The growing value of聽聽is a prime example of recommerce’s recent rise. Starting with an estimated worth of US$96 billion in 2021, the retail segment is projected to double in size within the next three years, reaching $218 billion by 2026. Similar growth levels are also reflected in other retail categories, including electronics, fashion accessories, and oversized goods such as furniture.

However, innovating this business model is more than just an exercise of responding to consumer demand, regulatory pressure, and expectations for prolonged product life. It’s also an opportunity to enter markets that are otherwise inaccessible due to price sensitivity, supply chain barriers, provenance uncertainty, and monopolization of recommerce-native startups running on customer-to-customer (C2C) platforms.

Recommerce’s Potential Goes Beyond Sustainability

While the rules of creating, implementing, and operating a recommerce business model are similar to those for other innovation initiatives, the scope of change is much more wide-reaching.

Business model innovation is traditionally consumer-centric and mainly focused on the buying experience in the retail sector. However, in the case of recommerce, the seller and buyer are equally considered “consumers.” Therefore, frictionless processes are essential whether sellers send their used goods to the retailer and receive in-kind payment or buyers browse the commerce site, complete their purchase, and return an item.

Compared to competing startups, larger retailers and brands could have a considerable edge in creating seller and buyer experiences that are fast, transparent, and responsive. Organizations can achieve these characteristics by further advancing existing technology infrastructure to help ensure immediate payout for every item sold, optimize inventory turnover and control, streamline logistics, and prevent fraudulent transactions.

True Value Emerges with Expertise and Guidance

Capturing the total value of a recommerce business model can be easier said than done 鈥� especially within the confines of traditionally slim margins and under the watchful eyes of consumers, industry auditors, and government regulators. However, access to industry, process, and technology expertise allows retailers to create an authentic model that meets consumer needs and expectations while optimizing profitability and sustainability performance.

For businesses within the retail industry, Resell Engine from 麻豆原创 can help fulfill that promise with an intelligent algorithm. The software can evaluate a wide database of secondhand items and calculate a buy-back and competitive resale price. In addition, recommerce managers can set rules for different markdowns to help tailor the price determination to their needs.

Furthermore, with the support of , businesses can blend their established Resell Engine with existing applications to draw on the latest 麻豆原创 innovations, broad leadership in industry expertise, and a global innovator ecosystem. In return, executable strategies are shaped to help optimize operations, business models, and revenue streams while driving change with less risk, increased speed, and exceptional outcomes.

Suppose your retail organization wanted to automate the pricing of received goods. You could give sellers optimal payback for their items, yield the high-quality inventory that consumers demand, and expand margins for your company by using Resell Engine.

The first step is automating analysis and price-setting consistently across sales channels. The algorithm of the Resell Engine software can evaluate a comprehensive database of secondhand items to help calculate a buyback and competitive resale price based on authentication and condition. You can then adapt pricing strategies 鈥� such as markdowns 鈥� to optimize the profitability of every transaction and seize market demand effectively.

But pricing is only one area where big losses can take place in a recommerce business model. Margins are also susceptible because the 24/7 pace of your e-commerce business model can challenge the balance between pricing, sustainability, and profitability.

Extending Resell Engine across your business can help facilitate that equilibrium by complementing your brand’s strategic vision and meeting consumer expectations. You can also implement, deploy, and roll out new capabilities of Resell Engine necessary to support the business model 鈥� pivoting processes to help address emerging business needs and realize expected outcomes.

Based on extensive industry, process, and technology research, Resell Engine can enable you to explore the impact and value of your price determinations while aligning requirements and objectives with the business model. In return, you can increase secondhand good sales with a higher sell-through rate, double your operational efficiency, attract more customers with fair pricing, and promote experiences that your customers and sellers will love.

But more importantly, you can build a business model that helps ensure your costs do not outweigh the benefits of recommerce. Resell Engine can provide the insights needed to undergo an accurate cost-benefit analysis of your recommerce scenario, including risk assessment and mitigation.

A More Sustainable and Profitable Future Is Ahead

Retailers that invest in recommerce today will position themselves to weather economic downturns and reap the benefits of becoming a more sustainable brand. But they must take the proper steps by designing a highly efficient system that provides the greatest possible value to their buyers and sellers while maximizing revenue recovery on returns and resale items.

This is where Resell Engine from 麻豆原创 comes in. Through the software鈥檚 guidance, insights, and enablement, retailers can set a clear vision, create a best-practice design, and drive a strategic plan that can reveal a more sustainable and profitable future through a recommerce business model.

Want to learn more about how 麻豆原创 can support the innovation and delivery of your recommerce business model? Contact us at聽resell_engine@sap.com聽or visit “” on LinkedIn.

Maximilian Schmid is an entrepreneur in residence (Resell Engine from 麻豆原创) and a BTS management consultant for 麻豆原创 Germany.
Benedikt Scheuermann is an entrepreneur in residence (Resell Engine from 麻豆原创) and a BTS management consultant for 麻豆原创 Germany.

But rising to the challenge of today’s marketplace 鈥� especially increasing raw material and energy prices, margin pressure, supply chain complexity, and regulatory requirements 鈥� requires much more than Industry 4.0 initiatives focused on efficiency and price reduction. From operational performance to customer experience, companies must integrate data from across the enterprise into a single source to form sound decisions that make sustainability profitable and profitability sustainable.

Such a transformation is undoubtedly technology intensive, but the key enablers are also unassailably human. Understanding this reality, many chemical companies rely on the portfolio, provided by the Business Transformation Services group at 麻豆原创, to help transform their operations and gain a competitive edge amid fast global changes.

Turning Challenges into Great Opportunities

Competitively addressing turbulence depends on the ability to view transformation through the lens of six fundamental challenges:

R&D 麻豆原创ure across the Product Portfolio
The imperative to resist margin shrinkage, mitigate risks, increase ROI, and boost growth calls for innovative products and services that offer business value and foster close partnerships with customers. By pushing forward the adoption of advanced technologies to drive global R&D, supplier, and customer collaborations and joint ventures, businesses can prevent commoditization.

The Need for Vertical Integration
Evolving production facilities with a balance of high efficiency, global scale, flexibility, and intelligent responsiveness allows supply chains to weigh the synergistic benefits of integrated manufacturing plants or industrial parks against the flexibility of smaller plants. As a result, businesses can leverage new opportunities with disruptive business models, such as making raw materials instead of buying them and producing semi-finished or even finished goods.

Global Supply Chain Complexity
Global supply chains must be secure enough to mitigate volatile market conditions, such as global health emergencies, rising prices for raw materials and energy, and other factors that impact economic conditions. Companies can gain this advantage by establishing commercial and logistical transparency to support optimization and global planning of demand, sales, and operations.

Hidden Advantages of Business Networks
Business cannot stay competitive in a complex ecosystem alone. They must also scale and optimize their supply chain globally with business networks, such as the Catena-X Automotive Network. Doing so empowers suppliers, contract and toll manufacturers, joint ventures, and customers to collaborate openly and create new prospects for co-innovating better products and services, improving value chain efficiency, and fueling long-term growth.

Compliance and Sustainability Urgency
A primary objective for any chemical business is ensuring compliance with industry regulations. Yet, B2B customers also favor suppliers that help meet their own environmental, social, and governance (ESG) mandates. Sustainable businesses and innovations provide balance between these two expectations, creating a highly sought-after competitive edge by gearing products and services towards a circular economy.

Business Agility
The industry鈥檚 dynamic and fast-changing environment of mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures is creating tremendous complexity and pressure for permanent change and adaptation. Chemical companies need to balance industry-wide globalization and centralization while increasing business agility.

Chemical companies with a digital strategy encompassing all these topics can address industry challenges and seize on market trends in a disruptive manner. Through , businesses can gain new opportunities and capabilities never previously considered possible 鈥� including increased speed and efficiency, process automation, and data transparency.

Seizing the Moment with Advisory Expertise

From the perspective of 麻豆原创 Advisory Services, digitalization is not just another IT term but also a critical business priority. The more intelligent and sustainable a company becomes, the more agile, flexible, and integrated its value chain becomes.

Advisory experts from 麻豆原创 can enable chemical companies to turn their fundamental challenges into opportunities with a well-structured, business-driven design. This approach elaborates on the steps of the digital transformation journey 鈥� leading to a road map for future architecture design. Each phase of the road map follows an ideal sequence of digital innovation, technology adoption, and industry best practices and leverages the highest value for the company in the short term.

麻豆原创 Advisory Services help organizations evaluate and act on the sentiments of their customers, partners, and employees and improve their environmental impact. Chemical companies can then be well positioned to keep their workforce engaged, increase organizational agility, and deliver the products and services customers need and trust. Furthermore, they can control their varied sources and categories of spending with outstanding finance and operational efficiency and real-time enterprise insight.

Essentially, chemical companies that work with 麻豆原创 advisory experts can realize their potential as . They can make confident decisions and drive continuous innovation to adapt, innovate, and overcome challenges while making responsible choices that help reduce waste and emissions and drive long-term growth.

This business model is accomplished with intelligent technologies, including business networks, a business technology platform, cloud-based infrastructures, and solutions for business process management, experience management, industry cloud, and sustainability management. Additionally, artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, data platforms, the Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, predictive analytics, and virtual as well as augmented realities (VR/AR) are embedded in the intelligent technologies to drive end-to-end business processes and decision-making across enterprise domains.

Bringing to Life an Intelligent and Sustainable Network

The pressures on the chemicals industry may be relentless, with shocks coming in from all directions. However, this doesn’t mean businesses cannot find great opportunities in this volatile environment. With the right approach to digitalization, they can transform, innovate, and collaborate across the value chain to build upward momentum and better serve customers as an intelligent and sustainable network.

Learn more about the and how 麻豆原创 can help guide the innovation needed to overcome them. Read the series 鈥� on 麻豆原创 Community.

Ornulf Rexin is chief business consultant of Chemicals and Life Sciences for Business Transformation Services at 麻豆原创.

The answer is quite simple: true business transformation in the cloud requires a comprehensive approach that unites the strategy, organization, process, and technology needed to optimize performance and accelerate innovation.

