RETURNS THE ENGINE TO SEARCH SAFE & SMART CITIES SUPPLY CHAIN RISK
MURPHY
BE EVERYTHING? BE EPICOR.
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EDITOR’S WORDS
We need “introprise” tech, not enterprise technology
The word “enterprise” is an expansive one, suggestive of big corporations, big customer bases and a myriad of functions and subsidiaries each needing their own solutions.
It’s fair to say that the big ERP vendors are chasing the bigger sorts of customers, and more specialized vendors are very happy to say this to ERP Today in person to showcase their specilizations. Both types of vendors are allowed to do, say and target as they wish - and the point of this editor’s letter is not to say that “baiting big” is breaking bad in any sense for the customer. It can be bad if the customer has forked out for an offering that doesn’t meet their needs - but that’s an obvious tale, one as old as time and true of transactions in any industry.
What the conversation really needs to pivot to when it comes to the debate between big vendors and niche ones is one of opportunity. A giant vendor can hold as many retailers, manufacturers and accountancies in the palm of its hands. Money is made, and - hopefully - clients are happy.
A niche vendor meanwhile can hold its fair share of certain industries and rely on them for continued relations and the ever-lucrative “lock in” of a cloud subscription. Money is, once again, made.
But there may be an opportunity missed in not seeing the woods for the trees. In conversation with Epicor for this issue’s cover story, I came across a startling realization: what if a vendor could hold the great part of an entire industry in its hands, and somehow not bring with it the money-minded and moronic malaise of monopoly myopism?
The Epicor example touches on today’s supply chain challenges. The company knows it has many arms across manufacturing and distribution in the USA. In other words, it has a software reach across the North American supply chain. What that means is many companies across that chain using the same ERP system. Add in automation, cloud and the interconnections that come with this agility, and you could potentially be looking at an easy fix for the supply chain.
That kind of effect is only possible when many enterprises in one sector are “joined up” and free from platform siloes. The possible outcomes are better operational agility, happier clients for vendors - and happy customers for those enterprises. End users avoid the usual bottlenecks and slow-downs; business repeats.
We could call it a well-meaning monopoly, if monopoly is the right word. We could call it “introprise tech”, introspective tech tailored to a particular niche instead of a cookie-cutter template for all and sundry.
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We could even call it wishful thinking. But with technology an inescapable part of our lives, it may be time to move on from discourse on sales and target marketing. Instead, we should examine the real possibilities of tech. Usually a vendor loudly proclaims they have signed up the world’s largest retailer of X as a customer. What if instead a vendor could say they supply HCM for the entire talent marketplace in space technology? Or the CRM for every private and public healthcare provider in a given country, meaning patients are seen sooner and booked in for procedures quicker than ever before?
It’s an enterprising idea, right?
- Giacomo Lee, editor-in-chief
ARTICLES
Industry news from across the enterprise technology sector.
Epicor CEO Steve Murphy on putting the engine back into search – and solving the supply chain challenge. 36 Resurfacing from the Slump
EY’s global consulting head of SAP, Dr. Tom Janoshalmi, talks coming up for air in a ‘permacrisis.’ 40 It’s Electric!
CIO Thomas Buck of Vitesco Technologies and driving a 4.0 sky-high, sustainable world.
46 Manufacturing Roadbloacks
How technological advancements can help meet obstacles head on. 52 AI in HR
Can AI offer businesses a streamlined yet ethical recruitment future?
58 Automation and The Chocolate Factory
One chocolatier gives a taste of the best technology recipe for factories in the age of AI.
64 Balancing the Books
Can ERP cash in on FinOps? 72 Munchies and Motorcycles
Intersnack and Triumph Motorcycles on sweetening their Infor systems.
76 Nobody wants a Cyber Leak
Getting cyber secure in manufacturing with advanced stacks.
AWS and Deloitte secure TfL and the PA Turnpike.
86 ESG Spaghetti
They say there is no single thread in ESG software supplier chains.
From universities to pandas, get real accounts of successful ERP implementations.
NEWS DEALS &WINS NEWS
AWS heralds new user opportunities
BY STEPHANIE BALL
AWS unveiled a myriad of innovations at the AWS Summit in London to back users in uncertain times.
The company announced Amazon Bedrock is to be made available for UK regional customers, marking the seventh region for the managed AI service, joining Frankfurt and Paris European availability, as well as Tokyo and several regions in the US.
This follows a fresh set of updates to Amazon Bedrock, AWS’ GenAI foundational model and application build service. The releases include the general availability of Meta Llama 3 (featuring a training dataset seven times larger than used for the Llama 2 models).
Tanuja Randery, VP and MD EMEA at AWS focused on the topic of pace during her keynote and the “unique and unusual growth opportunities”
that come in times of crisis. No doubt a timely topic given current global events such as geopolitical conflict, climate crisis and cost of living.
Under the banner of “technology for good customer experience and productivity,” AWS reaffirmed its climate promises, claiming its original target of operating on 100 percent renewable energy by 2030 is still set to come five years ahead of time, by 2025.
Randery also shared: “My customers tell me, how do we become more energy efficient? And I say it’s very simple - move to the cloud.”
90 percent of its global staff are now trained on AWS skills and are currently training on AWS AI tools.
In another development, Visa joined the AWS Partner Network (APN) to streamline access to Visa’s payment services for cloud-native fintechs, enterprises and financial institutions.
Visa’s presence in the APN, a global community that leverages AWS technologies, will help enable its partners and clients, including cloudnative fintechs, to access and integrate select Visa services more efficiently.
“HOW TO BECOME MORE ENERGY EFFICIENT? IT’S SIMPLE - MOVE TO THE CLOUD”
Elsewhere, AWS also reaffirmed its promise to ensure 29 million globally are trained on its systems by 2025 through AWS Skill Builder, AWS Educate and AWS re/ Start, with 1.1 million people already trained in the UK since 2017.
TUI Holidays is one such customer, which announced at the summit that
By making its services available in AWS, Visa’s clients will be able to integrate software like Visa CrossBorder Solutions without the need to step out of their established platforms. The solution will assist in streamlining the process of sending and receiving money globally and holding multiple currencies.
NEWS DEALS &WINS
Bastian Nominacher and Alexander Buresch, SVP, BMW
Celonis and BMW team up for process mining
Celonis and the BMW Group have announced an expansion of their strategic partnership to continuously optimize BMW’s marketdefining processes and increase its efficiency, productivity and sustainability. The two Munich-based leaders have also agreed to
cooperate in the development of future process mining innovations.
