How can the Intelligent Enterprise Impact Professional Services Companies?

In today’s digital economy, there is immense pressure on professional services firms to do more for less. Firms are facing new price pressures and competitive threats. New entrants into the marketplace have changed the way firms deliver services, forcing them to either adopt new approaches or face stagnant or declining revenue growth and margins. Firms must be able to respond rapidly to these challenges yet still comply with the pressure of new reporting standards. How does a digital core with a true single source of truth help?

Strategic Priorities in a Digital Economy
The digital economy is disruptive. Professional services firms must use market dynamics to create and capture new business opportunities and enable their strategic objective of nonlinear revenue growth.

Outcome-based engagements
The simple “time and materials” business model that proved highly profitable for professional services organizations in the past is being replaced by outcome-based models. Clients are increasingly focused on the business outcome of an engagement, rather than the effort involved, and are negotiating prices and relationships accordingly. The key lever for firms is to adopt a superior bidding process resulting inaccurate proposals that will ensure predictability and repeatability of outcomes and thus minimize delivery risks.

Knowledge as a service
Professional services firms are realizing that they have valuable expertise and content that can benefit their customers beyond the typical face-to-face engagement model. In the past, intellectual property (IP) was available for customers only in formal engagements and was a key point of differentia-tion. However, innovative service firms continue to productize their service lines, create knowledge “vaults,” and monetize their institutional expertise. To keep pace, the quote-to-cash “process infrastructure” must be adapted to the emerging business models and address the full lifecycle of the new delivery models for digital expertise and IP services.

Leverage talent networks
Digitalization of talent has made new business models possible by identifying, classifying, and attracting talent on an as-needed basis outside the boundaries of a firm and effectively integrating talent into one team based on powerful virtual learning and collaboration platforms.

Professional Services Capabilities with the Intelligent Enterprise

• Understand and optimize engagement profitability - Reduce service costs with full, real-time insight and automated accounting, time and expense processes, while recognizing more revenue through integrated project delivery and billing processes.
• Assess staffing levels anytime, anywhere - Onboard critical resources in time for upcoming projects, track resources continuously, and access contact details quickly to support collaboration between teams, organizations, and partners.
• Simplify time entry in the cloud - Streamline time-entry processing to notify employees when their time entries are rejected and allow them to correct their timesheets and resubmit them – anytime, anywhere, and on any device.
• Enforce limits on time and expense billing - Boost your clients’ confidence in your services by staying within the defined limit for time and expense with the addition of an upper cap amount to your sales agreements and service contracts.
• Reimagine bid management - Speed bid creation dramatically and improve project margin, with more effective planning, then move smoothly into project execution with consolidated real-time and historical insights. 
• Streamline quote-to-cash - Create customer contracts with competitive pricing, personalized payment plans, and multiple methods of billing, while simplifying billing through consolidated invoicing across all engagement types. 

The intelligent ERP
Bringing SAP S/4HANA and SAP Leonardo technologies together as a digital core will result in a more flexible and intelligent enterprise. To achieve next-generation business processes and business models, companies need an intelligent ERP solution that can be continuously enhanced and extended with innovative business services and applications built on emerging technologies, including machine learning, blockchain, and the Internet of Things (IoT).

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How can the Intelligent Enterprise impact the Construction Industry

The digital economy is disruptive. Construction companies need strategic priorities that drive transformation. SAP solutions powered by Approyo supports a re-imagined set of end-to-end (E2E) business scenarios to support the strategic priorities of working in a digital environment.

$15.5 trillion –that is the projected size of the construction market by 2030, up from $8 trillion today. A recent study expects that 75% of the infrastructure that will exist in 2050 does not exist today, and that the design and expected outcomes will be transformative. This is a huge opportunity for the construction industry; however, projects are getting more complex, and there are many inefficient and wasteful practices. Successful companies grow by increasing market share, self-performing to a greater extent, expanding internationally, and even operating some of the assets they build. How does a digital core with a true single source of truth help?

