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
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Digital Transformation for Life Sciences with SAP powered by Approyo

In today’s digital economy, patients are more accountable for their care and have greater access to their personal health information. Patients and payers are seeking personalized treatments with superior outcomes, but cost-effectively. Increasingly, value-based and outcome-based reimbursement are being floated as reforms to healthcare systems, primarily in the United States.

There is immense pressure on life sciences companies to do more for less. They are facing new price pressures and competitive threats. New entrants into the marketplace have changed the way they deliver products, forcing them to adopt new approaches or face stagnant or declining revenue growth and margins. Digitalization is forcing life sciences companies to rethink their business models and restructure the value chain. New value will come from the ability to digitalize the model and accelerate innovation.

To execute on their digital strategy, life sciences companies will need to reengineer their business processes. Life sciences companies with a global presence must have lean processes that are consistently executed. They must get away from siloed processes that are implemented and executed differently at different sites. This will help ensure that the support systems (process and technology) can scale up quickly to match the company’s growth. Life science companies must also evaluate if they have the right technology platform that can deliver on the vision. The winning platform will require an IT architecture that provides both stability and long-term reliability for core enterprise processes, while allowing flexibility in areas of frequent change.

The digital core is the foundation for the core processes that need to run consistently and in a flexible manner. It provides uninterrupted, real-time transactions and analytics, the ability to work with extraordinary large volumes of data, and connectivity to line-of-business extensions that enable supporting processes, such as talent sourcing and networks. To succeed, firms will need to put in place a coherent digital vision with clearly articulated offensive and defensive strategies. They will need to address emerging business models to drive outcome-based engagements and achieve connected health. They must satisfy new and evolving compliance regulations, outsource manufacturing, and drive operations based on the Internet of Things (IoT). Increasingly patients are adopting a connected health system by resorting to wearables. Life science companies can leverage such devices and build apps that enable the physicians and the manufacturers to understand patient behavior in order to provide the right guidance and treatment as well as improve products for enhanced wellness.

To comply with newer regulations such as serialization and identification of medicinal products (IDMP), companies must have high-performing databases with close integration to their inventory management systems. For global pharmaceutical companies, serialization can easily add a few billion records into their databases. Furthermore, such data must be stored for long periods, retrieved quickly, and reported to various entities. The right technology platform, along with niche compliance solutions, will enable companies to comply with these evolving regulations effectively.

The right technology platform that delivers streamlined integration to supply chain partners and outsource manufacturers can help companies get their products manufactured on time, efficiently, and at much lower cost. For product visibility across the extended supply chain, optimal equipment maintenance, and effective distribution of specialized products, IoT device-based data and a rich analytics platform become the new imperatives. By leveraging IoT, life science companies can significantly cut costs on equipment maintenance, react in real time to exceptions while products are being delivered, and gain better insights into their product distribution.
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SAP S/4HANA was specifically developed to represent the digital core in this bimodal IT architecture. It provides life sciences companies with a proven framework to adopt industry best practices while attaining operational excellence – specifically, but not exclusively, across core industry capabilities,such as real-time supply chain and digitalized sales.

A comprehensive solution for life science companies
Life science companies need to manage their product shipments very carefully. Some products, such as blood derivatives, plasma products, and biologics, must be shipped in a temperature-controlled environment. Other products, such as medical devices, must be guarded against exposure to light, shock, and other factors. SAP S/4HANA with other SAP solutions can monitor such parameters in real time during shipment. In combination with transportation management and event management modules, the software provides functions to send out real-time alerts. Such alerts can save shipments if product is not yet damaged. The software also helps reduce costs and time in aborting shipments when the product is damaged. The analytics provided by the SAP Leonardo digital innovation system can help predict which shipping lines are best and safe for continued engagement. The process below illustrates how temperature-controlled distribution is tracked.

Read the full blog post on www.approyo.com

SAP Demystified: SAP Fiori

The SAP Fiori design language is used in SAP applications, including the S/4HANA and C/4HANA suites, SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP Data Hub, SAP Ariba and others. Applications that use the Fiori design language are often called Fiori applications or Fiori user interfaces (UIs). SAP Fiori designs can be implemented using almost any technology, though SAP provides Fiori-compliant UI libraries in its SAPUI5 JavaScript library, as well as the SAP Cloud Platform software development kit (SDK) for iOS and SAP Cloud Platform SDK for Android.

