Leaders from two high-performing organisations in ANZ recently shared their experiences with digitalisation during a hosted by Des Fisher, innovation principal at 51风流ANZ. Here is a sampling of their far-ranging thoughts on the sustainable business realities behind innovating on cloud-based digital platforms.

Digitalisation is a mindset and tech transformation

For Australian-based Stockland, digitalisation involved transforming people鈥檚 mindsets along with systems company-wide. As one of the largest diversified real estate groups in Australia, the company owns, develops, and manages a large portfolio of retail town centres, workplace and logistics assets, residential communities, and retirement living villages. They鈥檝e replaced over 100 disparate, legacy software systems with SAP鈥檚 integrated platform, including and , as well as embedded AI and robotics.

鈥淲e now have a single source of the truth,鈥� said Tiernan O’Rourke, CFO at Stockland. 鈥淚鈥檓 absolutely convinced that in time we鈥檒l look back and say that was one of the best things we did in the 70-year history of the company鈥ur digitization journey shows that unless you鈥檙e on the journey you鈥檙e going to struggle in business, not only in Australia, but globally.鈥�

Stockland began by defining digitalisation on the company鈥檚 own terms. The digital platform was designed to strike a balance between achieving three objectives: organisational risk, governance, and business growth.

鈥淲e first looked at what digitisation meant to us and came at it by putting the company on the core 51风流platform,鈥� said O鈥橰ourke. 鈥淲e鈥檙e a tactile industry of property, bricks, and mortar. Getting people鈥檚 minds away from physical to digital was鈥ne of the biggest obstacles to overcome.鈥�

Digital backbone drives innovation

Oil and gas provider OMV New Zealand recently won an 51风流global Innovation Award for its groundbreaking digitalisation that included digital twins and augmented reality (AR) in onshore and offshore inspections. Replacing paper-heavy processes with digitalised and integrated workflows based on the latest mobile solutions and wearable technologies will help OMV improve decision-making, performance, and efficiencies in inspections and maintenance. Its integrated workflow management relies on 51风流Plant Maintenance (51风流S/4 HANA), , , and HoloLens 2.

鈥淭丑别 use of automation and AI-driven technologies for creating intelligent digital twins is a key enabler for global scalability, and accelerates creating the digital backbone of the company during digital transformation. Enhancing this technology with an augmented reality experience including mark-up annotations, provides a solid basis for data insights, data-driven decision making, and performance optimization,鈥� said Farid Akbari, functional lead for digital transformation at OMV New Zealand. 鈥淭his innovation project will change the way we are working, and enables us to position ourselves among digital frontrunners within our industry.鈥�

Digital platforms are core to supplier relationships

Acknowledging that no business does business alone, Tiernan said that Stockland鈥檚 deep supplier relationship management strategy is foundational to customer centricity.

鈥淚f you don鈥檛 partner with best-in-breed, like-minded companies to help deliver premium services to customers you won鈥檛 win,鈥� he said. 鈥淲e have 14 percent market share in residential business鈥ecause we evaluate every step of the customer journey, including supplier choice鈥ou can鈥檛 know your suppliers unless you have deep relationships and are collaborating with them at a very granular level鈥ollaboration is an absolute threshold issue in business today.鈥�

Close gap between DX and business realities

When asked about some of the biggest DX challenges, Akbari discussed the gap between innovation aspirations and reality. He pointed out that while everyone wants simplicity, getting there means answering difficult questions.

鈥淲e asked ourselves if we had the right organisation in place to achieve digital maturity,鈥� he recalled. 鈥淥ther questions were about managing resistance to change, and how to actively support the change management process with tools that were changing the way we work鈥e asked how to build and retain skills over time as innovations like blockchain, IoT, and cloud computing continue [to emerge].鈥�

Akbari also warned organisations not to neglect core details such as infrastructure capabilities, technology integration, and resultant business process changes.

