The Need for an Intelligent ERP System in the Utilities Industry

A radical change in the utility industry is occurring at a rapid pace. Changes in technologies, business models, standards, and the makeup of utility companies themselves require constant adaptation. Utilities must be able to respond to rapidly changing conditions, yet still comply with all standards. How does a digital core with a true single source of truth help?

Agility
A digital core is an IT architecture that offers stability and long-term reliability for core enterprise processes, yet also provides the flexibility to adapt quickly to new opportunities, challenges, and regulations. This solid foundation gives you a single source of truth, which in turn enables flexibility for innovation to accommodate things like new business models, new regulations, and business events, such as mergers or acquisitions.

Managing Big Data
Every utility company needs the computing capability to carry out complex algorithms with large data sets to support timely, real-time analysis. Everyone in the company must have access to data they need, whenever and wherever they need it. This is also true for the rest of the utility ecosystem so that suppliers can stay up to date with a company’s orders; customer service
agents can see customer history for billing, service, and consumption information; and maintenance teams can accurately monitor asset performance.

Innovation
Utilities must transform to grow profits and reduce costs by simplifying their operations. The value of the digital economy is based on how the consumer or “prosumer” (producer and consumer of energy) is served. Value creation often comes from edge solutions that are based on and coordinated by digital core solutions. It is the framework for innovation and business process optimization, connecting the workforce, suppliers, customers, assets, and the supply network.

Analysis
It is crucial to get the right information at the right time on the right device. Plant processes are supported or controlled by predictive and self-learning systems that interact with machines and business processes. Predictive analytics and machine learning (ML) accelerate the delegation of business processes and decisions from people to machines. People who need the knowledge have digital access on demand and in real time, regardless of whether they are part of the core or the extended workforce.

Stand apart in a world that never stands still – with SAP S/4HANA powered by Approyo
Your business isn't generic. Your ERP shouldn't be either. SAP S/4HANA powered by Approyo provides utility companies with industry best practices built from decades of experience – and allows them to bring cutting-edge innovation in the cloud to their core processes, be it customer engagement, predictive maintenance, or usage-based billing. So they can attain the operational excellence they need to deliver the ultimate customer experience.

• Industry Insight - A world of rapid technological change – distributed energy resources, microgeneration, batteries, microgrids, and electrical mobility – and social media adoption is forcing providers of electricity to rethink how they work, the services they provide, and their business models. The most successful companies will flexibly manage demand, enabled by insights garnered from smart technologies.
• Customer Success - SAP S/4HANA provides re-engineered and simplified business activities transforming the execution from multistep, batch-driven processes with latency in terms of key performance indicators to real-time processes with actionable insights to accelerate invoice processing, increase cash flow, and protect revenue assurance.
• Productivity Improvement - SAP S/4HANA empowers call-center agents and field workers with an end-user centric, consumer-grade experience because, for utilities, it's the call-center agents that add value to customer engagements and field workers who deliver operational excellence.
• Cost Savings - SAP S/4HANA powered by Approyo allows for real-time monitoring of asset health and can predict failure before it happens. Maintenance orders are triggered just in time, avoiding unnecessary inspections and decreasing the cost and risk of unplanned failure.

Start your path to the Intelligent Enterprise with Approyo
Bringing SAP S/4HANA and SAP Leonardo technologies together as a digital core results in a more flexible and intelligent enterprise. 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...

Big Data and Digital Transformation

This article from Approyo CEO Chris Carter originally appeared in the Technology Headlines: https://www.thetechnologyheadlines.com/technology/big_data/Big-Data-and-the-Digital-Transformation/

Over the past two to three years, big data and digital transformation have become all the rage within organizations and IT departments around the world. This has led to a lot of confusion and myths in the marketplace. Let’s dig into some myths around Big Data and The Digital Transformation.

The first major myth is that every company has a digital transformation or a big data project in place. The truth is, not everyone has a need for digital transformation and even less have a need for big data and analytics. As you look out into the scope of these initiatives, companies are bypassing big data because of the lack of need within their organization. Companies might be utilizing applications and tools that feature some form of big data analytics, but as far as acquiring new tools, specifically for big data analytics, it’s just not happening.

As far as digital transformation projects, small companies with under a million in revenue per year, are already using some sort of tool or software, with features of digital transformation such as QuickBooks or Salesforce. These types of tools, already have the features and functionality, smaller companies need to succeed.

Another myth is that digital transformation is very difficult to implement within an organization. This really is not the case. As mentioned in our first myth, there are a lot of software tools available with various digital transformation and big data applications built into them out of the box. Many of these applications are available through a web browser or smart device, allowing every individual within the organization, the access and ability to transform their day-to-day activities with these software tools. That’s not to say digital transformation and big data initiatives are easy. This is an important fact to make sure your company understands. However, there are tools and applications out there that can make it easier. The hardest part is knowing what you want to analyze and accomplish. This is really where you start a big data analytics and digital transformation project.

Today, there are vast amounts of data everywhere. You can grab data from your website, apps, smartphones, smart devices in your home, your car and thousands of other devices. With all this information available to your company, it is important to figure out what data is the most valuable. That is the key for anyone working on a big data analytics project. Your business needs to know what data is most valuable, in order to make business decisions that will positively impact your company.

Valuable data is key. It can impact your business and bottom line in many ways. However, dirty data can make any digital transformation or big data project wasteful for you and your company. This is where most companies run into problems with big data projects. They get sidetracked by data that doesn’t have a positive impact on their business. When starting a big data and digital transformation project, your company needs to focus on what data is relevant in helping your business succeed.