As part of their existing partnership, BMW Group relies on Celonis’ process mining technology to boost its group-wide digitalization initiative. The duo is now focusing on making Celonis available to all of the group’s
employees, enabling them to analyze all relevant company processes and identify and eliminate setbacks causing inefficiencies.
As part of the partnership expansion, BMW Group will use the newly-introduced Celonis Process Intelligence Graph for cross-process optimization and it will work on simplifying the software’s user experience, particularly for non-IT-savvy users.
The BMW Group’s Center of Excellence for Process Mining and Celonis’ development team have also agreed to collaborate on tasks like connecting suppliers in cross-company processes more efficiently by automating the transfer of data (e.g. via Catena-X) and mapping the entire customer journey.
Bastian Nominacher, co-founder and co-CEO of Celonis, said: “Our platform offers companies like the BMW Group unprecedented process intelligence and thus a central decisionmaking tool to take the right measures, quickly create added value and become more efficient overall.”
JOBY AVIATION SOARS WITH IFS
IFS has announced that Joby Aviation, a manufacturer of electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft for commercial air taxi services, has chosen IFS Cloud for the Aviation Maintenance solution.
Leveraging the solution, Joby can enhance end-toend maintenance software for its eVTOL aircraft across key functional areas such as engineering, records management, operations and planning - to support its global expansion plan and ensure high safety and efficiency standards.
Unit4 and Embridge team up with Concern Worldwide
Unit4 and Embridge Consulting have announced a new project with humanitarian organization Concern Worldwide to deliver an ERP solution.
After growing substantially in recent years, Concern Worldwide, which focuses on reducing the suffering of extreme
poverty around the world, decided to upgrade its finance and aid distribution management systems by automating and moving them to the cloud.
With some complexities of international branches throughout the world presenting issues with training, support and connectivity, Concern enlisted
Embridge Consulting which has supported large-scale projects in the non-profit sector.
The joint project will implement Unit4 ERP to streamline finance, procurement and warehousing. The teams also intend to improve operations through training and support.
Workday unveils UK investment and new partnerships
Workday has announced plans to invest over £550m in its UK operations over the next three years to offer locally-run solutions with an AWS UK Public Cloud partnership, growing the UK economy with workforce expansion, skills development programs and Workday venture funding. Key growth initiatives that the investment promises include the launch of Workday applications running locally on AWS London region for UK customers, the development of a new
Customer Experience Center and new facilities at Workday’s London headquarters.
Daniel Pell, VP and country manager of UKI at Workday, commented on the announcement:
“This level of investment not only supports the growth of our customers in the region but marks a key milestone in Workday’s efforts to drive the UK economy forward.”
“THIS LEVEL OF INVESTMENT WILL HELP US DRIVE THE UK ECONOMY”
Workday has also announced that multinational human resource consulting firm, Randstad, is extending its existing Workday agreement to roll out
Workday Financial Management and Workday HCM across its 39 markets.
In addition, the company has revealed a partnership with Swedish defense and security company Saab, using AI-powered Semantic Search to assist it in understanding and addressing employee sentiments while keeping on track with diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and sustainability objectives.
Similarly, Workday announced a new collaboration with Kyriba and Onyx, to improve cash management, payments and liquidity performance for CFOs and treasurers.
ORACLE AND PALANTIR TEAM UP FOR AI BOOST
Oracle and Palantir have joined forces to deliver mission critical AI to businesses and governments around the world. The partnership will use Oracle’s cloud infrastructure and see Palantir move its Foundry workloads as well as provide availability for its Gotham and AI platforms on Oracle’s distributed cloud.
Oracle’s distributed cloud and AI infrastructure, combined with Palantir’s decision acceleration and AI platforms, aim to help organizations maximize the value of their data with secure cloud and AI solutions.
This AI offering from Big Red is hoped to extend Palantir’s AI capabilities to help customers accelerate decision-making while Oracle’s history in defense and intelligence brings a depth of experience and technology “critical to the success of highstakes missions.”
NEWS DEALS &WINS
Epicor Grow transforms supply chains through ERP
Epicor has unveiled its new Epicor Grow portfolio, an integrated suite of AI and Business Intelligence (BI) capabilities powered by a data platform, specifically tailored for the needs of the make, move and sell industries.
The portfolio was unveiled at the Epicor Insights 2024 user conference in Nashville, Tennessee, to reimagine how AI-powered ERP software can and should support the supply chain industries and their workforce.
Aligned with the company’s cognitive ERP
vision to evolve traditional ERP from a system of record to a system of action, the Epicor Grow portfolio employs various AI technologies including GenAI, ML, natural language processing, predictive analytics and more.
Epicor Grow AI enhances ERP with practical, outcomes-focused AI, offering capabilities such as predictive analytics,
“GROW PUTS WORKERS AT THE CENTER OF THE INTELLIGENCE ECOSYSTEM”
VAIBHAV
VOHRA,
CTO
AI-generated sales orders, personalized product suggestions and predictive maintenance.
The Epicor Grow Data Platform consolidates enterprise data for deeper insights, featuring a nocode Pipeline Canvas for customized data management.
Vaibhav Vohra, chief product and technology officer, Epicor, said: “Our new Epicor Grow portfolio delivers on both fronts, putting workers at the center of the intelligence ecosystem. We’re delivering deep AI integration across realworld industry workflows - unlike ‘one size fits all’ industry-agnostic ERPs - to surface actionable insights and drive efficiencies.”
.
MICROSOFT POWERS UK COUNCILS
Microsoft has assisted the UK’s Barnsley and Aberdeen Councils in streamlining their workloads and improving public service.
England’s Barnsley Council rolled out the GenAI assistant Copilot for Microsoft 365, integrating it into programs and apps that workers are using, such as PowerPoint and Teams.
Copilot can reorganize visit notes into accurate records and divide them into categories, saving social workers hours of analysis.
Scotland’s Aberdeen City Council launched an enhanced version of its AB-1 in Azure to optimize its chatbot and is adopting technologies to improve public service delivery while adapting to the increasing pressures on authorities.
In another development, Microsoft released guidance for the Department of Defense - a Zero Trust strategy to inform risk-based decisions.
Infor Velocity Tour arrived in London with Infor’s CEO and CTO delivering the most recent updates. Following the opener in New York, the event marked the second of eleven tours around the globe.
