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...

SAP and Microsoft Announce Project Embrace to accelerate adoption of SAP S/4HANA

Building on a joint commitment to simplify and modernize customers’ journeys to the cloud through project “Embrace,” SAP SE and Microsoft Corp. announced an extensive go-to-market partnership — from conceptualization to sales — to accelerate customer adoption of SAP S/4HANA and SAP Cloud Platform on Microsoft Azure.

Today’s new, preferred cloud partnership brings together SAP and Microsoft, along with a global network of system integrators, to offer holistic bundles that provide customers with unified reference architectures, road maps and market-approved journeys to illuminate a clear path toward the cloud. As part of this simplified customer journey, Microsoft will resell components of SAP Cloud Platform alongside Azure. This unique offering is aimed at more easily migrating SAP ERP application and SAP S/4HANA customers from on premise to public cloud.

Under the banner of project ‘Embrace’, SAP, Microsoft and a global ecosystem of system integrators including Approyo will combine to offer “holistic bundles” designed to provide customers with unified reference architectures and strategic roadmaps in the context of cloud.

SAP will lead with Microsoft Azure to move on-premise SAP ERP and SAP S/4HANA customers to the cloud through industry-specific best practices, reference architectures and cloud-delivered services. This includes future deployment and migration of existing direct SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud customers leveraging hyperscaler infrastructure. However, SAP continues with its long-standing policy of supporting choice for those customers who request alternatives based on business requirements.

"I am proud to have the Approyo team working with Microsoft Azure and SAP on Project Embrace" added Christopher M. Carter, CEO of Approyo. 

Specifically, project “Embrace” on Microsoft Azure will provide customers with:

• A simplified move from on-premise editions of SAP ERP to SAP S/4HANA for customers with integrated product and industry solutions. Industry market bundles will create a road map to the cloud for customers in focused industries, with a singular reference architecture and path to streamline implementation.
• Collaborative support model for simplified resolution. In response to customer feedback, a combined support model for Azure and SAP Cloud Platform will help ease migration and improve communication.
• Jointly developed market journeys to support customer needs. Designed in collaboration with SAP, Microsoft and system integrator partners will provide roadmaps to the digital enterprise with recommended solutions and reference architectures for customers. These offer a harmonized approach by industry for products, services and practices across Microsoft, SAP and system integrators like Approyo.

Read the Full Announcements:

From Microsoft:
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2019/10/20/new-cloud-migration-pairing-offers-enhanced-customer-experience/

From SAP:
https://news.sap.com/2019/10/sap-microsoft-partnership-cloud-migration-offerings/

SAP S/4HANA: The Speed and Power of Simplification

SAP S/4HANA eliminates the complexities of legacy ERP databases, giving organizations a vastly simplified digital core with access to business-critical data in real time. The “S” in SAP S/4HANA is a nod to SAP's legacy business suite. SAP S/4HANA is optimized for SAP HANA, which supports a data model that simplifies the business computing environment dramatically. To take full advantage of this design, SAP S/4HANA was created to reimagine and recode the business suite from the ground up.

REUNIFICATION
Traditionally, the typical enterprise computing environment has been split between online transactional processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP). This split is a compromise made long ago: each system gets a copy of the original transactional data, commonly in a different data model, with each optimized for the type of workload (OLTP versus OLAP) in that system. This compromise, though, comes at the cost and complexity of managing two separate environments and moving data between them. Because SAP HANA can support performing analytical calculations and transformations on the fly, organizations can now bring OLTP and OLAP together again. Gone are the complex “helper structures” (indexes and data aggregate tables) that are used to overcome system performance issues running at the speed of disk. Now, with a simplified data model and the speed of in-memory processing, organizations can perform analytics on all data (live and historical) in a single environment – in the moment, as needed.

SIMPLICITY
By redesigning ERP for SAP HANA, the SAP S/4HANA reduces the number of tables dramatically across a wide range of functions. Take, for instance, finance and controlling. While in the past, data was structured in subledgers (accounts payable, accounts receivable, general ledger, asset accounting, cost center accounting, and so on), today they run on a single universal journal. This universal journal brings together postings related to finance (FI) and controlling (CO) in one single source table. The integrity of financial data is guaranteed by design, eliminating reconciliation effort between FI and CO and ensuring that every-one can always access the most current data. Teams are aligned and more effective because the complexity has been removed. Forecasting is faster and more accurate. Key performance indicators such as days sales outstanding (DSO) are avail-able in real time on a granular level. Profit center reporting, profitability analysis, and other real-time analytics performed on top of the universal journal become a reality.

As much as this simplification helps SAP, it also helps our customers. The SAP Tax Compliance application, for example, helps to streamline tax compliance through an automated tax control framework and now runs in SAP S/4HANA instead of a separate system that requires data replication. This application provides an enterprise-wide repository of compliance checks and enables corrections continuously during the current declaration period, freeing tax specialists from searching for anomalies. This simplification to a single source of truth supports new benefits – such as a comprehensive enterprise search. Now business users can search for master data and documents across different LoBs and across systems for a holistic view of the enterprise with zero latency in a modern user interface. At the same time, a built-in authorization framework helps to minimize administrative overhead and enable single sign-on so that users can work across LoBs in a secure fashion, without impediments.

