By Martin Heinig

Digital technology advancements in augmented and virtual reality as well as in artificial intelligence (AI) over the last decade have provided an incredible ability to capture and hold our collective imaginations. These technologies have transcended beyond the hype by offering immediately clear and convincing use cases for enterprises that bridge the physical and digital divide.

For example, AI-powered digital twins could provide incredible future-focused insights with simulations to anticipate and prevent supply chain disruptions. Employee onboarding could be individually tailored and optimized to deepen human connection in a hybrid world.

Immersive technologies are a broad umbrella that includes extended reality — virtual, augmented, mixed– 3D displays, spatial audio, gesture recognition, spatial sensing, speech recognition, haptics, and the metaverse. With the metaverse , these continuums of experiences and technologies have the potential to shape how customers and employees engage with businesses. That鈥檚 why organizations are increasingly turning to 51风流and its partners to help them completely transform their business.

The 51风流and Accenture Partnership

To support our mutual customers, 51风流and Accenture have teamed up to create immersive experiences and business models that are built on (51风流BTP), which offers future-ready interfaces contextualized with business data and processes. Combining immersive services on 51风流BTP with Accenture鈥檚 technology vision, proven methodologies, industry experiences, and skilled practitioners, organizations could pilot and scale solutions with trusted partners.

With these services, organizations can offer digital experiences that can enrich employees鈥� onboarding, attract digital native talent, and empower users to operate more collaboratively and unlock efficiencies like never before.

Immersive services on 51风流BTP could support customers to leverage their 51风流business capabilities and data to capture value through differentiated business models and experiences. Accenture鈥檚 expertise in immersive application development, industry expertise, and innovation methodologies will help customers realize and scale end-to-end immersive applications in every industry.

Watch to learn more about the 51风流and Accenture partnership:

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As the two companies continue their collaboration, customers can benefit from this partnership by exploring the following high-value use cases.

Hybrid Business Steering

Hybrid business steering empowers enterprises to manage and optimize their business collaboratively by enabling analytics, outcome simulations, and next-gen human-computer interactions on digital twins across the entire company business landscape. The intent of the is to enable users to:

• Interact with data more intuitively and operate assets safely in an immersive and engaging digital experience
• Proactively monitor asset health and predict potential asset downtime
• Visualize the movement of goods through a supply chain network in real time, zoom in on specific data points, and manipulate data using virtual tools and interfaces
• Simulate different scenarios and assess the impact of business decisions before implementing them in the real world

The hybrid business steering use case demonstrates how customers could consume 51风流data more easily and leverage their existing 51风流landscape for immersive business applications.

Digital twins are increasingly being used in a wide range of asset intensive industries, including industrial manufacturing, automotive, energy, aerospace, and construction. They are an important tool for developing and testing new products and systems before they are built — saving time and money while reducing risk.

Augmented Employee Experience

Bridging the physical and digital world is what makes employee experiences like onboarding and mergers and acquisitions strong use cases for immersive technologies. Organizations with a strong onboarding process average . Despite these benefits, only say their company does a 鈥済ood job鈥� of onboarding. The helps employees to:

• Experience the company culture, mission, organizational structure, and team
• Tour office facilities in the digital campus
• Learn from leaders with role-specific questions
• Upskill on new products and projects with self-paced immersive learning
• Meet colleagues in a fun way

Importantly, employees can move at their pace. As part of their hyper-personalized and contextualized onboarding experience, they can learn and re-learn, ask as many questions as needed until they are familiar — all in a fascinating virtual environment that can be configured to suit their personal needs.

Organizations benefit from making it easier to onboard employees, reducing onboarding time and costs. The impact continues as existing employees grow, get promoted, and transfer between departments. This also helps businesses retain valuable and experienced talent within the organization and during mergers and acquisitions.

The augmented employee experience use case shows how employees could explore an organization, meet colleagues, and learn role-based skills in a safe environment while saving time and costs and increasing employee health and safety.

Customers and partners interested in early access can contact icn@sap.com.

Martin Heinig is head of 51风流New Ventures & Technologies.