Redefining the Pathway to True Transformation

Over the past few years, cloud technology has evolved into an alternative business transformation option based on continuous learning and business improvement. Once a traditional exercise of highly integrated and standardized solutions and long, predefined timelines, cloud implementations have become more agile with small, digestible steps for delivering new innovations and adopting next practices.

Take, for example, public cloud solutions. The technologies offer the opportunity to standardize, harmonize, and simplify processes, especially in non-differentiating areas. However, those gains do not come without sacrifices. Compared to highly customized on-premise solutions, companies need to be willing to bring their processes to the cloud鈥檚 standards while questioning previous on-premise investments that are customized and automated.

Every business starts at a different point and can select between standardization and differentiation strategies. Organizations can continuously innovate new business models, products, and services and optimize various areas of their operations to achieve or maintain a competitive edge, even during times of rapid expansion or massive disruption. Cloud technology offers the means to focus on core competencies and outsource as much or as little as needed.

Adding Value and Impact with Expertise and Guidance

Cloud technology comes in many forms, including infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS). In all of these cloud variations, the technology enables rapid, secure scaling through a subscription or pay-as-you-go model.

However, it is essential to note that each cloud choice serves a specific purpose and should be evaluated and selected on a case-by-case basis, even when migrating to a modern, cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. IaaS helps transfer the operation of IT hardware and related services to an infrastructure provider. PaaS offers a platform that can be used to build own software while being operated in a cloud environment. SaaS offers standard software for defined functionality in a cloud model.

Companies can determine which cloud option is best for the next stage of their digital transformation with from the Cloud Success Services organization at 麻豆原创. Based on a holistic digital transformation framework, Cloud Success Services helps 麻豆原创 customers connect every single step of the cloud adoption process 鈥� from strategy to translation to activation 鈥� in a continuous loop of innovation and optimization. The framework directs cloud-based business transformation with a portfolio of advisory methods, tools, and expertise that accelerates time to value.

麻豆原创 Intelligent Enterprise Framework is a proven methodology that brings together IT and business areas along a continuous journey of technology evolution. 麻豆原创 customers can considerably impact their digital transformation initiative by working with Cloud Success Services. As soon as the value of the 麻豆原创 solution is identified and aligned with strategic goals, they can improve processes, enhance organizational capabilities, and realize next practices and innovations early.

By taking part in the initial development of the digital strategy, Cloud Success Services can help adjust predefined plans and timelines to address emerging business needs or adopt technology capabilities faster as the opportunity arises. In essence, the organization meets 麻豆原创 customers wherever they are on their digital journey, whether they are taking the first step, approaching the midway point, or trailblazing the future of digital transformation.

Setting the Foundation for Agility and Trust

A cloud-based business model changes much more than the value of companies鈥� software assets and revenue streams. Ultimately, it fosters a relationship with the software provider that drives transformation agility and trust.

And that鈥檚 the same experience that 麻豆原创 customers can expect from Cloud Success Services. By designing a cloud environment that considers their people, processes, and existing technology systems, they can make each phase of their digital transformation journey even more successful than the last.

When considering a new IT investment, the real issue is quantifying and verifying measurable outcomes to better understand the technology鈥檚 value. And this gap is only growing wider as data loads continue to increase and the need for fast, agile, and business-improving analysis tools becomes a critical part of long-term growth.

Investments in cloud solutions are prime examples of this reality. In most cases, businesses have adopted the technology for the first time or expanded their cloud architecture over the past year or more. As a result, this move to infrastructure-as-a-service technology has led to a rise in IT services spending, with an intent to remove the cost of supporting mission-critical workloads and on-premise landscapes.

The adoption of cloud solutions unquestionably offers an opportunity to select specific functions that meet unique business requirements. But companies 鈥� no matter the size or budget 鈥� still require guidance to move to the cloud successfully and scale the technology鈥檚 functionality continuously as their business models and market conditions change.

It鈥檚 All about Relentless, Expertise-Based Attention

At 麻豆原创, we have worked persistently to adapt and enhance our software, tools, capabilities, and services to help our customers move from a purely on-premise environment to one that is hybrid and ultimately cloud-focused. This vision allows companies to operate as a single, standalone ecosystem, smoothly connected to exchange-required data across different systems, functions, and devices to serve a broad set of business needs and detailed cross-analyses.

But this move to the cloud is much more than another technology initiative. With the right guidance, the cloud can help companies adapt and evolve their business models to rise to their customers鈥� expectations while remaining profitable.

罢丑谤辞耻驳丑听, our customers can receive the support necessary to help solve their challenges quickly and with less cost and risk by fostering innovation, nurturing new ideas, and building strong offerings. The portfolio blends established applications with emerging technologies and draws on the latest innovations, industry expertise, and a partner ecosystem 鈥� from requirements and process analysis to implementation and go-live to rollout, value realization, and enhancement.

After purchasing a cloud solution, our customers can gain the care and professionalism they have come to expect from 麻豆原创, as well as our experience in the former on-premise world. Most importantly, their requirement to adapt to a cloud business model is our central focus throughout the cloud solution life cycle.

The guidance and close collaboration enabled through 麻豆原创 Advisory Services help ensure that the requested functionalities are analyzed by 麻豆原创 to grasp customer needs fully. Our teams of experts work shoulder to shoulder, facilitating a smooth handover whether the customer runs a project on its own, with 麻豆原创, or through a partner.

Furthermore, the portfolio helps build a rapport between the customer, partner, and 麻豆原创 to the point where honest feedback, as well as concerns, expectations, and needs, is exchanged. Our customers can even access the right experts to address questions about architecture, planning, operations, business process improvement, or capability expansion.

麻豆原创 Advisory Services experts analyze customer expectations and requirements in detail to help sufficiently resolve them and integrate the respective new solution or capability into the IT landscape. 麻豆原创 customers are not left alone during any phase of their transition to the cloud. Instead, they are guided by experts with years of experience who recognize and fulfill customer needs to help ensure the best possible business outcomes.

For example, when facing foundational issues during the implementation and go-live phase, our customers can receive the professional support and the attention they expect before their project timelines and costs are impacted. Of course, the best support is always the avoidance of critical incidents during the implementation phase with strategic and well-planned measures. To help avert risk, 麻豆原创 offers fundamental and operational support as well as strategic and foresighted assessments.

A Professional and Future-Oriented Experience

When migrating or implementing a cloud landscape, organizations require a broad understanding of the new architecture and its impact on business conditions. And the assistance of experts with industry and business-process knowledge and technology know-how is the answer to fulfilling that need.

麻豆原创 Advisory Services can deliver on that promise with a level of professionalism and future-oriented thinking that our customers demand. By orchestrating and communicating openly with various partners and internal resources, the portfolio provides an environment of trust across operational and strategic areas.

Jutta Grosse Wichtrup is principal business enterprise consultant at 麻豆原创.

The more sophisticated technology becomes, the greater the struggle to adopt new business models and establish internal policies and processes to support them. Yet, the barrier is not the technology 鈥� it鈥檚 how people experience those models.

One of the ways you can focus on the human factor of digital transformation is by implementing聽聽(麻豆原创 BTP). The platform features a comprehensive selection of solutions and functionalities that are cloud native or can be used for on-premise or hybrid environments and architectures. It includes database and data management solutions, analytics advancements, application development and integration capabilities, and intelligent technologies.

By integrating your choice of functionalities across 麻豆原创 solutions and processes on a single platform, you can obtain the critical insights and tools you need to amplify the value of those investments. But many organizations are gaining even more value when leveraging 麻豆原创 Services and Support offerings that emphasize enablement, integration, optimization, and operational change.

Connecting Digital Change to the Human Experience

It seems that 麻豆原创 customers know a secret to meaningful change that most businesses do not. According to a newly released聽, “The Benefits of Services and Support for Complex Technology Adoption,” surveyed CIOs and business managers indicated that they are too focused on their processes and organizational structure to take full advantage of new technology solutions and platforms. As a result, they cannot quantify business value adequately, nor scale and innovate with the IT architecture effectively.

Many organizations worldwide are using 麻豆原创 BTP to help address operational- and talent-related challenges in digital transformation initiatives. You can innovate a wide variety of new business scenarios and strengthen existing ones with technology providers and partners that provide ongoing services and support with a portfolio of integrated applications and services.

But with the help of 麻豆原创 Services and Support, you can safeguard a key part of your future success 鈥� how your customers and employees experience change. Every day, our service experts and I see how an outside perspective from vendor-driven services can help an organization gain the full value of increasingly complex technology. Such support brings much more than deep, industry-specific expertise and proprietary solutions and methodologies. It鈥檚 a much-needed answer to addressing unique people-related challenges quickly and effectively when they occur.

For example, the from 麻豆原创, with tailored business scenarios enabled by 麻豆原创 BTP, offer detailed road maps for specific business objectives. The offering provides recommendations for optimizing cloud solutions from 麻豆原创. Our step-by-step, quick-start help ensure technical and functional cloud readiness to adopt new industry and business scenarios and accelerate deployment and delivery. Meanwhile, our provide the continuous learning, hands-on practice, and skill validation you need to use the platform confidently.

Combining 麻豆原创 BTP and 麻豆原创 Services and Support helps unlock human-centered solution design that empathizes with real-world challenges of customers and employees. This collaboration allows you to identify significant use cases, create relevant and engaging user experiences, and develop value-added services. In fact, one of our customers 鈥撀�Kakao Enterprise聽鈥� verified 68 cross-industry use cases to expand its consumer-grade mobile app鈥檚 functionality to improve user flow and overall performance quality for a business-to-business market.

Building Up Transformations That Last

Without question, your organization has profound opportunities to advance your digital transformation, especially when leveraging our technologies and the expertise of our global ecosystem of partners. But that does not mean that the internal challenges encountered along the way are becoming any less critical to resolve.

麻豆原创 BTP and 麻豆原创 Services and Support provide the tools and expertise that help you and your partners overcome technical and nontechnical barriers that get in the way of realizing a future as an intelligent enterprise. And as you continue to refine, innovate, and expand business scenarios and digital capabilities, we help you, as our customer, become well-positioned to deliver ongoing value to your business and the people that support you.