INTELLIGENT TECHNOLOGY FOR THE INTELLIGENT ENTERPRISE
A simplified data model is imperative for intelligent technologies, such as machine learning. Traditional database models that maintain acceptable performance only with added complexity simply cannot scale to meet the needs of machine learning deployments. To run simulations, train algorithms, and improve visibility into what’s coming next, technologies need a data model up to the task. SAP S/4HANA is leveraging machine learning technology in the solution itself. One example is accelerated accounts receivable. With legacy databases and complex data models, accounts receivable can be an error-prone process that crosses multiple systems to match purchase orders to invoices. With SAP Cash Application software on SAP S/4HANA, machine learning technology does the matching automatically – and gets better over time with the addition of new data.

THE DIGITAL CORE
With SAP HANA as its foundation, SAP S/4HANA serves as a digital core for the business – one that helps drive business agility, improve customer experiences, and increase business performance.

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... 

Industry Capabilities with SAP S/4HANA

SAP S/4HANA is an intelligent, integrated ERP system that runs on the in-memory database, SAP HANA. It can help you:

• Address industry-specific requirements with proven best practices for 26 verticals and enable new business models as your marketplace evolves
• Revolutionize business processes with intelligent automation — supported by artificial intelligence and robotic process automation
• Make better decisions faster with embedded analytics, a conversational interface, and digital assistants
• Meet your IT landscape goals with hybrid, cloud, and on-premise scenarios that share a consistent data model, code line, and user experience

Here are just a few capabilities that SAP S/4HANA provides across multiple industries:

• Simplify asset operations and maintenance - Maximize asset value, control risks, and help ensure safety with a holistic view of asset status to plan maintenance activities with the right person, tools, resources, and integrated documentation. 
• Manage environmental, health, and safety risks - Execute tasks in critical environments with a complete view of compliance and safety measures, so you can identify risks and regulations, define priorities, implement controls, and track incidents.
• Maintain service agreements - Provide a single contract for all outcome-based services and reduce administrative burden by consolidating and maintaining task lists, catalogues, maintenance plans, and warranty information.
• Provide customer-oriented services - Engage with customers across a multitude of channels to offer packaged service offerings; manage complaints, claims, returns, and refunds; and schedule and dispatch field services to fulfill service orders.
• Streamline service parts management - Optimize parts logistics and inventory processes with real-time visibility across all supply locations to source service parts globally and ensure their availability.
• Streamline Core HR and payroll processes - Integrate employee master data, organizational data, and cost-center-related information from the SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central solution to speed reorganizations and other end-to-end processes.

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...

Stay Connected with Intelligent Business Processes

An intelligent enterprise starts with a digital core. It is the foundation for flexible, connected, and intelligent business processes that enable your organization to keep the customer experience at the center of everything you do.

SAP S/4HANA is SAP's flagship enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. It is built on the power of SAP HANA – SAP's in-memory database management system that provides real-time analytics – to unite transactional systems, overcoming limitations imposed by legacy technologies.

With that, SAP S/4HANA allows you to connect across all your lines of business and, externally, across your ecosystem so you have seamless visibility and insights across your entire business.

Capabilities of an Intelligent Business

Simplify asset operations and maintenance - Maximize asset value, control risks, and help ensure safety with a holistic view of asset status to plan maintenance activities with the right person, tools, resources, and integrated documentation.

Manage environmental, health, and safety risks - Execute tasks in critical environments with a complete view of compliance and safety measures, so you can identify risks and regulations, define priorities, implement controls, and track incidents.

Maintain service agreements - Provide a single contract for all outcome-based services and reduce administrative burden by consolidating and maintaining task lists, catalogues, maintenance plans, and warranty information.

Provide customer-oriented services - Engage with customers across a multitude of channels to offer packaged service offerings; manage complaints, claims, returns, and refunds; and schedule and dispatch field services to fulfill service orders.

Streamline service parts management - Optimize parts logistics and inventory processes with real-time visibility across all supply locations to source service parts globally and ensure their availability.

Streamline Core HR and payroll processes - Integrate employee master data, organizational data, and cost-center-related information from the SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central solution to speed reorganizations and other end-to-end processes.

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...

How can the Intelligent Enterprise impact the Telecommunications industry?

Disruptive change is happening in the telecommunications industry at a rapid pace. 5G, new market entrants, innovations in business models, mergers, and evolving industry standards require constant adaptation. Communications service providers (CSPs) 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?

Strategic Priorities in a Digital Economy
The digital economy is disruptive. Telecommunications companies need strategic priorities that drive transformation. SAP solutions powered by Approyo supports a reimagined set of end-to-end (E2E) business scenarios to support the strategic priorities of working in a digital environment.

