A recent global survey of procurement officers shows a major gap between where companies are and where they want to be when it comes to digital transformation. While 82 percent surveyed see digital transformation as having a major impact on processes -- only five percent so far see significant automation across their processes.
How can business networks and the
cloud-based applications underlying them better help companies reach a more
strategic level of business intelligence and automation?
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy.
To find out, BriefingsDirect recently visited SAP in Palo Alto, Calif. to sit down with Darren
Koch, Chief Product Officer at SAP Ariba. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner,
Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: As
consumers we have information at our fingertips -- so we can be savvy and smart
– probably better than at any other time in history. But that doesn’t always translate
to a larger business-to-business (B2B) decisions.
It’s all about how much of
that goes to actually delivering on what your customers, your employees, and your
stakeholders’ value -- and how much of it is waste? As we link these data sets
together -- the real production planning, understanding end-user demand, and
all the way back through the supply chain – we can develop new transparency that
brings a ton of value. And by ultimately everyone in the value chain understanding
what the consumers’ actually value, then they can innovate in the right ways.
Koch: We
are at a really exciting time inside of our products and services. We're just
getting through a major re-platforming to S/4 HANA, and that’s really exciting because
of HANA’s maturity and scale. It’s moving beyond basic infrastructure in the
way that [SAP Co-Founder] Hasso Plattner had
envisioned it.
[SAP business unit] Concur has
been down this path for a long time. The president of SAP Ariba, Barry
Padgett, actually started the initiative of opening up the Concur
platform. So deep at our core -- in our roots -- we believe that networks, ecosystems,
and openness will ensure that our customers get the most value out of their
solutions.
Here are some excerpts:
Gardner:
What's holding companies back when it comes to becoming more strategic in their processes? They don’t seem to be able to leverage intelligence and automation
to allow people to rise to a higher breed of productivity.
 |
| Koch |
Koch: I
think a lot of it is inertia. The ingrained systems and processes that exist at
companies impact a lot of people. The ability for those companies to run their
core operations relies on people and technology working together. The
change management required by our customers as they deploy solutions -- particularly
in the move from on-premises to the cloud -- is a major inhibitor.
But it's not just the
capabilities and the change in the new technology. It's really re-looking at --
and reimagining -- the processes, the things that existed in the highly
customized on-premises world, and the way those things change in a digital-centric
cloud world. They are fundamentally different.
Gardner: It's always
hard to change behavior. It seems like you have to give people a huge incentive
to move past that inertia. Maybe that's what we are all thinking about when we
bring new data analytics capabilities to bear. Is that what you looking at, incentivization
-- or how do we get that gap closed?
Reimagining change in the cloud
Koch: You are
seeing more thought leadership on the executive side. You are seeing companies more
willing to look holistically at their processes and saying, “Is this something
that truly differentiates my company and adds sustainable competitive advantage?”
And the answer on some processes is, “No."
And so, we see more moving away from the complex, on-premises deployments that were built in a world where a truckload of consultants would show up and configure your software to do exactly what you wanted. Instead, we’re moving to a data-centric best-practices type of world that gives scale, where everybody operates in the same general business fabric. You see the emergence of things like business networks.
And so, we see more moving away from the complex, on-premises deployments that were built in a world where a truckload of consultants would show up and configure your software to do exactly what you wanted. Instead, we’re moving to a data-centric best-practices type of world that gives scale, where everybody operates in the same general business fabric. You see the emergence of things like business networks.
Gardner: And
why the procurement and supply chain management folks? Why are they in an advantageous
position to leverage these holistic benefits, and then evangelize them?
Koch: There's
been a ton of talk and innovation on the selling side, on the customer
resource management (CRM) side, such as our announcement of C/4HANA
at Sapphire
2018 and the success in the cloud generally in the CRM space. What most
people stop at is, for every seller there's a buyer. We represent the buy-side,
the supply chain, the purchasing departments. And now from that buy-side we
have the opportunity to follow the same thought processes on the sell-side.
The beauty at SAP Ariba is that
we have the world's biggest business network. We have over $2 trillion of buy-side
spend and our ability to take that spend and find real insights and real
actionable change to drive value at the intersection of buyers and sellers.
This is where we’re headed.
Gardner: It
seems like we are moving rapidly beyond the buy and sell being just transactional
and moving more to deeper partnerships, visibility, of understanding the processes
on both sides of the equation. That can then bring about a whole greater than
the sum of the parts.
Understanding partners
Koch: Exactly.
I spent 10 years working in the consumer travel space, and my team in
particular was working on how consumers choose hotels. It's a very complex
purchasing decision.