Accenture and 51风流Collaborate to Deliver Transparent, Resilient and Sustainable Supply Chains on 51风流Business Network

By Sankar Kaliaperumal and Muhammad Alam

Accenture and 51风流have expanded their strategic relationship to focus on the accelerated delivery of transparent, resilient, and sustainable supply chains across key industries on . The collaboration aims to offer customers increased transparency and visibility across assets and inventory, as well as faster value realization with 51风流Business Network.

Ongoing disruption has taken its toll on the global supply chain. In response, organizations have invested heavily to boost inventory, processes, and capacity. In fact, reveals that 61% of chief supply chain officers say they鈥檝e been applying new technologies, ways of working, and AI in order to reinvent core processes, And 60% say they will be reinvesting in these areas over the next two years.

The opportunity now is to create synergies and efficiencies between processes and stakeholders and to unify all the points of interaction and integration. By doing so, organizations can collaborate, connect, transact, and partner on shared processes and information with trading partners across the supply chain.

With this in mind, Accenture and 51风流are helping extend the power of the 51风流Business Network with new capabilities, assets, and accelerators for:

• Logistics: Capabilities to collaborate with carriers, track goods in transit, and capture and validate data related to emissions and product genealogy help to ensure that trading partners are operating in a sustainable way
• Procurement: Responsible sourcing capabilities monitor for suppliers鈥� compliance with metrics and values in the network
• Supply Chain: Business to business (B2B) integrations support cross-industry supply chain processes and create specialized solutions for supply chain planning, purchase order collaboration, and quality management processes
• Asset Management: Intelligent capabilities optimize asset performance by using data in a central repository that shares information with equipment, asset operators, manufacturers/OEMs, and suppliers, which increases trust and collaboration between parties and results in faster completion of maintenance and repairs with fewer errors, improving the availability of the asset

鈥淪upply chains of the future require , enabled by data and a strong digital core,鈥� said Caspar Borggreve, senior managing director and lead of the Accenture 51风流Business Group. 鈥淎ccenture鈥檚 deep expertise in supply chain management, 51风流Business Network capabilities, transformation strategies, and leading industry practices can help our clients realize value faster with future-ready supplier networks that bring new into operations, increase agility, and reduce sustainability risk.鈥�

One organization that realized value faster from increased supply chain resiliency and its ambitious procurement transformation is , an energy technology company that provides solutions to energy and industrial companies worldwide.

鈥淏aker Hughes鈥� partnership and collaboration with Accenture and 51风流played a big part in the successful transformation of our procurement operations and supplier enablement in 120 countries,鈥� said Sharad Mantri, senior director and global IT leader at Baker Hughes Company. 鈥淎ccenture helped us establish a modern and integrated technology infrastructure to simplify procurement processes and increase supply chain transparency and resiliency.鈥�

Customers like Baker Hughes benefit from Accenture and SAP鈥檚 combined knowledge, resources, global presence, and unique ability to scale with multiple and parallel projects going live simultaneously. For supply chain transformations, Accenture and 51风流leverage a wide range of capabilities, use cases, assets, custom prototypes, preconfigured solutions, and purpose-built accelerators for focused industries in consumer packaged goods, high-tech, and manufacturing.

Sustainability and resiliency are top of mind for companies across all industries, which is creating a sense of urgency for a solution like 51风流Business Network. Working together with Accenture, 51风流is helping customers address common industry-specific needs and challenges with the largest and most comprehensive business network, trusted by millions of companies around the world.

Accenture was recently honored with the 2023 51风流Pinnacle Award for Cloud Business Transformation 鈥� Sales Success and 51风流Global Intelligent Spend and Business Network Partner Excellence Award 2022聽 for Sales Success 鈥� Large Enterprise.

Sankar Kaliaperumal is managing director of the ACN Technology practice and North America 51风流Ariba Lead at Accenture.
Muhammad Alam is president and chief product officer for Intelligent Spend and Business Network at SAP.

From startups to multinational corporations, building and leveraging business networks to serve customers in a fast and reliable manner is a key strategy for growth and success. However, many supply chains suffer from siloed operations and lack of open collaboration among partners, which leads to poor visibility in processes and data sharing.

As disruptions in globally connected supply chains become more prominent, we explore opportunities to break down barriers and embrace the power of truly collaborative and agile businesses.