Find out how vendor-provided services and support can help your business manage a complicated digital transformation more effectively, with minimal disruption and long-term success. Read the IDC Vendor Spotlight, sponsored by 麻豆原创, “.”

Augusta Spinelli is interim services president and head of Services Intelligent Delivery Group at 麻豆原创.

Unfortunately, consequences can run deep when executives place insufficient importance on the value of data at strategic and operational levels. Organizations often become too stagnant to evolve with market dynamics and changing business needs to effectively challenge competitors and gain considerable market share.

I have experienced how the long-term success of a company begins with an executive-level commitment to become a data-driven business. By unifying every area of the enterprise with this foundational goal, organizations can collaboratively develop an outcome-driven data strategy that breaks down the enterprise strategy into measurable data key performance indicators (KPIs).

Setting the Foundation for a Data Culture

For many 麻豆原创 customers, 聽is a critical part of their transformation into a truly data-driven business. The opportunity to foster innovation, nurture ideas, and build a resilient infrastructure with supporting processes enables organizations to understand the value of data and apply it to resolve business challenges with less risk and cost.

One of the first steps that our advisory experts undertake is to help our customers establish the essential cornerstone of a data-driven business. They outline a framework of critical positions 鈥� which we call a 鈥渉ouse of roles鈥� 鈥� needed to support the data transformation of each organization.

Each role in the framework has a unique set of responsibilities to help ensure control over the data landscape in terms of quality, consistency, relevance, processing performance, regulatory compliance, security, and authorized access:

• The data owner (usually a level-one manager) is accountable for a specific subset of data and defines management goals.
• The head of master data management (MDM) or chief data officer oversees data objects within scope, defines objectives for data quality and specifications, and monitors respective service-level agreements and KPIs.
• The data steward defines governance rules and validates maintenance requests for specific data objects to help ensure business intelligence remains high in quality and integrity.
• The data architect designs master data processes and logistics for dependent systems and provides technical support, such as data-quality rules and analysis.
• The data requester (any employee) requests new data or changes in existing data.
• The data agent creates and maintains master data in consultation with a data requester.

When setting up the framework, conflicts may occur within it. For example, the head of MDM may want data agents to be responsible for maintaining a specific set of data, while business organizations may disagree.

麻豆原创 Advisory Services helps defuse such controversies by leading workshops that allow our customers to transparently define roles with the involvement of all relevant stakeholders. This exercise includes the appointment of employees to each position and a data domain for which they will manage communications and governance requirements.

Cultivating Pivotal Change

Data-driven businesses begin with a clear decision-making process that transforms the company into a culture that values data accountability and governance. Through the 鈥渉ouse of rules鈥� framework, 麻豆原创 Advisory Services can bring customers one giant leap closer to realizing this vision.

What does this mean for 麻豆原创 customers? A world of opportunity. In addition to having a complete foundation for correct, fact-based decision-making, they can open up new revenue streams through聽data monetization and uncover insights already existing in their business applications.

Jan Hoffmann is a business processes principal consultant at 麻豆原创.

Access to predefined industry scenarios in the cloud is convenient and returns value quickly. Yet, companies ask how they can leverage industry solutions specifically for their business. Which solution would have the highest impact, and which are not necessary? What processes borrowed from other industries would help us innovate? 麻豆原创 Services and Support offers services to help address these questions specifically. Companies can explore which solutions fit business needs best and then develop a vision to innovate. 麻豆原创 Advisory Services can also provide technology guidance on how to integrate industry cloud and intelligent applications into an existing system landscape. Also, a user interface prototype or showcase is included.

Once clear on a vision to extend core business process with innovative solutions in the cloud, the next step is to achieve value without delay. To that end, designed to help launch and run industry cloud solutions from 麻豆原创 and create value rapidly. The services apply 麻豆原创 best practices and internal knowledge of the solution while using agile project deployment. There’s a common structure and approach, but the scope and content are specific for each industry cloud solution. The quick-start services can also be a foundation for a larger-scale, future deployment. A rich set of industry applications and services developed by 麻豆原创 partners can enhance industry cloud solutions from 麻豆原创.

麻豆原创鈥檚 industry cloud has been inspired by the opportunities and challenges real enterprises face. 麻豆原创 Services and Support is a vital force in helping companies deploy and adopt industry cloud solutions from 麻豆原创, accelerate innovation, differentiate their business, compete more effectively, and run more successfully.

Lois Bruckner is senior director of the Services Business Office at 麻豆原创.
Fritz Onnasch is services offering manager for Industry Cloud and Manufacturing Industries at 麻豆原创.

When talking about the cloud, people often toss around terms like 鈥渟oftware as a service鈥� (SaaS) and 鈥渋nfrastructure as a service鈥� (IaaS). However, very few understand the distinct differences between the two types.

SaaS is usable, off-the-shelf software 鈥� such as 麻豆原创 SuccessFactors solutions or 麻豆原创 Fieldglass solutions 鈥� made available in a public cloud. Meanwhile, IaaS stretches this cloud-based service by adding complementary IT services to operate a single cloud solution or a set of cloud solutions.

Another fundamental change in cloud technology is the opportunity to shift away from big release upgrades that typically happen every three years. Companies can now take advantage of a continuous deployment model to acquire new features and functionalities when and where needed. This approach may not impact daily operations, but it does allow organizations to rapidly apply and facilitate digital innovations.

Thanks to all these developments, native cloud-based applications can be designed and deployed considerably faster and at a lower cost than any internal IT department could accomplish. However, this also means that the pressure to innovate groundbreaking, sustainable innovations is relentless 鈥� and it鈥檚 not going away anytime soon.

To truly seize this moment to solve challenges quickly and stay ahead of the competition with less cost and risk, many 麻豆原创 customers seek the expertise, tools, resources, and support of . The portfolio features multiple services designed to support 麻豆原创 customers and help safeguard their cloud deployments. They include digital discovery assessment, digital strategy planning, landscape strategy and architecture, organizational change management, quick-start implementations, and a straightforward process for adopting standardized solutions.

Define Long-Term Value First

Like any other IT project, the goal of a cloud migration and upgrade is to deliver more business value. Ideally, this 鈥渧alue鈥� is defined and benchmarked long before a new solution is launched.

At the most basic level, 麻豆原创 Advisory Services can help ensure that a migration or upgrade:

• Reduces total cost of ownership
• Prevents negative impacts on functionality and usage
• Meets the needs of changing business and IT requirements
• Replaces custom-developed codes, features, and interfaces with standard functionalities
• Maintains the same level of performance and reliability experienced before the implementation, at a minimum
• Sets a more agile foundation for future innovation and digital transformation

If these criteria sound familiar, you鈥檙e right.

For years, most organizations have relied on at least a couple of homegrown solutions to cover an administrative area, such as procurement, finance, controlling, human resources, digital marketing, sales, operations, and warehousing. But 麻豆原创 Advisory Services can allow them to run various applications across single or multiple data centers or clouds by providing the support to help keep their system landscape current and operationally reliable.

Get the Advisory Support to Move Forward

The portfolio of cloud technology that鈥檚 available today has grown extensively over the last few years. In most cases, there is a cloud version of an on-premise solution. Just one look at the portfolio of聽聽is proof of that new reality.

With so many choices available and the constant pressure to evolve, it鈥檚 no longer feasible to explore and experiment with new technology, hoping an advantage reveals itself. With 麻豆原创 Advisory Services, companies can gain the guidance to commit to a vision, a strategic plan, and an expert-led framework that helps bring simplicity and certainty to a cloud migration or upgrade.

For example, some of our customers rely on 麻豆原创 Advisory Services to weigh which cloud technologies best match SaaS principles. During an expert-led design thinking workshop, they may learn that the standardized functionalities, features, and comprehensive processes delivered in a public cloud are a good fit for their business. Decision-makers can also discover the pros and cons of using a shared platform and data center managed by the software provider or implementation partner. More importantly, stakeholders are able to better understand the need to keep technology standardized to聽.

Other times, our customers may prefer the freedom to customize solutions as close to the on-premise version of the application as possible. In this scenario, they can still achieve the benefits of a cloud-native application, including continuous new features and functionalities. But as with their existing on-premise solutions, their IT organization must continue to maintain individualized, customized, or added functionalities.

Meanwhile, some companies have specific requirements 鈥� such as business process requirements or legal obligations 鈥� that might not allow the use of the shared platform structure of a public or private cloud. This may even include the use of a data center located in the same country. In this situation, organizations can consider a hybrid solution architecture that combines public and private clouds and on-premise solutions into one landscape.

Make the Right Decisions with Comprehensive Insight

Before our customers choose to move to a public or private cloud, remain on premise, or use a hybrid approach, 麻豆原创 Advisory Services can lead them through a comprehensive investigation of each element of the initiative, including:

• Technology: Ideate preconfigured innovations, IT model changes, and more intelligent technologies to exploit novel ways to transform.
• SaaS or IaaS services: Rent or purchase cloud capabilities when needed, scale as needs change and the business grows, and gauge the cost of public cloud services.
• Impact on business processes: Determine whether the business benefits from keeping application capabilities and content standardized or customized.
• Aftereffects of implementation methodologies: Consider the opportunities and risks of near-instant consumption of predefined content.
• Cloud landscape operations: Overcome the barriers of adoption and change by assessing legal constraints, demand for localization, interface complexity and variety, workforce readiness, and IT resource availability.
• Migration planning: Evaluate whether a new implementation (greenfield) or a move that maintains many of the functions of the on-premise application (brownfield) is more advantageous and aligned with expected outcomes.

Throughout this process, our advisory experts can provide the knowledge and best practices necessary to help customers accelerate transformational innovation and optimize operations. The value of the cloud solution is measured in terms of potential gains and total cost of ownership, and changes to business and IT processes are detailed 鈥� long before the implementation project begins.

Shape the Future of Business Value with Cloud Innovation

Many companies are entertaining the benefits of transforming their solution landscape from historically homegrown, on-premise solutions into a cloud-based solution architecture. And the realized benefits are many, including continuous migration and upgrades, lower total cost of ownership, fast adoption of the latest technologies, and ongoing support.