There are location aspects,
there are quality aspects, there are amenities, room size, obviously price, and
there are a lot of non-price actors that go into the purchase decision, too. When
you look at what a procurement audience is doing, what a company is doing, there
are a lot of such non-price factors. It’s exactly the same problem.
The investments that we are
making inside of SAP Ariba get at allowing you to see things like supplier risk.
You are seeing things like the Ariba Network handling direct materials. You are seeing time, quality, and risk factors -- and these other
non-price dimensions -- coming in, in the same way that consumers do when choosing
a hotel. Nobody chooses the cheapest one, or very few people do. Usually it’s a
proper balance of all of these factors and how they best meet the total needs.
We are seeing the same thing on the business procurement side.
When you look at what a procurement audience is doing, what a company is doing, there are now a lot of non-price factors.
What sort of insights do you
think businesses will want when it comes that broader visibility?
Koch: It starts
with the basics. It starts with, “How do I know my suppliers? How do I add
scale? Is this supplier General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)-compliant? Do they have slavery or forced labor in their supply chain? Where are they sourcing their materials?” All
of these aspects around supplier risk are the basics; knowing your supplier well
is the basic element.
Then when you go beyond that,
it's about things like, “Well how do I weigh geographic risk? How do I weigh
supply chain risk?” And all the things that the practitioners of those
disciplines have been screaming about for the rest of their companies to pay attention
to.
That’s the new value they are providing.
It's that progression and looking at the huge opportunity to see the way
companies collaborate and share data strategically to drive efficiency into processes.
That can drive efficiency ultimately into the whole value chain that leads to a
better customer experience at the end.
Gardner: Customer
experience is so important across the board. It must be a big challenge for you
on the product side to be able to contextually bring the right information and
options to the end-user at the right time. Otherwise they are overwhelmed, or
they don't get the benefit of what the technology and the business networks can
do.
What are you doing at SAP
Ariba to help bring that right decision-making -- almost anticipating where the
user needs to go -- into the actual applications and services?
Intelligent enterprise
Koch: That
begins with our investments in re-platforming to SAP HANA. That feeds
into the broader story about the intelligent enterprise. Purchasing is
one facet, supply-chain management is a facet, sales is a facet, and production
-- all of these components are elements of a broader story of how you
synthesize data into a means where you have a digital twin of the whole
enterprise.
Then you can start doing
things like leveraging the in-memory capabilities of HANA around scenario
planning, and around, “What are the implications of making this decision?”
What happens when a hurricane hits Puerto Rico and your supply chain is dramatically disrupted? Does that
extend to my suppliers’ suppliers? Who are my people on the ground there, and
how are they disrupted? How should my business respond in an intelligent way to
these world events that happen all the time?
Gardner: We
have talked about the intelligent enterprise. Let's hypothetically say that
when one or two -- or a dozen -- enterprises become intelligent that they gain certain
advantages, which compels the rest of their marketplace to follow suit.
When we get to the point where
we have a critical mass of intelligent enterprises, how does that elevate to an
intelligent economy? What can we do when everyone is behaving with this
insight, of having tools like SAP Ariba at their disposal?
Koch: You
hit on a really valuable and important point. Way back, I was an economics
major and there was a core thing that I took away 20 years ago from my intro to
macroeconomics class. The core of it was that everything is either value or
waste. Every bit of effort, everything that's produced around the world, all
goods or services are either valuable or a waste. There is nothing in between.
The question then as we look
at value chains, when we look at these webs of value, is how much of that is
transaction cost? How much of that is information asymmetry? How much of that is
basic barriers that get in the way of ultimately providing value to the end
consumer? Where is all of that waste?
When you look at complex value
chains, at all of the inventory sitting in warehouses, the things that go unsold,
the mismatches between supply and demand across a value chain -- whether you
are talking about direct materials or about pens and paper sitting in a supply
closet -- it really doesn't matter.
When
you look at complex value chains ... how much of that goes into
actually delivering on what your customers and employees value -- and
how much of it is waste?
So, I see this all dramatically
changing as you link these intelligent companies together. As companies move in
the same way -- into a sharing mindset – then the sharing economy uses resources
in a far more efficient way, in the exact same way as we use our data resources
in a more efficient way.
Gardner: This
also dovetails well with being purposeful as a business. If many
organizations are encouraging higher productivity, which reduces inefficiencies
and helps raise wages, it can lead to better standards of life. So, the stakes
here are pretty high.
We’re not just talking about
adding some dollars to the bottom and top lines. We’re also talking about a
better economy that raises all boats.
