UPDATED 15:31 EDT / MAY 18 2016

NEWS

Customers and innovation are center stage at SAP Sapphire 2016 | #SAPPHIRENOW

Day two of SAP Sapphire 2016 began at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida, and the keynote was filled with customer experiences and use cases, along with product demonstrations and announcements. Straight out of the gate, Robert Enslin president of SAP SE’s Global Customer Operations, explained how companies of all sizes are transforming with SAP S/4HANA as the digital core on the SAP HANA Platform. This combination is enabling live insights into suppliers and networks, customer experiences, workforce engagement and Big Data and Internet of Things (IoT).

“SAP S/4HANA is the ERP [enterprise resource planning] system for the 21st century and the fastest selling product with over 3,200 customers,” Enslin said. He has noticed that customers are moving from the design state to fulfilling urgent requirements.

Interconnecting solutions

Bringing Terence Stacey, group CIO at Nestlé S.A., on stage, Enslin demonstrated how SAP guided, planned and created a new digital destination for the entire Nestlé global organization across all businesses.

The 150-year-old company has over 335,000 employees in 120 countries, and in 2000, the two companies began their journey on one of the largest IT projects for the companies. As Stacey explained, there was a split architecture running three ERP systems for the Asia-Oceania-Africa (AoA) zone, three for the European zone and three for the Americas zone.

Two years ago the company’s architecture faced new challenges due to changing consumer trends and technological changes. Beginning with the AoA zone about one month ago, the company put SAP HANA to work to integrate the systems on a territory where the sun never sets and there are no days off. Stacey reported: “It was flawless,” continuing by saying there was zero downtime, with performance and reliability that is six times faster. Nestlé anticipates going live in Europe in November 2016 and in the Americas in April 2017.

Enslin finished by saying that he is committed to ensuring each company’s investment in SAP HANA is protected. “We will provide clear, concise roadmaps that address your line of business and industry specific needs,” he explained. “Ones that give you the insights into the core business scenarios available now and in the future and to personally connect you with other customers who are on a similar journey to you. … We want to be your partner to connect all areas of your business through S/4. … It is our job and a great pleasure to make digital a reality for your company.”

From real time to live

Bernd Leukert, member of the SAP Executive Board, Products & Innovation, came on stage next to describe how SAP is helping customers make the most of the digital economy. Talking about the SAP Hybris solution he explained how this is the future of marketing to customers.

He also brought out customers and showcased their use cases, but his message was simply that SAP through SAP S/4HANA wants to extend solutions that differentiate customers by providing predictive intelligence, real-spend applications and true transparency. The mission is to move from real-time to live and succeed in the digital age.

Using an automotive theme, Leukert worked through customer preferences and how to capitalize on them in the digital economy. Instead of the much talked about “360-degree view” of the customer, he explained how SAP is moving to a contextual and live view of the customer to get inside their head to provide the right product at the right time and at the right place. “There is no need to ask questions anymore … because you will already have the answer,” Leukert said.

He believes the new focus will be on the front office and go beyond target marketing to contextual content to improve the customer experience through machine learning using SAP Hybris or the subscription model of the product.

Shopping cart to shop floor

The other area SAP will be focusing on is manufacturing. Leukert said that 20 years ago manufacturing was about the theory of constraints. “This was the bible for those in manufacturing and supply chain management. Companies were focused on throughput, inventory and fulfillment time,” he explained. “This was the time for APO, Advanced planning and optimization.” He then talked about outsourcing through other countries. However, he sees the biggest change about to happen in supply chain management and manufacturing.

He described a shift in manufacturing and fulfilling dreams of end customers on demand. Leukert said that because of technology we are getting close to the dream. He talked about Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), which connect, monitor, and control manufacturing operations. This system integrates business processes on the shop floor and provides access to real-time information in order to trace products globally.

Announcements and partnerships in open source and 3D

Leukert discussed collecting and learning from your data and introduced SAP HANA Vora, a distributed computing solution that leverages and extends the Apache Spark execution framework to provide enriched interactive analytics on enterprise and Hadoop data.

Watch the keynote on demand and see more customer use cases and product announcements along with Steve Singh, member of the SAP Executive Board, Global Head of Business Networks and Applications, talk about making the connected world a reality. And be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of SAP Sapphire 2016.

Photo from SAP Sapphire keynote presentation

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