• Intelligent operations - New innovations around artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain, and more have the potential to drive vast efficiencies around existing business processes and enable new generation processes moving forward.Labor-intensive processes around management of invoices, service tickets, and customer attrition will be among the first processes that leverage new technologies to drive optimization in an intelligent enterprise.
• Profitable customer centricity - With new market entrants and OTT players providing heavy competition, successful telcos are extending the use of new technologies to rethink how they can deliver optimal customer experiences, manage profitability, and offer relevant services.Putting customers first and optimizing margins will become more important to drive overall business growth.Focusing on delivering a superior and personalized customer experience will become even more critical to compete effectively.
• Innovative business models - The emergence of a sensor-based world opens up the space for platform providers to deliver adapted and scalable solutions for connectivity, insight, applications, and processes in the IoT. Providers can offer sensor-friendly vertical services and solutions to enterprise customers or industry ecosystems, and also develop industry-specific stack-and-build competence and partner ecosystems that target strategic industries, both organically or by acquisition.

Respond quickly to market dynamics
A digital core is a critical component of a modern telecommunications company’s IT architecture to ensure stability and long-term reliability for core enterprise processes. It must also provide 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 new over-the-top (OTT) competitors, new revenue driving business models, and continued industry consolidation.

Create efficiencies throughout the business
The ability to respond quickly is an essential part of managing a telecommunications company. To do this, simulation, prediction, and analytical capabilities are important components. Data is critical for gaining the insight to make decisions. This insight must be at a granular level, so that margins can be optimized to drive profitability by understanding where revenue leakage is happening at the per-subscriber level.

Gain visibility to become more profitable
With the commoditization of core communications services, every telecommunications company is looking for opportunities to maximize margins and profitability. Visibility across the business is the critical component to finding areas to mitigate margin loss and optimize profitability. Granular insights at the subscriber, service, and channel levels provide the opportunity to identify problem areas and react quickly to remedy them.

Leverage new innovations for evolving business models
Customers in every industry are demanding innovation and often look to their CSP to deliver services based on these innovations. The opportunity exists for CSPs that can react quickly and that have a digital core in place to deliver these services. With the right capabilities in place, CSPs are in a prime position to be the providers of choice to enable new services such as connected cars, smart transportation, connected health, and more.

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). Telecommunications companies that have big innovation appetites or prefer to be early adopters have already begun this journey.

How can the Intelligent Enterprise impact the Insurance industry?

Radical change in the insurance industry is occurring at a rapid pace. Changes in technologies, in business models, in standards, and in the makeup of insurance companies themselves require constant adaptation. Insurers 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?

Strategic Priorities in a Digital Economy

• Digital engagement - Customers want to engage with insurers through seamless, interactive experiences across all channels, including self-service portals. Insurers must communicate with people and devices and connect to external data sources to build an engagement model with the real world. The creation of consistent, loyalty-building experiences is essential to meet the expectations of customers in today’s digital world.
• Protection service - Customer expectations are moving in the direction that a potential loss should be prevented before it occurs by means of a protection service. Insurers should deploy hybrid products by bundling insurance coverage across lines of business with non-insurance products and services to offer requested protection services.
• Data-driven influence - Customer data about behavior and points of view needs to be analyzed to enable insurers to deliver innovative products to market quickly while maintaining existing products more efficiently. Insurers need to use the key insights provided by IoT applications and related insurance services to drive not only what products are created and what services are offered but also when and where.

The Need for an Intelligent ERP System

Responding to rapid changes
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 new business models, new regulations, and new business events, such as mergers or acquisitions.

Simulation and analytics
The ability to respond quickly is an essential part of managing an insurance company. To do this, simulation, prediction, and analytical capabilities are important. Data is critical for gaining insight to make decisions. This insight must be at a granular level so decision-makers have the detail they need to understand trends, opportunities, and risks and quickly carry out what-if analysis using predictive algorithms.

Keeping data under control
Every insurance company needs the computing capability for carrying out complex risk assessments 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. They must also manage the enormous amount of data generated by connected networks to develop and deliver leading-edge products and services.

Addressing innovative opportunities
Customers in every industry are demanding innovation. Companies are responding with new products and services that better meet individual needs. These new offerings impact every facet of business, not just the front office. Companies must address end-to-end (E2E) processes across departments and lines of business to deliver on new customer experiences, products, and services

The Intelligent ERP powered by Approyo 
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, 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). Insurance companies that have big innovation appetites or prefer to be early adopters have already begun this journey.

SAP S/4HANA migration fears are overblown - Approyo CEO Chris Carter interviewed by Tech Target

Approyo CEO Chris Carter was recently interviewed by Jim O'Donnell for Tech Target. Below is an excerpt from the interview, to read the full interview, please visit https://searchsap.techtarget.com/news/252467155/S-4HANA-migration-fears-are-overblown. 

Most SAP customers will eventually have to face the inevitable S/4HANA migration.

SAP has stated it will end support for the legacy SAP ECC platform by 2025. Although migration is a daunting prospect, the fear factor may be overblown, and customers could be missing out on the benefits of going to S/4HANA.

In this Q&A, Chris Carter, founder and CEO of Approyo LLC in Brookfield, Wis., comes at an SAP S/4HANA migration from a more hopeful place: The leap from ECC to S/4HANA may be inevitable, but it's also manageable.

Carter has been around since the SAP R/2 days, SAP's ERP software in the 90s and the predecessor of SAP HANA. Approyo, an SAP partner, provides managed services, hosting, migration and implementation services for more than 300 SAP cloud environments for customers around the world, according to Carter. It has also done just over 100 SAP migrations.