Among the updates were multi-vertical applications, Infor GenAI, ESG environmental reporting and CareFor, aimed at leveraging “prebuilt best practice processes” for improved compliance, efficiency and seamless integration experience.
also momentum,” highlighting Infor’s mission to continuously and meaningfully drive innovation forward.
Kevin Samuelson, Infor’s CEO, followed and shared the “grim reality” of enterprise transformation, stating recent statistics from Gartner and McKinsey that between 55 and 75 percent of ERP projects fail.
“THE HOPE IS INFOR CAN BE THAT DISRUPTOR OFFERING SOMETHING UNIQUE”
Opening the welcome session, Mark Hughes, VP sales and country manager UKI at Infor, said that “velocity is all about speed but
G“The hope is that Infor can be that disruptor that will offer something unique for customers,” he stated.
Infor also announced a strategic partnership with SourceDay at the annual SyteLine User Network (SUN) conference in Tampa, Florida to enhance the efficiency of direct spend purchase
order (PO) lifecycle management.
The partnership will aim to bridge the gap between ERPs and supplier networks and assist shared clients in managing direct material POs proactively and comprehensively from creation to receipt.
As part of the collabora-
tion, the supply chain collaboration platform has become an Infor Certified Solution Partner delivering a deep, bi-directional technology integration across Infor’s Discrete Manufacturing ERPs (Infor SyteLine/ CloudSuite Industrial, LN, VISUAL, XA) and Distribution ERPs (M3, SX.e).
Google Cloud teams with Mercedes-Benz and Bharti Airtel
oogle Cloud has announced the expansion of its strategic partnership with Mercedes-Benz to transform Mercedes’ customer experiences with AI and GenAI technologies on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform.
Mercedes will leverage the capabilities into its
online storefront with a GenAI-powered smart sales assistant and new Googlequality search and recommendations capabilities.
Google Cloud and New Delhi telecoms firm, Bharti Airtel, also announced a collaboration to deliver cloud solutions to businesses in India. The partnership will provide Airtel’s customers with advanced
solutions, speeding up cloud adoption and modernization.
Airtel will leverage its data to train AI/ML solutions, delivering enhanced value. The offerings include geospatial analytics for trend analysis, predictive insights, market assessment, site selection, risk mitigation and asset tracking.
Infor Velocity Tour, London
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NEWS DEALS &WINS
Sridhar Ramaswamy, CEO Snowflake
Low- and no-code innovation from Snowflake & Creatio
Snowflake has partnered with low-code platform Mendix to help enterprises drive value from their data through low-code application development.
By combining Snowflake’s Data Cloud and Mendix’s enterprise lowcode application development platform, customers can unlock the value of data for their digital trans-
formation initiatives, particularly those involving AI.
The companies’ customers will benefit from a seamless end-to-end developer journey, including secure supported integration between Snowflake’s and Mendix’s technology stacks and improved data exchange between the organizations.
Data from Snowflake’s platform will also be
available as ready-to-use, combined with other reusable components. The announcement also promises improved mobile application capabilities to create apps for mobile devices using data, analytics, cybersecurity and governance at all levels.
Similarly, global vendor Creatio has partnered with Synolia to reinforce the company’s ability to offer a no-code platform to automate workflows and customer relationship management (CRM).
Creatio’s solutions are powered with composable quantum architecture, which allows no-code creators to assemble various components, blocks and apps to create enterpriseready solutions that match their requirements without coding.
Together, the duo will aim to advance their clients’ digital transformations, using Synolia’s expertise and Creatio’s technology to enhance operational efficiency and business agility.
SAP PUT THE AI IN SUPPLY CHAIN
As global trade disruptions and material shortages continue to plague industries, the need for agile supply chains has never been more critical. In response, SAP has unveiled new AI advancements in its supply chain solutions to automate product development and optimize decisionmaking.
Conor Riordan, chair of UKISUG, explained: “The rapid advances in AI promise to help organizations derive more value from their supply chain data, navigate disruption and achieve greater operational efficiency.”
EY’s busy quarter with blockchain and more
April and May saw EY roll out a handful of innovations to springboard its future efforts. EY is significantly enhancing its audit and assurance services with a massive $1bn investment in emerging tech and a new global AI Assurance framework.
In this vein, EY has
teamed up with Empowered Systems to integrate the EmpoweredNEXT platform into its tech stack, making GRC solutions more userfriendly with low-code/nocode options. This means users can easily create and manage compliance processes without needing deep technical skills.
The “Big Four” player has been busy with many other
new initiatives, including the launch of the EY OpsChain Contract Manager, a blockchain tool designed to streamline contract management, and a partnership with the MoneyGram Haas F1 Team to roll out Microsoft Dynamics 365 solutions using their Rapid Foundation service to enhance supply chain management.
Accenture Federal Service’s recent investments and partnerships carry weighty implications for users across multiple sectors, starting with a new partnership with Microsoft to launch a Cloud Modernization and Migration Factory on Microsoft Azure Government. This initiative aims to revolutionize the modernization efforts of federal agencies, guiding them toward highly secure cloud environments and emphasizing stringent national security standards.
John Goodman CEO of Accenture Federal Services, said that this will: “Help our clients meet their mission objectives through highly capable, protected, monitored and resilient connected services.”
“CLIENTS CAN MEET THEIR MISSION OBJECTIVES THROUGH PROTECTED SERVICES”
In a parallel development, Accenture has also teamed up with Google Public Sector to establish a Data and Artificial Intelligence Center of Excellence. This project seeks to modernize citizen services for federal agencies, offering access to AI. This partnership will also add a Cybersecurity Center of Excellence to equip fed -
eral agencies with tools to combat sophisticated cyber threats.
Meanwhile, Accenture’s investment in Turbine, a predictive simulation company specializing in interpreting human biology, promises to reshape biopharma services worldwide. With Turbine’s Simulated Cell platform Accenture aims to revolutionize disease mechanisms and therapy responses.
Accenture’s strategic alliances signal a start to a new digital era of global defense and medical breakthroughs – making it clear they don’t shy away from the big stuff.
NETSUITE DOES MORE WITH LESS
Oracle NetSuite’s SuiteConnect event in London unveiled some major platform upgrades, including NetSuite Text Enhance, EPM Analytics Warehouse MultiInstance Connector, Electronic Invoicing and Field Service Management, now available to UK customers. These new tools, paired with a snazzy flexible licensing model, aim to streamline operations, making it a breeze for users to manage specific tasks without the hefty full licensing fees. In a real-world example of these benefits, Hotel Equities, which manages nearly 300 properties, announced it’s hopping on the NetSuite bandwagon to implement a “single source of truth” in a unified platform. By integrating NetSuite’s new tools, Hotel Equities plans to implement the latest innovations for all hotel operations. Talk about a suite deal.