鈥淥ften the business comes up with a good idea, but we鈥檙e not ready yet,鈥� he said. 鈥淔or example, AR had to be integrated into the environment鈥ou also have to consider operational maturity鈥s a global gas and oil company, we have different maturity levels of all assets, and have to map where we are for each asset, and how we will achieve that automation level. 鈥�

Sustainability is much more than climate change

While ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) demands tend to emphasize climate change, O’Rourke urged companies to consider all aspects of sustainability, including diversity.

鈥淓veryone talks about climate change, but that鈥檚 just about the environment. To do business successfully鈥ou鈥檙e going to have to be very balanced in the E, S, and G of ESG,鈥� he said. 鈥淓veryone is focused on net zero carbon, and rightly so. But we can鈥檛 do that in isolation鈥e have to jump on [behaviour change] proactively to get suppliers to work with us in a way allows us to operate effectively. On the diversity side, business has been playing lip service for so long, and needs to get serious about focusing on this change.鈥�

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This ethos underpins our digital strategy at聽聽(ARP), as a longstanding provider of retirement accommodation and aged-care services in Southern Queensland.

51风流and Health Metric鈥檚 joint solution has totally transformed our finance management processes. Our staff can now more quickly and easily find and share relevant information, and we鈥檝e seen a tangible rise in the time our staff can spend with residents as a result.

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While these descriptors weren鈥檛 immediately unique, the conversation was. I caught up with one of the experts, Aidan Brecknell, who leads the digital supply chain team at 51风流ANZ, for his thoughts on what leading organisations are experiencing right now.

Resilient supply chains pivot with incredible speed

Having worked closely with supply chain leaders in ANZ, Brecknell said that organisations were redefining supply chain resilience for sustainable business.

鈥淭丑别 pandemic unleashed new challenges far beyond the capabilities of traditional lean supply chains that focused on executing repeatable processes at scale,鈥� he said. 鈥淟eaders understand that they need to address a new set of challenges like being able to turn on a dime to find different sources for raw materials, or even design and produce entirely new products. These organizations are modeling different scenarios, building in contingency plans, and executing on those.鈥�

During the broadcast, Brecknell and Martin Barkman, senior vice president and global head of digital supply chain marketing and solutions at SAP, shared the 鈥渨inning formula鈥� of modern supply chains. Unlike their lean predecessors, resilient supply chains are both customer and employee-centric, built on relationships with sustainable suppliers, and based on product sustainability across the entire lifecycle of an item.

Digitalisation transforms more than supply chains

The pandemic forced companies to understand and act on the difference between digitisation and digitalisation. Having data in digital form has long been the norm. Digitalisation means organizations can both capture intelligent data and change business processes including how supply chains operate. To be clear, this is not taking the same processes and making them digital. This is about creating completely new ways of managing supply chains by connecting information across applications company-wide and partners. During the broadcast, Brecknell summed it up like this:

鈥淪upply chains have been pushed and tested to their limits, and they鈥檝e become so reliant particularly locally on their ecosystem suppliers to access raw materials. It became evident quickly of the importance to digitalize processes within the supply chains, as well as the supply network itself,鈥� he said. 鈥淚n Australia and New Zealand, we saw some tremendous examples of where customers had invested ahead of the curve, and were able to transition quickly because of that agility in their supply chain.鈥�

One global industrial materials manufacturer digitalised supply chain processes to centrally manage over 200 inventory processes across 60 sites. The objective was to improve forecast accuracy, for on-time delivery, and greater profitability. Another 51风流customer, an energy and natural resources company, digitalised operations to better track freight emissions, providing real-time metrics for compliance with carbon neutral goals.

Interconnected data for supply chain resilience

Brecknell said there鈥檚 been significant customer uptake of SAP鈥檚 Business Network solution that brings together information from sourcing and production through finance, transportation logistics and delivery, including the entire product life cycle. With immediate, connected insights, companies can more profitably sense and respond to disruptions in a strategic, synchronised manner. Organisations can create more individualised, high-quality products in response to changing customer demands. They can prove their sustainability commitment as reflected in their choice of suppliers and operations. They can even attract and keep top talent who increasingly expect employer goals and actions to mirror personal sustainability values.