The final area of big data, that has caused a lot of confusion in the marketplace, is how you are getting that data and using it. As part of a data transformation, you must make sure that you are compliant with the usage of that.

If you cannot be relied upon to do the right thing with your data, someone will step in to make sure that you are or you could have major legal ramifications like we are currently seeing with Facebook and Google. You need to make sure you have a controllable platform within your organization.

Big Data analytics and Digital Transformation will remain an important key to growing your business today and into the future. Your company needs to stay on the forefront of these trends, in order to succeed in the marketplace.

This article from Approyo CEO Chris Carter originally appeared in
the Technology Headlines: https://www.thetechnologyheadlines.com/technology/big_data/Big-Data-and-the-Digital-Transformation/

Big Data and Digital Transformation

This article from Approyo CEO Chris Carter originally appeared in the Technology Headlines: https://www.thetechnologyheadlines.com/technology/big_data/Big-Data-and-the-Digital-Transformation/

Over the past two to three years, big data and digital transformation have become all the rage within organizations and IT departments around the world. This has led to a lot of confusion and myths in the marketplace. Let’s dig into some myths around Big Data and The Digital Transformation.

The first major myth is that every company has a digital transformation or a big data project in place. The truth is, not everyone has a need for digital transformation and even less have a need for big data and analytics. As you look out into the scope of these initiatives, companies are bypassing big data because of the lack of need within their organization. Companies might be utilizing applications and tools that feature some form of big data analytics, but as far as acquiring new tools, specifically for big data analytics, it’s just not happening.

As far as digital transformation projects, small companies with under a million in revenue per year, are already using some sort of tool or software, with features of digital transformation such as QuickBooks or Salesforce. These types of tools, already have the features and functionality, smaller companies need to succeed.

Another myth is that digital transformation is very difficult to implement within an organization. This really is not the case. As mentioned in our first myth, there are a lot of software tools available with various digital transformation and big data applications built into them out of the box. Many of these applications are available through a web browser or smart device, allowing every individual within the organization, the access and ability to transform their day-to-day activities with these software tools. That’s not to say digital transformation and big data initiatives are easy. This is an important fact to make sure your company understands. However, there are tools and applications out there that can make it easier. The hardest part is knowing what you want to analyze and accomplish. This is really where you start a big data analytics and digital transformation project.

Today, there are vast amounts of data everywhere. You can grab data from your website, apps, smartphones, smart devices in your home, your car and thousands of other devices. With all this information available to your company, it is important to figure out what data is the most valuable. That is the key for anyone working on a big data analytics project. Your business needs to know what data is most valuable, in order to make business decisions that will positively impact your company.

Valuable data is key. It can impact your business and bottom line in many ways. However, dirty data can make any digital transformation or big data project wasteful for you and your company. This is where most companies run into problems with big data projects. They get sidetracked by data that doesn’t have a positive impact on their business. When starting a big data and digital transformation project, your company needs to focus on what data is relevant in helping your business succeed.

The final area of big data, that has caused a lot of confusion in the marketplace, is how you are getting that data and using it. As part of a data transformation, you must make sure that you are compliant with the usage of that.

If you cannot be relied upon to do the right thing with your data, someone will step in to make sure that you are or you could have major legal ramifications like we are currently seeing with Facebook and Google. You need to make sure you have a controllable platform within your organization.

Big Data analytics and Digital Transformation will remain an important key to growing your business today and into the future. Your company needs to stay on the forefront of these trends, in order to succeed in the marketplace.

This article from Approyo CEO Chris Carter originally appeared in
the Technology Headlines: https://www.thetechnologyheadlines.com/technology/big_data/Big-Data-and-the-Digital-Transformation/

Approyo CEO Chris Carter featured in Authority Magazine

Approyo CEO Chris Carter was featured as part of an ongoing series with Authority Magazine on February 27. In this interview with Dr. Ely Weinschneider, Chris shares how he manages to be there for his daughters while running a successful company.

Here is an excerpt from the interview:

"With almost three decades of extraordinary working experience in the SAP industry, Christopher Carter, CEO at Approyo founded the company with the goal of making it easy for customers to embrace SAP HANA. Chris works with businesses around the globe and is known to assist them in their journey to the usage of Big Data in the forms of Hadoop (Cloudera and Hortonwork’s) and SAP HANA. His experience has earned him national recognition by the American SAP Users Group, SAP, Hadoop World, Cloud Expo and more.

Under Chris’s leadership, Approyo has been named to the Inc. 5000 three years in a row (2016–2018) and named one the SAP Solution Provider of the Year in 2018 by ACQ5. In 2018, Chris was awarded the Gamechanger of the year by ACQ5, one of the 10 Most Inspiring Business Leaders by Mirror Review and one of the Rising Entrepreneurs of the Year by The Technology Headlines.

Thank you so much for joining us! Can you tell us your “childhood backstory”?
Absolutely I grew up as the oldest son of 4 boys. I was the first to leave for college. My parents were divorced, and I grew up between my mother and my father’s homes. When I left for college, I wanted to go somewhere warm and as far away from my parents as possible. I joke about that now, but at the time it really seemed fitting because I wanted to leave to become a technologist or baseball player.

Can you share the story about what brought you to this specific point in your career?
What brought me to this point in my life was a lot of life experiences. A ton of trial and error. And many times, not trusting others and doing it myself. It took a long time for me to be able to understand the fact that I could trust others which would help grow myself and my business."