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NEWS DEALS &WINS
Microsoft assembles a string of big partnerships
In a flurry of big collabs, Microsoft is building on partnerships to leverage its new AI tech in the wake of the digital revolution.
They’ve teamed up with the likes of Coca-Cola, Dropbox, Sainsbury’s, Currys and Paystand to drive innovation throughout all sectors.
Coca-Cola is embarking on a five-year collab with Microsoft, investing heavily in Azure OpenAI Service to pioneer innovative AI applications. John Murphy, president and CFO of Coca-Cola,
commented: “Our partnership with Microsoft has grown exponentially, from the $250m agreement we initially announced in 2020 - to $1.1bn today.”
Meanwhile, food retailer Sainsbury’s is also leveraging Microsoft’s AI to enhance store operations and elevate customer service as part of their Next Level Sainsbury’s strategy.
“OUR PARTNERSHIP WITH MICROSOFT HAS GROWN FROM $250M TO $1.1BN”
Electronics retailer Currys is taking a leap forward by partnering with Accenture and Microsoft to modernize their core
cloud infrastructure with Azure OpenAI Service for CX and employee personalization.
Paystand is shaking up the B2B payments landscape meanwhile by integrating its full payments system with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, making transactions seamless for businesses worldwide. Additionally, Dropbox is collaborating with Microsoft to enhance security and teamwork features, providing users with advanced data protection and real-time co-authoring capabilities.
For Microsoft, then, partnerships were the way forward this quarter, and likely beyond it.
TECH MAHINDRA TEAMS WITH ATENTO
Tech Mahindra and Atento have newly cemented a partnership aimed at delivering end-to-end business transformation solutions and services leveraging GenAIpowered technologies and CX consulting. Combining Atento’s expertise in nearshore CX capabilities in Latin America with Tech Mahindra’s global footprint, the companies can offer comprehensive business process outsourcing solutions in over 50 languages.
Birendra Sen, business head, business process services, Tech Mahindra, said: “At Tech Mahindra, we are committed to pushing the boundaries of innovation and continuously improving our business process services. The partnership with Atento will further strengthen our joint positioning in the United States, Europe and tap into new potential business opportunities in Latin America.”
Birendra Sen
Salesforce launches banking capabilities and AWS integration
Salesforce has announced the expansion of its partnership with AWS, making select Salesforce products available for purchase via the AWS Marketplace in the UK.
The accessible products include data cloud, service cloud, sales cloud and industry clouds, making it easier for AWS customers to subscribe to and manage these solutions.
increase business performance.
Specifically, users will have a single view across their IT spending, simplified procurement processes and flexible options like private pricing and consolidated billing through AWS.
“THE PARTNERSHIP WILL RESPOND TO CUSTOMER DEMAND IN AN AI-FIRST ECONOMY”
The partnership aims to provide users with a seamless way to leverage pre-approved budgets, build trusted AI apps, deliver data-powered CRM experiences and ultimately
Paul O’Sullivan, UKI CTO and SVP of solution engineering at Salesforce, called the step a “significant moment” for the Salesforce and AWS partnership.
“The expansion of our partnership will respond to customer demand in an AI-first digital economy, offering enhanced access to new opportunities to innovate and experiment,
IBM has seen a string of new AI collabs aimed at nuturing innovation.
Big Blue and Salesforce have expanded their partnership to bring together IBM watsonx AI and Data Platform capabilities with the Salesforce Einstein 1 Platform for greater customer flexibility. This includes data inte-
in turn driving better outcomes and faster time to value,” he added.
Salesforce also recently launched new AI-powered capabilities, built on the Einstein 1 Platform, to help banks handle transaction disputes more quickly and efficiently. The company also announced implementation and data governance bundles for
IBM unveils AI collaborations
Arvind Krishna IBM CEO
gration, flexibility in LLMs and prompts for CRM solutions.
Big Blue also announced a partnership with Palo Alto Networks to deliver AI-powered security where the two will facilitate migration of QRadar SaaS clients to security operations platform Cortex XSIAM.
Another collaboration
safe and secure AI rollouts.
For instance, AIpowered Transaction Dispute Management will help bank service agents streamline the entire dispute management cycle so bank agents will be able to use pre-built data email prompt templates and GenAI to draft personalized customer emails related to dispute activity.
will see Tech Mahindra and IBM help enterprises adopt trustworthy GenAI using watsonx and drive explainability to help mitigate risk and bias. Similarly, IBM and SAP announced plans to help clients build AI capabilities for RISE with SAP and infuse AI into SAP processes in cloud solutions and applications.
NEWS DEALS &WINS
Beyond
Inc bets on Salesforce for CX goals
Beyond, Inc., the owner of e-commerce brands Bed Bath and Beyond, Overstock and Zulily, has announced an expanded investment in Salesforce‘s data and marketing solutions to drive customer loyalty and deliver more personalized shopping experiences for customers across the company’s brands.
To unify customer data across its brands and enterprise data systems, Beyond will now use Salesforce Data Cloud, powered by the Einstein 1 Platform. Using this data is projected to help Beyond better understand who its customers are, how they act and how they engage across brands.
“The Beyond management team made a com-
mitment to vastly improve the way we ingest, process and utilize our valuable customer data,” said Marcus Lemonis, executive chairman of the Beyond board of directors. He shared that the company’s growth should be driven by “a profitable mindset to invest in customers who show a propensity to buy and return.”
Carlisha Robinson, chief customer officer at Beyond, said that the company’s work with Salesforce “signifies a new era for Beyond, with digital at the forefront of our growth initiatives.”
Ariel Kelman, chief marketing officer at Salesforce, also commented on the news: “Beyond is using Salesforce’s trusted AI, Data Cloud and integration technology to deliver highly compelling personalized experiences that turn casual single-brand customers into long-term customers […]. This will help Beyond drive revenue growth and enhance customer relationships in a whole new way.”
Nasdaq unveils AI surveillance
Nasdaq’s recently announced AIpowered feature promises to improve the efficiency of market abuse investigations in the American stock exchange company. The solution leverages GenAI to streamline the triage and examination process when investigating suspected market manipu-
lation and insider dealing.
Ed Probst, senior vice president and head of regulatory technology, Nasdaq said: “Market abuse is a substantial global challenge and one that demands increasingly sophisticated solutions to address it.