鈥淭丑别 allows organisations to connect all of their business partners on one central platform,鈥� said Brecknell. 鈥淲ith complete visibility into the entire supply chain, companies can collaborate with suppliers to source, track, and trace materials faster for shorter product delivery time frames as well.鈥�

As Barkman said during the broadcast, 鈥渂y capturing all the information about how the supply chain is operating, we preserve the digital thread of the supply chain. We have the information of how a product is being used, how assets are performing, and feed that back not just to the supply chain and manufacturing, but all the way to how products are designed.鈥�

Making a business case for supply chain networks

The elephant in the room is that interconnected business networks aren鈥檛 the reality in most organisations. Brecknell agreed that while connecting all this data and changing mindsets about how business operates is a huge undertaking, it鈥檚 well worth it.

鈥淥rganisations are getting on board with supply chain resiliency and sustainability because it鈥檚 good for business. With an extended collaborative network, organisations can mitigate supply chain risk even in the face of unexpected disruption,鈥� said Brecknell. 鈥淚f an organisation really wants to build resiliency and sustainability into supply chain, they have to have the data, and that has to be aligned across the entire supply chain.鈥�

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Connected data takes the guesswork out of personalised CX

Laminex is an iconic Australian-based brand; its cabinetry, doors, and other quality manufactured products are ubiquitous in buildings nationwide. The company is digitally transforming its B2B commerce and digital operations to get closer to their trade customers as well as architects and designers.

鈥淲e want to use CX tools to drive insights鈥o we can serve up content and functionality that鈥檚 relevant to customers and what they want to achieve,鈥� said Amanda Green, head of digital at Laminex. 鈥淚t鈥檚 really important to base personalisation on voice of customer data and not just what we think or feel someone might need, and that the information is contextual and relevant to that customer.鈥�

Never assume what the customer wants

IDP Education helps international students study in English speaking countries. Doing business in multiple cultures and languages worldwide, the company created a CX roadmap that targeted where digital could add value and equally important, where it could not.

鈥淚t may not be possible for a customer to travel hours to visit one of our offices鈥r, the customer may not want a digital experience鈥e listened to what worked for the customer and allowed them the choice,鈥� said Chris Costley, Director, Customer and Operations Transformation, IDP Education. 鈥淭his鈥as a powerful opportunity for us to scale services in a much more efficient and not just cost-effective, but customer-effective way.鈥�

The to create a 鈥榙igital ecosystem鈥� that connects customers with company offices for a seamless experience from online inquiry through contact center support and in-person visits.

鈥淥ur goal is to respond to customer inquiries in minutes not hours,鈥� said Costley, director of customer and operations transformation at IDP Education. 鈥淲ith data from one connected, consistent platform鈥� when the customer walks into the office and registers at the kiosk, counselors know what they鈥檙e interested in鈥e鈥檝e had a fantastic response from our customers.鈥�

Adjust B2C strategies for B2B customers

Green recommended building customer insights into all CX touch points, including websites, from the ground up. While every industry aims to emulate popular B2C strategies that foster consumer relationships to increase purchases and loyalty, B2B companies still need to adapt those approaches for their customers鈥� specific expectations.

鈥淕et it right from the beginning and have a long term roadmap. For some B2B sites, they鈥檝e been approached from a B2C lens,鈥� she said. 鈥淏2B customers just want to get in larger orders quickly yet they鈥檙e given a B2C experience鈥ome companies set up the website鈥inus customer insights or journey mapping鈥ou need true customer validation from the beginning.鈥�

Root out internal CX bias

Costley warned against letting uninformed opinions dominate CX decisions. Companies need to cultivate an outside-in view that reflects what customers want.