Can you tell us a bit more about what your day to day schedule looks like?
Typically, my day starts at 5 a.m. The first thing I do is listen to the news while I’m getting ready. I try to be out the door by 5:30 a.m. because my local radio station plays The Star-Spangled Banner at that time. I can continue to listen to the local news and any national activities going on once I get to the office. I usually have some good time to myself to get ready for my day, go through my notes that I left for myself from the evening prior, and answer any emails that have come in overnight. From that point, I continue my day with a lot of activities with customers and prospects. I meet with my team in the office and staff across the globe with phone call meetings.

Read the full interview at https://medium.com/authority-magazine/to-be-a-great-parent-you-must-be-able-to-enjoy-life-to-the-fullest-with-those-around-you-and-the-45cb5cbc1b96

About Authority Magazine
Leadership Lessons from Authorities in Business, Film, Sports, and Tech. Authority Mag is devoted primarily to sharing interesting feature interviews of people who are authorities in their industry. We use interviews to draw out stories that are both empowering and actionable.

Approyo CEO Chris Carter appears on DM Radio, Google and Amazon: The Future of Data Centers?

Approyo CEO Chris Carter was a guest on the latest episode of DM radio, "Google and Amazon: The Future of Data Centers?" with host Erik Kavanagh.

About this episode:
Time was, every major corporation built their own data centers! You found an appropriate site with enough power and cooling, bought all the hardware, set up the operating systems, loaded your applications, and then, sooner or later, had yourself a data center. These days, one visionary summed it up like this: “Friends don’t let friends build data centers.” The future is clearly in the Cloud, with Amazon, Microsoft, Google and others vying for those dollars. What does that mean for your organization?

Listen now: http://dmradio.dataversity.net/google-and-amazon-the-future-of-data-centers/ 

Guests:

• Keno Fischer, Julia Computing
• Chris Carter, Approyo
• Patrick Mcfaddin, Datastax

About DM Radio:
DM Radio is a weekly, one-hour live radio show broadcast Thursdays at 3 PM Eastern / 12 PM Pacific. It is owned and produced by The Bloor Group in partnership with DATAVERSITY. It is currently syndicated across three networks and broadcast live on WFOY and GAB Radio Network (please note: These are live radio stations which broadcast 24 hours per day. DM Radio and its affiliates have no control over any other show outside DM Radio.) Each show includes host Eric Kavanagh, a guest Analyst, and several industry experts brought together to discuss hot topics in Data Management. Every show is recorded and converted to a podcast within two US business days of the show. Some shows will keep the conversation going in a Webinar format at a later date or be followed by an article to dive deeper into the topics.

About Eric Kavanagh:
Eric Kavanagh CEO, The Bloor Group  Eric has more than 20 years of experience as a career journalist with a keen focus on enterprise technologies. He designs and moderates a variety of New Media programs, including The Briefing Room, DM Radio, as well as GARP’s Leadership and Research Webinars. His mission is to help people leverage the power of software, methodologies, and politics to get things done.

Approyo CEO Chris Carter named one of the Successful Leaders in Tech by CIOLook

Approyo is proud to announce that CEO and Founder Chris Carter has been named one of the Successful Leaders in Tech by CIOLook Magazine. The publication sheds light on th most admired tech leaders and their journeys to success, it also provides insights on their mission and vision, their backgrounds, and the traits that make a resilient leader.

"In our edition titled "Successful Leader in Tech," we envision exhibiting the vital contribution of emerging tech leaders who have brought about a disruptive change in their respective industries. With three decades of executive experience in the SAP Industry, the Founder and CEO of Approyo, Christopher Carter has marked his presence in the industry by aiding the commendable provision of optimal SAP solutions. CIO Look recognizes and appreciates his efforts and takes pride to feature him in our very first edition," Pooja M. Bansal, Editor-in-Chief of CIOLook.

“I am extremely honored to be named one of the Successful Leaders in Tech by CIOLook,” said Christopher Carter, CEO of Approyo. “I personally think the entire team at Approyo made this award possible, not just me alone. This achievement continues to validate our success in the SAP marketplace.”

Web Profile: http://ciolook.com/christopher-carter-enabling-customers-to-embrace-sap/
Magazine: Digital Link: http://magazines.ciolook.com/Successful-Leader-in-Tech-2018/

About CIOLook
CIOLook is Global business authority platform where you can explore the perspective of Entrepreneurs, business owners, and innovators who drive business around the globe. CIOLook has unvaryingly been at the front line for its honesty and genuineness acquiring acknowledgment from Business pioneers universally. Alongside, it focuses on showcasing world changing business concepts to help readers get a deeper understanding of the progressive business world.

Consistent updates to our online journals, internet based life and master sentiment give a substance rich perusing knowledge loaded up with fascinating perspectives and remark on the issues of the worldwide business .CIOLook Magazine inspires readers and users to think beyond traditional boundaries, lead conversations and create the future of business.

Innovation powered by the intelligent enterprise

An intelligent enterprise is a smart, best-run business. It is an organization that capitalizes on intelligent technologies to automate complex business processes, anticipates new customer needs and invents new business models.

To build an intelligent enterprise, you need to be equipped with the tools of the future.  Only SAP solutions have the depth of experience combined with the breadth of industry knowledge to offer innovative solutions that can effectively streamline your business from end to end. SAP solutions powered by Approyo are committed to delivering continuous innovations to our customers to ensure they continually have access to the latest innovations and best-of-breed technologies to deliver the visibility, focus and agility they need.