Where are SAP customers in their plans for S/4HANA migration with the 2025 deadline in mind?
Chris Carter: We've been working with SAP hand-in-hand on some of the migrations, but customers are very slow to migrate -- and understandably so. They're fed one line and then there's another real world thing that happens, but it's not as bleak as people think. You've got to work with a lot of Z data codes [non-standard data] and change activities, but there are so many tools that we can use that we can understand what is going on with their current environment in order to move into the new environment. You get a lot of integrators out there trying to get people scared, but it's really not that scary. This is a lot easier than what it was when it was R/2 to R/3, that's for sure.

What's the biggest fear SAP customers have about an S/4HANA migration?
Carter: Cost is No. 1, and change is No. 2. Everybody is worried about change -- is this going to change my job? Is it going to change what we do in FICO with the new [S/4HANA] finance tools? Every new SAP system has changes -- it's been that way since the R/2 days -- so they just have to understand that going in. You have to literally walk them through what those changes are and how they're going to benefit from them. You need strong change management and you've got to be very cognizant of what activities are going to happen.

What are the first things organizations need to do when starting a migration?
Carter: The first thing is always the plan. What is your plan and what's the plan for your SAP system, because they may not go hand in hand. An SAP system typically has had so many changes to it over the years that the individuals who are working on it today, and who may work on it tomorrow, may not know everything that has changed within that environment and what's going to happen starting tomorrow when the new system kicks in.

Read the full interview: https://searchsap.techtarget.com/news/252467155/S-4HANA-migration-fears-are-overblown

How can the Intelligent Enterprise impact Industrial Manufacturers

The digitalization of businesses across all industries is happening rapidly, and there is no turning back. Companies are looking for new ways to deliver value to their customers using digital channels and creating personalized, digitally-enabled products across all sectors, from consumer products to heavy equipment and machinery.

The industrial machinery and components (IM&C) industry is at the heart of this shift, providing the intelligent machines and equipment needed for this transformation, as well as spearheading innovative processes such as connected manufacturing and predictive maintenance and service.

Strategic Priorities in a Digital Economy
In this situation, where the opportunity is huge but at the same time new market entrants are threatening traditional IM&C companies, it is essential to focus on the right strategic priorities to drive digitalization across the business

Customer centricity
Putting the end customer’s point of view at the center of every decision is a key prerequisite for success in the digital age. This does not stop in the sales department but also applies to what products are built and what services are offered.

Serving the “segment of one”
Providing solutions that precisely fit the needs of one single customer has been commonplace in traditional engineer-to-order environments. Now, the ability to capture customer requirements effectively and drive mass customization is the key to giving customers exactly what they want.

Digital smart products
Differentiation and specificity in products stems from digital capabilities and value-added services that are bundled with physical products. Using digital capabilities such as self-awareness of technical health and operational status or business system connectivity helps industrial manufacturers differentiate.

Digital supply chain and smart factory
Digital technology on the shop floor and in the supply chain is not new. What is new is the way production and logistics are intelligently connected to the rest of the business and are able to deal with external impulses such as short-term demand and supply fluctuations or changes in the configuration of a customer order that require different materials, parts, and machining operations.

Servitization and new business models
As traditional products are commoditized, IM&C companies are shifting from selling physical products to providing complete solutions. Generating more than 50% of revenue from services is a common goal for manufacturers who are looking for higher profit margins and increased customer intimacy. The “digital twin for business” is a key requirement, representing the physical product over the entire lifecycle, including changing data points during manufacturing and installation as well as operational performance issues, the financial value created, and costs incurred up until the final phase of decommissioning.

View the full blog post on www.approyo.com 

Three principles that define intelligent ERP

In an age when the incumbent status is no defense against the competition, maintaining a sustained advantage requires you to meet customers where they are and provide services that will delight them. A strategy built on Intelligent ERP solutions serves this purpose by enhancing your efficiency, effectiveness, and agility. Intelligent ERP solutions provide business capabilities that will help you surpass current capabilities.

The Intelligent ERP Difference:

• Hands-free UX, digital assistance and instant insights deliver value-adding experiences
• Machine learning, AI and predictive analytics for increased automation and efficiency
• Reinvent and redefine processes with applied best practices built on the latest innovations

3 principles that define intelligent ERP

Digital age user experience
An award-winning user experience across the entire organization including a context-aware, business savvy digital assistant.

Automation
Intelligence and learning capabilities powered by AI, machine learning, NPL, predictive analytics and more, combined with real-time insight to action helps add automation to key functions, signal users when input is required and enable smarter and faster decisions.

Next-generation processes
Rethinking the way business gets done through the smart application of technology and innovation.

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... 

How can the Intelligent Enterprise impact Distribution

The digital economy is disruptive. Wholesale distribution companies need strategic priorities that drive transformation into intelligent enterprises. SAP powered by Approyo supports a reimagined set of end-to-end business scenarios that are part of a digital environment.