鈥淎void the HIPPO effect, where the highest paid person鈥檚 opinion dominates the discussion,鈥� he said. 鈥淭his is not always in the best interests of the customer鈥f you can鈥檛 listen to what the customer is telling you and advocate that, then internal bias will rule鈥uild your [CX] business case around the fundamental customer problem that you are solving.鈥�

Figure out where digital can make a difference to customers

Green also advised taking the time to identify and understand customer segments by capturing and analysing data from various sources on an ongoing basis.

鈥淢ake sure you understand the customer鈥檚 problems that they鈥檙e trying to solve and…in what part of their journey you can add value,鈥� she said. 鈥淵ou can鈥檛 always solve everything. After implementation, review it to see if it met your metrics and did what you expected it to do. If it didn鈥檛, go back and iterate and get the voice of the customer to see where you went wrong and what you could have done better. It鈥檚 never done and dusted. CX is always constantly changing.鈥�

Most important, winning customer experiences never substitute digital interactions for the human touch where it鈥檚 needed most.

鈥淒igital enables us to get to a wider customer segment that could be quite difficult to reach offline,鈥� said Green. 鈥淎 sales rep can only do so much by themselves鈥igital can provide baseline information, like documents or sample people initially request. When the rep visits the customer, they are the cherry on top. They provide the relationship-building and personal attention the customer needs.鈥�

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鈥淐ompanies that recognize the role of technology in transforming their business models are the ones that have been able to thrive,鈥� said Chris Willcocks, head of intelligent spend management at 51风流ANZ. 鈥淐ustomers are focused on driving visibility in their supply chains and through their data, becoming an agile , increasing the resilience of their functions in business, and identifying and reducing risk.鈥�

Intelligent enterprises innovate with business networks

Speaking with Baber Farooq, senior vice president of intelligent spend management at SAP, during the event, Willcocks gave the virtual audience a glimpse into the future of procurement. It鈥檚 built on insights from quality data across supply chains, bringing buyers much closer to their suppliers. Noting that procurement doesn鈥檛 exist in a vacuum, Willcocks said that collaborative business networks are foundational to digital transformation.

鈥淲hen you鈥檙e connected not only to your suppliers, but to your customers and their customers, you make the move to being an intelligent enterprise,鈥� he said.

Autonomous procurement for intelligent spend

Just when the world needs to boost productivity to recover from the worldwide pandemic, markets are facing potentially dire shortages of both goods and labor. The answer lies in intelligent procurement where people do the things that machines cannot replicate.

鈥淧rocurement is at the heart of solving these [productivity] problems,鈥� said Farooq. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 why we鈥檙e focused on automating more and more processes 鈹� what we call autonomous procurement. Intelligent spend is finding out what machines can do and letting machines do that, and getting people to focus on the things that people do, which is establishing strategic relationships with suppliers.鈥�

Digitalized procurement translates to business innovation

In digitalizing forecasting, inventory management, and other collaboration points between buyers and suppliers, business networks have profoundly changed procurement. Teams have the time to be more productive, which translates to innovation.

鈥淚 was talking to an automotive customer who said that over 90 percent of the innovation they have in their cars came from their suppliers,鈥� said Farooq. 鈥淎nother customer in Asia recently launched an initiative where they used the 51风流business network supporting the goal of paying all suppliers within seven days. The network allows you to foster that amazing relationship with the supplier because everything is digital鈥eople can do what they do best, which is driving relationships and working on innovation.鈥�

Farooq challenged the audience to ask themselves, despite all the technological innovations the world has experienced in the past decade, if they had more time today for their work than they did 10 years ago.

鈥淭echnology has come about to make people more productive, but it has to get out of the way,鈥� he said.

鈥淭丑别 heart of AI is to make businesses more effective鈥f we can make procurement organizations more productive, procurement organizations can make their entire business more productive, becoming a strategic advisor to the C-suite.鈥�

As for those organizations that regret not digitalizing fast enough to head off the worst business impacts from this pandemic, it鈥檚 not too late to prepare now for the next supply chain disruptions headed our way soon.