According to聽Guido聽Schlief, senior vice president and head of Services in Middle and Eastern Europe at 麻豆原创, moving to the cloud is not unlike the migration projects of the past. Businesses still need expertise, tools, and resources to foster innovation, nurture new ideas, and build strong digital capabilities 鈥� all while reaping the value of their existing and new technology investments.

And for our customers, all that know-how is packaged and accessible through 麻豆原创 Advisory Services. The portfolio can not only enable our customers and their implementation partners to understand the rules of engagement, but they can also identify innovations to help them stay competitive and continue to grow.

Find out how can help you solve business challenges quickly with less cost and risk.

Matthias Uhrig is principal business consultant for Business Transformation Services at 麻豆原创.

As B2B and B2C customers continue to shift more of their commerce transactions toward digital channels and engage in product-based digital services, the volume of master data is set to explode. predicts that the 鈥渁mount of digital data created over the next five years will be greater than twice the amount of data created since the advent of digital storage.鈥�

This growing trend is not only an opportunity, but also a challenge to how master data is managed. While considered a preparatory step for transitioning to the latest technologies, such as , MDM can also lay the foundation for future application development and business innovation.

Harmonizing Data to Drive Meaningful Transformation

While the pressure to innovate groundbreaking, sustainable value for customers and the business increases, many 麻豆原创 customers are solving unique challenges quickly with less cost and risk. The key to their success is聽, enabling a methodical, forward-thinking MDM approach to fostering innovation, nurturing new ideas, and building strong solutions.

By enhancing the quality of master data with the assistance of 麻豆原创 Advisory Services, our customers are overcoming significant challenges that many companies face in their MDM practices, including the following.

1. Turning a Lack of Commitment into a Shared Vision

Executive sponsors do not always connect how the benefits of an IT strategy can advance the overall business strategy, especially quick wins in MDM projects. Unfortunately, this level of detachment among decision-makers undermines the efforts of any solution implementation.

Consider an organization that purchased a solution license without setting aside the budget to support activities such as creating a master data team, staffing new roles, and setting up governance procedures. By not addressing errors made along the way and reconsidering the need for better MDM support, stakeholders likely feel frustrated once the project goes live because business needs were not met as expected. Worse yet, gaining the executive confidence and commitment needed for future projects become increasingly tricky as stakeholders feel their input will not make a difference in the outcome.

麻豆原创 Advisory Services help alleviate the situation by framing and solving various business and IT challenges and relaying how improved MDM processes can help. The organization can start its journey toward solution implementation by cultivating the business鈥檚 collective genius in an unconventional and creative atmosphere. This is accomplished with pragmatic design thinking workshops, pilots, prototypes, road maps, digital working models, and organizational expertise and enablement.

2. Strengthening Communication Between IT and the Business

IT departments typically lead MDM projects. However, users may still refuse to participate in the early discussions because they cannot see how the effort can benefit their business function. Over time, this lack of awareness turns into a lack of desire to fulfill MDM responsibilities, leaving behind any chance of leveraging data as a way to expand the company鈥檚 capabilities and help fuel revenue growth.

To overcome this bidirectional misunderstanding, 麻豆原创 Advisory Services help ensure that IT pays attention to the immediate needs of the business users and establishes MDM processes that are efficient and simple to maintain. Furthermore, the convenient delivery of training and timely knowledge allows closer collaboration between IT and the business and a better understanding of how the MDM project impacts the specific organization and overall business.

3. Establishing Governance and Common Data Definitions

When MDM tools and best practices are not implemented globally, individual organizations often feel compelled to act locally on their terms 鈥� limiting the visibility and consistency to make decisions at the corporate level. Meanwhile, users working with the same data sets have little idea of how they are being processed in other departments or whether decisions are based on the same understanding of what the data means.

Companies that rely on 麻豆原创 Advisory Services can employ universal governance of their master data processes at any point of their MDM project. Setting up a change management team and conducting an initial assessment early on improves organizational understanding of the level and magnitude of change needed to ensure MDM capabilities support the digital investment or transformation initiative. Plus, every user can access the proven knowledge, tools, and templates required to adapt and comply with data standards.

4. Speeding Business Optimization and Innovation

Although complex in theory, MDM is emerging as a critical part of digital readiness as companies recognize its long-term value and involve the right people to establish the right best practices. Even a standard approach to MDM can drive innovation when the right data strategy is in place and IT objectives are aligned with business strategies.

However, with 麻豆原创 Advisory Services, businesses can gain a more profound edge by using MDM to open the door to more accurate and consistent analytics tools. Data sets become more predictive and multidimensional by combining master data with , , graphical visualization, and other intelligent technologies. Different views on similar domains support the demands of various business groups on context-dependent insights.

Realizing the Full Potential of MDM Advancements

From the viewpoint of the business, MDM is valuable when cost reduction and closer cross-departmental collaboration are achieved. IT organizations can deliver on those expectations by implementing solutions successfully on the first attempt, harmonizing the way technologies and people work, and avoiding any misunderstandings along the way.

麻豆原创 Advisory Services enable IT and non-IT organizations to maximize the potential of their digital transformation by creating a master data foundation that drives greater visibility, agility, and focus. The service portfolio establishes emerging technologies and draws on the latest innovations, industry experts, and ecosystem of innovators from 麻豆原创. And for the business, this means an opportunity to further optimize operations and initiate change 鈥� faster and with less risk.

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Gelena Artemenko is a business enterprise consultant for CPG & Retail Industries at 麻豆原创.

Without question, demand for 鈥渒eeping the lights on鈥� remains strong. But at the same time, many IT leaders are concerned that they are neglecting investments in innovation that could help their business seize opportunities and mitigate risk quickly and effectively.

One prime example is the debate over legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP). Organizational executives may regard modernizing this trusted software as an unnecessary budget line item when business systems work well for the user. But from the CIO鈥檚 perspective, it is a critical must-have to unify the processes and data every employee needs to make the best decisions and act in real time, enterprise wide. Most importantly, the effort can reduce the cost of long-term system maintenance and enhance operational efficiency, the customer experience, and compliance.

The value of such IT innovation ultimately depends on how every person in the enterprise 鈥� across all roles and levels 鈥� embrace it. Based on the experience of our advisory services experts working with 麻豆原创 customers worldwide, our research has identified four use cases to illustrate IT organizational best practices. These use cases may look different from each other, but they all have the same goal: to deliver on rising expectations for intelligent innovation and strengthen IT performance continuity.

Use Case 1: Structuring Toward Technology

Some 麻豆原创 customers choose to take a technology-oriented approach to their innovation processes. Consider the structure adopted by a global software company shown in figure 1 below. At first glance, the structure seems very traditional. However, if you look further down in the chart, you鈥檒l see that must-have characteristics of a modern IT landscape are supported, such as a digital core, rock-solid and intelligent operations, smart connected cloud, and innovative business models.

A dedicated team is set up to support a continuous process for enterprise architecture and innovation creation. The agile and DevOps center of expertise (COE) provides the capabilities, methodologies, and training needed to help any regional, central, and line-of-business team participate in innovation programs.

The formal organization chart shown in figure 1 was first created eight years ago and continues to guide our customer鈥檚 agile transformation today. More than 80 product teams are in place with nearly 100 defined products, and each group contains six to 10 experts who are developed and reskilled on demand. More importantly, the innovation delivered enables the company鈥檚 1,500 employees 鈥� from the front office to the back office 鈥搕o adopt more agile ways of working and making decisions.

Use Case 2: Focusing on a Specific Business Domain

Other 麻豆原创 customers prefer a business domain-oriented IT organization. In this model, the IT organization mirrors the business structure, and DevOps teams emerge and retire it on demand and as expected to deliver a well defined outcome.

For instance, a customer in the automotive industry has created stable core DevOps teams staffed by function and IT experts (see figure 2). While function experts are permanently appointed, IT experts are temporarily assigned from their home-base organization. Plus, an agile COE can be used by any team or line of business.

Use Case 3: Expanding COE Capabilities

When our customers primarily use 麻豆原创 solutions for various functions, they often structure IT by business domains and expand them with the support of COE capabilities. 麻豆原创 application and solution experts are assigned to the business area, whereas cross functions are organized in the COE structure. For one of our customers from the research and development industry, this setup enabled it to facilitate business and IT integration, as illustrated in figure 3.

麻豆原创 solutions experts with process knowledge are assigned to each business team and embedded into the support chain as second-level support. Additionally, the solution experts are responsible for customizing, making standard changes, and evaluating requirements in close cooperation with cross-functional experts in the COE.

The customer鈥檚 COE must protect the productive 麻豆原创 landscape by performing design authority for new IT demands, centralized release management, and an operation control center.

Use Case 4: Directing Product and Service Innovation

Last is the product-oriented structure. With this use case, one of our customers from the financial services industry adopted this approach to distinguish between market products, enabling products, and corporate products (see figure 4).

A significant portion of our customer鈥檚 enabling and corporate products are supported by 麻豆原创 software and technology, and IT experts from 麻豆原创 were well integrated into its business activities. Meanwhile, the company鈥檚 product areas, such as market products and specific corporate products, relied on third-party software and technologies maintained by the second larger COE within company鈥檚 IT organization. Since every product area drives agility, and innovation was a critical responsibility.

In this case, our customer鈥檚 COE is the home base for 麻豆原创 innovation and DevOps capabilities. Plus, a scaled, agile framework (SAFE) is the chose innovation methodology.

Building IT鈥檚 Future as an Innovation Best Practice Organization

Across all four of these use cases, 麻豆原创 S/4HANA is the chosen intelligent ERP that serves as the core of all data, applications, and processes. However, no one-size-fits-all strategy for implementing, using, and benefiting from the solution exists. Each company must identify an approach that best fits their structure, meets their needs, and brings the desired success.

Today鈥檚 competitive landscape is pushing companies to become more agile and renew themselves. In response, the three dimensions of innovation 鈥� technologies, capabilities, and structures 鈥� need to be rethought and reconciled. Only then will businesses emerge stronger through meaningful transformation and take advantage of the opportunities that arise in the future with confidence and ambition.