• Using value-added services to create new revenue sources - For years, most distributors have been providing value-added services, many of which have been free of charge. Leading distributors will take these value-added services to the next level and use them to significantly increase revenue and bottom-line profitability. Distributors should consider providing customers with a menu of options such as light manufacturing, sensor-based services, training and consulting services, or lending services.
• Becoming a real-time distributor - Companies everywhere face volatile customer demand and heightened service expectations. Innovative technologies can help resolve these issues by providing vital business information across the network, improving real-time analysis, and enabling better collaboration across departments and trading partners – thus transforming the supply chain into a responsive network.
• Building lasting customer relationships - Build trusted relationships with customers by empowering sales teams and personalizing buyer engagements. Provide a vast variety of ordering channels from call centers, Web sites, text messages, and in-person interaction to deliver the exact products and services customers need when they need them. The customer experience today constitutes a lifecycle, not just an interaction restricted to the front end of the enterprise.

Leading wholesale distributors are transitioning into information-centric companies that utilize new business models to gain competitive advantage and deliver premium, consistent customer service. Digital transformation fosters operational excellence, specifically across order management and inventory management processes, providing wholesale distributors with real-time information and the ability to drive immediate impact with intelligent ERP.

Responding to rapid changes
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 such as new business models, new regulations, and business events, such as mergers or acquisitions.

Simulation and analytics
The ability to respond quickly is an essential part of managing a wholesale distribution company. To do this, simulation, prediction, and analytical capabilities are important components. Data is critical for gaining the insight to make decisions. This insight must be at a granular level, so that decision-makers have the details they need to understand trends, opportunities, and risks, and quickly carry out what-if analysis using predictive algorithms.

Keeping data under control
Every wholesale distribution 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 ecosystem so that suppliers can stay up to date with a company’s orders, salespeople can see customer history for credit risk and stock information, and accurate delivery schedules can be provided.

Addressing innovative opportunities
Customers in every industry are demanding innovation. Companies are responding with new products and services that better meet individual needs. These new offerings impact every facet of business, not just the front office. Companies must address end-to-end (E2E) processes across departments and lines of business to deliver on new customer experiences, products, and services.

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 and respond to rapid changes, 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). Wholesale distributors focused on innovation or who prefer to be early adopters have already begun this journey.

Third-party Maintenance Companies are Killing Your Future ERP Innovation

If you are a company with an ERP solution in-place, you are looking at a very bright future. A future where the newest, latest and greatest technologies are coming at you. Your ERP solutions providers are there to support you in your company's growth. These ERP vendors are building software specifically designed to help your company in this new digital age. The old legacy technology is just outdated, and it needs to be refreshed, just like our phones, our bodies, and our minds.

Unfortunately, there are third-party maintenance companies who are taking organizations down a road that will eventually kill innovation within that organization. These so-called “third-party maintenance companies” are telling you and other organizations like you, that status quo is “good enough”. That is not what true innovative technology and business partners should be doing. “Good enough” is socialism. If you want to be a socialist company with zero updates or innovation for the next 15 years, then you're going to be in trouble.

I deal with these horrible “third-party maintenance companies” every day. I listen to their stories on how they help an organization stay on an old antiquated and outdated SAP system. They tell the companies that they will maintain old systems day in and day out for organizations at 90% savings.

Unfortunately, that 90% of savings is a lie a flat out lie.  No third-party maintenance company can provide these kinds of services legally and ethically. I know who these companies are, their executives and their sales team. And they are slick as snake oil. If you really want your company to grow and you think that your firm is cutting-edge, then you need to stay away from these organizations.

Let me give you an example. I personally know of a third-party maintenance company that took over the support for a company running SAP ECC 6. This company is actively looking to grow and innovate its technology footprint. Unfortunately, because they are under contract with the third partner maintenance company that forces them to continue to use outdated technology. The third-party maintenance company lied to the organization. They will not be able to succeed while they are stuck using old ERP solutions. They will have to continue to rely on the third-party maintenance company to try to create custom code to connect everything while paying more costs and losing out by not having access to new innovative technology.

If they would have stayed on a simple upgrade plan from SAP (yes there's a cost to that), instead of believing this third-party maintenance company, they would be able to upgrade their SAP environments around the globe right now. SAP and other software providers have development teams around the globe, upgrading and updating the software every day of the year. To be so naive to think that a software application like SAP, Microsoft or Oracle should not get a license revenue maintenance because of the updates and upgrades that they are providing to an organization is asinine.

Don’t allow your company to fall further and further behind but signing a long term (up to 15 years) contract with a third-party maintenance company. While there will always be a cost to a licensing and maintenance agreement, staying with old legacy technology will cost more at the end of the day.

Don’t let that slick snake oil salesmen sell you.

About the Author - Chris Carter, CEO of Approyo
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 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.

How can the Intelligent Enterprise impact the Manufacturing Industry

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.

Read the full blog post on www.approyo.com 

Digital Supply Chain - New innovations with SAP S/4HANA

Supply chains are now a competitive differentiator based on their speed, agility, and insight. Customers’ unique needs must be met with personalized products, new business models, greater intimacy through Internet of Things insights and deeper real-time prediction and intelligence across the enterprise.

Intelligent enterprises across all industries are focused on business outcomes and innovation by leveraging an intelligent suite of applications, intelligent technologies, and digital platforms. Discover how SAP S/4HANA and other supply chain solutions from SAP can help your business turn digital innovation into a competitive advantage.