Purposeful interconnections
Koch: Yes,
absolutely. You see companies like Johnson and Johnson, who at their
core, from their founding principles, have the importance of their community as
one of the core founding principles. You see it in companies like Ford and their
long heritage. Those ideals are really coming back from the decade of the 1980s
where greed was good and now back to a more holistic understanding of the
interconnectedness of all of this.
And it’s good as humans. It’s also
good from the business perspective because of the need to attract and retain
the talent required to run a modern enterprise. And building the brands that
our consumers are demanding, and holding companies accountable, they all go
hand-in-hand.
And so, the purpose aspect
really addresses the broader stakeholder aspects of creating a sustainable
planet, a sustainable business, sustainable employment, and things like that.
Gardner: When
we think about attaining this level of efficiency through insights and
predictive analytics -- taking advantage of business networks and applications
and services -- we are also on the cusp of getting even better tools.
We’re seeing a lot more
information about machine learning (ML). We’re starting to tease out the benefits
of artificial intelligence (AI). When these technologies are maturing and
available, you need to be in a position to take advantage of them.
So, moving toward the intelligent enterprise and digital transformation are not just good or nice to
have, they are essential because of what's going to come next in just a few
years.
Efficiency in the digital future
Koch: Yes,
you see this very tactically in the chief procurement officers (CPOs) that I've
talked with as I've entered this role. I have yet to run across any business
leader who says, “I have so many resources, I don't know what to do.” That’s
not usually what I hear. Usually, it's the opposite. It’s, “I'm being asked to
do more with less.”
When you look at the core of
AI, and the core of ML, it’s how do you increase efficiency? And that’s whether
it's all the way on the full process automation side, or it’s along the
spectrum of bringing the right intelligence and insights to streamline
processes to make better decisions.
All of that is an effort to
up-level the work that people do, so that raises wages, it raises productivity,
all of those things. We have an example inside of our team. I was meeting with the
head of our customer value organization, Chris Haydon,
over dinner last night. Chris was talking about how we were applying ML to
enhance our capability to onboard new customers.
And he said the work that
we've done has allowed him to redeploy 80 people in his team on to higher
productivity use cases. All of those people became more valuable in the company
because they were working on things that were at the next level of creating new
solutions and better customer experiences, instead of turning the crank in the
proverbial factory of deploying software.
Gardner: I
happen to personally believe that a lot of the talk about robots taking over
people’s jobs is hooey. And that, in fact, what's more likely is this elevation
of people to do what they can do best and uniquely. Then let the machines do
what they do best and uniquely.
How is that translating both
into SAP Ariba products and services, and also into the synergy between SAP and
SAP Ariba?
We're
just getting through a major re-platforming to S/4 HANA and that's
really exciting because of HANA's maturity and scale. We're using ML
algorithms and applying them.
We’re really getting to the
point of not replicating data. We are using the ML algorithms and applying
them, building them once and applying them at large. And so, the company’s investments
in HANA and in Leonardo are
helping to create a toolkit of capabilities that applications like SAP Ariba
can leverage. Like with any good infrastructure investment, when you have the
right foundation you see scale and innovation happen quickly.
You'll see a lot more of how
we leverage the data that we have both inside the company as well as across the
network to drive intelligence into our process. You will just see that come
through more as we move from the infrastructure foundation setting stage to
building the capabilities on top of that.
Gardner: Getting
back to that concept of closing the transformation gap for companies, what is
it they should be thinking about when these services and technologies become
available? How can they help close their own technology gap by becoming
acquainted in advances and taking some initiative to best use these new tools?
Digital transformation leadership
Koch: The
companies that are forward-leading on digital transformation are the ones that made
the cloud move early. The next big move for them is to tap into business
networks. How can they start sharing across their value chains and drive higher
efficiency? I think you'll see from that the shift from tactical procurement
to strategic procurement.
The relationships need to move
from transactional to a true partnership, of how do we create value together? That
change involves rethinking the ways you look at data and of how you share data
across value chains.
Gardner: Let’s
also think about spend management conceptually. Congratulations, by the way, on
your recent Gartner
Magic Quadrant positioning on pay-to-procure processes. How does
spend management also become more strategic?
Koch: The
building blocks for spend management always come down to what is our tactical
spend and where should we focus our efforts for strategic spend? Whether that
is in the services area, travel, direct materials, or indirect, what customers
are asking SAP for is, how do all of these pieces fit together?
What's the difference between
a request for proposal (RFP) for a hotel in New York City versus an RFP for
chemicals in Southeast Asia? They're both a series of business processes of
selecting the right vendor that balances all of the critical dimensions: Price
and everything else that makes for a good decision and that has longevity.