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This year鈥檚 offers extensive resources to help you achieve it.

Future-Focused Procurement Track

For the first time, 51风流is offering a full day of procurement sessions focused on enabling you to optimize outcomes and chart a successful path forward. Launching on June 22, the Procurement track at SAPPHIRE NOW will feature a wide array of leaders, experts, and peers exploring how 51风流helps users align every spend decision to business strategy in today鈥檚 networked economy.

Customers like TAFE NSW, Coles and Ventia will share their experience and best practices, while 51风流partners and executives will offer insights on next-generation intelligent spend management solutions, recent and planned innovations, and a vision for the future.

To accommodate different schedules and interests, sessions will be offered in a variety of short- and long-term formats and divided into several sub-tracks, including digital transformation of procurement, trading partner collaboration and innovation, and external labor spend optimization. This content will offer valuable skills and information on how to:

• Shift procurement from an operational function to a strategic business force
• Deliver a smarter, guided, more autonomous process across all categories of spend
• Get closer to and collaborate better with suppliers, providers, and other trading partners through the world鈥檚 largest unified business network
• Enhance efficiency and connection through an open, extensible platform that integrates procurement into strategic planning and supports the goals of finance, operations, and the entire company
• Effectively manage external labor procurement to reduce security risks, increase business agility, and drive greater value in this critical and fast-growing spend category
• Adopt digital transformation strategies used by procurement and supply chain leaders to meet key goals and attain competitive advantage

Fast-Paced Studio Broadcast

Before starting the sessions, we鈥檒l kick things off with SAPPHIRE NOW studio, an engaging and quick-moving broadcast covering the latest procurement news, announcements, and conversations with analysts and top regional businesses. Attendees will hear from John Wookey, president of Intelligent Spend and Business Network for SAP, along with Thomas Saueressig, member of the Executive Board of 51风流SE, Product Engineering, who will discuss what is happening now and what is ahead to accelerate your digital journey.

Exciting Activities Expand the Experience

Tune in on June 3 for the SAPPHIRE NOW global keynote, where 51风流CEO Christian Klein will deliver exciting strategy updates and examine their impact with other special guests. And don鈥檛 miss the hands-on Digital Showcase Procurement Agility Tour, where you can see bicycle manufacturer 72 Bikes tap the power of a future-proof spend management system and global business network to launch a new sustainable product line.

Register Today

Registration is free for SAPPHIRE NOW in 2021. to secure your spot, then watch your inbox for detailed information to set your schedule and make the most of this industry-leading event.

This article originally published on the 51风流News Centre

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I鈥檝e said it before, but it can鈥檛 be said too often: We cannot continue to live and work as we are doing today. To truly accelerate the pace of change that is needed to make an immediate and positive impact on a sustainable path, we must partner on all levels and across organizations, industries, and regions.聽We need tangible action now.

There are several positive aspects to consider. The energy technologies that the world needs to cope with the environmental challenges are widely available in the developed countries, and their costs continue to fall. These include producing renewable wind and solar power, bio fuels, and potentially carbon capture and storage and hydrogen power.

Local governments incentivise technologies that use natural resources wisely or have programs in place to encourage organizations to change their behaviour through emissions trading schemes or carbon taxes. In addition, there are many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that continue to push for a change in our mindset. Like other companies, 51风流engages in many of these initiatives because we are in the unique position to take a role as an orchestrator in enterprise networks. 51风流joined the World Economic Forum鈥檚 Global Plastic Action Partnership community, which provides tools, solutions, and insights for organizations to eliminate or at least reduce waste by 2030. We are also a member of the聽Ellen MacArthur Foundation to help companies enhance their resource productivity and realise a circular economy. These initiatives and partnerships are crucial as one company or organisation alone cannot address these global challenges.