• Award-winning digital-age user experience (UI): SAP has delivered the world’s first hands-free ERP. It’s built on an award-winning UI including a context-aware, business-savvy digital assistant for the enterprise.
• AI-powered automation: Combining learning capabilities, predictive analytics, and real-time insight adds automation to key functions, notifies users when input is needed, and enables faster and smarter decisions.
• Next-generation business processes: SAP helps you rethink how business is done by reinventing and redefining processes with applied best practices built on the latest innovations. 

Get the most out of your data
To get the most out of your digital journey, you need to utilize data from multiple sources, including core data from your business processes, as well as external data sources such as connected sensors, weather information, satellite pictures, road conditions, market data, and social media.

Digitization is creating tons of data every day, much of which is unstructured, such as images and videos. This data by itself is of little use. Insights from data are essential for today ́s business, but they’re useless if you can’t make sense of them. Intelligent enterprises are driven by data and insights. It’s not just about having the right data at your fingertips but having the analytical insights from that data linked to your core business processes. This is where machine learning can help, as it unlocks knowledge from structured and unstructured
data to enable the intelligent enterprise.

Be intelligent – use machine learning
Machine learning lets you make sense of raw data and unlock new insights by learning from data, rather than programming explicit rules. Deploying machine learning capabilities across relevant business processes can help identify untapped opportunities, expose hidden risks, and automate repetitive tasks or knowledge-based work.

Unlock the value of IoT
Internet of Things (IoT) technology has been around for decades, but now it tops the agenda for many companies. That’s because the evolution of connectivity, Big Data management, analytics, and cloud technology are presenting new opportunities for IoT in business. Initially, IoT applications focused on operational activities on shop floors because downtime or system failure could result in significant losses. Aside from the benefit of uptime, the data collected from IoT technology wasn’t generally used. Now customers are using SAP powered by Approyo to leverage that data to shift from reactive maintenance practices to proactive endeavors to work smarter, get better insights, and provide new services to their customers based on IoT data.

Read the full blog post on www.approyo.com

Approyo CEO Chris Carter featured on Coffee Break with Game-Changers Radio, Presented by SAP

Approyo CEO Chris Carter was recently featured as a guest on Business Analyst by Day, Data Science Hero by Night - Part 2 of Game-Changing Predictive Machine Learning, Presented by SAP. During this episode, Chris talks about Big Data, Machine Learning, AI and more. Learn more about part 1 here...

About the episode:
Big data has officially crashed into the business world, taking competition to new levels.

Can your business benefit from big data without investing in qualified data-science resources – an entire lab and pedigreed experts – to navigate and take advantage of this new business domain, which includes AI and Machine Learning?

Good news!
Packaged application software has lowered the skills barrier to mining the data. Our panel is proof that anyone can successfully use data analytics tools. Hear what they wish they’d known when they began.

Listen on-demand: https://www.voiceamerica.com/episode/110564/business-analyst-by-day-data-science-hero-by-night-part-2

Featured Guests
Christopher Carter
With almost three decades of extraordinary working experience in the SAP industry, Christopher Carter, CEO at Approyo, founded Approyo with the goal of making it easy for customers to embrace SAP HANA. Chris works with businesses around the globe and is known to assist them in their journey to the usage of Big Data in the forms of Hadoop (Cloudera and Hortonwork’s) and SAP HANA. His experience has earned him a national recognition by the American SAP Users Group, SAP, Hadoop World, Cloud Expo and more. Additionally, Mr. Carter was fortunate to create the first SAP cloud ever used by an SAP client in 2005, and the first Client SAP HANA Production cloud.

Jason Olson
Jason Olson is an Analytics Specialist at Kimberly-Clark Corporation. He has spent the last 15 years working in every area of the Business Intelligence field accumulating end-to-end technical and functional expertise. He earned his BBA from the University of Wisconsin - Whitewater in 2003 and MBA from University of Wisconsin – Oshkosh in 2011. Leveraging his business acumen and technical expertise, Jason bridges the gap between technology and the real business needs in a wide range of business functions. His real passion is having a seat at the table with business users to accomplish their goals, demonstrate the art of possible, and enabling those who know their business best to leverage advanced tools and techniques. Jason’s current focus is on Machine Learning and enabling a diverse user base to leverage.

Samantha Wong
Samantha Wong is a Product Manager for Predictive Analytics at SAP. She has been part of the SAP Analytics team for over 4 years, and in her previous role, she supported customers across the Asia Pacific Japan region to drive actionable insights out of their data. With a Bachelor of Commerce degree specialized in Marketing, and experience in Advertising, Banking, and Insurance, Samantha fits the profile of analyst turned citizen data scientist. Connect with her on LinkedIn for interesting articles and commentary on the ever evolving world of Predictive Analytics and Machine Learning.

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... 

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

View the full blog post on www.approyo.com

Digital Transformation for Manufacturing with SAP powered by Approyo

The market is experiencing a disruptive shift in customer demand for new, extensive, smart, and personalized products. Sellers are constantly reducing buffer inventory with obsolescence risk in mind. Manufacturers are competing to meet this challenge and provide individualized products in similar lead times and cost as off-the shelf products. This creates tremendous complexity for the manufacturing operations team, yet at the same time, companies are looking for growth and profitability while maintaining high quality and sustainability.

