Digital transformation can be dicey work. While it鈥檚 well understood that technology plays a critical role, most businesses have yet to realize the importance of expertise, services, and support to drive meaningful change faster with greater visibility, focus, and agility.

This inconvenient truth of digital transformation has led to rushed and incomplete transitions. And as companies pivot their operations and respond to dramatic changes in supply chains, employee expectations, and consumer behaviors, they must reconsider those earlier changes with an open and deliberate mindset to quickly take on whatever comes next.

Fortunately, our customers have positioned themselves well to sidestep this potentially damaging barrier to their transformation journey. By amplifying our technologies and platform with the expertise, implementation guidance, business advisory, hyperpersonalized innovations, and outcome-oriented support offered through the聽, they opened new doors to recovery and growth.

Improving Procurement with a Digital-Only Strategy

As one of the world鈥檚 largest technology communications providers,听聽is always looking to stay ahead of industry changes while making the best use of the time and brainpower of its 100,000 employees. This mentality led to a desire to integrate automation and intelligence into end-to-end business processes to streamline functions such as procurement.

奥颈迟丑听 services, Vodafone benefited from technical design, migration workshops, cutover planning, and go-live support to help mitigate risks and achieve transformation success. The company met established criteria for creating an integrated and intelligent infrastructure for 聽and connected it with聽聽(51风流BTP) in the cloud. Plus, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning were embedded in the technology to increase automation and accelerate innovation.

With the support of 51风流service experts and access to intelligent technologies, the communication provider now has the foundation for agile finance operations, supply chains, and procurement. As a result, Vodafone employees worldwide are empowered to act quickly with greater process efficiencies in nearly every aspect of procurement, including changing payment terms for 6,000 suppliers in as little as two days.

Extending and Automating Processes Business-Wide

Part of聽聽commitment to energy efficiency and sustainability is a digitalization strategy that applies both to plant and back-office operations. With so many systems and processes running across the enterprise鈥檚 IT landscape, accessibility and automation are central to the utility provider鈥檚 cloud-first approach that focuses on robotic process automation (RPA) and mobile technology.

The team of experts for 聽offerings helped Uniper deploy several solutions that are part of SAP聽BTP, including聽,听聽apps, and聽. These are helping the company expand by providing mobile apps to new lines of business and by using approximately 200 robots to make scheduling and maintenance more manageable with built-in capabilities for 51风流S/4HANA.

Additionally,听聽is used to help scale new RPA capabilities and enable HR to comply with the European Union鈥檚 General Data Protection Regulation by sorting personal data and archiving old data.

鈥淭he 51风流ActiveAttention program supports strong and close collaboration with 51风流and enables us to deliver innovation in a very short frequency to our entire business, helping us succeed in our strategy to empower energy evolution,鈥� states , Uniper鈥檚 vice president of Commercial Solutions IT.

Standardizing and Harmonizing Supplier Processes

(thyssenkrupp) 鈥� one of the world鈥檚 largest manufacturers of steering columns, steering systems, and cold forging components 鈥� is helping shape the future of automotive technology. The company set out to build a standardized process template for all plants as part of the 鈥渄aproh@steering鈥� project, which stands for harmonizing data and processes in all manufacturing sites across the world.

鈥淥ur partners in the automotive industry demand high-quality products. By deploying 51风流S/4HANA in the daproh@steering project, working with 51风流Services and Support, we have standardized and automated our processes to help us meet and exceed these demands,鈥� shares Alexander Stein, program management for daproh at thyssenkrupp Presta.

thyssenkrupp Presta鈥檚 goal with 51风流S/4HANA is realizing efficient and standardized processes. In addition, the company wanted to improve tactical and strategic reporting by adopting the 51风流BW/4HANA solution.