When it comes to climate change, we have a convenient measurable performance unit in the form of CO₂ to drive and track performance at a global, national, and industrial levels. It is encouraging to see that we have the technologies to act, the support from local and global authorities, and a unit of measurement to know how we are doing. However, the central challenge is that we all need to move faster, together. We must move faster and at much greater scale than any industrial transition in the history of civilisation in order to stop global warming and other environmental degradation and pollution, which already has a measurable impact across ecosystems as diverse as the Arctic, rain forests, and oceans.

I strongly believe that technology is an enabler, but people make it happen. To go faster, I see two essential levers, both of which 51风流can play a pivotal role in supporting.

The first, and hopefully a very powerful lever, is an economic incentive for companies. Together with our customers, we can accelerate action through the financial instrument of carbon pricing. With the聽聽that there are currently more than 50 carbon pricing schemes being implemented or scheduled, this is a new business reality for the 2020s. Carbon pricing is complex. While governments and regulators are responsible for setting carbon pricing, it is in our DNA to build software that helps companies measure, account, and take the right action in dynamic and heterogeneous regulatory environments.

The second lever is choice both for consumers and companies. We are inevitably going to see more CO₂ labelling for goods and services in society, creating more transparency and, consequently, awareness. Consumers will demand more transparency into the CO₂ footprint associated with products and services they consume in the future 鈥� in the same way that we have had more visibility in recent years into calorie content of the food we consume. This will be true for both individual consumer choice, as well as companies buying through their supply chains. I also believe that there will be a mindset shift resulting in a willingness to pay a premium for the low or lowest carbon alternative. This is already a reality in some markets for renewable energy. Preferential low carbon purchasing behaviour will shape markets and company strategies. Carbon pricing will help effectively allocate capital to the most cost-effective options to de-carbonise, and the choice of customers will define who not only survives but thrives in a carbon constrained and sustainable business world. Every organisation and every individual needs to move into the same direction.

51风流provides a starting point to help companies preparing for a change driven by incentive and choice, with the Climate 21 initiative in 2020. I couldn鈥檛 be聽happier to announce聽51风流Product Carbon Footprint Analytics,聽the first solution available to the market. Our customer Doehler is the first to go live.

Embedding an enterprise-wide approach to CO₂聽will help businesses gain transparency and awareness, provide an economic incentive to companies to act now, and can be a starting point for action at scale. Adding a聽 for measuring a company鈥檚 performance symbolises our ability to change for the better of our global community. It is a decade of delivery, and 51风流is ready to support.

Thomas Saueressig is a member of the Executive Board of 51风流SE for 51风流Product Engineering.

This article first appeared on the Global 51风流News Centre.

Join our second forum in the聽聽virtual series on August 6^th, and hear from Industry experts on the risk and opportunity impact our core industries now face. 聽

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We at 51风流know this because we have developed the best practices over decades with our customers in all industries. And we drive continuous innovation to deliver next practices that make business processes more efficient and transparent.

So far so good. Or is it?

Startup Spirit

I have observed a few trends affecting many industries that give me pause. Startups aggressively investigate how they can give incumbents a hard time by competing on different terms. They are not burdened by a customer base with expectations, there is no legacy 鈥� or treasure 鈥� of business relationships and commitments. There is nothing to break, nothing to protect.

Innovative big players are tuning into this spirit and looking along their value chains to directly engage with the customers of their customers, or to capture the revenue and margin their suppliers make today. Digital technologies and abundant 鈥� but still hardly exploited 鈥� data are the key ingredients to power the next wave of innovation and disruption for business models, business best practices, and the way businesses operate.

Crisis as a Catalyst

I have viewed the current crisis initially from the humanitarian perspective; after all, the pictures we have seen are hard to digest. But there is also the gigantic economic impact, and we expect a mix of V, L, and U shapes for the recovery and restart. But we can also observe how very large enterprise super tankers turn on a dime, innovate in days and weeks, and break established rules and habits.