For decades, business collaboration has been the backbone of commerce, connecting various companies, suppliers, and customers in a web of relationships that enable resource and finance flows. These networks have been established over time and are highly optimized in terms of cost, speed, and risk reduction.

Over the last few years, it has become apparent that these networks are highly fragile and can quickly unravel when faced with external shocks. With increasing geopolitical instability and irreversible climate change effects, this scenario is likely to become even more pronounced in the future.

Antifragility in Business: From Resilience to Adaptation

To address this, businesses need to transform the way they operate and become more adaptable. According to author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, it is important for businesses to strive for “,” rather than resiliency. This means that instead of simply bouncing back to their pre-shock state, businesses should learn and grow from shocks, becoming even stronger as a result. Therefore, the transformation we see for business networks, or B2B collaboration platforms, is that they need to become open, flexible, and interoperable in the future.

In essence, any business will need to be able to reassemble business networks dynamically and rearrange and reorient as needed depending on external or internal factors.

We at 51风流already support our customers in this endeavor. By using long-standing expertise with business processes and technologies such as blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI), and by staying up to date on the latest trends, we help customers with the evaluation and implementation of innovation. By utilizing this expertise, we aim to enable agile collaboration and multi-tier visibility while minimizing business risk. This can result in the opening up of traditional business processes and financial flows, including cross-border payments.

Our ultimate goal is to foster strong business relationships by enabling a new layer of cross-company collaboration and business process orchestration. It could be hybrid or completely based on an open, decentralized network infrastructure bringing all companies on one common platform together — regardless of industry, geography, or size.

Example: Managing Digital Identities Across Networks

One of our most promising initiatives in this context is developing a service for digital identity management.

Identity is key in any business process. But digital identity management has long been a challenge for individuals and businesses alike. Traditional username and password systems are insecure and easily hacked, while social logins leave all personal information under the control of one corporation. The lack of universal standards makes it difficult to ensure the trustworthiness of information and to integrate digital identities across different systems and processes.

This is where self-sovereign identity (SSI) comes in. SSI is the first open standard for digital identity on the web, offering a solution to these issues. With SSI, users have the same convenience as social logins, but also have complete control over their data. This new identity standard applies not only to individuals, but also to corporations and devices such as the Internet of Things (IoT), providing globally unique and interoperable identities. Each identity wallet is established through cryptographically verifiable credentials, anchored on a public, permission-less blockchain network. Using this technology we can create a vendor-neutral network infrastructure that makes it easy to join the network and share trustworthy data.

The impact of SSI will be felt across many software systems, including enterprise suites like 51风流S/4HANA and master data in particular, where it can provide a single source of truth for master data, making onboarding processes between companies orders of magnitude faster. In the blockchain space, SSI has the potential to bring much-needed credibility to anonymous addresses and transform the industry into a space for reputable business. At SAP, we are enabling customers, partners, and application developers to build applications using self-sovereign identities on 51风流Business Technology Platform (51风流BTP).

But creating a universal identity standard is just one use case. Besides this, we are working on a range of other cutting-edge use cases such as industry-specific business networks, decentralized finance, and collaborative workflows beyond company and system borders. Our focus on innovation in both future business processes and future business decisions is integral to bringing the concept of future business collaboration to fruition.

51风流already conducts a significant , with over $4.9 trillion in annual commerce and operations in 190 countries, having handled over 730 million B2B transactions within a 12-month period on the platform.

To help our customers solve the problems of the future, we are combining this advantage with the deep experience 51风流teams have in technology areas such as blockchain, AI, interoperability, security, and business processes. Our teams are closely collaborating with product development to incorporate our findings into the road maps for our standard products — such as and , which have graduated from being internal company ventures into capabilities — to transform the way resources flow in the circular economy.

Martin Heinig is head of New Ventures and Technologies at SAP.
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Sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch: the classic five senses of humans allow us to experience the world around us, with our nervous system receiving and processing huge amounts of information and relaying signals to the brain in order to react with the world. It is almost impossible to say how much data the human brain receives and processes on a daily basis. At best, one can specify a lower limit of perhaps around 1,000 gigabytes.