For more information, explore .

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Torsten Scheffler is a business transformation consultant at 麻豆原创.

Getting ahead of the competition has become increasingly challenging as market dynamics continue to shock businesses to their core. But change itself is not the issue for IT; the real concern is providing a connected, collaborative, and agile ecosystem that the entire company needs to renew the customer experience, employee engagement, and business productivity.

From the CIO鈥檚 perspective, this new reality is only intensifying the pressure to rethink the IT function. Demand for fast, agile innovation continues to grow, but the existing technology landscape is being stretched beyond its capacity to effectively respond to ever-evolving priorities and market dynamics.

Accelerating IT Transformation to Address 麻豆原创ing Trends

Regardless of industry and business model, CIOs have been working diligently to implement a wide variety of changes within their organization to produce technology innovations that support the ever-expanding interconnection of people, devices, content, and relationships. But this overall transformation journey is an ongoing, fluid process.

Based on many years of working with 麻豆原创 customers from various industries and using a multitude of business models, our advisory services experts have identified key trends of well-running IT organizations that deliver on rising expectations for enterprise-wide intelligence.

Trend 1: Widespread availability of new technologies

An explosion of intelligent technology options is now universally accessible to businesses of any size, from any industry, and within any market. The Internet of Things (IoT), Industry 4.0, the cloud, automation, predictive analytics, Big Data, machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and blockchain — all these digital advancements and more are empowering peers and competitors alike to produce better outcomes.

However, companies that are adopting these data-driven technologies quickly are achieving game-changing benefits. They are experiencing accelerated growth in available information and harnessing it with advancements in real-time analytics enabled by AI and machine learning. More importantly, engagement among customers and employees is higher with immersive experiences enabled by voice recognition and virtual and augmented reality.

Trend 2: Changing expectations for the work experience

By connecting business and industry knowledge with expertise in technology, data management, and human behavior, IT organizations play a critical role in optimizing the value of every digital investment. This unique capability allows every business function to take advantage of existing and new applications in ways that meet employee expectations.

For example, migrating to the cloud can provide a much-needed platform for increased agility and adoption of next-generation solutions that drive innovation. While the project offers data-hungry organizations with massive volumes of data, employees of all generations and roles can also expand their skills, use intelligence more meaningfully, and satisfy their desire for purposeful work.

Trend 3: Rising competition to satisfy evolving customer behavior

As switching costs continue to decline, customers are empowered to evolve their behaviors and expectations in ways that benefit them. This constant evolution also opens the door to new competitors that provide more straightforward and satisfying business models as barriers to entry lower.

Even the most well-managed business can benefit from scaling its value proposition to shifts across its customer base. By considering changes in society, culture, and the world around it, IT organizations can connect the dots between digital investments and the larger purpose they serve beyond immediate business goals. Such opportunities may include attracting and retaining the best talent, building a brand name around unparalleled customer service, and setting a foundation for strategic market leadership.

Balancing Risk and Opportunity

With , many 麻豆原创 customers are taking advantage of these three trends to create and run new business models, processes, and products and services uniquely designed for a hyperconnected world. Our Intelligent Enterprise concept allows them to address their challenges head-on when transforming their operations.

Our team of technology and business experts guides customers through their innovation journey by attending to three major requirements.

Requirement 1: Modernize the technology stack

This requisite is much more than meeting business demands and lowering IT costs. For us, it鈥檚 about undergoing a thorough search for the right technology that enables each customer鈥檚 workforce to focus on higher-value tasks by replacing repetitive tasks with automation.

The Intelligent Enterprise concept allows 麻豆原创 to offer a broad portfolio of available technologies, covering a range of business functions and capabilities supported by three critical components:

• Intelligent suite: Automate day-to-day business processes and improve interactions with customers, partners, suppliers, and employees through applications with embedded intelligence.
• Digital platform: Facilitate the collection, connection, and orchestration of data and the integration and extension of processes within the intelligent suite by leveraging 麻豆原创 Business Technology Platform and the 麻豆原创 Database and Data Management portfolio.
• Intelligent technologies: Leverage embedded intelligence to detect patterns, predict outcomes, and suggest actions.

Requirement 2: Realign capabilities with the business strategy

By thinking beyond organizational boxes and lines, IT organizations can help business functions redefine their structure in terms of skill advancement and culture change. Every organization can work together as a dynamic network in which end-to-end accountability is fostered, flexible resources allow for quick changes, and the leadership team shows direction. More importantly, every employee is focused on delivering business outcomes that contribute to one shared objective: providing rock-solid operations to help ensure business continuity.

In our research of 麻豆原创 customers that successfully transformed their operating model with an adaptive and outcome-oriented approach, a thread of six key attributes is often present. These qualities help safeguard innovation efforts with the support of leadership and organizational structures across all levels.

1. Business IT integration: IT capabilities are embedded in all business-led product areas. Roles are usually characterized by fluid boundaries that allow people to work with smaller teams across organizational entities with common goals. Additionally, IT support is redefined by giving employees a choice of interaction channels, such as online chat, phone call, ticket submission, and service desk.

2. Product orientation: Priorities and budgets are set for specific business capabilities and products, not projects. Plus, product owners are accountable for objectives, end to end, which align with well-defined priorities.

3. Agility and DevOps: By creating a competence center for IT agility and DevOps, customers can scale new ways for employees to work productively. This approach combines continuous integration, delivery, and deployment to deliver uninterrupted operations automation, for example site reliability engineering.

4. Cloudification:In this case, customers are relying on a cloud environment. They can either increase their consumption of software as a service (SaaS), move to infrastructure as a service (IaaS) such as a hyperscalers, or access self-services in a landscape that scales automatically to changing needs and skills.

5. Innovation and emerging technologies:Innovation creation is considered an unceasing process. Customer and user experiences are the central focus when designing new technologies and leveraging emerging capabilities, including AI and machine learning.

6. Rock-solid IT operations:When protecting production and automation, our customers engage central release management to actively support continuous delivery and rely on an operations control center to enable nearly 100% availability.

Requirement 3: Redefine the organizational structure

Customers that fulfill requirements one and two often transform their organizational structures to address many external factors. They tend to implement an agile, outcome-focused IT operating model that anchors and applies the six key features of best-practice IT organizations, as listed in the figure above, within various organizational setups.

Embracing the Potential of Modern IT Innovation Practices

One organization鈥檚 risk can be another business鈥檚 opportunity. It all depends on how people embrace it. The same perspective can be applied when continuously modernizing the IT infrastructure.

The goal may be any number of possibilities, such as skill development, process realignment, organizational structure change, or reimagined operational models. But the real value of every newly adopted technology is the opportunity to revive the fundamental purpose of IT innovation 鈥� to deliver the right business outcomes every time.

For more information, explore .

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Torsten Scheffler聽is a business transformation Consultant at 麻豆原创.

If your company has yet to catch on to the importance of data quality, it鈥檚 not too late. Though Big Data has been around since the early nineties, the value and strong focus on data has increased drastically in the last decade. Since then, some organizations have undergone a of work realignment, process refinement, and business model innovation to reap the benefits of this information gold mine.

Companies that leverage their data want to create more value for their customers and themselves. But the is broad and depends on a defined set of strategic goals, technology adoption, and data operationalization. In most cases, businesses that cite 鈥渧alue鈥� as the efforts really mean boosting efficiency, optimizing supply chain flows, or using economies of scale to improve customer relationships.

So, how can organizations use data effectively? According to , 鈥淵ou can鈥檛 manage what you don鈥檛 measure.鈥�

Clearing the Path to Pivotal Change

To measure data use and find areas for improvements, many companies have created a new role within their C-level ranks 鈥� 鈥� over the last eight years. This executive is tasked with defining the company-wide data strategy, including controlling, governing, and managing data-driven engagements to shape the business into an intelligent enterprise. One operational example is the cleanup of inaccurate, incomplete, and duplicated information 鈥� also known as 鈥渄irty data鈥� 鈥� residing within the digital infrastructure.

Gartner describes 鈥溾�� as information that is inaccurate, incomplete, and pervaded of duplicates, impacting customer turnover, expense management, sales opportunities, and back-office functions. Therefore, companies should address this issue with the following practices based on a part of Gartner鈥檚 basic principles of data quality management:

• Consistency: Data is stored in one or multiple locations with equal values.
• Accuracy: Data value is consistent across the target model.
• Validity: Data values are within a certain predefined range or domain.
• Integrity: Relationships between data values are complete.
• Relevance: Data holds the right information to support the business.

Improving data quality to the point where any digital transformation gains a beneficial edge is like losing weight 鈥� it takes special effort to attain it and consistency to maintain it. With a focused mindset and healthy habits, companies can leverage their data to stay relevant and financially stable with room for future growth and new business models.

Managing Data with a Principled Approach

While approaches to assessing data quality are numerous, some methods work better than others. For example, many companies use the Friday afternoon measurement method, known as . Using FAM, one assesses the most common errors within the last 100 data records, such as sales orders or business partner information, on a paper-sheet table to derive an improvement strategy for corrupted data sets.

FAM may not be the best solution for most organizations. We recommend an online tool, namely a data quality dashboard. This online tool provides real-time insights into a company鈥檚 overall data health, uncovering all inefficiencies across different domains to be addressed by the CDO organization in one location, millions at a time. A rules framework combined with innovation technologies, such as machine learning and intelligent robotic process automation (iRPA), provides real-time insight to action across all systems in which master data is stored to restore inconsistencies.

1. Data consistency is evaluated in terms of quantity, not quality.

To enhance key performance indicators for data quality, organizations should consider a specific master data domain, such as material master data, against its availability in cloud-based or on-premise systems. This could be helpful if master data is scattered across different landscapes.

Master data records must also be checked for duplicate values based on the variety of their attributes. Duplicates, followed by missing entries, are the most common occurrence within corrupted data. To support the duplicate search, further aspects, like data accuracy, need to be taken into consideration.

2. Data accuracy is measured by the format and content of defined data sets.

The use of country-specific data formats 鈥� such as the structural difference between European and American dates 鈥� can significantly impact a company鈥檚 ability to deliver tangible outcomes. Decision-makers can never assume that data means the same to everyone.