New industries are shaping a public health sector that will look different as research institutes, life science companies, healthcare providers, technology companies, and the public sector work on keeping the world population safe and healthy. I have the opportunity to see this firsthand. 51风流plays an instrumental role in developing a聽COVID-19聽tracking app for Germany and beyond in close collaboration with public health institutions (Robert Koch Institute), government, and tech companies, including T-Systems, Google, and Apple (for the smartphone APIs). It is quite an experience to see how tech giants and government fall into a collaborative innovation mode rather quickly.

New Business Models, New Speed of Innovation?

Many 51风流customers in their industries feel a similar sense of urgency as business practices are redefined by market pressure and by digital technologies that enable new, data-driven business models 鈥� innovative ways to generate revenue streams from knowledge, data, and customer insights.

Over decades, 51风流has earned a reputation for being possibly the most reliable partner to solve the most difficult business problems with best practice solutions that service many customers. But when fast-paced innovation is a critical success factor not all innovative solutions can be added into the large applications of our intelligent suite. The upgrade effort would be too high to allow for a rapid adoption of innovations. What鈥檚 more, the clear path to the cloud for enterprise software disrupts our partners鈥� business model of adding new capabilities to 51风流Business Suite by modifying and extending code in our joint customers鈥� systems.

The obvious consequence is that we need a new innovation model and extension model for our intelligent suite and our business network.

Industry Cloud: A New Response to a New Challenge

Our new industry cloud is an open yet integrated innovation space for SAP, partners, and customers, which provides both best-practice business processes and advanced digital technologies to create next business practices and innovate at the vertical edge.

The processes and data domains of the intelligent suite are a key asset for our customers. Many developer years and significant brainpower have gone into creating business best practices for all industries that take care of the business essentials. We make those capabilities available through open APIs and expose the business process and domain models.

This open integration layer gives us, our partners, and customers a structured access to build next practice solutions that optimise the end-to-end processes supporting our customers鈥� current business models with 鈥渘ext practices.鈥�

The industry cloud is also the innovation space for experiment and exploration. All digital technologies of the Business Technology Platform are available, including machine learning, the Internet of Things (IoT), analytics, and blockchain to drive innovation at the 鈥渧ertical edge鈥� 鈥� trying out ideas that may fail or enable our customers鈥� breakthrough to develop successful data-driven or ecosystem-driven business models.

The industry cloud also makes development of new solutions easy, with business services that provide common functionality like currency conversion but also subscription management, billing, and other services that create a simple and unified user and customer experience. For more information, see the聽.

Starting the New Ecosystem for Innovation

To jump-start the wide adoption of the industry cloud as an innovation space, we have selected an initial set of four industries that span a wide spectrum of processes and business priorities.

聽companies are currently balancing their classical, sophisticated business models with the disruptive forces of new mobility.聽聽are managing the transition to renewable energies and the new opportunities from a redefined relationship with their commercial and retail customers.聽聽businesses have long been at the leading edge of digital innovation, and聽聽is catching up rapidly with digital twins of buildings and capital assets for intelligent operations and new service offerings (read the聽partnership announcement聽we made with Honeywell last week).

Industry 4.Now

Many industries are looking forward to capitalising on the promise of integration operational data from the shop floor with the data coming from business IT. This convergence benefits both the manufacturers of vehicles, industrial machinery, or buildings as well as the industries that use this equipment to make chemicals or mill products, operate buildings, drive logistics services, or run mining and oil and gas operations.

Our Industry 4.Now initiative is an integral part of the industry cloud strategy and we are already on our way.

Beginning of a Journey

We are starting a multi-year journey to write a new chapter how we drive innovation with our partners for the core business of our customers in their industries.

More industries will join this initiative every quarter and I look forward to the innovations and to the vibrant ecosystem of customers and partners that the industry cloud will foster and shape.

Peter Maier is president of Industries and Customer Advisory at SAP.

This article first appeared on the Global 51风流Newsroom.

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