To meet these demands, manufacturing is being used as a strategic pillar, becoming more collaborative, localized, automated, integrated, and highly adaptive. Companies are adopting digital manufacturing strategies and solutions to seamlessly connect relevant business stakeholders, information and operational processes in real time. Digital manufacturing simultaneously improves responsiveness and efficiency which drives growth, while decreasing cycle time and cost. Leveraging technologies like 3D printing, cloud, machine learning, and the Internet of Things (IoT) is increasing agility and extending the manufacturing network. Digital manufacturing has become a strategic differentiator.

SAP solutions powered by Approyo enable companies to integrate and embed intelligence in manufacturing processes facilitating Industry 4.0 principles with one source of live information. They provide an optimal coordination of planning and execution processes, covering all aspects of the manufacturing cycle from planning to shop floor and beyond.

Reduce manufacturing cost by increasing output and gaining real-time visibility into quality and costs 
Increase plant output with improved planning  and visibility into equipment utilization while also reducing the inventory held for manufacturing. Have a real-time and drillable view of the performance metrics of all the production facilities globally. This enables identifying and implementing global manufacturing best practices.

Reduce revenue loss due to plant fulfillment issues by agile planning and production orchestration
Gain the ability to respond to demand and confirmed order changes. Live inventory data and drastically reduced material requirements planning (MRP) processing time improve transparency and responsiveness. The planning system simplifies constraint based capacity planning by bringing together material and capacity constraints. Improve production tracking, labor shortage, first pass yield, and equipment availability to ensure on-time delivery.

Increase revenue growth by mass manufacturing of individualized products and 3D printing
Produce personalized products ordered by customers with minimal human intervention. Product genealogy for every unit is maintained in the system for service and compliance needs. Collaboration with Origin Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) and contract service providers enables fulfilment of custom orders faster, while reducing inventory levels, time to market, and waste.

Reduce scrap and rework cost by empowering the workforce to take informed decisions
Gain immediate insights on planning, execution, quality, with analysis at the finest level of granularity available on mobile devices. Supervisors can analyze and take immediate actions on their mobile devices.

Protect people and the environment and reduce manufacturing downtime by proactively managing operational risk
Provide critical safety information to all employees –top floor to shop floor –to create an effective safety culture. Establish a holistic approach to embed safety and operational risk management into all of your operations.

Reduce manufacturing-related IT cost by using an integrated set of solutions 
With SAP S/4HANA as the digital core, integrate seamlessly with the manufacturing execution suite and manufacturing network solutions (digital manufacturing insights, distributed manufacturing). This reduces the cost to develop and maintain digital manufacturing capabilities.

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...

Digital Transformation for Manufacturing with SAP powered by Approyo

The market is experiencing a disruptive shift in customer demand for new, extensive, smart, and personalized products. Sellers are constantly reducing buffer inventory with obsolescence risk in mind. Manufacturers are competing to meet this challenge and provide individualized products in similar lead times and cost as off-the shelf products. This creates tremendous complexity for the manufacturing operations team, yet at the same time, companies are looking for growth and profitability while maintaining high quality and sustainability.

To meet these demands, manufacturing is being used as a strategic pillar, becoming more collaborative, localized, automated, integrated, and highly adaptive. Companies are adopting digital manufacturing strategies and solutions to seamlessly connect relevant business stakeholders, information and operational processes in real time. Digital manufacturing simultaneously improves responsiveness and efficiency which drives growth, while decreasing cycle time and cost. Leveraging technologies like 3D printing, cloud, machine learning, and the Internet of Things (IoT) is increasing agility and extending the manufacturing network. Digital manufacturing has become a strategic differentiator.

SAP solutions powered by Approyo enable companies to integrate and embed intelligence in manufacturing processes facilitating Industry 4.0 principles with one source of live information. They provide an optimal coordination of planning and execution processes, covering all aspects of the manufacturing cycle from planning to shop floor and beyond.

Reduce manufacturing cost by increasing output and gaining real-time visibility into quality and costs 
Increase plant output with improved planning  and visibility into equipment utilization while also reducing the inventory held for manufacturing. Have a real-time and drillable view of the performance metrics of all the production facilities globally. This enables identifying and implementing global manufacturing best practices.

Reduce revenue loss due to plant fulfillment issues by agile planning and production orchestration
Gain the ability to respond to demand and confirmed order changes. Live inventory data and drastically reduced material requirements planning (MRP) processing time improve transparency and responsiveness. The planning system simplifies constraint based capacity planning by bringing together material and capacity constraints. Improve production tracking, labor shortage, first pass yield, and equipment availability to ensure on-time delivery.

Increase revenue growth by mass manufacturing of individualized products and 3D printing
Produce personalized products ordered by customers with minimal human intervention. Product genealogy for every unit is maintained in the system for service and compliance needs. Collaboration with Origin Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) and contract service providers enables fulfilment of custom orders faster, while reducing inventory levels, time to market, and waste.

Reduce scrap and rework cost by empowering the workforce to take informed decisions
Gain immediate insights on planning, execution, quality, with analysis at the finest level of granularity available on mobile devices. Supervisors can analyze and take immediate actions on their mobile devices.

Protect people and the environment and reduce manufacturing downtime by proactively managing operational risk
Provide critical safety information to all employees –top floor to shop floor –to create an effective safety culture. Establish a holistic approach to embed safety and operational risk management into all of your operations.

Reduce manufacturing-related IT cost by using an integrated set of solutions 
With SAP S/4HANA as the digital core, integrate seamlessly with the manufacturing execution suite and manufacturing network solutions (digital manufacturing insights, distributed manufacturing). This reduces the cost to develop and maintain digital manufacturing capabilities.

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...

