Day One Keynote: SAP Insider Logistics and SCM, PLM, MFG and Procurement: Raise your glass!
By Marcy Rizzo
Music blasting - a wall of humming conversation; I sit next to our keynotes as they prepare to take the stage. Calm; despite the 700 pairs of eyes anxious to learn how the next stage SAP developments affect their “idea-to-delivery efforts.
The 2011 SAP Insider combined keynote; Logistics and Supply Chain Management (SCM), Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Manufacturing, and Procurement, presented by Emiel van Schaik, Senior Vice President, EMEA Head of Industries, and Lori Mitchell-Keller, Senior Vice President, Suite Solution Management, SAP are about to kick off as I hear Pink sing the closing line *“Don’t’ be fancy; just get dancey” Indicating it is show time!
Mr. van Schaif introduces how SAP is responding to the “new networked normal,” by first setting a historical context that includes the move from crisis time-to-opportunity. He discusses managing risk for long term growth – while positioning the balance of short term pressures. Despite rampant geopolitical instability, cross-industry expectations for growth include critical elements such as collaboration; both a driver and a solution.
The Facebook nation (Mr. van Schaif reports is the 3rd largest country) extends into business; to include inter-enterprise, partner and customer –facing strategies that result in end-to-end process integration across the idea-to-delivery suite. Mr. van Schaif then describes how leaders are currently navigating this time of growth citing examples that include: sales from new products significantly increased, inventory reduction by 25%, cash to cash cycle time improvement by 55%, and most interestingly risk management practices up 96%. He talked about SAP Supplier Network Collaboration (SNC) as a tool to facilitate collaboration by improving product status visibility.
A significant message from this part of the Keynote included the next SAP driven revolution; a game-changer that results in faster decision making - closing the loop on analytics, with actionable insights, monitored by the building of performance metrics that consistently improve processes.
Lori Mitchell-Keller entered center state to share some of the new SAP offerings, including Rapid Deployment Solutions; designed to support faster time-to-implementation, improved response time, a link between manufacturing and innovation practices – all with an eye toward integration,
Lori walked us through a demo that illustrated how to manage unstructured data and transform ideas into a realistic demand signal, as well as how to execute against that plan – including manufacturing integration, and supplier collaboration; source-to-contract.
Thursday, 14 April brings more details, as each of the “4 conferences” prepares their General Assembly sessions for tomorrow. We’ll hear a drill-down that includes the latest solutions for the supply chain, new product development, procurement and manufacturing audiences.