Responding to rapid changes
To execute on this, engineering, construction, and operations (EC&O) firms not only need to re-engineer their business processes, but they also need to evaluate if they have the right technology platform that can deliver on that vision. This platform requires an IT architecture that provides both stability and long-term reliability for core enterprise processes, and, at the same time, allows for flexibility in areas where change is happening on a constant basis. The digital core provides uninterrupted, real-time transactions and analytics, the ability to work with Big Data, and connectivity to line-of-business (LoB) extensions that enable supporting processes such as sourcing networks. This seamlessly connects project progress and financial controls, aiding transparency and profitability and better enabling partnerships and new models such as integrated project delivery contracts

Addressing innovative opportunities
The construction industry can apply technology and best practices that have been previously proven in the industrial sector. This industrialization of construction enables reliable outcomes and improves margins by increasing productivity, eliminating waste and surprises, and greatly reducing project risk. Existing business models collapse as “construction-ready,” disruptive technologies – such as robotics, enterprise mobility, virtual design and construction, and 3D printing –redefine design and processes. To remain competitive, new contract and service models such as integrated project delivery and public-private partnerships are required. Construction is ready to experience the dramatic productivity gains seen in other industries while vastly compressing the 50-year evolutionary process that took place in manufacturing

Enhance and extend next-generation processes with intelligent ERP
Bringing SAP S/4HANA and SAP Leonardo technologies together as a digital core results in a more flexible and intelligent enterprise. To achieve next-generation business processes, companies need an intelligent ERP solution that can be continuously enhanced and extended with innovative business services and applications built on emerging technologies, including machine learning, blockchain, and the Internet of Things (IoT). Contractors that have big innovation appetites or prefer to be early adopters have already begun this journey.

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Data Powers Digital Business

The digital economy is driving a massive increase in the volume of data created by devices, business networks, organizations, and individuals. This tidal wave of data is driving demand for capabilities like machine learning and AI, and dramatically impacting economic productivity.

But core to all of this opportunity, is data.

In the new digital economy, data is essential in powering digital business. Data is the currency that provides the foundation for business insight, action, and innovation across the extended enterprise, from partners and customers, to assets and employees, all driven by the digital core.

Companies will need to capture and exploit data in increasingly creative and complex ways.  And the ability to digitize business events across customer touch points, partner interactions, asset states and employee activities, and to create meaningful insight, will allow businesses to be more agile and responsive than their competitors, and to open up new sources of value.

On average, companies today use only a fraction of the data they collect and store, and if a company is already struggling to store and analyze its own data, it will be drowning in data in the next few years.  Future success will depend on a company’s ability to:

• Transform Data into Insight – Data without insight is meaningless, it is essential for organizations to take the information at their fingertips, to understand it, and turn it into insight.
• Act in the Moment – Without the ability to take action quickly and effectively, there is no opportunity to create new value.  And thus companies must also focus on the ability to turn insight into action, in real time.
• Innovate without Constraints – And finally, with insight and the ability to act, the final critical need for competing in the digital economy is the ability to innovate and build new business models and create new outcomes for the organization

These three imperatives combine to demand the organization’s attention if it is to succeed in it’s digital journey.

SAP powered by Approyo can help you lead your organization’s digital journey and address the challenges of data proliferation from enterprise data, Big Data, IoT, and beyond.

And we help you to transform your all of data, the foundation of a digital enterprise, into insight to drive innovation and create business value.

As a result of optimizing existing processes and driving greater efficiencies, you can help fund new innovations.

Only SAP powered by Approyo allows you to innovate now with intelligent, real-time data to build new business applications

• Flexible and faster app development environment on ONE platform with choice of programming languages. Deployment available on cloud, in the data centers, and on laptops
• Applications can leverage hyper fast transactions and analytics to automate business processes with intelligent guidance
• Enrich applications with ONE platform that includes predictive, text, spatial, graph, and conversational UI capabilities

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Supply Chain in a Digital Economy

Digitization of the economy is continuing to accelerate the pace of innovation, shortening the product lifecycle and increasing the demand volatility. At the same time supply chains are becoming global and increasingly complex. To be in a position to create and capture opportunities, companies must develop an environment in which they can manage information and processes simultaneously across the extended supply chain. This evolution of supply chains is more connected, intelligent, responsive, and predictive.It enables companies to drive customer-centric processes and deliver personalized products uniquely built and delivered for the “segment of one.” These demanding customers have to be serviced across a business network of global partners that are increasingly challenged by resource scarcity. This transformation will continue to impact the business processes and systems that are required to remain competitive. It will change how we design, plan, make, ship, and operate our products and assets.

SAP S/4HANA Supply Chain, cloud applications such as SAP Ariba solutions and SAP Integrated Business Planning, and SAP Leonardo support a digital supply chain strategy with a digital value network that acts as an enabler for business transformation. The digital value network starts with a digital core that interconnects all aspects of the value network in real time to drive business outcomes. The digital core not only connects every aspect of internal operations but also enables real-time workforce engagement, supplier collaboration, outcome-based omnichannel consumer experience, and other market dynamics with Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data scenario.

Predictive Forecasting and Demand Sensing
Short-term demand prediction with demand sensing algorithms. Remote capture and analysis of sensor data from connected devices and feeding to demand management process.

