The first Sapphire Conference Day started with Bill McDermott's keynote, highlighting some quite impressive use cases for HANA - among those were enabling a human genome analysis in minutes instead of month or even years which paves the way into personalized medicine, or real time validation of credit card transaction data in real time for fraud detection/prevention. Overall he emphasized SAP's strategy to support B2B2C business processes which in particular reflects the behaviourial patterns and needs of the millenials. A panel with top executives from the NBA, San Francisco 49ers and Under Armour revealed the benefits of HANA in running statistics on athlete performance, supporting scouting and Talent Management via Cloud solutions or immediate sharing of emotions during a sports event among peer groups via social media.
After a quick lunch I listened to Dow Corning sharing its experiences with integrating SAP EHS Regulatory Documentation in its Product Safety and Stewardship process - >100.000 safety data sheets (SDS) in 50 coutries and 30 languages need to be managed with numbers are still increasing. Overall quite challenging task without automated system support. So far a globally consistent SDS support process including continuous monitoring of SDS regulations could be installed with reduced SDS creation cycle times and increased availability of resources for value adding tasks like managing chemical regulations.
Another Dow Corning presentation showed how plant shutdowns and outages could be successfully managed with an integrated solution comprising SAP Plant Maintenance and SAP Project Systems, including a set of specific metrics related to cost and schedule performance (plan vs. actual).
At our well visited and received Chemicals Expert table Sales & Operations Planning on HANA and Global Batch Traceability resonated most with customers.
Finally many quite promising partner meetings and discussions paved the ground for scaling our solution portfolio via Ecosystem and Channels.
My highlight of the day, however, came from my colleague Ray Adams who pointed me to some "hidden Cappuchino Bars" in the partner area....
More to come tomorrow...