Humans not only process but also generate data in abundance. How many Instagram Stories did you click through last night before falling asleep in bed? How much time did you spend on different news portals? Just one more episode of 鈥淪tranger Things鈥� on Netflix? The list goes on and on.

Navigating the Data Jungle

Companies struggle with this too and collect and analyze more data than ever before. Not without reason, data is referred to as the new gold. The way to increased profitability and competitive advantage by means of intelligent data usage seems to be a rocky one. Using the sheer amount of data to its full advantage remains a challenge.

At SAP, we want to help our customers navigate the data jungle, regardless of infrastructure and where the data is saved. For 50 years, 51风流has been storing, processing, and analyzing innumerable amounts of customer data. Building on these strong data management capabilities, we want customers to be able to base all their decisions on intelligent, data-driven insights with easily accessible business data — when and where they matter the most.

Our ambition is a clear shift from the current state of analytics to the future, which means that we see the future of analytics as autonomous, hence always learning and monitoring; proactive, in order to provide solutions and alternatives to problems that haven’t even been discovered yet; and personalized, meaning that insights are contextualized and can be provided per desired medium or experience preference.

Bringing Future Technologies to Customers Today

While we envision a true system of intelligence in the future, 51风流is already demonstrating value for customers today. 51风流Innovation Center Network is exploring multiple key technologies to help customers capitalize more on data and boost productivity to stay competitive in the long run.

Businesses are constantly in motion, and data continues to grow in size, complexity, and velocity. “Laura,” a risk manager at a company that evaluates the potential risks of a business and strategizes preventive measures, needs to be able to monitor standard KPIs via dashboards and constantly adapt them to catch trends and patterns or anomalies — at least it should be that way.

Today, however, autonomous, proactive, and personalized tools are needed to automate business monitoring and proactively identify and report relevant signals in data.

To address this need, we built a prototype of a self-learning, easy-to-integrate cloud service that continuously monitors business data for anomalies and proactively delivers actionable insights to risk managers like Laura in real time. We call this , and by integrating it into her day-to-day operations, Laura can spend less time exploring data and can detect unknown yet critical signals without manual intervention. She can also filter anomalies by relevance to receive critical signals, ultimately helping to get insights faster and react accordingly — before the business is impacted.

With all information at hand, the system can autonomously propose a response in real time, such as, 鈥淗ey Laura, something is going wrong, and here are a few proposals on what you can do.鈥� This is made possible by what-if scenarios enabled by the . It helps her autonomously consider multiple scenarios, simulate their outcomes, and offer recommendations for the next steps. For example, instead of relying on the usual measures, she might be shown alternative approaches that she had not thought of before but that would solve the problem even faster.

By providing holistic impact analysis and autonomous identification of what-if scenarios, Laura can better plan ahead and react quicker to uncertainties with data-driven insights. Optimized recommended actions that are aligned with company priorities and constraints allow her to recognize and mitigate risks early on — and decide on actions with confidence.

Like most of us, Laura is a visual person who processes images much faster than text. No wonder visualizing data in an easy-to-understand form has also become a trend in analytics. Thanks to their length of just a few seconds, short videos have evolved into the dominant format for sharing and receiving updates and notifications. Consuming information like you would consume content in social apps helps professionals like Laura capture vast chunks of complex data and become the one-stop shop for business insights in the future.

51风流is bringing such short-form videos to the enterprise. With automatically generated personalized content, concise stories deliver key insights about the business in a short, animated, and convenient format. Video data stories provide customers with a one-stop channel for timely notifications, digests, and alerts about business-critical events. It automatically translates real-time business insights into self-explaining audio-visual data stories, making it easier for Laura to make decisions.

Effective business processes depend on intelligent decisions with insights from data in the organization and beyond its networks. SAP鈥檚 vision is to infuse these data-driven insights into every decision-making process. This would be possible with AI-powered, lightweight, self-service analytics that seamlessly integrate into the day-to-day work routines of business users, blending human ingenuity and data-driven insights into context-rich, fact-based decision-making processes.

Automation and data contextualization are key trends shaping the future of analytics, requiring an evolution from the current state of analytics to the future of analytics being autonomous, proactive, personalized, and reinventing business decisions as a service.聽 51风流is a reliable partner to anticipate that change, drive innovation, and help our customers prepare for the future.