“As a major regulatory technology provider to the world’s financial sys-
SAGE LAUNCHES TWO NEW SUITES
Sage has launched Sage for Accountants and Sage for Small Business, to transform SMBs and accountancy practices.
The suites will boost the efficiency and productivity of accountants, bookkeepers and SMBs. There are three customizable membership plans: essentials, standard and premium.
“These new suites are making it easier for data and work to flow between our products, helping accountants, bookkeepers and SMBs to do more than ever before,” said Neal Watkins, EVP, small business segment, Sage.
tem, with a deep culture of innovation, Nasdaq is uniquely placed to leverage the power of technology to uphold the integrity of marketplaces globally.”
By leveraging Amazon Bedrock, Nasdaq’s functionality will empower analysts with GenAI capabilities to distill, analyze and interpret relevant information more quickly.
CHRIS YANG, UNSPLASH
Neal Watkins
Audi and SNP ride into cloud competitiveness
For SAP users, the shift to S/4HANA is integral to keeping up with digital innovations, but the looming end of maintenance for older SAP product versions means cloud transformations need to happen faster than ever. SNP offers tailored solutions to address the needs of SAP users, their expertise in application lifecycle management (ALM) and innovative software solutions empower companies to navigate the migration to S/4HANA with confidence
and efficiency.
“SNP’S MIGRATION APPROACH ENABLED AUDI TO TRANSITION SMOOTHLY TO CLOUD”
Audi AG, an automotive manufacturer known for its commitment to technological advancement, harnessed SNP’s capabilities to streamline its transition to S/4HANA, showing how transformation services can establish efficient processes in finance and maintenance logistics while ensuring a smooth migration. Recognizing the importance of embracing IT architecture, Audi AG embarked on multiple projects simultaneously in 2023 - aimed at
implementing SAP S/4HANA Finance for centralized finance operations and migrating maintenance logistics to the cloud.
However, executing such a comprehensive transformation posed challenges, like ensuring real-time insights into financial health and cash flows and mitigating risks during data migration. SNP’s table-based migration approach and proprietary software enabled Audi AG to select data from existing systems and transition smoothly to the cloud, even amidst year-end closing activities. By early 2023, both finance and maintenance logistics systems had transitioned to S/4HANA.
HPE ARUBA GETS BUSY IN THE US
HPE Aruba has recently helped AMB Sports and Entertainment (AMBSE) to modernize its wireless network with a WI-FI 6E solution.
HPE enabled guests to fly through entry lanes and live stream events in high-definition and ensure staff and partners have reliable connectivity to power real-time production technologies.
Kevin Pope, CIO of AMBSE, said: “HPE Aruba Networking provides us with the secure, reliable infrastructure critical to entertaining, engaging and informing our guests for awardwinning game day and major event experiences.”
HPE Aruba has also recently modernized the City of Carmel, Indiana, with its WI-FI 6E solution, to improve quality of life.
For example, HPE Aruba enhanced Carmel’s public and staff mobility in support of its arts scene, seasonal festivals and public amenities.
Kevin Pope
STEVE MURPHY
RETURNING THE ENGINE TO SEARCH
Epicor CEO Steve Murphy on putting the engine back
into search, and solving the supply chain challenge.
BY GIACOMO LEE | PHOTOS BY JAY WATSON
BEING ALL THINGS TO ALL PEOPLE.
DOES
IT EVER
WORK?
TALKING TO EPICOR - NAMELY ITS CEO, STEVE MURPHY - IT’S A QUESTION THAT COMES TO MIND, WITH A VERY SIMPLE ANSWER AS THE RESPONSE.
First though, let’s talk about the art of finding answers. For the last two decades, search engines have been the usual first port of call for all of us. But with the rise of conversational AI - assistants, chatbots, copilots and what have you - we are beginning to understand the algorithms behind search that have always been there, whilst also being inspired to ask more from search’s sorcery.
AI has made us realize we don’t - nor can’t - just have the usual offering of all things to all people. Instead, we want to know the right thing as individuals. That means an accurate end result, not an answer that exists simply because its output is necessitated through code.
This is especially true in an end-user context, whereby an increasing expectation can be found for both record and action; the act of searching records for answers and the affiliated act of generation. That expectation, as we all know, is being heeded and encouraged by the ERP vendors as they tout their GenAI wares to customers. But how many of those same companies can claim to have provided one of the world’s original “search engines”?
I’m talking about Epicor, and Steve Murphy talks to me in the company’s Dublin, California base. As he reminds ERP Today, generative AI still poses the risk of “hallucination,” so if you ask some agents who the CEO is, a mostly correct answer is returned - whilst sometimes a wholly inaccurate one is generated instead.
Murphy explains: “Part of getting our AI right is making sure there are checks and balances around what the ERP system tells you is true and what you should do. So five years from now, you can ask the ERP anything. It’s not just a system of record, it’s a system of action and it’s accurate.”
The exec is confident that Epicor’s AI poses little to no risk of hallucination, which is good news for the end user. In our interview it becomes clear Murphy is confident full stop in the company’s vision of “Cognitive ERP”, a symbiosis between AI and ERP that aims to redefine processes and operations in the supply chain for its manufacturingheavy customer base.
In some ways, Epicor is making its next pivot. But in others, the tracks have long been laid down, ones intrinsic to Epicor’s DNA so that its move to AI is more of a natural next step coming hand-inhand with its supply chain prowess.
Pivotal to understanding this is remembering
Epicor’s search engine prestige, stemming back to before all things internet and GenAI.
Back to the beginning: From print to cloud
The name Epicor dates back to an end-of-the-century rebrand, with the company forming from the financial and accounting software vendor, Platinum Software Corporation, which was founded in its headquarters-to-date, Austin, Texas. Platinum had started developing manufacturer-specific software packages in 1998, and by 2005 Epicor was offering what it called the industry’s first manufacturing solution based on a completely serviceoriented architecture.
2011 saw Epicor merge with Activant, a leader in supply chain connectivity and the automotive market. In 1984, the California-headquartered company had brought its electronic parts catalog from print to digital. Listing over 8.8 million automobile parts from engine to exhaust, Activant’s Automotive Electronic Catalog was one of the first digital inventories out there, if not the world’s first for the US automotive sector.
From print to digital, Epicor likewise transformed from on-prem to cloud. Murphy was appointed as CEO in 2017 to solidify the company’s burgeoning SaaS model, joining Epicor from a
tenure as president of OpenText, where he oversaw enterprise information management (EIM) solutions across cloud and on-prem.