Prediction of stock-in-transit arrival
The ability for warehouse managers to predict the arrival date of a shipment and manage delivery delays. Prebuilt set of KPIs supports robust analytics for the business scenarios. Early and efficient visibility for stock transport orders that leads to reliable processes for planning and scheduling of goods in transit.

Real-time Inventory
Live inventory management that enables unlimited simultaneous material movements and true transparency on inventory and material flows. Decreased stock buffers due to better transparency and insights.

Advanced ATP
Intelligent, real-time product availability check for sales, planned, and production orders. Includes scalable available-to-promise (ATP) for managing large transaction volumes and flexible allocation management capabilities. Provides back-order processing with intuitive priority classification and interactive exception handling.

Improve production planning
Coordinate manufacturing operations across your organization including material requirements, logistics, and receipts for proper material handling, work in process, and inventory. You can also make plan adjustments based on real-time information from the enterprise, suppliers, and the plant floor.

Accelerate manufacturing workflows
Plan and schedule maintenance tasks synchronizing labor, material, equipment and schedules. Execute planned and unplanned maintenance to ensure optimal operations including improved safety and environmental impact.

Single platform for warehouse management
Reduced TCO by landscape simplification through native warehouse management with SAP S/4HANA; a single warehousing platform for all warehousing operations, including optimization, automation, and labor management.

Single platform for transportation management
Reduced TCO by landscape simplification through native Transportation Management with SAP S/4HANA; a single platform for transportation management with basic and advanced shipping functionality and real-time embedded analytics.

Demand-Driven MRP (DDMRP)
Dynamic planning of replenishments with demand-driven MRP (DDMRP) that is fully integrated into existing MRP concept. Replenishment only for real demand and introduction of buffers at strategically important points.

How can the Intelligent Enterprise impact the Retail Industry

The digital economy is disruptive. Retailers need strategic priorities that drive transformation. SAP powered by Approyo supports a reimagined set of end-to -end business scenarios to support the strategic priorities of serving the digital consumer of today.

Radical change in the retail industry is occurring at a rapid pace. Changes in technologies, in business models, and in standards and with the ever-evolving customers require constant adaptation. Retail companies must be able to respond to rapidly changing conditions and offer targeted customer engagement at scale. How does a digital core with a true single source of truth help?

Stability and flexibility
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 with tailored real-time views delivering customer and business insights and enables flexibility for innovation to accommodate new business models, new regulations, and business events, such as mergers or acquisitions.

Immediate response
The ability to respond quickly is an essential part of managing a retail company. To do this, simulation, prediction, and analytical capabilities are important components. Data is critical for gaining the insight to make decisions. This insight must be at a granular level, so that decision-makers have the detail they need to understand trends, opportunities, and risks and quickly carry out what-if analysis using predictive algorithms.

Embedded intelligence
Innovative retailers leverage new technologies to support their digital transformation strategies and respond effectively to both encroaching competitors and new demands of the digitally empowered customer. Improved processing power is making machine learning applicable in more and more retail areas, enabling further optimization and automation of business processes as well as more impactful, personalized, and contextual consumer experiences.

Integrated and connected to the outside world
To take advantage of new opportunities and better meet individual needs, retailers must address end-to -end (E2E) processes across departments and lines of business to deliver on new customer experiences, products, and services. The Internet of Things (IoT) lets them connect to the outside world, driving unprecedented efficiency and optimization as well as new levels of customer connectivity and new retail business models.

Enhance and Extend Next-Generation Processes with Intelligent ERP
Bringing SAP S/4HANA and the SAP Leonardo technologies together as a digital core results in a more flexible and intelligent enterprise. To achieve next-generation business processes, retailers 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, block chain, and IoT. Intelligent ERP is immediate– empowering business users with insights to act in the moment; it is intelligent– going beyond automation to predictive suggestion; and it is integrated– not only between your departments, but for consumers and suppliers alike.

Approyo CEO Chris Carter to speak at the 2019 CloudEXPO

We are excited to announce that Approyo CEO, Chris Carter will be speaking on Wednesday, June 26 at the CloudEXPO in Silicon Valley. Chris's session, The Growth of Cloud Usage in the ERP World, will dive deep into the enterprise cloud computing world.

The Growth of Cloud Usage in the ERP World
GCP, Azure and AWS are dominating the "cloud" world, well now they are attacking the Enterprise with partnerships with SAP. Learn how and why these cloud firms see the enterprise ripe for the attack.

Wednesday, June 26, 4:20pm - 4:55pm
Register: https://sched.co/K6Ut

About the Cloud Expo
Now is the time for a truly global DX event, to bring together the leading minds from the technology world in a conversation about Digital Transformation. DX encompasses the continuing technology revolution, and is addressing society's most important issues throughout the entire $78 trillion 21st-century global economy.

DXWorldEXPO® has organized these issues along 10 tracks, 22 keynotes and general sessions, and a faculty of 222 of the world's top speakers.
DXWorldEXPO® has three major themes on its conference agenda:

Technology - The Revolution Continues
Economy - The 21st Century Emerges
Society - The Big Issues

Global 2000 companies have more than US$40 trillion in annual revenue - more than 50% of the world's entire GDP. The Global 2000 spends a total of US$2.4 trillion annually on enterprise IT. The average Global 2000 company has US$11 billion in annual revenue. The average Global 2000 company spends more than $600 million annually on enterprise IT. Governments throughout the world spend another US$500 billion on IT - much of it dedicated to new Smart City initiatives.