A popular use case for verifying content for accuracy is the handling of workflows and abbreviations. Following logic like 鈥渟hipment date must not come before the order date鈥� can help ensure the dates on specific activities communicate the same insight to everyone involved in the delivery process.

Further content-related accuracy checks are necessary for homogenous data sets. Abbreviations should be set to a company-wide standard. For instance, in the 鈥淐ity鈥� field, 鈥淣ew York鈥� must be appear as 鈥淣YC,鈥� not 鈥淣Y.鈥� Such checks will be useful also in the duplicate search, once applied.

3. Data validity checks are a recurring task.

As a byproduct of manual processes or reorganizations, companies often have addresses that are only up to date for a specific time frame. A dedicated business rule can frequently check time frames against a specified date, mark affected records, and alert the data quality responsible to derive actions. Such checks need to be done on a frequent basis.

4. Data integrity is assessed to identify data sets with a recurring pattern.

Key performance indicators for meaningful data quality should consider data integrity patterns from all master data domains. For example, detecting a recurring data pattern could be as simple as programming a required field as mandatory to capture necessary insights. However, a more complex scenario may also be applied to classify a material code to a specific characteristic category or plant location. Patterns within the integrity key performance indicator (KPI) must be of major weighting within the overall data quality KPI.

5. Data relevance is achieved through continuous maintenance.

After setting up rules for deriving meaningful data quality, the dashboard setup still requires attention to help ensure users can drill down to the line item level for dynamic, real-time, and actionable insight. Directing analytics results generated by the dashboard to the maintenance layer allows CDOs to easily improve data quality by opening service requests. Furthermore, user feedback from service requests can serve as input to improve rule composition. This feedback should be the starting point of a cycle to resolve and refine the rules and data issues.

Focusing on Data Improvement and Consistency at Scale

Every company needs a single source of truth to pinpoint their weaknesses and inefficiencies. Fortunately, innovations in mobility, artificial intelligence, process automation, bots, and predictive analytics are making data creation and editing more efficient and convenient than ever before.

But to be truly successful, businesses must take a quantum leap in data quality with the assistance of tools such as a CDO dashboard. Why? Because data quality is the heart of every digital transformation and a must-have for every company pursuing an increasingly digital marketplace.

Explore how can help energize your business鈥檚 digital transformation with a flexible and scalable rule framework for data quality management.

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Pascal Angerhausen is business transformation lead for CIO Advisory at 麻豆原创.
Tobias Fischer is data architect for CIO Advisory at 麻豆原创.

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聽聽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聽

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聽

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聽

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聽聽and existing digital assets such as a聽聽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聽 can help your company reveal its true potential as a data-centric business with the one data platform approach.

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

Many executives guide their transformation efforts by following the signs of emerging market trends and ticking off the boxes of their corporate strategy. This mindset unquestionably generates exciting new business models, products, services, and experiences. But it still misses the ultimate goal: to reimagine everything from the innermost depth of their infrastructure to the furthest reach of their operational edge, including soon-to-be decommissioned legacy business functions.

This reality is also true when modernizing enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. When moving from 麻豆原创 ERP to 麻豆原创 S/4HANA, IT teams must also support the change process for legacy business areas with a three-fold approach:

• Reduce overall IT complexity and total cost of ownership
• Maintain a stable IT environment for current operations
• Prepare for and provide a future-ready IT landscape and operation

By paying attention to these less strategic functions, ERP modernization can further minimize IT cost and effort. More importantly, unplanned shutdowns and intelligence displacement can be avoided while operations and data security remain stable.

Strategy #1: Keep Legacy ERP As Is

When considering the future of legacy ERP, some organizations choose to preserve their existing system as long as possible and carry out housekeeping activities to simplify the system operations, especially when supporting less strategic business areas. This approach helps ensure stable, continuous operation of the 麻豆原创 production environment while avoiding new investments.

Sounds good, right? Unfortunately, extending an ERP system beyond its useful life can require incremental expenses that do not fully deliver any real impact 鈥� for example, cost savings 鈥� for the business. On the IT side, the historically grown complexity of the ERP system keeps IT operational costs high.

Strategy #2: Convert Legacy ERP to 麻豆原创 S/4HANA

Converting the legacy ERP to 麻豆原创 S/4HANA is the best choice when organizations must retain proven business processes and value chains, use in-house applications, support numerous subsidiaries, or rely on historical data. In addition, the overall business benefits from a long-term maintenance and support relationship with 麻豆原创.

Our team of advisory experts supports the conversion model in two phases: first, housekeeping and preparation and second, execution. During the initial stage, organizations simplify their existing ERP system by reducing its data footprint and removing unused custom developments, data, and software inconsistencies and redundancies. The latter phase delivers the measures necessary for the transition to 麻豆原创 S/4HANA, including delta solution design and a multi-cycle execution plan covering every aspect up to full production.

This tactic gives our customers the ability to adopt 麻豆原创 S/4HANA with few training and change management needs and no additional data migration. The conversion also allows organizations to maintain operations for their familiar legacy processes in a new technical environment, helping to ensure that 麻豆原创 S/4HANA and the data it leverages is maintenance proof.

Strategy #3: Implement 麻豆原创 S/4HANA with a Steady Move to the Cloud

麻豆原创 S/4HANA can be built alongside an active legacy ERP system, which can be retired later. While it encourages organizations to redefine processes and consider new ways to balance traditional operations with new capabilities, this approach may not make sense for legacy business, considering the cost and effort involved.

This is where deploying 麻豆原创 S/4HANA in a public cloud environment can help. By following the 麻豆原创 Activate methodology and standardizing business processes, our customers can quickly start moving to a modern ERP, build it up intelligently, operate it with simplicity, and innovate continuously.

While implementation costs can be reasonably controlled by adopting the 麻豆原创 software standard, the public cloud allows customers to significantly reduce operating costs by scaling their digital capabilities and processes to meet today’s business needs. Plus, they can simplify system operations to prepare for tomorrow鈥檚 changes with a future-proof, maintainable, and scalable ERP.

However, this doesn鈥檛 mean that these customers must start with a new implementation and move to the cloud immediately. With a mixed mindset of “keep legacy as is,” and “implement the modern ERP as new,” organizations can first maintain the status quo and improve the legacy system operations. This perspective gives executives additional time to react to market trends, business changes, and innovations. Then, they can define a comprehensive transition strategy to 麻豆原创 S/4HANA. Meanwhile, 麻豆原创 S/4HANA continues to evolve with broader functional innovations.

When ready, our customers can transition 麻豆原创 S/4HANA fully to the cloud to help ensure a future-proof, lean ERP that further optimizes operating costs and reduces IT complexity 鈥� even across legacy business functions.

Bringing the True Spirit of Transformation

C.S. Lewis once wrote, “Mere change is not growth. Growth is the synthesis of change and continuity, and where there is no continuity there is no growth.”

The same is true for ERP transformation: Projects that bring the most significant changes are still relevant to legacy business functions that may no longer appear as strategic as newer approaches to go-to-market models, products and services, and organizational processes.

Explore how聽聽can help energize your business’s digital transformation with flexible and scalable options for deploying a modern ERP software, such as 麻豆原创 S/4HANA.

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Di Li is a principal business consultant and enterprise architect at 麻豆原创.
Georg Heberle is a senior business consultant and enterprise architect at 麻豆原创.

In an interview, Peter Flohrer, global vice president of 麻豆原创 Services Manufacturing discusses Industry 4.Now, 麻豆原创鈥檚 Industry 4.0 strategy, and how its accompanying service package is designed to support the entire Industry 4.0 transformation journey.

Q: Why is it so important for customers to take on Industry 4.0?

A: All industries are facing increased volatility resulting from the lasting impacts of COVID-19, such as the reordering of trade relationships, climate variability, technology advancements, and other forms of economic, environmental, and social disruptions. By prioritizing end-to-end processes rather than siloed thinking, companies are better positioned to achieve objectives specific to their business needs and footprints.

When companies are connected from end to end and shop floor to top floor, they can capture, process, and analyze more critical data to stay ahead of the pack. A highlights how the current global pandemic has also underscored this need to coordinate and optimize production beyond the shop floors and plants, ultimately helping ensure more resilient manufacturing and supply chain operations.

It鈥檚 clear that now is the time for Industry 4.0.

Can you tell us about the 麻豆原创 Industry 4.Now initiative?

Industry 4.Now is 麻豆原创鈥檚 strategic initiative for helping companies thrive in volatile times through Industry 4.0 intelligent processes. This means helping them bring their manufacturing and full product experience process to a new level by combining manufacturing automation with enterprise business execution.

While Industry 4.0 is a broad topic that has been around for some time 鈥� and we often consider the concept more of a philosophy than a concrete solution 鈥搘e created this enhanced Industry 4.Now strategy to guide customers in achieving their specific Industry 4.0 transformation goals.

With every customer鈥檚 situation looking entirely different, there is no cookie-cutter solution, which is why the consultative approach is so key and why we draw on our cross-industry expertise to counsel customers in how to integrate all these processes.

How is the new Industry 4.Now service package positioned to meet the needs of today鈥檚 users?

To support the customer鈥檚 overall journey to Industry 4.0 processes, 麻豆原创 created an accompanying innovation service package for Industry 4.Now 鈥� and the included advisory and implementation services. The four key pillars of Industry 4.Now 鈥� intelligent factory, intelligent asset, intelligent product, and empowered people 鈥� are the foundation of these services. As I mentioned, Industry 4.0 is an expansive concept, so this service package helps users to home in on specific opportunities where they can improve and excel. They provide actionable road maps for customers to reinvent production and connect their entire company across multiple business areas and shop floors.

For example, the intelligent factory service uncovers intelligent automation opportunities; the intelligent asset service identifies ways to extend the useful life and safety of assets through connected devices; the intelligent product service links to the circular economy; and the empowered people service advances a motivated and engaged workforce that, in turn, drives innovation, growth, and resilience.

In addition, these services help leaders quantify the improvement and benefits resulting from their Industry 4.0 initiatives to show how they contribute to overall customer success.