“Seven years ago, we [Epicor] knew we had great products and a lot of great people,” Murphy reflects. “But we had to quickly migrate to a bestin-class cloud architecture.
“Now we have [that] architecture and it has dramatically changed our profitability, our growth rates, the scale we’re at and our success.”
April of this year saw the company reach $1bn in annual recurring revenue, with Murphy labeling the subscriptions within Epicor’s cloud revenue as the “crown jewels.” From prior experience, the exec has seen how important it is for customers joining the cloud to understand what they’re going to get when purchasing from Epicor - the buy of a customizable product on a cloud subscription.
“You may have to adjust your work process a little bit so that it does everything you want in the end, which will be better than what you have [currently.] I’ve seen software companies fail and go out of business because they do not understand this concept or they make promises they can’t keep in the sales cycle and they disappoint their customers,” Murphy says.
The CEO also puts Epicor’s success down to the
company being steeped in manufacturing, distribution and supply chain management for over half a century.
Murphy’s lore
As a professional, Murphy himself is steeped in that same authority. The CEO’s career began in the 1990s as an engineer for Procter & Gamble (P&G), where he witnessed first-hand the importance of software and mechanical systems for the success of major factories, distributorships and warehouses.
“I was like 22, 23 when I saw how traumatic it was when system failure brought these plants down,” he recollects. “I was working side-by-side with the operators, the technicians, the hourly workers that keep the operation running, and it made a huge impact on me as far as how important that was and how frustrated they were when for no fault of their own, the production system was brought down.
“In many cases, if the software failed or had a glitch it was because it wasn’t built properly. It re-
ally affected everything from the performance of the plant, to the bonuses people earned. So that made a difference as far as what we are really trying to do here when we build a software product and bring it to market,” Murphy continues. “We want something that they’re going to love, that they’re going to think is great and which makes their job easier.”
An MBA from Harvard followed for Murphy, before a role as logistics consultant for Accenture. Murphy remembers one US high tech customer from this time which was sourcing “everything
WE’RE NOT EVERYTHING TO EVERYONE - AND WE’RE OK WITH THAT
out of Southeast Asia” while an equally-American competitor had clusters of production in the US with only some overseas outsourcing.
“The question was, if [your competitor can] meet demand based on what comes in on the website on a 24-hour basis, then can you compete with them? And the answer I came to was not unless you change your supply chain.
“The importance of the physical supply chain and the ability to meet demand when prices are at a premium was a huge deal in high tech and it went counter to a lot of the prior wisdom. And then as long as you were cheap enough on the components and everything else, you’d be able to sell it well with high tech [and how] quickly it ages [into] obsolescence.
“That was a big lesson learned for me around the differences between conventional wisdom, what people tell you should work and what actually does work.”
This period saw Murphy realize the power of ERP, finding it a “confluence of all the things I learned and like.” Working on software implementations thereafter, at the likes of Oracle and more, taught Murphy to never underestimate “how much work it might take to make an adjustment to the software, how it works, or how it presents itself to be easier to the user.”
From Cloud to Cognitive
On the AI software front, Murphy knows GenAI can’t be all things to all people, as he recognizes that isn’t what best serves the Epicor customer base. As he succinctly puts it, “We’re not everything to everyone - and we’re OK with that.”
Murphy sees Epicor’s strengths as serving users in manufacturing, distribution, retail and automotive industries who are searching for actions, not
just answers. This can often mean a worker on the shop or factory floor using an AI agent for inventory, this agent being able to flag an item that a customer is willing to pay a premium on to receive sooner compared to other clients’ timescales.
Without AI, Murphy argues, this agility may not be as feasible. As he describes it, current actions can mean a product gets sent deep into a 400,000-square-foot warehouse. Once there, it either doesn’t get retrieved or goes intermodal, locked up on a ship or truck to not be received for another six weeks. The same inertia occurs when a defect issue comes up by surprise and the product needs to be inspected. The later this happens in the process, the more costly and loss-making.
“That issue [can instead] get pushed to a production worker or supervisor, who decides to divert the item and prepares the trucks and forklifts. So they’re going to be able to make a change in the process and make more money.”
Murphy explains: “The biggest difference now is the information is available from the point of demand, where someone wants it and they’re willing to pay for it as it’s important to them.”
This is good for the business - and also good for the supply chain. Murphy elaborates on AI’s potential in supply chain, with the flagging of incorrectly assigned inventory and even environmental factors, such as a tornado, which may affect distribution.
“The intelligent agents are that smart,” Murphy says, smart being the keyword. With Dublin being Epicor’s M&A hub, there was nice continuity around our interview with Epicor newly acquiring Smart Software, a Massachusetts-founded provider of demand planning, forecasting and inventory optimization solutions. Smart Software boasts a statistical forecasting solution providing probabilistic AI models which deliver analysis on ‘what-if’ scenarios. These can help users mitigate risk by adjusting stock levels to enable them to meet demand, and suggest actions should something like tornado season be on the horizon.
The offering ties back to Murphy’s comments on the benefits of having a system of action over a system of record, in which a “Cognitive” ERP is
I’VE SEEN COMPANIES
provided to users. Discussing this in Pleasanton with Epicor CTO Vaibhav Vohra, ERP Today delves deeper into the C-Suite’s vision for Cognitive ERP.
For Vohra, the Epicor mission is, “empowering essential workers with superpowers to give them ten times the skills and insights.”
He continues, “What I mean by that is for AI or any advanced technology to be successful, it has to be ten times better than whatever the human does, right? Essentially AI is going to cost more money. The value will not totally be delivered because of this, so you have to invest far more than you ever think.”
Handshakes, Gears and Sparks
The CTO sees three elements of the Cognitive journey, starting with “Handshakes” to redefine how humans and machines talk to each other. Next are the “Gears”, essentially low-code tools which make automation and insightful analytics possible on the shop floor. Finally, the “Sparks”, which he dubs insights to the power of ten.
An example is given of one Epicor customer, Visa Cash App RB Formula One Team, based in Faenza, Italy.
“So we have an AI that actually allows [Visa Cash App RB] to send through all their suppliers and come up with the right trade-offs,” says Vohra. “And then gives you the insight to say ‘you should use this supplier.’”
Epicor is used to track in real time approximately 14,000 components, so the team will know when they need to make or buy a part. When the make or buy decision happens, Epicor Prism allows the team to quickly determine the best vendor to deliver the part at the right price, the fastest, and if that beats the time/cost of making it themselves, they buy it from that vendor.
