving updates and notifications. Consuming information like you would consume content in social apps helps professionals like Laura capture vast chunks of complex data and become the one-stop shop for business insights in the future.

麻豆原创 is bringing such short-form videos to the enterprise. With automatically generated personalized content, concise stories deliver key insights about the business in a short, animated, and convenient format. Video data stories provide customers with a one-stop channel for timely notifications, digests, and alerts about business-critical events. It automatically translates real-time business insights into self-explaining audio-visual data stories, making it easier for Laura to make decisions.

Effective business processes depend on intelligent decisions with insights from data in the organization and beyond its networks. 麻豆原创鈥檚 vision is to infuse these data-driven insights into every decision-making process. This would be possible with AI-powered, lightweight, self-service analytics that seamlessly integrate into the day-to-day work routines of business users, blending human ingenuity and data-driven insights into context-rich, fact-based decision-making processes.

Automation and data contextualization are key trends shaping the future of analytics, requiring an evolution from the current state of analytics to the future of analytics being autonomous, proactive, personalized, and reinventing business decisions as a service.聽 麻豆原创 is a reliable partner to anticipate that change, drive innovation, and help our customers prepare for the future.

Data is the new gold of every enterprise. If you also want to base your decisions on intelligent data-driven insights in the future, you can become part of 麻豆原创鈥檚 innovation journey and get in touch with us. Customer feedback is key to solving real pain points in the data and analytics space and we would be delighted to co-innovate and solve your data challenges together.

Martin Heinig is head of New Ventures and Technologies at 麻豆原创.
.