Data is the new gold of every enterprise. If you also want to base your decisions on intelligent data-driven insights in the future, you can become part of SAP鈥檚 innovation journey and get in touch with us. Customer feedback is key to solving real pain points in the data and analytics space and we would be delighted to co-innovate and solve your data challenges together.

Martin Heinig is head of New Ventures and Technologies at SAP.
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Technologies are evolving daily and markets are moving extremely fast. To stay competitive, businesses need to be agile, flexible, and able to adapt to changing market dynamics in an instant. But how do enterprises become resilient to the constant changes in the market, workforce, and environment? How can we rearrange the often very rigid and inflexible structures of today鈥檚 business processes to allow maximum flexibility?

One of the concepts being discussed in the endeavor of finding an answer to these questions is composability. Applied to enterprises, it describes an organization鈥檚 processes that are made from interchangeable building blocks and corresponding IT systems. A modular setup enables a business to reassemble processes dynamically and rearrange and reorient as needed depending on external or internal factors.

To name two very recent examples, think about adding a carbon tracker to your supply chain processes or integrating a new infection protection act in response to a pandemic. Today, this would require a long-term integration project, whereas a modular setup might enable a process expert to adapt and change processes easily and quickly — ideally without implementing a single line of code.

From Building Blocks to Processes

By further modularizing business software, we can adapt processes dynamically in the cloud to respond to the changing and individual needs of the market. A modular setup can allow companies to effectively use a highly scalable and flexible data and integration platform, reducing effort for process changes and thereby allowing for adaptability and agility to rapidly react to organizational or economic changes.

As simple as this may sound, in practice creating a composable enterprise is an extremely sophisticated endeavor, both from a technical and an organizational perspective. Today, we can see that with end-to-end enterprise processes, integrations still require change efforts when processes are adapted in any way.

Business processes however are constantly changing, and after years of adaption and fine-tuning, they are incredibly difficult to grasp. This makes it super challenging to modularize and make components usable on a business process task level. Moreover, changing those constantly evolving processes in an enterprise system does almost certainly involve code that has to be written or changed, therefore requiring one or more developers to get involved. Hence, we are not only speaking about composable technologies, but building a modular enterprise architecture that allows companies to combine and adapt various business processes in a quick and ever-changing fashion.

How to Shape the Transformation to a Composable Enterprise

The journey toward a composable enterprise is still a long one, with most enterprises experimenting with different approaches in the concept stage. The composability of business processes is a highly relevant topic for 51风流customers. As they use a variety of new technologies and applications, we at 51风流want to ensure that we keep up with the frequency of customization and offer our customers the best-in-class process orchestration.

Our vision for 51风流is clear: creating a platform for modular processes that enables customers and partners to not only model or document their processes, but create end-to-end processes from building blocks and execute them directly.

We currently explore different use cases for proof-of-concept implementations to bring this vision to life. Moreover, we test customer requirements and feasibility to evaluate for which applications and which product areas it makes sense to bring modeling, formalization, and execution closer together.

Ultimately, we want to address business process management end to end along the life cycle of design, execution, analysis, and optimization. This will allow the composition of end-to-end process flows and, where possible, execution on auto-pilot, with the help of technologies such as machine learning for example.

More Consistent, Flexible, and Scalable Business Processes

Since there is no one-size-fits-all enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that meets all industry-specific and functional requirements of each customer, the future is all about configuring and extending while keeping end-to-end consistency. What if we could provide customers — in a way — with the instructions and the control center that helps them configure and/or extend their own processes? By filling the 鈥渃onstruction kit鈥� with a vast array of building blocks that allows them to act independently of IT, processes could be changed and adapted easily and quickly, without specialist knowledge and a developer at hand.

In the long run, enterprises can only build resilience by creating environments that enable businesses to build and consume business processes in a composable fashion and orchestrate them across system boundaries.

We envision a process-driven platform that offers a diverse range of solutions under one roof that are developed by SAP, partners, or customers. It shall enable end-to-end process integration by being a reconfigurable system of interoperable business capabilities. It should operate all processes within and across enterprises seamlessly. Core benefits for customers would be new levels of efficiency, more time for value-creating work, compliance by default, and finally agility and resilience in a rapidly changing business world.