Approyo CEO Chris Carter featured on Game-Changing Predictive Machine Learning, Presented by SAP

Approyo CEO Chris Carter was recently featured as a guest on Game-Changing Predictive Machine Learning, Presented by SAP. During this episode, Chris talks about Big Data, Machine Learning, AI and more...

About the episode: 
Big data has officially crashed into the business world, taking competition to new levels.

Can your business benefit from big data without investing in qualified data-science resources – an entire lab and pedigreed experts – to navigate and take advantage of this new business domain, which includes AI and Machine Learning?

Good news!
Packaged application software has lowered the skills barrier to mining the data. Our panel is proof that anyone can successfully use data analytics tools. Hear what they wish they’d known when they began.

Listen on-demand: https://www.voiceamerica.com/episode/108752/business-analyst-by-day-data-science-hero-by-night

Featured Guests

Christopher Carter
With almost three decades of extraordinary working experience in the SAP industry, Christopher Carter, CEO at Approyo, founded Approyo with the goal of making it easy for customers to embrace SAP HANA. Chris works with businesses around the globe and is known to assist them in their journey to the usage of Big Data in the forms of Hadoop (Cloudera and Hortonwork’s) and SAP HANA. His experience has earned him a national recognition by the American SAP Users Group, SAP, Hadoop World, Cloud Expo and more. Additionally, Mr. Carter was fortunate to create the first SAP cloud ever used by an SAP client in 2005, and the first Client SAP HANA Production cloud.

Jason Olson
Jason Olson is an Analytics Specialist at Kimberly-Clark Corporation. He has spent the last 15 years working in every area of the Business Intelligence field accumulating end-to-end technical and functional expertise. He earned his BBA from the University of Wisconsin - Whitewater in 2003 and MBA from University of Wisconsin – Oshkosh in 2011. Leveraging his business acumen and technical expertise, Jason bridges the gap between technology and the real business needs in a wide range of business functions. His real passion is having a seat at the table with business users to accomplish their goals, demonstrate the art of possible, and enabling those who know their business best to leverage advanced tools and techniques. Jason’s current focus is on Machine Learning and enabling a diverse user base to leverage.

Samantha Wong
Samantha Wong is a Product Manager for Predictive Analytics at SAP. She has been part of the SAP Analytics team for over 4 years, and in her previous role, she supported customers across the Asia Pacific Japan region to drive actionable insights out of their data. With a Bachelor of Commerce degree specialized in Marketing, and experience in Advertising, Banking, and Insurance, Samantha fits the profile of analyst turned citizen data scientist. Connect with her on LinkedIn for interesting articles and commentary on the ever evolving world of Predictive Analytics and Machine Learning.

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... 

The Journey to the Intelligent Enterprise with SAP powered by Approyo

In a consumer-driven digital economy, the pace of innovation is relentless. Change has never been this fast, but it will never be this slow again. Companies are beyond the stage of awareness when it comes to digital technologies. They already understand the power of Al, loT, cloud, robotics, and mobile, while others like blockchain and augmented reality are just appearing on the radar.

All of this innovation will be fueled by data, from having the right intelligence to execution. We are entering the era of intelligent mega ­processes, which start by combining the right data sets and converting them into intelligent insights. These insights then trigger automated transactions across the process. Leading companies that are making digital transformation a reality are putting data and intelligence at the center of their future. They are building new capabilities, skills, and technology, and evolving their culture to transform into an 'Intelligent Enterprise' and achieve the aforementioned outcomes. These companies are not only delivering short-term value to shareholders, but are also positioned to thrive and transform their industry.

However, executives are concerned about the path to digital transformation. Early adopters failed to understand their digital ambition and the complexity associated with transformation and are struggling on their journey. Successful companies that are engaged with SAP powered by Approyo are focusing on these five common capabilities:

• Reimagine end-to-end mega-processes - For example, customer experience is not just omni­channel, it's about orchestrating the entire value chain to deliver the best customer experience.
• Enhance enterprise intelligence through smart use of data and Al technologies.
• Run the world economy in real time by connecting industry value chains. For example, leverage end-to-end industry best practices, digital technologies, and SAP HANA to run in real-time
• Manage complexity by simplifying IT's operating model- Focus on clear IT strategy aligned to business priorities and a customer-first mindset.
• Accelerate innovation by moving to the cloud.

Why should your company start the path to digital transformation?

RUN VS. INNOVATE 
Executives struggle to strike a balance between the need to keep running a current profitable business and investing for future innovations. Quite often these two goals conflict, and most executives mistakenly focus only on the former and ignore the latter.

CORPORATE CHOLESTEROL 
The older the company is, the more stuck they are with policies, procedures, layers of management and risk aversion. Their own processes get in the way of change.

INNOVATION CULTURE 
Digital transformation is a journey without a destination. Companies need to build the right talent, skills, and partnerships to capitalize on digital opportunities.

COMPLEX IT INFRASTRUCTURE 
For an average organization with 30+ applications per billion of revenue, 70-80% of the IT budget is spent on keeping the lights on. It is difficult to manage data as a strategic asset and enforce master data governance across a fragmented portfolio. This means considerable value potential is untapped as companies cannot even use 1 % of the available data. Also, executives do not have the necessary visibility into operational and financial performance to manage quick course corrections.

These are complex issues and navigating through them requires change in attitude, mindset, as well as time. Companies that start now will have more time to address these challenges at their own pace.