SAP Fiori 2.0
SAP Fiori 2.0 was released in October 2016 and is the leading design for all SAP applications providing a harmonized user experience across on premise and cloud solutions. A new visual theme – named Belize – comes along with light and dark flavors. Using SAP S/4HANA, the UI Theme Designer allows you to adapt the theme to your corporate identity.

• With SAP Fiori 2.0, the SAP Fiori Launchpad is your central and role-based entry point  to access all apps.
• With the viewport concept, the user’s desktop has been expanded to the left and to the right. While users can access the Me Area to the left, notifications on the right keep them well informed.     
• The SAP Fiori 2.0 concept also includes new SAP Fiori elements – Overview Pages, List Reports, and Object Pages – which can be easily developed using SAP Web IDE

Types of Fiori apps:

• Transactional applications designed for interacting with individual business objects such as customers or sales orders, managing lists of business objects or carrying out a specific business process such as posting of financial documents.
• Analytical applications meant to analyze a business question or visualize a business process or set of key performance indicators (KPIs) at a higher level.
• Fact Sheets, designed to display all the relevant information regarding a specific business object in one place.

Functional Capabilities
SAP Fiori UX design principles - The design concept is based on five core principles that combine to deliver a deeply satisfying user experience:

• Role-based - Deliver the right information at the right time via multi-faceted user interfaces
• Adaptive - Get instant, relevant insight – whether using mobile apps or a desktop computer
• Simple - Zero in on your most important tasks, functions, and activities
• Coherent - Deliver a consistent UX across the enterprise – whether you need to fulfill a sales order, review your latest KPIs, or manage leave requests
• Delightful - Enrich your work experience with intuitive,  easy-to-use SAP Fiori apps

Modern user experience
SAP Fiori 2.0 is a modern UX that encompasses visual design, information architecture, and interaction patterns:

• Visual design – SAP Fiori 2.0 offers a refined visual language. Clean and consistent layouts throughout the user interface convey the content with clarity. Experience modern, visually pleasing aesthetics with a strong focus on ease of use 
• Information architecture - Give business users ready access to the information they need to complete their tasks
• Interaction patterns - Harness simple and intuitive interactive patterns to boost productivity company-wide

SAP S/4HANA and SAP Fiori
With SAP S/4HANA software using the SAP Fiori 2.0 user experience (UX), you can simplify user onboarding and increase productivity. From the SAP Fiori launchpad as the single entry point, to the domain-specific information and actions, you gain the relevant information you need at a glance to get work done.

Read the full blog post on www.approyo.com

Digital Transformation for Research and Development with SAP powered by Approyo

The market is experiencing a disruptive shift in customer demand for new, extensive, smart, and personalized products. The journey of a new product initiates from the research and development (R&D) department, where significant difference can be made to improve features and reduce cost. A successful R&D department brings new formulations and designs to life with speed and accuracy based on inputs from the marketplace, customers, and latest technologies. R&D integrates with downstream departments to manufacture, sell, and service products with higher quality and lower cost while continuously iterating formulations and designs to create more profitable, desirable, and reliable products.

SAP's industry-leading portfolio of cloud and industry-specific solutions is uniquely positioned to enable our customers’ digital transformation across all key aspects of their business value chain. SAP Leonardo capabilities combined with SAP S/4HANA as the digital core provide an intelligent, integrated, fast, and visual product innovation platform with built-in compliance. The SAP S/4HANA R&D/Engineering solution enables informed decision-making in ideation and concept development, portfolio and project management, product development, and compliance management. Smarter products are brought to the market faster and with full compliance.

With the new Industry 4.0 capabilities, customers can now personalize the product design in real time to meet their needs through the variant configuration engine. The production order moves with minimal human intervention through downstream processes such as product engineering, production engineering, and manufacturing to serve a “lot size of one” to the customers. Another paradigm shift is the capability to deliver consumer-centric business models so that you can “uberize” your business before someone else does.

SAP solutions powered by Approyo enable companies to substantially enhance, simplify, and visualize the entire R&D process from idea to product.

Increase revenue from new products by offering wider variants and personalized and smart products  - Run design and development processes on live insights into product performance and customer needs. Enable individualized products with flexible and high-performing configuration, formulation, and classification capabilities.