For the past 10 years CloudEXPO® helped drive the migration to modern enterprise IT infrastructures, built upon the foundation of cloud computing. Today's hybrid, multiple cloud IT infrastructures integrate Big Data, analytics, blockchain, the IoT, mobile devices, and the latest in cryptography and enterprise-grade security.

Digital Transformation is the key issue driving the global enterprise IT business. DX is most prominent among Global 2000 enterprises and government institutions.

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.

Read the full post at www.approyo.com 

Top Highlights from the 2019 SAP SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG Annual Conference

Another SAP SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG Annual Conference is in the books. 2019 will be remembered for a year of game-changing announcements and the Intelligent Enterprise continuing to grow momentum in the SAP ecosystem. We will have numerous blog posts over the next few weeks that will dive deeper into some of the key announcements and takeaways from our team of experts. For now, here are some of the major news announcements and highlights from the show.

SAP Paves the Path to Create Outcome-Based Intelligent Enterprises with Experience Management (XM)
Just three months after completing its acquisition of Qualtrics, SAP has rolled out 10 new offerings that combine experience data (X-data) with operational data (O-data) to measure and improve the four core experiences of business — customer, employee, product and brand. The rollout of this system sets a new standard in enterprise software

The combination enables organizations to continuously listen to the beliefs, emotions and intentions of customers, employees, suppliers, partners and other stakeholders. These new offerings — four for customer experience (CX), three for employee experience and three in market research — embed X-data directly into an enterprise’s applications, such as its CRM, ERP or HCM systems, to drive continuous action and improvement.

SAP Expands App Portfolio on Both iOS and Mac®
SAP and Apple announced that CORE ML®, Apple’s on-device machine learning technology, will be available for the first time as part of the SAP Cloud Platform SDK for iOS. The next version of the SAP Cloud Platform SDK, available later this month, enables businesses to create custom, intelligent iOS apps powered by SAP Leonardo. Machine learning models will automatically download to iPhone® and iPad® so apps can run offline, and then dynamically update while connected to SAP Cloud Platform.

Through the partnership with Apple, SAP has rebuilt its most popular mobile apps for SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Concur solutions, along with SAP Asset Manager, to run natively on iOS. These apps are fully integrated with iPhone and iPad, to maximize security, performance and the latest platform innovations from Apple. SAP today announced it will expand its native iOS experience across its broader applications portfolio, starting with SAP Ariba solutions.

Building on the success of its iOS efforts, SAP also announced it will expand its app offerings to the Mac, with new apps that match the power and ease of use of SAP iOS apps. The new native Mac apps will bring the richness of the SAP iOS experience to the desktop world.
Read more about SAP and Apple...

SAP Extends Its Leadership in AI-Powered Intelligent ERP with SAP S/4HANA
SAP announced a series of innovations to SAP S/4HANA to make it easier to add artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, and to customize apps. This will help companies improve business results, automate business processes and make accurate predictions for better decisions.

With more than 100 out-of-the-box AI and robotic process automation–powered capabilities, the 1905 release of SAP S/4HANA Cloud solidifies its position as the most intelligent ERP on the market today. The new additions, being released in May 2019, cement our goal announced in 2018 to automate 50 percent of manual tasks in the ERP system over the following three years. Examples of new AI capabilities include:

• Intelligent accruals management: Allows closing books faster with automated conversion of purchase order data into posted accruals
• Defect code proposal: Speeds up quality checks and increases data quality simultaneously with automated categorization of defects based on free-text entry
• Financial journal entry with intelligent robotic process automation: Automates the collection, extraction and validation of financial journal data from e-mails, and mass uploads the data into SAP S/4HANA

Read more about this announcement on SAP.com...

Introducing SAP Data Warehouse Cloud
SAP is introducing SAP Data Warehouse Cloud, which brings the power of SAP HANA performance and flexible modeling along with SAP BW/4HANA structured modelling into one enterprise-class cloud data warehouse. With pre-built templates, integration to SAP, hybrid modes with SAP HANA and SAP BW/4HANA, and other data sources, as well as the power of SAP HANA, SAP Data Warehouse Cloud delivers faster results, simple cloud-based end-user analytics, and the flexibility to control costs and pay-for-what-you-use.

One of the capabilities of SAP Data Warehouse Cloud is powerful, integrated analytics-as-a-service with SAP Analytics Cloud.

SAP Analytics Cloud is continuing to build on existing augmented analytics capabilities that infuse artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning into business intelligence and enterprise planning workflows in order to help users go from insight to action in a fraction of the time. The latest innovations push conversational analytics to the next level, with the user’s search and natural-language processing (NLP) experience in SAP Analytics Cloud now expanded to understand and leverage semantics across all of your data.

