In today’s economy, the impact of digital transformation can be huge and businesses must innovate to survive. In a collaborate digital environment, co-innovation can be considered as an ideal way to help companies avoid being disrupted and create a digital strategy that meets their innovation needs. In an exclusive interaction with CXOToday, Kamolika Peres, Vice President and Head – Strategic Customer Program, SAP India throws light on SAP’s digital transformation strategy for customers and how the company is co-innovating with its customers and partners.
CXOToday: How is SAP helping organizations transform their existing IT strategy?
Kamolika Peres: Digital disruption is driving new business models, new ways of working, collaborating and communicating.We have helped leading Indian conglomerates to think big, embrace change, and reap the benefits of the digital economy. By now, most organizations already know how they want to approach digital transformation in order torevamp their existing IT strategy. Digital businesses are built on new computing infrastructure such as mobile, Big Data, and analytics.
Through the convergence of these technologies,SAP is bringing all the technology pieces together that are leading to digital transformation of enterprises. Our concept of Intelligent Enterprises aims at helping businesses adopt modern technology and transform the traditional ERP systems. Intelligent Enterprises helps in developing a strong digital strategy and an easy to use system that supports innovations.
CXOToday: What are the current maturity levels of cloud adoption among India’s conglomerates?
Kamolika Peres: Cloud is an enabler to digital transformation. The platform is designed to accelerate the process by helping customers quickly and economically develop the right application without investing in an on-premise infrastructure.A recent study by International Data Corporation (IDC) found that over 93% of Indian organizations are still in the early stages of maturity when it comes to cloud adoption.
India’s conglomerates are at an inflection point. From financial institutions to large manufacturing groups most of the Indian conglomerates have an exceptional track record of success. However, they now find themselves competing and working hard to improve operational efficiency and the quality of their products and services. SAP recognized this gap in the industry and over the last few years, created a cloud portfolio that helps conglomerates achieve end-to-end management of their business.
CXOToday: How are conglomerates consuming next-generation technologies such as AI, ML, IoT & others?
Kamolika Peres: Digital transformation is a massive task, especially for larger, established companies.Embracing digital transformation at the enterprise level requires a strategic approach and a convergence of next-generation technologies such asAI, ML and IoT. For years, companies have been collecting massive amounts of data from connected things. Making the transition from things to outcomes is a much bigger challenge. By leveraging information from sensors, microcontrollers, mobile communications, and other smart devices, IoT data can be mobilized to transform end-to-end business processes, evolve new digital business models, and imagine new work environments.
On the other hand, embedded into enterprise systems, MLand AI are letting companies augment and automate repetitive tasks and unlock entirely new kinds of digital innovation by learning from data, rather than programming explicit rules. By effectively deploying ML & AI applications, companies can ensure digital intelligence can be easily consumed across the entire business to create better customer service, optimize business operations, improve employee job satisfaction, reimagine existing business processes, and more.
We have been working with several conglomerates that have deployed AI, ML and IoT successfully at a large scale, across various functions. SAP Leonardo allows access to intelligent technologies that work together across business processes, enterprise applications, and platforms. It works towards creating a seamless ecosystem which is one of the key goals of any digital transformation process.
CXOToday: Kindly give an overview of how you are co-innovating with your customers?
Kamolika Peres: At SAP we have always valued co-innovation opportunities by actively working with customers and partners to build on SAP technology and create new opportunities. We are working with our customers to co-innovate and help them in digital adoption. We created a co-Innovation Lab (COIL) in 2007, to provide a physical environment for SAP, customers and partners to collaborate on solutions and offerings that can help address business challenges and opportunities. This has also helped us in creating an ecosystem so that we can provide joint solutions for customers.
To help explain this better, let me give an instance of our customer which is one of the leading integrated mining & metals companies in India. For the mining industry, metal recovery calculation is one of the key requirements and has a direct impact on EBITA calculations. Our customer decided to automate the entire end to end metal recovery calculation process using specific application build up on SAP platform through our Innovative Business Solutions team. This application was designed to fill the gaps in production and quality from a recovery perspective and as well as bring all relevant data together along with automatic calculation mechanisms. The application thus developed for automatic recovery calculation enhances the people productivity by automating jobs of recovery analyst, lab analyst and production supervisor. This has also resulted in providing real time and accurate visibility into multiple stages of production which earlier required a lot of manual and human intervention. In next phase, now the plan is to enhance this to also cover mining operations and fully integrate the entire value chain.
CXOToday: Please give examples of how SAP’s customers are using your solutions innovatively.
Kamolika Peres: At SAP, innovation is more than just developing top-notch software it’s about creating technologies that open up new possibilities. Case in point– Larsen & Toubro Infotech (LTI) deployed the SAP S/4HANA Business suite to support its digital transformation initiatives. Since LTI is also a global partner of SAP,this deployment has beenenhancing the company’s global operational excellence througha robust platform enabling innovation and improving agility.