Given the current speed of change, digital innovations have a short shelf life - today's breakthrough will become a 'me too' in a couple of years. Therefore, it is important to start now, build a foundation and realize value in a step-by-step manner instead of waiting for a proven stack of solutions and proven technologies with which to innovate.

With multiple mature solutions and design thinking led approach to innovation, SAP powered by Approyo is strongly positioned to help companies on their digital transformation journey, so they can become an intelligent enterprise. With the SAP HANA platform and our investments in Al technologies, we will exponentially increase the number of intelligent apps embedded in the Intelligent Suite over the next few years. These new innovations can be consumed at any time through the cloud, but will deliver value much faster if the modern foundation is in place right now.

Read the full blog post on www.approyo.com 

Unlock business value across all your data sources with SAP Leonardo

In today’s digital economy, anywhere from 60% to 73% of all data within an enterprise goes unused. Like many organizations, you may be collecting information on a massive scale. But are you realizing the true power of Big Data?

SAP Leonardo Big Data capabilities are the answer to the challenge of making the most of your Big Data, providing solutions for easily ingesting, storing, processing, and sharing petabytes of information. SAP Leonardo customers gain more powerful business value from their data, with rapid deployment, greater scalability, faster analytical processing, and more powerful sharing across the enterprise than ever before.

In the past, gaining business value from Big Data faced three challenges:

1. Where to keep the data?
2. How to process diverse, unstructured data types?
3. How to unify the enterprise information architecture with Big Data environments?

This resulted in counter-productive enterprise siloes and expensive, time-consuming manual solutions for sharing information. SAP Leonardo Big Data solutions offer you a superior approach. The comprehensive lineup of Big Data offerings reduce complexity, overcome silos, and help you get value from the diversity of today’s enterprise data.

Rapidly ingest huge amounts of diverse data
Digitally connected businesses are receiving unprecedented amounts of data across a growing number of sources, at variable speeds and in different formats – from operational logs and social media to Internet of Things (IoT) and machine learning touchpoints. To use this data effectively, you need to be able to quickly ingest it. It’s the first, crucial step to applying insights to real-time business decision-making. And it can be one of the most challenging to handle. Until now. SAP Leonardo Big Data solutions quickly acquire, store, transform, and share data from every source, including relational databases, enterprise data warehouses, and Hadoop resources. In addition, we provide you with critical tools for data cleansing, quality, and transformation using machine learning, graph computation, and stream processing, giving you the ability to utilize refined data in real time.

Ingestion functions for Big Data processing are handled by an array of SAP solutions across enterprise and Hadoop data. You also have the option to use open source solutions for ingestion to the SAP Distribution for Hadoop software. SAP ingestion solutions let you ingest data to an SAP HANA stack or to Hadoop, depending on analytics requirements.

Store massive datasets from across your enterprise and beyond
The SAP Leonardo Big Data offering delivers massive scale for your growing data, organizing petabytes for ready analysis. This Hadoop-as-a-service computing solution is known as SAP Cloud Platform Big Data Services. It provides a scalable, cloud-based Hadoop data store, Spark complement, and a full Big Data platform environment for storage and processing.  Cloud deployment lets you get started rapidly, process much larger volumes of data at a lower price, and scale volumes quickly and easily. The SAP offering uniquely includes operational services to ensure consistent and reliable performance. This is a must for enterprise production environments. In addition to the cloud-only approach, there is also an option for a hybrid model.

Further, in combination with SAP HANA, SAP Cloud Platform Big Data Services delivers native multi-temperature management for hot or cold data virtualization and schema extension capabilities. And with the ability to federate data from any source, it reduces data movement and speeds response times.

Get comprehensive insights faster with combined analytics
With the SAP Leonardo Big Data solutions, getting business value from combined data is no longer a daunting challenge. Our unified, yet flexible, in-memory architecture simplifies the process of refining and cleaning diverse types of data to enable your business analytics to keep pace with the variety and velocity of business demands. SAP Vora is a distributed computing solution deployed on Apache Hadoop and Spark clusters that provides integration with SAP HANA, so you can quickly and easily run combined analytics across enterprise and Hadoop data.

All SAP Vora operations can be accessed, executed, and extended through SAP HANA. SAP HANA and SAP Vora act as a single system, with joint query optimization and automatic storage decisions. SAP Vora runs on Big Data clusters separate from your Hadoop data. It provides specialized analytical processing for different data formats. The computing engines are designed to run high-performance sophisticated analytics against relational, time series, graph, and JSON data.

Understand every facet of your digital enterprise
The SAP Leonardo Big Data solutions bridge the Big Data value gap by processing diverse data types to make them collectively useful for accelerating your organization’s processes and decision making.

As a result, our customers can thoroughly analyze and understand every aspect of their business, including customer behavior, operational behavior, market behavior, and beyond. They feed that insight into new experiments, forward-thinking innovations, and better customer relationships.The comprehensive approach of SAP Leonardo’s Big Data solutions, combine data ingestion, storage, processing, and sharing to fuel holistic digital transformation. Our data management services encompass diverse data sources, types and endpoints, and accommodate cloud, on-premise, and hybrid deployments for ultimate customization to your organization’s needs.

Unlock insights and intelligence across your entire enterprise to imagine new business models, develop new supply chains, create new customer interactions, and be outstanding. Only with SAP Leonardo Big Data.

Read the full blog post on www.approyo.com

Mid-year review – 2018 Technology Predictions from Approyo

Every year, the team at Approyo puts together a few predictions for the upcoming year. We published our original predictions back at the start of 2018 and now that we are half through the year, we thought we would revisit these predictions.