When leveraged together, this service package allows customers to effectively explore their business vision and personalize a road map to success. We start with a free maturity assessment to evaluate where a customer is in their Industry 4.0 transformation. Once an entry point is identified, the advisory services package offers a big-picture view of opportunities and agile approaches for reimagining processes and realizing business goals. For example, this helps customers determine which area they should prioritize, whether it be management or product design.

The implementation service package then assists with the necessary steps for each customer鈥檚 road map to success, including identifying the optimal partners and tools required. What is unique about this package is that it is tailored to specific business scenarios, providing key insights into how businesses can drive time to value as they automate processes and improve the resiliency of their operations and supply chains along their journeys to Industry 4.0.

As a leading manufacturer of gas springs and hydraulic vibration dampers,听聽is no stranger to this increasingly challenging reality. The urgency around innovation and accelerated delivery has become so high that the midsize company with production locations worldwide modernized its IT landscape using the hyperscaler Microsoft Azure with聽.

鈥淥ur decision to leverage Microsoft Azure with 麻豆原创 HANA Enterprise Cloud allows our business to upscale the IT landscape to meet the needs of peak scenarios and downscale it during idle times. Most importantly, this setup seamlessly supports the fluctuations of our innovation cycle,鈥� reflected Matthias Zanger, director of IT at Stabilus.

Encouraging Flexibility and Curiosity with Digital Openness

Since its start in 1934, Stabilus has maintained a long-standing tradition of commitment to customer satisfaction, openness to turning opportunities into progress, delight in winning customer trust, and ethical approaches to long-term partnership and prosperity. This core vision has proven to be precisely what its customers need, earning the trust of industrial businesses worldwide.

To safeguard this reputation, Stabilus chose to upgrade a relatively unstable, high-maintenance, and on-premise infrastructure to the cloud. This decision led to the migration of existing 麻豆原创 applications to 麻豆原创 HANA Enterprise Cloud, which standardizes the IT environment, minimizes the time and effort to manage it, and reduces the total cost of ownership significantly.

But these advantages were only the beginning of the potential of 麻豆原创 HANA Enterprise Cloud. Stabilus quickly learned that running a hyperscaler, such as Microsoft Azure, with the service gave the business the technology support necessary to scale IT resources, as needed.

鈥淔or us, this migration is a significant step forward in our mission for dynamic progression and innovation,鈥澛燴anger said.聽鈥淢icrosoft Azure with 麻豆原创 HANA Enterprise Cloud enables us to create powerful solutions for our customers by combining application management with our engineering expertise and ingenuity. And it鈥檚 all available in a global and intelligent cloud environment that we trust.鈥�

Kick-Starting the Journey to a Hyperscaler-Enabled Cloud

Gaining the full benefit of Microsoft Azure with 麻豆原创 HANA Enterprise Cloud required Stabilus to follow a well-mapped strategy.

鈥淭he scope of our project consisted of two waves. The first handled the upgrading and migration of our HR applications, enterprise portal, 麻豆原创 BusinessObjects solutions, and text retrieval and extraction (TREX) capabilities. Then, we focused on our ERP and supply chain management software as well as the 麻豆原创 Fiori design system,鈥� shared Erhard Stannek, IT team lead of 麻豆原创 cross-applications at Stabilus.

By first provisioning the system targeted for 麻豆原创 HANA Enterprise Cloud, Stabilus underwent a structured and measurable migration with the assistance of the landscape strategy and architecture services available through . The framework included sandboxing, development, quality assurance, testing, and production 鈥� taking the project from premigration tasks to uptime, downtime, and post migration.

鈥淯sing the database migration option of the Software Update Manager tool, 麻豆原创 migration consultants helped us combine our upgrade and migrated database in one tool 鈥� 麻豆原创 HANA,鈥� mentioned Stannek. 鈥淲e not only reduced downtime but, more importantly, finished the migration successfully.鈥�

During all these activities, Stabilus did not experience any disruption, compared to a non-hyperscaler migration to 麻豆原创 HANA Enterprise Cloud. The target system was handed over to 麻豆原创, so the software landscape could be integrated into the cloud service, undergo user and regression tests, and ramp up.

鈥淲ith two consultants from the Business Transformation Services group from 麻豆原创, we accessed a tremendous volume of valuable knowledge from highly experienced experts,鈥� Stannek observed. 鈥淭he well-established back-office unit allowed us to exchange information with 麻豆原创 and leverage a migration framework based on the 麻豆原创 Enterprise Architecture Framework methodology to create and use our unique聽enterprise architecture.鈥�

Optimizing the Landscape, Closing Gaps, and Reshaping the Future at Stabilus

For Stabilus, a migration to the cloud with a hyperscaler is setting its foundation for a digital landscape that is optimized, simplified, and seamless. Giving 麻豆原创 the responsibility to maintain its technology operations allows the company鈥檚 IT team to concentrate more on strategic topics that can help move the business forward, explore the possibilities of enterprise content management, the Internet of Things (IoT), and a .

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Verena Eitle and Thomas Dieter Hauschildt are business consultants for BTS IT Architecture Advisory at 麻豆原创 Germany.

In recent years, many significant global events have changed everyday life in unimaginable ways. Everything 鈥� from how people behave, think, and communicate to which regulations and policies are enacted to tighten governance and control 鈥� is constantly evolving. And those shifts are sometimes so dramatic that old norms are no longer relevant, safe, comforting, or familiar.

This well documented truth is also reflected in the quality of B2B customer experience. XM practices that focus on traditional factors, such as feature-based product selection and market leadership, are not considered necessary anymore. Instead, customers are more likely to value brands that demonstrate care and concern, meet their needs on their terms, navigate a completely changed world, and respond to demand and individual requirements with agility.

How can companies in the B2B space pivot fast enough to trigger an immediate and lasting impact on their customers鈥� sense of brand accountability, security, trust, and loyalty? For many 麻豆原创 customers, the secret is getting to the root of their XM challenges quickly and innovate with聽less risk by using .

Close the Experience Management Gap

The disparity between a company鈥檚 perception of their customer experience and what customers think about it is often nothing short of shocking. A survey conducted by indicates that 80 percent of companies believe they deliver superior experiences, while only eight percent of customers agree.

This disconnect is what we call the XM gap. To close it, companies need to do three things better than ever: Listen to their customers more; understand how customer feedback relates to their products, services, interactions, and business operations; and act on that knowledge in ways that improve experiences on their customers鈥� terms.

For decades, organizations have relied on operational data (O-data) to know what is happening to support their decisions. Such intelligence is based on transactional data that is necessary to manage the overall business. Coming from software such as 麻豆原创 S/4HANA, 麻豆原创 Analytics Cloud, or 麻豆原创 Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain, it helps measure key performance indicators (KPIs) like inventory turnover, days sales outstanding, profit and loss, and sales conversion rate.

However, the insight provided by O-data is just a part of the bigger customer experience story. Experience data (X-data) has the power to inform why certain events happen. X-data considers all the human factors — beliefs, behavioral instincts, emotions, and intentions — behind every action and outcome. This information can be derived from customer feedback, purchase intent, Net Promoter Score, product satisfaction surveys, social sentiment, and customer engagement.

The real magic behind a meaningful B2B customer experience happens when both X-data and O-data are combined. By comprehending the 鈥渨hat鈥� and the 鈥渨hy鈥� of every business event, companies can identify new opportunities, strengthen customer loyalty, optimize inventory to reduce costs, and deliver on promises with the highest level of quality possible.

Activate the Untapped Potential of Every Customer Interaction

One of the best resources for opening the potential of the customer experience is digital strategy advisory services for XM. As part of the portfolio, the services enable 麻豆原创 customers to transform their XM practices with one unified platform. It ties together the insights of O-data and X-data to empower better decision-making with enterprise-wide visibility and a clear understanding of what is happening operationally and why specific outcomes happen during the experience.

For a better view of the XM improvements that businesses can expect to achieve with digital strategy advisory services, consider three of the many use cases explain the power of XM in the B2B context

1. Reduce Goods Returns and Improve Customer Satisfaction

Receiving customer returns can bring undesirable operational and financial burdens. But more importantly, it can be an indication that customer satisfaction may be eroding. Businesses that have limited visibility into the connection between their operations and customer experiences cannot easily decipher whether the root cause is, for example, quality management, poorly scheduled or delayed delivery, or inaccurate sales forecasting.

By leveraging XM, a systematic approach to processing returned goods can yield the visibility businesses need. When a customer initiates a return request, XM solutions from 麻豆原创 and Qualtrics trigger the automated capture of reasons and product experience. Once the warehouse receives the shipment, a survey is initiated to obtain the results of the physical inspection of the items and verify the return. Once the returned item is accepted, the account manager and customer contact receive a questionnaire to provide feedback on the process.

All touch points — O-data and X-data — are captured and visualized in a dashboard to understand the correlation between the reason 鈥渨hy鈥� a customer returned and 鈥渨hat鈥� financial and operational consequences followed it.

2. Increase Sales and Demand Planning

Product sample management is one of the most critical customer-facing processes for the manufacturing industry. Customers do not usually share information about the use, purpose, and experience of the sample product. This lack of insight can become a considerable challenge when manufacturers try to predict demand, potentially resulting in long lead times or misaligned product availability.

XM helps to ensure that the product sample management process immediately creates and confirms the sample request from a customer in an enterprise resource planning (ERP) backend system. Then, the delivery process allows XM solutions from 麻豆原创 and Qualtrics to initiate surveys to obtain data on the customer鈥檚 experience. The provided information is transferred to 麻豆原创 Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain, and a dashboard from 麻豆原创 Analytics Cloud correlates the O-data and X-data to generate insights into future demand and new leads.

3. Optimize Billing and Payment Processes

Errors in billing and payment processes can impact the customer experience as well as revenues and operating margins. For example, escalations often culminate in legal action and loss of customers.

In most cases, customers are more willing to express their disappointments or satisfaction with suppliers during the billing and payment process. Therefore, this phase of the customer experience is a prime opportunity to detect potential operational problems and needed experiential improvements early on.

