Bridging cutting edge technologies with common sense at Delaware
Richard Evans, Head of Digital Supply Chain at Delaware, on the technological innovations shaping the modern supply chain.
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Located in over 20 countries, technology consultancy Delaware’s cutting-edge solutions and work with key partners like Microsoft and SAP have enabled the company to deploy innovative solutions for clients worldwide.
or Head of Digital Supply
Chain Richard Evans, Delaware’s expertise lies in the company’s ability to apply emerging technologies seamlessly to a client’s circumstances.
“We help our customers become better at running their supply chains,” says Richard. “We help them innovate, and we help them apply these innovations to their key problems. I’ve always been curious about how the physical and digital worlds meet, and in this role I’m helping clients solve problems that directly address that concept.
“Very often, we turn to technology to solve our problems, but at Delaware we like to apply a lens of common sense –one informs the other. Because if you’re having technology make decisions that are impacting real world safety, you need to be very comfortable that you’ve got a model that works, and will continue to work years down the line. Our approach is taking the data the technology provides us, and working out what the next best step is based on that information.”
Alongside this strategy, Richard has been paying attention to the key trends shaping the supply chain industry, and the way this is impacting clients’ specific needs.
Richard. “We’re seeing significantly more focus on hyper-personalisation within the supply chain. In our personal lives, there are so many more products available now where you can get your name on them or your own logo. Services are customised to your tastes and preferences. This concept is spilling over into our professional expectations, meaning that everyone across the supply chain is having to react faster to create these tailored products or services, especially with demand rising.
“A lot has changed recently,” reflects
“This is particularly challenging in relation to current geopolitical uncertainties. In some cases, companies are having to significantly adapt and redirect inputs, transforming their supply chain completely. With any disruption, the impact is far reaching. If an incident reduces capacity in a major shipping route, it’s not just affecting everything on the one ship causing the incident, but all the goods on the ships stuck behind it.”
Richard Evans
“We partner heavily with SNP – they are incredibly helpful with data mapping, even in cases where master data is changed significantly”
One crucial area people don’t typically think about when considering disruptions, Richard suggests, is internal supply chains.
“We do a lot of work with companies in asset intensive industries, such as energy and heavy manufacturing,” says Richard. “When you see news relating to the supply chain, it’s typically about end stock and raw materials, but what people don’t often think about is the spares and the inventory that you need to keep those machines running.
“What we’re looking at the moment with one particular customer right now is their internal supply chain and maintenance spares, because they’re a business that does a lot of maintenance out in the field. This is where VertiGIS comes in for us, because they help us visualise geospatial characteristics of an operating environment.”
Introducing SNP – Your partner for selective SAP data transformations
As an SAP Gold Partner, SNP has been supporting companies worldwide to carry out business and data transformation projects in their SAP systems for over 25 years.
SNP’s selective data transformation platform CrystalBridge® and approach, known as BLUEFIELD™, provides a streamlined and efficient approach to managing data within your SAP landscape.
At SNP we understand that supply chain companies have a unique set of challenges and requirements when it comes to SAP data transformation projects.
Supply chain operations generate large volumes of data, and managing the velocity at which this data is created, processed and transformed can be difficult.
Preserving accurate and consistent master data across the supply chain is crucial. Challenges arise in harmonising master data across different systems and ensuring its accuracy.
Maintaining continuous operations is crucial for supply chain companies and extended periods of downtime are not an option.
CrystalBridge® and BLUEFIELD™ offer many benefits associated with supply chain operations:
Reduced complexity and migration time
A thorough scan of your systems means you know exactly what you are working
with, and what you need to do. Focusing on migrating specific data, essential for ongoing or upcoming operations rather than migrating entire data sets, minimises the complexity and time involved in the migration. It reduces data volume and helps focus efforts on transforming the data with the highest business impact.
Data transformation that suits your business
Customisation of data transformation processes to meet specific business needs enables companies to define rules and criteria for data transformation, aligning data to business requirements. This streamlines mandatory elements of migration journeys.
Optimal system performance
Selectively transforming and loading only the necessary data guarantees optimal system performance, ensuring systems operate efficiently and deliver timely and accurate information to support supply chain processes.
Manageable and compliant
Identifying data in your system with archiving potential – or even decommissioning entire legacy systems and moving them to more cost-effective, easily accessible storage solutions –ensures compliance and slows down future data growth. The ability to set up retention management, legal hold and data destruction provides additional peace of mind.
Minimal business disruption
Supply chain companies require continuous operations. Our nearzero downtime approach minimises
system downtime during the transformation process. A selective data transformation (SDT) approach means business interruptions are kept to an absolute minimum resulting in no impact on business as usual.
Agility and flexibility
SNP provides companies with the agility to adapt to changing business needs. Flexibility to selectively transform and update data allows for quick adjustments to accommodate evolving requirements in the business landscape.