We see a lot of shared
elements in the way you interact with your suppliers. We see a lot of shared
elements in the way that you deploy applications inside of your company. We’re exploring
how well the different facets of the applications can work together, how
seamless the user experience is, and how well all of these tie together for all
the stakeholders.
Ultimately, each element of
the team, each element of the company, has a role to play. That includes the
finance organization’s desire to ensure that value is being created in a way
that the company can afford. It means that the shareholders, employees, management,
and end-users are all on the same page.
This is the core of spend
management – and the intelligent enterprise as a whole. It means being able to
see everything, by bringing it all together, so the company can manage its full
operations and how they create value.
Gardner: The
vision is very compelling. I can certainly see where this is not going to be
just a small change -- but a step-change -- in terms of how companies can
benefit in productivity.
As you were alluding to
earlier, architecture is destiny when it comes to making this possible. By
re-architecting around, as for S/4 HANA, by taking advantage of business
networks, you are well on the way to delivering this. Let’s talk about the
platform changes that grease the skids toward the larger holistic benefits.
Shifting to the cloud
Koch: It's
firmly our belief that the world is moving to mega-platforms. SAP has a long
history of bringing the ecosystem along, whether the ecosystem is delivering
process innovation or is building capabilities on top of other capabilities
embedded deeply into the products.
What we're now seeing is the
shift from the on-premises world to a cloud world where it's API-first, business
events driven, and where you see a decoupling of the various components. Underneath
the covers it doesn't matter what technology stack things are built on. It
doesn't matter how quickly they evolve. It's the assumption that we have this
API contract between two different pieces of technology: An SAP Ariba piece of
technology, an SAP S/4 Cloud piece of technology, or a partner ecosystem piece
of technology.
For example, a company like Solenis was recently
up on stage with us at Ariba Live in
Amsterdam. That's one of the fastest-growing companies. They have
raised a B round at $1 billion valuation. Having companies that are driving
innovation like that in partnership with an SAP platform brings not just
near-term value for us and our customers, it brings future-proofing. It brings
extensibility when there is a specific requirement that comes in for a specific
industry or geography. It provides a way a customer can differentiate. You can
just plug-in.
We're
now seeing the shift from on-premises to cloud where you see a
decoupling of the components. It doesn't matter what the technology
stack is. ... It's now about API-first business events.
Gardner:
Because SAP is an early adopter of multicloud, SAP can be everywhere at the
most efficient level given what the hyperscale cloud providers are providing with
global reach and efficiency. This approach also allows you to service small- to
medium-sized businesses (SMBs), for example, essentially anywhere in the world.
Tell me why this long-term
vision of a hyperscale-, multicloud-supported future benefits SAP, SAP Ariba,
and its customers.
A hyperscale, multicloud landscape
Koch: When
you look across the landscape of the hyperscalers and you look at the pace of
innovation and the level of scale that that they are able to deliver, our lead
time is slashed. We can also scale up and down as required. The cloud benefits
apply to speed compared to having boxes installed in data centers, as well as ease
in workload variability -- whether it's test variability or our ability to run
ML-training models.
The idea that we still suffer multi-month
lead times to get our physical boxes installed in our data centers is something
that we just can't afford. Our customers demand more.
Thankfully there are multiple
solutions around the world that solve these problems while at the same time
giving us things like world-class security, geographic footprints, and localized
expertise. When a server fails halfway around the world and the expert is
somewhere else, the hyperscalers provide a solution to that problem.
They have somebody who walks
through every data center and makes sure that the routers are upgraded, and the
switches and load balancers are working the way they should. They determine
whether data correctly rests inside of a Chinese firewall or inside of Europe
[due to compliance requirements]. They are responsible for how those systems
interact.
We still need to do our investment
on the applications tier and in working with our customers to handle all of the
needed changes in the landscape around data and security.
But the hyperscalers give us a
base-level of infrastructure so we don't need to think about things like, “Is
our air conditioner capacity inside of the data center sufficient to run the
latest technology for the computing power?” We don't worry about that. We worry
about delivering value on top of that base-level of infrastructure and so that
takes our applications to the next level.
In the same way we were
talking earlier about ML and AI freeing up our resources to work on higher-value
things, [the multicloud approach] allows us to stop thinking about these base-level
things that are still critical for the delivery of our service. It allows us to
focus on the innovation aspects of what we need to do.
Gardner: It
really is about driving value higher and higher and then making use of that in
a way that's a most impactful to the consumers -- and ultimately the whole
economy.
Koch: You
got it.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: SAP Ariba.
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