Demand Driven Material Requirement Planning
Dynamic planning of replenishments with DDMRP which is fully integrated into existing MRP concept.Replenishment only for real demand and introduction of  buffers at strategically important points.

Live Inventory Management
Live inventory management enabling unlimited simultaneous material movements and allowing for true transparency on inventory and material flows. Decreased stock buffers due to better transparency and insights.

Warehousing and Transportation on One Platform
Single warehousing platform for all warehousing operations, including optimization, automation, and labor management. Single transportation platform with basic and advanced shipping functionality and real-time embedded analytics.

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Three game-changing technologies impacting Digital Transformation

Business leaders say they need three things from their data systems to help them compete effectively and embrace digital transformation: reliable data to empower their workers, deep insight from all their data, and access to the latest analytics and machine learning techniques to amplify their insights and apply them to their business.

In addition to new business demands, technology advances are creating new strategic opportunities for data management and analytics. The three key technologies that are having the most impact are:

• In-memory computing delivers real-time performance that obviates the need to have separate solutions for transaction processing and analytics. This has the added advantage of removing the need for multiple copies of data and eliminating latency between transaction systems and data warehouses introduced by batch or overnight replication.
• Storage for large data sets is dramatically lower in cost allowing almost unlimited data sets to be created. Coupled with in-memory performance that can handle these massive data sets, business can see insights into their business in real time.
• Cloud computing has reduced the need for huge capital investments and made powerful advanced computing more accessible. New applications can be deployed quickly to capture opportunities without waiting for data centers to be built and systems readied. 

Start your path to the Intelligent Enterprise with Approyo
Approyo provides full SAP service technology with extensive capabilities in consulting, solutions architecture, hosting and managed services, in order to develop the right solution for our customers. Get started today... 

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SAP HANA and the Digital Economy

IT groups no longer need to rely on 20th-century technology while seeking a strategic role in 21st-century business innovation. The revolutionary SAP HANA® platform lets you perform all transaction and analytic processing in-memory and make data instantly available from a single system. Fend off competitors by building smart, insight-driven applications your business needs to take immediate action and capitalize on change.

INCREASE EFFICIENCY, DEEPEN INSIGHT,  AND ADAPT TO CHANGE QUICKLY
Help your business accelerate the pace of innova-tion by moving to SAP HANA. Choose the game-changing in-memory platform that combines a database that complies with the standards for atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability (ACID) with advanced analytical processing, appli-cation development, and flexible data integration capabilities. Remove the burden of maintaining separate legacy systems and their silos of data, so you can Run Simple in this ever-changing digital economy, where new technologies and solutions emerge at Internet speed.One of the most challenging roadblocks to innova-tion today is the sheer complexity of IT systems. SAP HANA can help you simplify your infrastruc-ture. As illustrated in the figure, SAP HANA con-verges database, advanced analytical processing, application development capabilities, and data integration in-memory to process transactions; analytics; text analysis; and spatial, streaming, and machine data processing in one system. You can operate in real time and accelerate business trans-formation by integrating core business processes with customer data, supplier data, and data from the Internet of Things.

The massively parallel, in-memory paradigm underlying SAP HANA speeds information pro-cessing by a quantum leap. This architecture converges online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) opera-tions on a single data copy in one in-memory, column-based data store. SAP HANA, in short, eliminates data redundancy, disk latency, and data movement among applications and analytical tools. And it provides advanced integration capa-bilities such as data virtualization, replication, bulk loading, transformation, cleansing, and remote data synchronization in the same architecture. This further simplifies application development and processing across Big Data sources.

SAP HANA is the platform for all existing applications – your legacy software, third-party software, and SAP software – and the optimal platform for building and deploying next-generation, real-time applications; machine learning applications; and predictive analytics. You can perform business operations and data analysis in minutes rather than hours, untangle your data center operations by integrating all data into a single truth, and lay the groundwork for reimagining business models. Plus, you stand ready to help expand and diversify your business with minimal IT growing pains.

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Living in a digital economy

The digital economy is developing rapidly worldwide. It is the single most important driver of innovation, competitiveness and growth, and it holds huge potential for entrepreneurs and businesses of all sizes across the world.

In the last two years:

• 90% - Of the world’s data has been generated
• 40% - Growth in adoption of business networks

By 2020, it's estimated:

• 9 billion - Mobile users in the world
• 212 billion -  “Things” will be connected

Are you keeping up with the changing world?
Our SAP HANA and Big Data solutions can help your company address the changing digital world. Let us show you how!  Set up a free consultation today.