Partners in Innovation: Fast-Tracking the Full Potential of a Business Technology Platform

Business Technology Platform

A little assistance always goes a long way in innovation. The hands-on engineering skills of Louis Latimer led to Thomas Edison’s invention of the lightbulb. Data insights from Rosalind Franklin’s analysis of DNA inspired the infamous Watson and Crick double-helix model. And more recently, the 10-year research of a little-known scientist, Katalin Karikó, led to a breakthrough in mRNA technology that the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world are using to help end a global pandemic.

The same is certainly the case when businesses undergo digital transformation. By leveraging lessons learned, best practices, success plans, and skills from experts, they can explore the latest capabilities and unlock new forms of innovation in ways they never imagined before. This level of support is so powerful that IDC believes 75% of organizations will rely on a comprehensive implementation road map, by 2023, to guide their every move toward a future-proof and agile enterprise.

Staying agile and adapting rapidly with services and support

Many SAP customers already know the value of services and support when implementing and scaling their investment in technology, especially SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP). With dedicated SAP Services and Support offerings, they are accelerating time to value by optimizing processes, applying intelligence to user experience and analytics, and extending capabilities incrementally across various aspects of the business.

Early in the innovation planning stage, SAP Services and Support enables our customers to explore new possibilities, optimize processes, and prepare their system landscape to become cloud ready. Then, as the transformation initiative moves forward, they can leverage the latest expertise and advisory services to deploy, adapt, and run SAP BTP and other solutions. And increasingly, our customers are reducing IT costs and improving their operational flexibility by moving extensions to a cloud-ready, side-by-side infrastructure.

Over time, business outcomes can be maximized with insight-driven, prescriptive, and personalized recommendations for consuming and optimizing the value of SAP BTP. Our customers can also foster tailored functional learning, change management, and skill validation with a choice of 80 SAP Learning Journey guides that are self-paced, expert-led, and hands-on.

Bringing value early with integration

Ansaldo Energia S.p.A. is an excellent example of SAP customers leveraging SAP Services and Support to innovate with SAP BTP. The company is fulfilling its smart-factory vision to connect, standardize, and streamline processes for manufacturing, supply chain management, warehousing, and predictive machine repair and maintenance.

During its initial deployment of SAP S/4HANA, Ansaldo Energia created an IoT environment that integrated its applications, data, and processes across a landscape of various industrial field gateways. This output data is now transmitted to a predictive maintenance and service solution in the cloud, facilitating root-cause analysis of product issues to see if the cause lies in manufacturing equipment and processes. Furthermore, field data from operating turbines at customer sites is processed to support premium predictive-based services.

As plant maintenance and customer services are further optimized using SAP BTP, Ansaldo Energia is transforming IoT sensor data into business outcomes. It expects to see a 5% to 8% drop in the cost of its equipment maintenance, as well as less downtime. Quality control requires less paper, and 40% more suppliers are expected to share that data digitally – helping ensure parts are always in stock. Having more service options also makes it easier to onboard new customers through the services portal, which will bring a substantial increase in related revenue.

Extending business-wide data for clear customer value 

For other SAP customers, SAP Services and Support and SAP BTP are helping them stay agile and adapt rapidly to new business conditions and changing customer demands by extending their application investments across the business.

Trusco Nakayama Corporation is no stranger to this edge, thanks to premium engagement services from SAP and the platform’s application extension service. By streamlining quotation work and inventory management based on sales results and other data, the company can automatically respond to quote requests. This capability is helping the business improve customer response times and increase order rates.

Leveraging advanced analytics and reporting across core business processes, the organization has also gained real-time business insights, allowing it to make data-driven decisions. And with its business transformation centered on Intelligent ERP, Trusco Nakayama is well-positioned for further innovation using intelligent technologies.

Preparing for the future by converting data into insight

In addition to optimizing internal operations and enhancing customer experiences, our customers are also designing products and services that enrich people’s lives in environmentally friendly and socially responsible ways. Stadtwerke Augsburg (Public Utilities Augsburg) is one such organization, which is offering customers energy, water, public transport, and car- and bike-sharing with a mobile flat rate.

With SAP Services and Support, Stadtwerke Augsburg gained expertise that helped find, implement, and integrate a solution that automatically receives data from its car-sharing partner. Consolidating this data into one platform enabled both parties to gain insights that guide the development of new products, business model expansion, and creation of marketing campaigns and offers for specific customer segments.

The collaborative ingenuity of Stadtwerke Augsburg and SAP gives customers one subscription for all their utility services and an environmentally friendly means of transport. More importantly, their efforts are now the basis for future business models and growth.

Energizing innovation with flexible, outcome-based support

No matter how unique the challenge, business, or solution, it’s always good to have the assistance of a vast portfolio of tools, methodologies, plans, and expertise along the way. That’s the beauty of SAP Services and Support offerings for SAP BTP. Any chance to gain a detailed, forward-looking view into all the technologies, capabilities, and IT architecture elements that SAP BTP offers is a distinct opportunity to accelerate the delivery of meaningful innovation.

Explore services and support offerings, such as implementation road maps, that can help drive true transformation across facets of your business. Read the IDC market spotlight, “Ignite Your Agile Enterprise: Five Key Trends to Future-Proof the Business in 2021 and Beyond.”

Learn more about SAP services in our solution brief, “Energize Business Innovation with the Help of Flexible, Outcome-Based Services,” and learn about best practices in “Drive Resiliency with an Agile, Future-Ready Move to the Cloud.”

This blog is part of a series on SAP Business Technology Platform, covering the following topics:

• Why Technology Completeness Matters to the Success of a Business Technology Platform
• How a Clean ERP Core Breaks the Code of Your Data’s Secret Language
• Digital Platforms Drive Innovation in HR to Deliver Trusted Employee Experiences
• How a Single Platform Can Turn Small Projects into Big Outcomes
• How to Amplify the Power of a Great Customer Experience

I worked with my colleague Olaf Winkler who is a key contributor to this article and brings in tremendous value from Go to Market perspective in Business Technology Platform program.