IT predictions for 2018

• Cloud First - It's not a question of "if" the Cloud and more. Companies of all shapes and sizes need the cloud to innovate in a digital world. You can't be on the sidelines anymore and 2018 is the year to fully embrace the cloud. 
• Everything as a service - Traditional business products are being re-imagined as services.
• AI and Machine Learning - Creating systems that learn, adapt and potentially act autonomously. SAP introduces SAP Leonardo this year that has many features for AI and Machine Learning that can help companies today. 
• Security – As we mentioned in our first bullet point, the cloud is the new normal. Your data is one of the most important aspects of your business. Cloud and hosting partners will need to continue to adapt security measures to protect this valuable information.

Observations from the first half of 2018
Through the first half of the year, the Cloud continues to be more and more important. One of the major themes from this years SAP SAPPHIRE NOW conference was that the cloud is the foundation to achieve the intelligent enterprise through SAP Solutions.

Additionally, security continues to be an important topic throughout the year and into the future. As your company continues to create more and more data, securing that data becomes more important. That’s why we recently announced a new partnership with Bohh Labs. BOHH Labs brings an easy to implement service that acts as a layer between the user/ application and the back-end data store. BOHH enables total security on all stored data by uniquely providing database or specific file security, removing it from the source and storing it separately without changing the structure, enabling prioritization and control of sensitive data. BOHH’s security service provides full text search capabilities, even on secured data, and supports Bot technology for data to be conveniently accessed through keyboard, text-and-type from any device and voice commands to enhance the access flow to data within the system. This means sensitive and non-sensitive data residing in SAP HANA can easily be searched at once in real-time to extract valuable analytical insights without putting sensitive data that must stay protected at risk by hiding it away for access by authorized users only.

Data also continues to be an important trend. We already talked about the security side of data, but another important aspect is how companies are using that data. Another major focus on SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018 was how companies need to implement the right technology foundation in order to use all the data they are producing in an intelligent way. This will continue to be an important trend for the rest of the year and beyond.

Read the full blog post on www.approyo.com 

Unleash the Potential of your Business with SAP Hybris

With SAP Hybris increase productivity and customer acquisition and amplify customer satisfaction by having relevant and personalized interactions across any channel. Engage your customers in more proactive and meaningful ways by understanding what matters to them in the moment. SAP Hybris delivers rich predictive insight, flawless execution and contextual customer experience throughout your sales and service organizations.

Mobile (on- and offline)
SAP Hybris supports the three key mobile platforms (Android, iOS and Windows) and is available on mobile devices in an offline mode. That means that SAP Hybris can be used on a tablet even if there is no wireless Internet connection, thus significantly raising user efficiency!

Integration
SAP Hybris features, as standard, out-of-the-box integration. Your CRM platform can thus be easily linked to and from many major (3rd party) applications, such as social networks, SAP on-premise solutions or even ERP software from other providers.

SAP offers an extensive Microsoft Excel add-in, as well as one for Microsoft Outlook. The data is constantly synced between SAP Hybris and the Microsoft platform, so that you can choose which platform you work in (bi-directional).
With native SAP ERP and SAP CRM integration and business application mash-ups, you’re always effortlessly up-to-speed on your customers and accounts.

Future-proof
SAP Hybris will grow along with you and is kept up to date. Every quarter (February, May, August and November), SAP launches several new functionalities. Quite often, these updates are inspired by customer feedback, as users are invited to post and vote for the best ideas on SAP’s online.

Multi-everything
Multichannel, multi-vendor, multi-language is the set of core features in this application that seems to dazzle every customer that is into this product as an organization. Gartner has positioned SAP Hybris solution in its Magic Quadrant report meant for management of multichannel campaigns.

Omni Commerce Connect is yet another interesting innovation within SAP Hybris that lets businesses network with customers and clients regardless of location. All this is done while simultaneously leveraging fresh channels and touch points enabling highly efficient interaction. The channels referred to here may range from direct mail, call centers, programmatic advertising, email, social media, mobile and websites.

Download the Whitepaper... 

View the full Blog Post... 

Ask Approyo - 2017 Technology Predictions

It's the start of 2017 and everyone wants to know, what are some predictions in technology for the new year. In the latest edition of Ask Approyo, Approyo CEO Chris Carter talks about some big technology predictions for 2017.

 

The predictions for 2017 differ from 2016. Big Data will have an impact on both personal and business standpoints. Companies will no longer just dip their toe in Big Data, they will be all in by the end of the year. in fact, we will start to refer to Big Data as just "data".

Additionally, more things will be automated from personal devices from Google and Amazon to business applications. Plus, Virtual Reality will start to go more mainstream.

Are you ready for the New Year
Don’t let the new digital world pass you by. Approyo can help your company deal with the changing world. Our SAP HANA and Big Data solutions address these important questions and more. Let us show you today! Set up a free consultation.

Ask Approyo: Old Dogs NEED new tricks

Remember the saying "You can't teach an old dog new tricks"? Well, your company NEEDS to learn the new tricks of technology and business to survive in today's complex digital world. You can't survive on spreadsheets alone anymore.

Big Data, Cloud Computing and other technology innovations are too important to ignore. Platforms like Hadoop, SAP S/4HANA and more can impact your bottom line right now.

Join Approyo CEO Chris Carter as he talks about companies needing to learn new tricks in the latest edition of Ask Approyo!

Let Approyo help! 
Approyo can help your company deal with the changing world. Our SAP HANA and Big Data solutions address these trends. Let us show you how! Set up a free consultation today.