SAP HANA Cloud Services
SAP HANA Cloud Services will be the gateway to a single source of truth for all data, including transactional and analytical data, as well as structured and unstructured data across on premise and cloud. SAP HANA Cloud Services aim to make data of any size and shape available to people, algorithms, and data-driven applications with online access, providing cloud qualities like low total cost of ownership (TCO), elasticity, serverless principles, high availability, resilience, and autonomous behavior.

With SAP HANA at the core, the new solution will be built on the fastest in-memory computing engine. By making this engine elastic, it will be possible to scale out indefinitely, enabling customers to add more resources as they require — and reduce them when they don’t need them anymore. Building on technologies such as SAP IQ, SAP HANA Cloud Services also will also offer an SQL data lake as a storage layer at minimum cost.

This is just a small sampling of some of the major news and announcements at the 2019 SAP SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG Annual Conference. Our CEO, Chris Carter and new CTO, Sean Gilmour will provide you with more updates throughout the next few days and week. Plus we will more videos and announcements from the show floor.

SAP Announces First Quarter 2019 Results

SAP Announced its first quarter results on www.sap.com. The results continue to show growth for SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA. This growth mirrors Approyo's growth and accolades throughout 2019 and align with our vision as the premier SAP Platform as a service partner.

Business Performance - Financial Highlights First Quarter 2019
In the first quarter, new cloud bookings were up 32% (26% at constant currencies). Cloud revenue grew 45% year over year to €1.56 billion (IFRS), up 48% (non-IFRS) and 41% (non-IFRS at constant currencies). Software license revenue was up 4% year over year to €650 million (IFRS), up 4% (non-IFRS) and 1% (non-IFRS at constant currencies). New cloud and software order entry was up 17% (13% at constant currencies) year over year in the first quarter. Cloud and software revenue grew 16% year over year to €5.04 billion (IFRS), up 16% (non-IFRS) and 12% (non-IFRS at constant currencies). Total revenue grew 16% year over year to €6.09 billion (IFRS), up 16% (non-IFRS) and 12% (non-IFRS at constant currencies).

SAP’s rapidly expanding cloud business together with solid growth in support revenue continued to drive the share of more predictable revenue, which grew by one percentage point year-over-year to 72% in the first quarter.

As previously indicated, the IFRS operating profit in the first quarter was impacted by recognizing the expected cost of SAP’s 2019 restructuring (€886 million) as well as higher acquisition-related charges and share-based compensation primarily due to the Qualtrics acquisition.

This resulted in an IFRS operating loss of -€136 million (Q1 2018: operating profit of €1,025 million). In contrast, Non-IFRS profit was up 19% at €1,467 million (up 13% at constant currencies). Earnings per share were -€0.10 (IFRS) (Q1 2018: €0.59) and up 24% at €0.90 (non-IFRS). Operating cash flow for the first three months was €2.80 billion, up 9% year-over-year. Free cash flow increased 10% year-over-year to €2.37 billion. At the end of the first quarter, net liquidity was -€6.19 billion. Segment Performance First Quarter 2019

SAP’s three reportable segments “Applications, Technology & Services”, “Business Network” and “Customer and Experience Management” showed the following performance.

Applications, Technology & Services (AT&S)
In the first quarter, segment revenue in AT&S was up 12% to €4.99 billion year-over-year (up 9% at constant currencies).

SAP S/4HANA
SAP S/4HANA is at the core of the Intelligent Enterprise. With S/4HANA, customers automate more and more of their business processes
enabling employees to focus on higher-value tasks. It detects patterns, predicts outcomes and suggests actions empowering companies
across all industries to reinvent their business models for the digital economy.
This quarter, SAP S/4HANA Cloud was named as a Leader in The IDC MarketScape: Worldwide SaaS and Cloud-enabled Operational ERP

Applications 2019 Vendor Assessment. IDC recognizes SAP S/4HANA Cloud as an intelligent ERP that enables various business processes such as idea to design, procure to pay, plan to production, order to cash, offer to project, and core finance.

S/4HANA adoption grew to more than 10,900 customers, up 30% year over year. In the first quarter, over 40% of the additional S/4HANA
customers were net new.

View the complete Q1 results at: https://www.sap.com/docs/download/investors/2019/sap-2019-q1-statement.pdf

Approyo expands team, adds Sean Gilmour as new CTO

​Approyo, a leading enterprise SAP HANA Solutions Provider headquartered in Milwaukee announces the addition of Sean Gilmour as CTO.

Mr. Gilmour joins Approyo with decades of expertise. Most recently he led the Global Applications and Big Data Practice for Dell EMC.

“I have been working on and around SAP for almost 7 years now, and wanted to take it to the next level,” says Sean Gilmour. “I believe Approyo to be one of the top SAP partners globally. I am thrilled to help them continue to grow and doing what I love, says Gilmour.

Gilmour resides in the San Francisco, CA area and will be working directly with our clients, partners and team to help grow the Approyo footprint in the United States and around the globe.

“I would personally like to welcome Sean to the team,” says Chris Carter, CEO of Approyo. “Having worked with and known him for many years, it is a pleasure to have an executive of his caliber and experience inside the organization as we continue to grow. His experience, knowledge, partnerships, as well as his level of technical expertise, are second to none in our SAP ecosystem, which will mean great growth,” says Carter.