Customers can integrate 麻豆原创 S/4HANA with XM solutions from 麻豆原创 and Qualtrics to establish an embedded early warning system of issues that could harm the customer satisfaction. This insight can help companies use numerous touch points within the billing and payment processes more effectively to resolve mistakes proactively and improve overall customer satisfaction.

Take the Lead in a New World of Experience Management

Brands that people love and follow know that great products and services are no longer enough to earn and maintain customer loyalty. But for many businesses, this growing sentiment is challenging their ability to secure, enhance, and create new opportunities 鈥� unless a high level of customer centricity is exercised.

The key to a highly competitive, customer-centric business is listening to customers actively, understanding their motivations fully, and acting appropriately at the right moment.

This reality is why 麻豆原创 offers XM as part of the digital strategy advisory services portfolio from 麻豆原创. By focusing on our advisory services on XM for B2B processes, companies can navigate the complexities of today鈥檚 ever-evolving market dynamics and build experiences that resonate well with new and existing customers across any channel.

This is the new era of experience management, bringing X-data and O-data together to leverage and generate new insights into business operation.

Digital strategy advisory services from 麻豆原创 are available through 麻豆原创 Advisory Service. For additional information, reach out to your 麻豆原创 account executive or .

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Meanwhile, new digital capabilities should be adopted, mapped, and scaled across the entire distributed landscape.聽One approach to addressing these architecture requirements is leveraging the services of hyperscale computing providers, or hyperscalers.

Though hyperscalers are ready to deliver a simplified, seamless, and secure IT landscape, companies are often apprehensive about making such an investment.

A recent engagement with Siemens was no different. As one of Europe鈥檚 largest industrial manufacturers, the company decided to undergo a significant implementation of 麻豆原创 S/4HANA at its headquarters and chose 聽for holistic support of landscape strategy and architecture services.

When a fast setup of sandbox and testing systems was needed to mitigate multiple risk factors, there was only one option: combining the existing landscape of 麻豆原创 solutions with a hyperscaler鈥檚 platform.

As this was one of Siemens鈥� first experiences running 麻豆原创 solutions on a hyperscaler platform, I spoke with Heiko Jonuscheit, cloud solution architect at Siemens, about how this implementation experience changed the business鈥� perception of hyperscalers.

Q: How did your business know that it needed a hyperscaler-supported architecture?聽

A: The time and effort needed to set up and manage an intelligent ERP like 麻豆原创 S/4HANA are substantial. New systems and applications are sometimes required temporarily or at a moment鈥檚 notice. Unfortunately, our existing IT services could not provide the flexibility to support business cases for performance scalability, a pay-per-use approach, or fast provisioning 鈥� all with low overhead costs.

As a result, we developed solutions, with the assistance of our internal cloud expert groupto address the need for consulting services to navigate our transition to cloud and hyperscaler services. We created a proof of concept for setting up 麻豆原创 S/4HANA within one of our suppliers鈥� Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment.

During this assessment, we were impressed by the hyperscaler鈥檚 fast system provisioning and pay-per-use model, especially when combined with the 麻豆原创 Cloud Appliance Library tool. It increased our flexibility so we could rapidly respond to project demands and decrease the total cost of ownership for specific scenarios. And during the implementation of 麻豆原创 S/4HANA, we were prepared to get the system up and running and decommissioned within an hour or two, which allows us to reset the IT landscape to its previous state in a matter of minutes.

Which business scenarios does 鈥� and will 鈥� your hyperscaler support for your company?聽

Right now, our hyperscaler partner provides multiple services. But at the moment, we use primarily the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), while we use 麻豆原创 Cloud Appliance Library to predefine the starting point for the 麻豆原创 solution environment.聽Momentarily, we focus on nonproductive scenarios.

We are also exploring more options to improve our maintenance and operation of business systems. Once our adoption rate increases, we will require a service provider, even for our on-premise solutions. For this reason, we are exploring our hyperscaler鈥檚 integration capabilities.

Are you finding that your total cost of ownership is minimized by using a hyperscaler?

Great question! Total cost of ownership is a crucial advantage. But so are provisioning time, reliability, and security.聽Due to our hyperscaler鈥檚 pay-per-use business model, the cost of operating our IT landscape and related use cases are lower compared to our internal on-premise infrastructure. We achieved significant benefits due to decommissioning of applications that are temporarily not required or stopping applications that are only used during regular business hours.

For 24/7 services, hyperscalers do not make a significant difference, but they do bring considerable flexibility for specific use cases. Such results may change with economies of scale. However, the main challenge is leveraging the application managed services model to adapt to new infrastructure options.

Did the introduction of the hyperscaler increase the complexity of your hybrid deployments?聽

From my point of view, they are more complex. We must integrate the cloud environment with internal systems while addressing sensitive concerns such as data privacy and data security. We are coming from an internal data center, which manages the IT infrastructure very well, to an additional provider without an appropriate application support model. This situation raises many questions and concerns that will be addressed over time.

Did the hyperscaler鈥檚 architecture accelerate the delivery of 麻豆原创 S/4HANA?聽

With standardization and test data, deployment and adoption of 麻豆原创 S/4HANA were rapid after the cloud environment was established and connected to our business network.聽Meanwhile, we are in the process of defining requirements for trusted system connections, user provisioning services, and integration so we can make the necessary adjustments needed to support new options for our IT landscape.

Based on the current results of your first hyperscaler experience, what are your next steps?

First, we should find a service provider that can maintain our cloud solutions based on an IaaS model. Then we can secure integrations across our on-premise landscape and improve the provisioning of trusted system connections and internal interfaces.

Challenges always exist when a business goes down a different path with their IT landscape. But once they are addressed, I do not doubt that hyperscaler managed services will provide the service levels we need and integrate with our existing infrastructure and applications into a unified, tightly connected, intelligent system.

Special thanks to Heiko Jonuscheit for sharing his team鈥檚 first impression of a hyperscaler environment. I hope this first experience helps you decide whether a hyperscaler is right for your business.

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Read the entire 鈥�Enterprise Architecture and Landscape Strategy鈥� series to learn how to future-proof your enterprise architecture and landscape strategy. Discover whether it鈥檚 time for your business to make the leap to a hyperscale environment and how to chart your path to one.

Tobias Futterer is an enterprise architect at 麻豆原创.

But as IT operations grow more complex, the effectiveness of lean business practices begins to diminish.

What if lean principles were applied to IT implementations too? Could deploying a defined set of technology capabilities and delivering it to specific users through the cloud streamline the software landscape and minimize complexity?

Recently, I worked with an international company on the financial functionalities of intelligent, cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP). Together with the customer, we discovered a better and faster way to assess and respond to the valuation of its materials inventory in a public cloud environment.

Setting a Lean Foundation for Material Inventory Valuation

With the assistance of聽, the industrial manufacturer kicked off this lean ERP approach with a defined set of critical requirements for聽聽conducted by its finance organization. A digital architecture and road map design service provided the advice and guidance needed to plan the transformation of business process architecture with intelligent tools and services. Such provisions ranged from linking postings to the right customer accounts to valuating materials with precision.

Through this process of self-reflection and planning, the manufacturer and 麻豆原创 experts worked together to define the risks of their existing and future material valuation practices.

• Quantity risk:The basis for assessing the write-down for the span of inventory depletion.
• Technical risk:Inventories become technically obsolete due to the presence of defects or new technical developments from the business and its third parties. The existence of technical risk should be assumed if material reworking is required before the productive use of the manufactured item(s). For example, a long period of storage is often associated with an increase in technical risk.
• Price risk:The lower of cost or market (LCM) method calculates whether price risk exists. If the LCM value equals recognized costs, the inventory is not devalued. But if it matches the net realizable value, price risk is assumed.
• Management judgment:The managerial decision-maker selects certain materials and excludes them from the standard automatic risk calculation. Rates are written in a custom table and an allowance is created accordingly. In this case, quantity, technical, and price risks are not applied.

Knowing that best practices for material valuation call for a particular sequence and immediate posting of results, the industrial manufacturer chose the聽聽organization. Together, they designed, delivered, and now run a finance application that leverages the right capabilities 鈥� and only those capabilities 鈥� based on a lean ERP approach (see figure 1).

The finance application was designed with two main components:

1. On-premise backend supported by 麻豆原创 solutions

During an on-premise transaction, a primary material resource network is used to determine the range of coverage for materials. To minimize the number of materials to be processed and limit the processing time within month-end operations, not all materials will be selected. For example, a pre-selection program triggers the network to process materials with a value over a predefined limit 鈥� anything less remains untouched.

In the parameters of the valuation management application, the selections are set. Since the primary material resource network runs only in a simulation, data is not warehoused. Instead, a user exit stores the data in a custom table. A core data service view pushes the data logic from the application server to the client-side and the database and exposes it through on-demand data services.

2. 麻豆原创 Cloud Platform

With 麻豆原创 Cloud Platform, data is stored, risks are calculated, and even values are displayed and changed. The data can then be pushed and warehoused on premise.

This platform supports two applications:

• Valuation management:All parameters for material valuation are maintained; for instance, the selection of data or considerations for technical risk.
• Inventory valuation management:Data generated by the valuation of different risks are displayed and can be changed according to financial guidelines.

Both applications run productively and comply with guidelines such as policies for logins, user authorizations, archiving, and documentation.

Reshaping Inventory Valuation Through IT Simplicity

Many industrial manufacturers are moving to lean material valuation methods based on the rate of inventory reduction. However, as we learned with our customer鈥檚 lean ERP approach, the process cannot be fully optimized without a simplified IT landscape.

By combining the expertise, best practices, and tools from 麻豆原创 Advisory Services and 麻豆原创 Innovative Business Solutions, our customer supports its business users with a better user interface in the cloud while minimizing traditionally inherent risks during the process. In return, its workforce has a transparent overview of material inventory, enabling better decision-making and empowering employees to act swiftly and strategically.

For our customer, this is only the beginning of the journey to lean ERP-based operations. What is next? Side-by-side innovation development for provisioning learning content and opportunities.

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Meinrad Hauser is a principal business solution architect at 麻豆原创.