SAP simplifies the digital transformation journey in Southeast Asia

 As governments and businesses work towards the ASEAN ICT Masterplan 2020 goals, SAP identifies opportunities to empower organisations in Singapore to thrive in the digital era

 SAP aims to help organisations become digital leaders in their respective industries

 New solutions and services introduced to the market will help take customers to the next stage of their digital journey

At the SAP Asian Innovators Summit today, SAP identified opportunities present in the digital economy and emphasised that it has harnessed its digital core, technologies of the future and its expertise in ERP to help customers make everything digital, programmable and smarter. This is part of the company’s overall strategy to drive its innovation agenda and support customers’ digital transformation and journey to the cloud through its portfolio of solutions.

Taking the first steps towards digital transformation

Khor Chern Chuen, MD, SAP Singapore, noted that the landscape is moving fast with new and reinvented companies like Grab, Alipay, Amazon, and Apple forcing the traditional companies which are SAP's customers to rethink their business models. "These examples (are) blurring the lines between industries, combining industries and getting into new industries," he said.

A new global study by SAP supported by Oxford Economics titled SAP Digital Transformation Executive Study: 4 Ways Leaders Set Themselves Apart, released at the event, found that 84% of global companies said that digital transformation is important to their survival in the next five years, but only 3% have completed company-wide efforts. This finding shows the significant gap between the digital transformation aspirations of organisations and what they have actually achieved to date.

"SAP is committed to help customers move beyond not knowing how to innovate, not knowing what the next step is," Kathleen Muller, Head of Analytics and Insight, SAP SEA elaborated. "A lot of customers are struggling with the concept of digital."

“Singapore organisations who aspire to be digital leaders should be empowered to act instantly through real-time, data-driven insights. With data being the new currency in this new market landscape, they need to be equipped with the tools to deliver delightful, meaningful experiences to their customers, employees, suppliers and partners. Governments and businesses need to operate with a digital core, such as the SAP S/4HANA, to master massive amounts of data digitally in real time to guide critical decision making and run live,” said Khor.

SAP is making the road to digital transformation easier with a four-phase approach for innovation, compiling use cases, providing prepackaged, cloud-enabled services and solutions and helping students and professionals gain new digital skills. The company is empowering some 12,000 youth in the region through digital literacy, and working with governments to tackle the job displacement that digitisation of industries creates by helping professionals acquire new skills such as those around machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI).

As it happens, SAP has global expertise for machine learning in Singapore. The company hosts nearly 100 machine learning experts in Singapore at its global Innovation Centre for Machine Learning, Khor shared, producing solutions for worldwide use. The company also has high-quality datasets that are perfect for machine learning, having gained a wealth of data over decades through its transactional systems. "For the past 45 years we have been helping customers across industries, making processes more efficient, making end-to-end supply chains and customer engagement digital, seamless, and user friendly," Khor said. 

Under the Leonardo framework SAP has set out a clear approach on how to move from brainstorming to technology blueprints in the creation of innovative products and services. 

New Leonardo IoT solutions

To empower businesses to bridge this gap and harness the power of data, SAP has launched a suite of IoT solutions which are part of the SAP Leonardo digital innovation system. The solutions will allow businesses to leverage on advances in big data and analytics to propel their business forward and be digital leaders in their respective industries.

Muller.

The IoT solutions take advantage of advances in big data and analytics, the ability to connect people, things and business with SAP Cloud Platform, and technologies such as machine learning to enable IoT and Industry 4.0 strategies across digital logistics, manufacturing and asset management.

The new solutions include:

 SAP Leonardo IoT Bridge, a configurable role-based platform giving operations managers unprecedented visibility and ability to act in real time. SAP Leonardo IoT Bridge is a live operations centre that converges, correlates and contextualises IoT sensor data with business processes and both structured and unstructured data.

 SAP Global Track and Trace, a cloud-based offering for unified, end-to-end tracking, monitoring and reporting of objects and business processes across supply chain networks. SAP Global Track and Trace provides modelling of tracked business processes, is designed to share data among the partners in the supply network, and is built on a big data architecture for high volume and throughput.

 SAP Leonardo IoT Edge software to bring compute, storage and business semantics via the cloud to where intelligent devices reside outside of the data centre, for near real-time and deterministic performance of business processes. Using the container infrastructure of SAP Cloud Platform IoT services, SAP Leonardo IoT Edge is intended to seamlessly work with other line-of-business solutions such as SAP Digital Manufacturing Insights.