Cost efficiency
Selective data transformation reduces the amount of data being processed and migrated. This, in turn, can lead to cost savings in terms of storage, processing power and overall infrastructure requirements. It also removes several pre-project steps – meaning only investing time in the things that add value and are relevant to your future state.
Enhanced reporting and analytics
By transforming and preparing data in a structured manner, SDT facilitates more accurate and meaningful reporting and analytics. Supply chain companies can derive valuable insights from their data, enabling better decision-making, forecasting and strategic planning. Our data integration software, SNP Glue, helps to bridge the gap between SAP and non-SAP data by smoothly providing SAP data to your cloud innovation platform in real-time and in a format ready for analytics.
The future of GIS for utilities is here.
Enterprise spatial management solutions by VertiGIS.
Manage the entire life cycle of your network assets consistently, in one system, and across all domains with VertiGIS Networks. From planning, construction and commissioning to maintenance, servicing and renewal, our web-based spatial solutions support you – online and offline.
Synchronise your spatial data with SAP and other systems (SCADA, ERP, CRM) using VertiGIS Integrator and benefit immediately from consistent data sets and efficient map-centric workflows in both systems.
“VertiGIS does a really good job at mapping out those networks – whether it’s pipes, substations or dams”
Global software development company
VertiGIS has been a key partner for Delaware in this endeavour, providing a visual aid to efficient operational planning.
“VertiGIS helps us visualise assets,” explains Richard. “If you take water companies as an example, they might need to repair a pipe. But a pipe is not physically accessible, it’s underground. So we need to know where it’s rooted to conduct those repairs, and VertiGIS does a really good job at mapping out those networks – whether it’s pipes, substations or dams – and bringing it into a real-world context. It’s crucial to get this right, because if you dig in the wrong place, you have the potential to release hydrocarbons unexpectedly. But with VertiGIS, we can plan things objectively and execute it correctly the first time.”
Technological innovations such as this have been critical for Delaware, and the company is now exploring the use of automation solutions to help clients build more efficient supply chains.
“At its heart, Delaware is a technology company, and keeping abreast of the latest innovations from our partners, including SAP and Microsoft, helps our
clients deliver their best outcomes,” says Richard. “We’re running a really interesting investigation at the moment, to attempt to reduce the amount of spares in our clients maintenance supply chains. These spares sit in vans and consume energy as they are moving around the country, so an innovative, operational redesign and the setting of stock levels will help to reduce working capital and obsolescence and also consume less energy on a day-to-day basis.”
So, what technologies are Delaware leveraging for this investigation?
“We’re looking to SAP’s MRO (maintenance, repair and operations) capability, to ensure we’re getting stock levels right,” says Richard. “This is a reasonably straightforward form of AI, because it’s going to involve a forecast – but instead of forecasting sales, we’re forecasting consumption into work orders to inform decision-making about stock levels.
“Another phase of this process involves utilising our key partnerships to connect Microsoft Copilot with SAP, democratising the way people can interact with enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. If someone
needs to know how much stock is in a location, or when the next purchase order is arriving, then they type that into the system and can easily access it. We don’t want our clients having to waste time on complex processes when all they want is a piece of information.
“We first began this process when we integrated Microsoft Teams with SAP around six years ago, but the technology at the time didn’t have the capability to use context when answering a question. That’s been a really exciting development for not just us, but Microsoft and SAP, because no one’s ever done this before.”
Here, Tim Rowe, Head of Microsoft Strategy at Delaware, joins us to explain how these exciting developments are transforming the end-to-end supply chain.
“With this in mind, we have built a groundbreaking solution connecting Microsoft Copilot and SAP’s platforms. In essence, this will allow you to have a conversation with SAP and allow us to deliver a true end-to-end business process. With our current assets, you can create purchase orders, query master data and send order requests, all from Microsoft Teams. You can even create a new customer and associated sales orders in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and appear in SAP virtually instantly.”
“As a business, we’re working to implement solutions based on SAP and Microsoft Dynamics,” says Tim. “During Sapphire 2024, SAP announced they are going to prioritise collaborative ERP by integrating Joule with Microsoft CoPilot. For me, this acknowledges many business processes start and finish outside the traditional boundaries of an ERP platform and therefore, combining the power of both platforms will enable a genuine step change in process efficiency.
Tim sees the use of AI in this new tool as being particularly transformative in streamlining processes such as this.
“CoPilot for Finance is a Microsoft application to support Accounts Receivable processes such as sending an email requesting payment, with supporting sales invoices, without leaving Microsoft Outlook. Something that once may have taken half an hour – can now take thirty seconds. And Delaware is the first partner in the
world to build this connector to SAP Public Cloud.
Microsoft and SAP we can make these processes even easier.