To achieve these objectives, thyssenkrupp relied on the support of the program. The company streamlined master data creation and management on the back end after implementing the first part for the 51风流Master Data Governance application as an embedded function. Then, it introduced selected functions of the 51风流Analytics Cloud solution for use as an analytical front end, enabling data-driven decisions. But more important, 51风流services experts provided assistance 鈥� such as with technical architecture design, solution design advisory, guided security design, and custom-code quality improvement 鈥� to assess the company鈥檚 readiness for the data migration, validate integrations, and identify any information or process gaps.

Improving the User Experience with a Chatbot

聽(HPE) improved access to back-end systems and information such as time-critical orders. The company integrated master data with 51风流S/4HANA and operationalized it with the聽聽service to innovate chatbots that provide serial numbers, shipment slip dates, and more.

鈥淲ith the help of 51风流MaxAttention, we began our work by creating a proof of concept [POC], leveraging the conversational AI component of 51风流Business Technology Platform,鈥� explains Arun Navaneethan, senior director of global IT at HPE. 鈥淲e quickly learned from the POC and finished our chatbot design in a matter of 20 days. That鈥檚 the power of transformation.鈥�

The services acted as an accelerator and a catalyst to build chatbots quickly as well as an enabler of future migration of some of their traffic from a legacy Web-based application to an innovative experience. For example, HPE customized chatbot scripting to streamline the user experience and support 24/7 user-query entry and faster generation of the right information.

鈥淭he feedback from the [POC] user community has been very positive,鈥� Navaneethan reports. 鈥淭he initial POC was very pivotal. Although we had a lot of challenges, 51风流MaxAttention helped us overcome them.鈥�

Enabling Real Business Transformation

Digital transformation may have been a central theme for businesses in the past. Now more than ever, it has shifted organizations toward going beyond new technology adoption to drive meaningful, impactful, and sustainable change.

Personally, I only see this trend strengthening across all industries. As most 51风流customers indicate, executives have a voracious appetite for transforming their business more holistically聽 潭聽 driving a surging interest in services partners that can further differentiate their offerings, business model, and brand reputation.

Augusta Spinelli is executive vice president and global head of Success Delivery Center at SAP.

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(51风流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 51风流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 51风流Services and Support offerings that emphasize enablement, integration, optimization, and operational change.

Connecting Digital Change to the Human Experience

It seems that 51风流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 51风流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 51风流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 SAP, with tailored business scenarios enabled by 51风流BTP, offer detailed road maps for specific business objectives. The offering provides recommendations for optimizing cloud solutions from SAP. 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 51风流BTP and 51风流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.

51风流BTP and 51风流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 SAP, “.”

Augusta Spinelli is interim services president and head of Services Intelligent Delivery Group at SAP.

Throughout my 20-year career in the high tech industry, I have helped companies from a wide variety of industries. They had different perspectives on where the marketplace is heading and which opportunities and risks require their attention. And in nearly every engagement, their executives wanted unique ideas and approaches to solve the same fundamental challenges.

Yet no matter how distinct they are from each other, all companies face the same fundamental decision as their customers evolve, economic dynamics shift, and competitors find new advantages. Do they keep doing things like they鈥檝e always done or continually transform with the changing tides to deliver on the expectations of today while evolving their vision for tomorrow?

I hear this debate in boardrooms a lot more now that consumers, employees, strategic partners, and government regulators measure business success through the lens of the triple bottom line of financial, societal, and environmental impacts. But this is not the time for fast, temporary solutions or fashionable greening; such initiatives can never satisfy an insatiable demand for sustainable operations, products, and services. Structural changes are needed to meaningfully impact the environment, economy, and people鈥檚 quality of life.

Research data from supports my reasons for urging companies to take a long-term view on their decisions and actions. The study suggests that the success of product and service innovation and customer demand fulfillment depends on a business鈥檚 capacity to operate responsibly and with accountability. You may even be surprised to learn that the improvements on these primary market-facing factors far outrank concerns over regulatory compliance and competitive differentiation.