In other words, the catalog from 1984 has come a long way, souped up and raring to go in a postpandemic world. The CTO goes on to explain how Sparks are industry-specific insights powered by AI.
“It could be not just that example of supplier insight, but also a product recommendation for your customer. Steve mentioned turning a system of records into a system of actions - those are the Sparks,” explains Vohra.
The CTO also elaborates on the Gears element of Epicor’s cognitive ERP, which can help end users learn ERP faster. Citing the forecast that four million jobs are going to be created in US manufacturing by 2030, Vohra notes that 50 percent are estimated to go unfilled due to skills shortages.
“It can take someone a year to two to learn ERP. What if we could bring it down? The Gears are meant to create this easy way to level up through an ERP system,” he says.
It’s an alluring proposition, especially when one considers the rise of AI comes with an increasingly apparent skills shortage, whatever the sector. ERP’s role is a crucial part of this discussion, for as Vohra states: “ERP is the vehicle for AI, right?”
Epicor’s epic visions
The message from Epicor’s C-Suite is confident and unified: AI is the solution for today’s supply chain challenges, and Epicor is equipped for the artificial age and the future of supply chain. This is down to an inherent agility as shown by the company’s journey from print to cloud, against which a move into AI looks easy in comparison.
On supply chains, Vohra notes that if Epicor already serves so many customers along the same chain, then the network can be fortified in future by virtue of those clients being in the same cloud, on the same platform with the same AI tools, interconnected without the disruption that comes with software siloes.
Shorter-term, Steve Murphy sees the company in five years’ time as a global leader in ERP, and doing this without needing to become all things to all people.
“We’ll be more than twice the size we are now,” he predicts. “So $2bn in ARR, maybe two and a half to three in total revenue.”
IF ANYONE WANTS TO COPY US - GO AHEAD, GOOD LUCK!
Murphy has evident pride in Epicor, calling his decision to join as CEO as the “best career move of my life; I’ve really enjoyed building a company of enduring value.” This value comes from his pride in “having great people, functionally excellent products [and] deep industry expertise” in manufacturing and supply chain.
Other vendors, he notes as a comparison, “are aiming really high” in going after huge customers, while offering “not very good” products for SMBs.
In comparison, Epicor, he notes, offers an “industrial-strength product for the high-to-upper SMB market where our close rates are high.”
“And if anyone wants to copy us - then go ahead, and good luck,” he says with a smile. “It ain’t that easy.”
In other words, you can either be everything to everyone - or, like Epicor, be true to your customer. That’s where all the answers - and luck - can be found in today’s AI age.
Giacomo Lee discusses the C-Suite’s vision with Epicor CEO, Steve Murphy (left) and CTO, Vaibhav Vohra (right) in Dublin, California
Coming upairfor Coming upairfor
in a permacrisis
BY STEPHANIE BALL
Manufacturers and supply chains are feeling the permacrisis pressure.
EY’s global consulting head of SAP, Dr. Tom Janoshalmi, shares how users can resurface from the slump.
There’s been a word making the rounds of the utmost pessimism – amongst the global conflicts, environmental crises, pandemics, inflated cost of living, (and honestly, we could go on) – the “permacrisis” is said to be flourishing.
It’s arguably very fitting for the current global mood; reflecting the extended period of instability and insecurity, coming from a series of catastrophic events. It no doubt is making for a difficult time to ensure profitable, secure businesses.
So, to discover a more positive take, ERP Today speaks with Dr. Tom Janoshalmi, global head of SAP consulting at EY, and hears how some SAP users are not only making the best of this troublesome era, but actually finding opportunities to be gained, hidden in their tumultuous lot.
Seeking opportunity in a crisis
Of course, SAP has an extended planning and analysis solution set to help customers stay ahead of most curves. Utilizing Analytics Cloud and integrating all SAP applications, the xP&A solution enables users to run a host of scenario planning sessions to cover all the eventualities you could think of.
The challenge with crises is usually related to whether you can predict them or not, and therein you can have the preparation ready to go, waiting in the wings. But what about the scenarios that take businesses completely by surprise? These are surely the most disruptive, but is there something to be gained during these times too?
For Janoshalmi there’s a positive opportunity to be had, seeing crisis as a time for progression and for enterprises to embrace change: “The way we accelerated through COVID, some analysts or some experts say that that particular crisis accelerated the use of advanced
digital technologies by 25 times.”
“For me, that’s the opportunity. If we didn’t have that disruption from the global pandemic, then our ways of working, our digitally interconnected business network, would not be at the level of sophistication that we have today. So, I would look at these, as you call them - series of disruptions or series of crisis situations - as an accelerator for change. And it seems that all of it is heading towards more digitalization.”
A strong SAP core makes for business integrity
In Janoshalmi’s mind, preparing for any crisis starts with fortifying the core of your technology stack to create a firm data and process foundation. That way, he says, businesses will have the ability to make better-informed decisions in any given crisis moment.
But, as ERP Today asks of Janoshalmi, with users wondering what to do, the options tend to volley between fronting up a large and expensive investment in technology, hoping that it will help businesses manage these crises, or holding tight and spending a little to just weather
“Through COVID, some analysts say that particular crisis accelerated the use of advanced technologies by 25 times.”
the storm. Worried about the risk of technology debt, many businesses are instead looking at changing a few elements of their technology stack for smaller, yet cheaper gains, instead of ripping and replacing the whole core at an already precarious time.
Janoshalmi is upfront in saying that it’s a common question for SAP customers to ask: “Will this be another long and potentially expensive SAP deployment?” But, he’s keen to share that there is light at the end of the tunnel, with the message that: “EY, through the use of intelligent industry templates, tools and accelerators and industrialized processes, can completely change this paradigm.”
“We’re bringing in significant acceleration because of the use of next-generation technologies. We have design coach capabilities that can help using GenAI [meaning] SAP customers can co-create or pre-create the design in a way that can significantly reduce the time required to design the target architecture so humans can validate. That same is true for how the actual build phase of an SAP project is managed and equally true for the deploy and the run phases.”
With these EY tools and templates, SAP customers can then, the exec says: “limit the need for customization,” thereby maintaining that agility and flexibility further down the line, and avoiding much of the immovable technical debt you’d otherwise have to regularly work to maintain.
Janoshalmi is clear, however, that “no one size fits all” for SAP customers. “It varies so much by industry. For a bank,
it’s a very different proposition compared to a retail company or a manufacturer,” he says.