“Generative tools can significantly reduce the time taken on tasks like this, and by building a tool to connect
“SAP and Microsoft both do a great job in providing rich capabilities for automation. But while those capabilities stop within the boundaries of that application, business processes typically do not. We want to automate from the very first touch point and take it from that initial demand through the entire business process. That’s the difference.”
By implementing these processes, Delaware is able to prioritise helping clients with streamlining solutions.
“Our focus is on efficiency,” says Richard. “We’ve developed our own, internal version of ChatGPT that we use to help us prepare answers for bids that we’re working on, which helps us from a company standpoint. Outside of that, we’re trying to warm people up to using conversational language models to help them in their day-to-day lives.
“It doesn’t have to be groundbreaking, but if AI can save you ten minutes of your time, then you’ve got ten minutes to do something else. It’s really that simple. There’s always going to be purists that want to do things manually, but having an eye on the future is what improves business outcomes.”
A part of this planning for future development, Richard explains, is the company’s partnership with German IT consultancy SNP Group.
“We partner with technology providers to deliver the right solution to our clients,” says Richard. “If I categorise the technologies we use into two areas, we have the technologies that help deliver products efficiently, and the technologies that are used in operations after a big project has gone live.
Tim Rowe, Head of Microsoft Strategy at Delaware
“In the case of the first area, we’re seeing more and more businesses transformed through acquisitions and divestments – these are significant events in a company’s history, and our current technological capabilities offer a rich opportunity for harmonisation.
“The actual methodology used can vary depending on the context of the merger or the acquisition, but we utilise our partners such as SNP with their CrystalBridge® product to help us accelerate these transformations, because it allows for a much simpler data journey between two systems.
“We partner heavily with SNP – they are incredibly helpful with data mapping, even in cases where master data is changed significantly. In some cases, it’s just the only thing that will do the job. If a client has a complex data
journey they need help with, that’s where we’ll go first.
“Our partnerships with leading companies – SAP, Microsoft, VertiGIS and SNP being key examples – are crucial. We’re not trying to be a one stop shop for every technology, but we want to be able to connect clients with key players.”
This work in connecting clients is underpinned by Delaware’s commitment to utilising AI, which has come at a crucial time, explains Tim.
“There have been five waves of innovation since the Industrial Revolution,” says Tim. “We are now in the sixth. Each wave gets shorter than the previous one, and they each have a material impact on power, transportation and communications.
“What history has shown us is that when we have these waves of innovation, we tend to overestimate their impact in the short term, but drastically underestimate their longterm impact. Things start to happen really quickly once you get to that tipping point, which is where we are with GenAI.
“When we’re looking at this as a company, we’re looking at how people and companies are embracing this technology. There are a broad range of use cases, and many businesses are targeting low-hanging fruit – primarily customer service, knowledge and content generation.
“At Delaware, we have to respond to that. So, we’ve developed a four-step process to guide our clients through the adoption of generative AI, starting with an exec briefing to make sure the board understands what this technology is, where and how it can be used and how it can be taken into production.”
The company has implemented AI solutions in several client areas – this includes GenAI solutions to create product marketing materials for a large European pharmaceutical business, enriched distress signals for marine vessels to sanction reports for a bank.
These innovations, alongside Delaware’s key partnerships, gives Richard an optimistic outlook for the future of the company.
“The beauty of Delaware is that, due to the nature of the company, we can never be sold,” explains Richard. “That’s why a lot of clients come to us, because when they’ve worked with previous consultancies that have then merged with another company or been acquired, the tone changes. We’re not going to do that.
“Our approach to clients is founded in the knowledge that we’re running the company today for the people who are going to be working in it tomorrow. There’s a community feel here that can’t be found anywhere else.”
Learn more about Delaware at delaware.co.uk.
ADDED VALUE
Getting away from the screen
“In the last few years, I’ve picked up mountaineering and indoor climbing,” says Richard. “I look at screens for a living, so once I’m done with work I don’t want to sit and play video games all evening. Instead, I’ve been prioritising physical activity outside of work, and taking any opportunity I can to get out in the outdoors.”
The opportunity to self develop
“My daughter recently graduated with a degree in chemistry from the University of Leeds,” celebrates Richard. “My wife and I have always encouraged her to take self development opportunities, and she’s off to Cambodia in a few weeks to become a diving instructor, because she’s interested in going into marine conservation. We’ve always instilled the importance of living your best life, because you never know what’s going to happen.”
Currently reading…
Richard recommends the book Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as If Your Life Depended on It by Chris Voss.
“This book is a sales and negotiation training manual, written by a former hostage negotiator,” explains Richard. “It’s an interesting read, because of the experiences he’s had. I’ve been listening to it as an audiobook on long car journeys, which is a great use of that time.”
Connect with Richard