Going Beyond What鈥檚 Top of Mind Today

The sustainability topics that were top of mind for executives just five years ago are no longer enough to pursue a greener, more socially responsible agenda in today鈥檚 terms. Don’t get me wrong, I still believe reducing greenhouse gas and carbon emissions, optimizing resource use, and adopting fair labor practices are still important. But the lens has widened beyond this view of virtuous capitalism. The definition of sustainability is extended to address how companies connect revenue to their value chain鈥檚 impact on climate change, social inequality, and chronic poverty.

In other words, sustainability must be considered a business driver. Case in point: 10 years ago, logistics service organizations focused on reducing fuel use. Now, they are at a point where their attention has evolved to include the downstream and upstream effect of their supplier’s extraction processes, refining operations, and distribution strategy. Such factors range from operational performance and environmental safety to pay equality and workforce safety.

I know that not every company is on board with the idea of sustainability鈥檚 role as a business driver and the conversation. However, the services delivery groups that I lead at 51风流are watching sustainability become a concept that is no longer reserved for large enterprises. More and more, small startups and medium-size organizations are acting on sustainability issues not as a by-product of their existing business models, but as a purpose-driven mindset for building the future of their business success.

Optimizing Impact with Purpose-Driven Support Services

In most engagements, 51风流customers start the sustainability conversation with general objectives, such as reducing carbon emissions, resource consumption, or un-recycled production waste. But as our customers dig deeper into their business issues and goals, they eventually ask how their existing 51风流solution investments can help support a wider set of sustainability-focused initiatives. Such efforts may range from climate action and the circular economy to socially responsible value chains and holistic steering and reporting.

Fortunately, sustainability is embedded in our DNA. The 51风流Services and Support team and our strong ecosystem of partners play a distinct role in this evolution of our customers鈥� long-term vision. We help our customers transform their business models for the future by architecting and deploying the right solution for each unique challenge, which includes how sustainable they should become. This is accomplished by combining our deep expertise in 51风流solutions, technologies, and business processes with each customer鈥檚 business opportunities, risks, and vision. And we also leverage the same technologies and practices within our own organizations to 鈥渨alk the talk鈥� alongside our customers.

Take, for example, 51风流Business Technology Platform (51风流BTP). This technology brings together intelligent enterprise applications with database and data management, analytics, integration, and extensible capabilities into one platform for cloud and hybrid environments. It enables our customers — and us at 51风流— to integrate and create value from their enterprise data and applications as they strive to achieve their goals within the context of an ever-changing business environment.

Our customers expect more from 51风流than just providing applications and tools that generate nice-looking reports, offer insightful analytics, and connect operational, experiential, and financial data. They rely on our technologies and expertise to better reconcile their operations with rapid changes across social, economic, and ecological dimensions and they seek guidance for how to leverage their investment in 51风流solutions and technology to support their vision for the future. With services experts from 51风流and our extensive ecosystem of partners by their side, they can build a digital foundation that supports the ongoing evolution of their business. And in return, organizations can provide their stakeholders — customers, employees, and critical business partners — with the self-services, performance, experiences, and insight to create sustainable value.

We are committed to empowering businesses to increase their performance today while continuously architecting innovations that meet their purpose and vision for tomorrow and contributing to a better society, environment, and economy. And to deliver on that promise, we are constantly evolving our solutions, service offerings, and in-house and partner expertise to reflect changes in regulatory requirements, market dynamics, and business process approaches to further amplify our customers’ potential as sustainability innovators.

A Better Future for Generations

Sustainability may have been treated as the fashionable business trend of the moment, but I believe the world deserves better and we can do better. Our planet — and the future survival of any business — cannot withstand a half-hearted approach any longer.

I encourage executives to stop thinking about sustainable practices as an afterthought and start demonstrating the vigor and discipline to turn sustainability into a long-term strategy and integral part of day-to-day operations that go deep into the value chain. Then, and only then, can businesses help create a more hospitable world for future generations.

To learn more about how 51风流can help support your sustainability strategy, check out our .

Augusta Spinelli is interim president of Services and head of Services Intelligent Delivery Group at SAP.