Accelerate time to market with real-time project control, informed product decisions, and streamlined compliance - Analyze live performance of the project portfolio with predictive insights at any stage of the innovation process. Reuse designs and recipes, work in an integrated development environment, handover to manufacturing seamlessly, and leverage embedded compliance to launch new products faster.

Reduce R&D expense by informed product decisions, integration of formulation and design tools, and efficient supplier collaboration
For discrete industries: Design and simulate in an integrated development environment (supporting mechanical, electrical, electronics, and software disciplines). Synchronize all downstream processes internally and externally with harmonized and consistent integration of different design tools.

For process industries: Streamline development of recipes with full process support from first trials to definition-of-process parameters, efficient reuse of existing formulations and specifications, and synchronization of all downstream product development needs internally and externally.

Improve profitability by having insights on cost of new products early on and across the lifecycle - Reduce existing product cost and launch new products with competitive pricing by simulating the impact of design decisions. Calculate cost and other dimensions for new products in the early stage of the product lifecycle to quickly identify cost drivers and compare alternatives.

Improve profitability of customer projects, such as engineer to order - Detailed project cost controlling and forecasting, including issue and change management.

Reduce compliance costs and recalls through embedded compliance in the R&D processes - Compliance checks are embedded in the system for R&D processes. The coverage extends to markets, industry, materials, and downstream processes.

Read the full blog post on www.approyo.com

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 the Technology Industry with SAP powered by Approyo

Although high tech is finding itself in nearly every product and service across all industries, high-tech companies are not themselves immune to disruption. Factors such as new entrants, blatant IP theft, and knowledge leakage due to key employee turnover accelerate the rate of disruption.

Strategic Priorities in a Digital Economy
The digital economy is disruptive. High-tech companies need strategic priorities that drive transformation. SAP supports a reimagined set of E2E business scenarios to support the strategic priorities of working in a digital environment.

• Subscribing to outcomes -  High-tech companies are shifting from selling products and services to selling measurable results that are relevant to their customers. Becoming an outcome provider requires a different business model –one where customers can pay for the outcome. As high-tech companies realize this, they are increasingly acquiring, building, and joining the platforms and ecosystems that are needed for the outcome economy
• Realizing a digital supply chain - Transform your supply chain into a responsive network. Companies everywhere face volatile customer demand and heightened expectations of responsiveness. 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 making the supply chain more responsive.
• Providing digital smart products - Digitally connect your products and transform them into solutions. Enabling products to provide intelligence about their usage and to be upgraded remotely any time with the latest features required by customers allows for differentiation in an industry where products get rapidly commoditized. Data-based services can be monetized, and individualized offerings can be provided cost-effectively. Leverage IoT technology to connect products to R&D and sales processes.
• Achieving customer intimacy - Putting the end customers‘ 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

So, how does the incumbent not only defend itself but also become the disrupter? 

Plan less, experiment more
Many refer to the high-tech industry as dynamic, however, it is better characterized as frenetic. Product launch delays, yield losses, and IP disputes can all lead to unexpected events that can throw off a perfectly crafted plan. However, for some, this also represents an advantage. Those who can leverage their data and incorporate more simulation and other sophisticated analytic techniques to model their environment will respond much faster to unforeseen events.

Harness the intelligence of the network
High-tech companies have a long-standing history of developing complex supply chain networks to enable high efficiency, which keeps prices down and quality high. These networks have evolved to handle more than just physical goods; they are now conducting commerce, distributing IP, and contain component pricing awareness. The data required for sophisticated decision-making has now shifted to the network, providing the next frontier for data exploration.

Make every meeting a decision making meeting
Most meetings are best described as information-sharing sessions. Participants often spend most of their time preparing and reconciling reports yet often end up with poor meeting outcomes due to a lack of current information. With the unprecedented speed of competition within the industry, executives need real-time information to make prompt decisions. Adopting innovative solutions to support rapid and informed decision-making can shift the focus from reporting to achieving outcomes.

Recognize the Knowledge Worker
Arguably, the most valuable asset for a technology company is the productivity of the knowledge worker. Far too often, these employees are straddled with excessive data preparation tasks involving spreadsheets and must spend precious time filtering through extraneous data. This leaves little time to focus on business outcomes. Decision support tools have evolved to take the burden of data preparation off individuals and provide them with predictive capabilities –accelerating productivity.

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, 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). High-tech organizations that have big innovation appetites or prefer to be early adopters have already begun this journey.

Read the full blog post on www.approyo.com