 SAP Digital Manufacturing Insights, a centralised, cloud-based manufacturing performance management solution that provides cloud-based, multitier analytics for full visibility into manufacturing on multiple levels. SAP Digital Manufacturing Insights is seamlessly and securely connected to the shop floor. This provides high-fidelity information overlaid with business data to enable effective decision making and process optimisation.

 SAP Asset Manager, a cloud-based mobile app for managing asset health, inventory, maintenance and safety. A result of SAP’s partnership with Apple, SAP Asset Manager supports highly skilled professionals by mobilising key asset management processes. The enterprise-grade mobile app provides the ease of use of consumer apps and a delightful user experience available through the SAP Fiori for iOS design language.

Together, the solutions are intended to integrate with SAP’s portfolio to enable cohesive management of operations and effective Industry 4.0 strategies as well as new scenarios such as outbound logistics.

Using delivery, shipment, handling unit and vehicle number unit data from SAP Global Track and Trace, combined with information from SAP Connected Goods software such as pallet and container sensor data, information on transport location from the SAP Vehicle Insights application, and purchase order data from SAP S/4HANA software in core enterprise systems, SAP Leonardo IoT Bridge can provide cross-process, cross-system visibility enterprise-wide so that command centre and operations leads can know exactly where a shipment is in transit, what is in the shipment, and the condition and performance of the vehicle.

SAP is also co-innovating on digital logistics with leading companies around the globe, including The Bosch Group, a global supplier of technology and services with roughly 390,000 associates worldwide. Bosch and SAP are collaborating on scenarios for delivery track and trace, exploring cloud-to-cloud integration with Bosch IoT Cloud.

The four-part approach to innovation

SAP's Leonardo Innovation Services arm practises a four-part approach that easily brings the benefit of innovation to customers, Muller shared. In the ideation phase, customers establish their business requirements, challenges that require addressing, or opportunities to innovate.
In the rapid prototyping phase, the use cases are identified and does pilot testing performed, allowing the customer to become comfortable with the results without fully disrupting the business. "It's not always about a big bang approach. What we've seen as most successful for customers today is to be able to pilot technologies across their businesses," she said.

In the business case development phase, customers and partners come together to create, test, and refine the business case. In the final phase, technology blueprints can be created for scaling the innovation.

Change management is key to success, Muller added. "It's never going to be plug-and-play, because up-front you are aware that there will be change management and you can better prepare as an organisation," she said. 

Seeing the significance of data in Southeast Asia

SAP has further called for public and private organisations alike to harness the power of data. As governments and businesses work toward a digitally-enabled ASEAN, data is increasingly viewed as an important engine for growth.    

“As governments and businesses work towards a digitally-enabled ASEAN as outlined by the ASEAN ICT Masterplan 2020, we see plenty of opportunities for organisations from the public and private sectors alike to harness the power of data. In the digital economy today, data is the new gold for digital enterprises. SAP allows organisations to act instantly through real-time, data-driven insights to deliver delightful, meaningful experiences to their customers, employees, suppliers and partners,” said Claus Andresen, President and MD, SAP Southeast Asia.

The ASEAN ICT Masterplan (AIM) 2020 was formulated and approved by telecommunications and IT ministers from ASEAN member states in November 2015 during the 15th ASEAN Telecommunications and Information Technology Ministers Meeting in Vietnam. The five-year plan provides guidelines governments and businesses to drive the digital economy in ASEAN from 2016 to 2020.

For Singapore, the government has outlined its vision to be a Smart Nation and has been making strides in executing on its digital strategy. Earlier in 2017, the Committee on the Future Economy (CFE) published a report that strongly recommended for Singapore to recognise and utilise data in the new digital economy, highlighting the value of data as a new engine of growth.

According to IDC, organisations that capitalise and analyse all relevant data and deliver actionable information could achieve an extra US$430 billion globally in productivity benefits over their less analytically oriented peers by 2020.  "As more organisations in Southeast Asia become digitally-connected, they cannot escape this reality. The increasing volume and detail of information captured by enterprises, the rise of multimedia, social media, and the Internet of Things (IoT) will fuel exponential growth in data for the foreseeable future.

"Governments and businesses alike will need to be ready to leverage information and turn them into a key premise of competition, supporting new influxes of efficiency development, advancement, and customer surplus," says IDC's Chwee Kan Chua, Global Research Director, BDA and Cognitive/AI.
The SAP Asian Innovators Summit will visit six cities in total. Singapore is the third leg of the roadshow, after Bangkok, Thailand and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

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*The global SAP Digital Transformation Executive Study: 4 Ways Leaders Set Themselves Apart, is based on survey results from more than senior executives across 17 countries and regions, which include 195 business leaders from Southeast Asia. The research identifies the challenges, opportunities, value, and key technologies driving digital transformation.