As part of the SQ&S Talent Development program, a Roundtable Meeting was organized to engage talents in small workgroups to leverage their strengths and develop collaboration and networking opportunities. The theme of the event was “Simplify Everything. Do Anything”.
Talents from different lines of business were invited to participate in this event and grouped into eight teams. The teams participating in the event collaborated on projects covering strategic topics like Cloud, HANA Enterprise, Innovation, and ONE Service. Each team presented their findings to Gerd Oswald and the SQ&S leadership team during their visit to the Newtown Square Office, outlining their ideas and recommendations, new applications in development, and suggestions for future steps forward – all while echoing the same philosophy of “Simple Wins”. The leadership team actively listened to the talents and acknowledged the ideas put forward. The event was managed and moderated by Tarun Luthra and Christiane Lamy from the AGS North America team.
The discussion of “Cloud – Harmonization across LOB Clouds” centered on integration, unification and consistency, and how they can be combined to create a unified, proactive support experience. Both internal and external infrastructure was covered; the first group focused on ways to boost and reinforce support teams with scalable tools, processes, and SAP Solution Manager powered by HANA. The second group focused on ways to drive more customer Cloud adoption through collaboration with LOB’s, customers, and MaxAttention team members. Despite their different approaches, both groups arrived at the same goal at the end of their presentations: to align support teams with Cloud customers in a seamless partnership where onboarding, integration, and engagement on all fronts addresses each customer’s concerns.
Presentations on “HANA Enterprise – Operational readiness to scale on HEC model” brought up challenges that SAP faces regarding HEC implementation and delivery. Two large touch-points outlined by both groups were operations management – addressing gaps in sales and delivery processes – and business continuity – handling newer business models based on big data and disruptive technologies with their impact on the HEC model. The common theme of ONE team, ONE support, and ONE solution was strongly reflected in both teams’ recommendations: standardization across design process, service catalogues, value added services, and operations in order to establish communications between different HEC teams and design scalable strategy across partners and all project steps.
Two original applications developed by talents were demonstrated during “Innovation – New Business Models.” The first was One Rewards, a mobile application developed for consumers to carry multiple rewards/loyalty cards using one application. They can track their points and spending while vendors can collect data on consumer spending activity and implement predictive analysis on consumer behavior. The second was Sales Central, an internally-available application that presents, sorts, and categorizes all available mobile apps for end users that addresses the challenges with adopting mobile apps – such as where to install them from, where to find training, and when to know what apps should be used for what cases. Both apps are powered by SAP HANA, and provide simple mobile solutions for end users.
Customer perception and engagement were the main focuses of “ONE Service – Delivering extraordinary customer value.” There is a need for SAP to present itself as a strategic innovating company who can provide end-to-end business software solutions with SAP HANA Cloud as one single face. Using the well-known story of a large SAP customer in the entertainment industry, both teams drove the point home that the key to stronger and more robust customer relationships is an internal push to shift from a mindset of project-centric engagements to solution-centric engagements. The change starts from within the company, to simplify the SAP front office teams and learn the language of the customers
Published by AGS CoE NA, Jenni Lu