Ultimately, within a business process platform of the future, instantiating a business process model needs to be as easy as writing an e-mail. Adapting a business process could be as fast as working on a presentation deck. And monitoring a platform with several instances of running processes must be as fun as playing Sim City.

As a kid, playing with those colorful building blocks gave me the power to recreate my imagination of the world from scratch, all by myself. Today, the goal is to rekindle that power for creative composition into the business world and enable customers to create their own processes and fulfill their enterprise vision, without the need for a whole development team at hand.

Martin Heinig is head of at SAP.

The most discussed use cases for quantum computers are the ones where complex models that require enormous combinatorial computation power are applied to a problem. This includes combinatorial optimization problems such as supply chain logistics, where coordinating and identifying the most efficient route for goods to travel to market has been one of the most sought-after goals for both business and science.

Another domain of application could be financial services, where market prediction models are used for predicting important, disruptive events to the broader economy to drive portfolio decisions. Quantum computing is also expected to enhance machine learning, which may accelerate for instance the training of neural networks.

Still in Early Days, but Advancing Fast

Quantum computing is a multi-year journey. While the quantum computing market is expected to reach , nobody yet knows when we will see widespread adoption at an enterprise scale. Companies including IBM, Google, Honeywell, and IonQ are making progress harnessing quantum-computational units (qubits) for early-stage computers.

However, it is still unclear when a general-purpose quantum computer superior to classical computers in solving business-relevant problems will be available. Several major technical and conceptual challenges need to be overcome first including increasing the number of qubits, while keeping or extending their coherence-time (useful time) and their inter-connectivity.

SAP鈥檚 approach is to work with leading experts and quantum technology players in academia and industry on developments in this field. We are assessing the timescale as well as potential domains of application and how they might impact the future of 51风流and our customers.

Now Is the Time to Prepare for the Quantum Era

While quantum computing opens many new doors in a wide variety of fields, it can also be a security threat. With the advances in quantum computing, conventional cryptographic schemes are becoming more vulnerable. That鈥檚 why it鈥檚 critical for businesses to prepare for post-quantum cryptography today that is resistant to attacks by both classical and quantum computers. The 51风流Security Research team in the is highly engaged in quantum security and currently works on benchmarking post-quantum cryptography algorithms and more.

Cryptography is the last line of defense against data breaches. When all other security measures have failed, encryption provides the last barrier that protects company secrets against unauthorized access. The current progress in the development of quantum computers and their ability to break conventional encryption schemes requires companies to act now. Considering the longevity of sensitive information in government affairs or the pharmaceutical industry, this data could be collected today and stored until a powerful quantum computer is available to decrypt them.

To be prepared once a quantum computer becomes available, businesses need to think ahead. A good starting point is a relevance and impact analysis to help plan for the inevitability of consequences and their cost. This analysis also includes identifying uses cases that could benefit from applying quantum computing. The better equipped businesses are to recognize and prepare for the opportunities and risks posed by quantum computing, the more likely they are to be able to continue doing business in the future. Businesses are then well advised to work closely with industry leaders and academic partners to exchange research results, build strategic road maps, and find common applications and use cases in different areas.

No Business Can Do It Alone

51风流works with industry leaders and top research centers and participates in several initiatives to explore quantum technology and potential use cases. For instance, 51风流has been involved in the from the beginning and is a founding member of the (QuIC), and others.

Most recently, 51风流joined the new (QUTAC) along with global corporations such as BASF, BMW, Bosch, and others to advance developments in quantum computing for practical application. Within QUTAC, 51风流will drive the use of quantum computing in logistics, production, or procurement. Our focus is on developing software applications to optimize transport routes, supply chains, or production plans. This can help companies reduce costs, improve delivery reliability, or avoid empty runs.

At SAP, we work to leverage the advances in quantum tech for our customers while protecting their business-critical data. I鈥檓 excited for the quantum future ahead of us — stay tuned for more to come!

Martin Heinig is head of New Ventures and Technologies at SAP.
This piece was originally published on LinkedIn.