“But ultimately, what I’ve seen is that it comes down to, at the moment, data integrity and process integrity. And if you can establish both, then even if you can predict certain changes, the way your organization is prepared to manage change or to manage disruption is significantly enhanced or better than those who don’t have that.”
He splits data integrity for the enterprise into four main categories - master records of suppliers, customers, employees and assets.
Just one side of managing those, Janoshalmi explains, is improving how they relate to each other, how value gets created from supplier to customer, what the employee contribution is to that, and how users can optimize assets in that process.
On the other side, for process integrity, and what Janoshalmi terms “the way forward in a crisis”, is the interconnected enterprise. “When all parts of an enterprise or an organization know what the other parts do and how they become interdependent or integrated, I think these two things are technology-driven mostly.
“If a company can have them at a high sophistication level, then they’re in a much better position than the rest.”
It follows that with all things connected, verified and working cohesively, your operations can turn into a trusted environment, even when the external one is not. In theory, it can become easier to maintain factors such as data security and protect from cyber attacks. Businesses can more quickly see weaknesses in their supply chains and act to adjust their operations on reports of a geopolitical conflict or climate disaster. And manufacturers can detect which parts and raw materials may be in short supply before customers are left unhappy with unfulfilled orders.
Managing manufacturing risk with emerging technologies
Creating the “lean and clean core” which is critical in Dr. Janoshalmi’s view is also a key way to ready operations for
expedited time-to-value from emerging technologies too. This not only helps companies to avoid risk in a crisis, but also disrupts and creates new opportunities in operations.
For one SAP customer, a large natural resources and oil and gas company, utilizing digital twin technology is enabling it to avoid a high number of high-risk scenarios for its time and resources. With deep sea exploration involved, traveling to locations is long, performing the required processes can be complex and parts are expensive to replace.
“They really want to create a digital twin for their offshore operations exploration business,” explains Janoshalmi. “So that the maintenance process can be a lot more predictable, [as well as] the maintenance costs of having these offshore assets.
“Having digital twins and being able to simulate the eventualities of a potential malfunction or break is making a significant impact and changes the way the company can operate.”
Businesses using IoT technology are
“Ultimately, it comes down to data integrity and process integrity. If you can establish both, the way your organization is prepared to manage disruption is significantly enhanced.”
also seeing benefits here, says Janoshalmi, for increasing real-time visibility in the supply chain. “We’ve seen customers who have really taken this to new levels in terms of collecting data from the first point of entry of that raw material into the supply chain all the way to the end. With that, you get insights that will make you a better decision-maker. So, not only do you have flexibility and resilience, but as a supporting capability, your ability to make decisions faster and with better, more predictable outcomes is superior.”
It also applies to the end-user experience, with the story of a sports and fashion retailer using digital interconnectivity amongst its consumers to improve its product development. The digital technologies allowed the designers and the product engineers to have instant feedback and data collection from runners.
Having tested the SAP solution himself, Janoshalmi shares that: “The moment I finished my run, I was able to provide some feedback on the cushioning or on the actual feel of the shoe and my performance relative to that and, again, that was a great example of leveraging big data computing and digital interconnectivity with the concept of crowdsourcing and pattern recognition.”
The same rings true for rethinking processes in the automotive industry, working with an original equipment manufacturer (OEM). “Here we are talking a complete shift towards everything digital: Designing your own car, ordering that car and then receiving it without having to go to any physical locations,” Janoshalmi says.
“The question is, how can we rethink the retail path, so the actual selling cars to customers part, and how we can move away from the concept of showrooms and dealerships to completely digitize the experience?”
For EY’s SAP consulting branch, it’s a demand that is steadily increasing, with sights set on more modern, eventdriven data architectures to allow data to flow across the enterprise and its diverse technology landscapes. To achieve this, it’s something that needs multiple technologies on hand and Janoshalmi advocates that this is best bolstered by that ever “lean and clean” core system, whether on-premise, cloud or hybrid.
Despite the permacrisis looming around us, it would seem the old saying of finding a diamond in the rough perhaps rings true. What SAP and other technologies can’t do is predict when the next unknown will hit, but having a well-armed stack at the helm of your business can help avoid shipwreck and find a faster, less risky route to profits and growth on the other side.
IT’S ELECTRIC!
DRIVING A 4.0 SKY-HIGH, SUSTAINABLE WORLD
CIO THOMAS BUCK TALKS CLOUD AND SUSTAINABLE TRANSFORMATION FOR ELECTRIC POWERTRAIN ENGINE TECHNOLOGY
FIRM, VITESCO TECHNOLOGIES, PLUS THE POSSIBILITIES OF INDUSTRY
4.0, ACROSS ITS AWS, SAP AND MICROSOFT STACK.
“IN THE CLOUD, THE SPEED OF INNOVATION GOES FASTER”
Transformation is everywhere, from the move to cloud, to AI augmentation, the changing nature of the hybrid workforce and the development of Industry 4.0. Infused in all this change is a growing push towards better sustainability, on both the enterprise and customer-facing level.
One major tenet behind the Fourth Industrial Revolution is an automation of processes with the hope of leading enterprises to achieve better sustainability practices. An example from the B2C front is the rise of the electric vehicle (EV), a proposition from the automotive industry that offers the market promises of lower emissions and improved energy conversion efficiency. EVs provide the chance for sustainability transformation on a consumer level - and the same goes for traditional automobile makers switching some or all of their manufacturing lines to EV production.
“YOU NEED TO BE ABLE TO PROVIDE THE FOOTPRINT OF YOUR PRODUCT FROM CRADLE TO GRAVE”
Take the case of the multinational automotive parts manufacturer Continental, which in 2019 spun out its Vitesco Technologies Group AG division. Formerly known as Continental Powertrain, Vitesco Technologies develops drivetrain and powertrain technologies for hybrid electric, electric drive and combustion engines. Present from the beginning of the split-off venture was Vitesco CIO Thomas Buck, who moved from CIO for automotive at Continental to strap in for the spin-out ride.
In an exclusive interview with ERP Today, Thomas Buck reveals how the powertrain sector’s challenging pivot towards electromobility led to Vitesco becoming its own entity. The CIO also explains how this naturally led to a cloud transformation using SAP, driving the firm toward a real exploration of the Industry 4.0 concept.
“It meant a huge effort, a huge transformation of people, of skills, a change of products. And this needed some kind of agility and freedom to act,” Buck explains. “And the spin-off was really intended to give that new and smaller company the freedom that is needed to be successful in that transformation, to get the right speed in that transformation and become a market leader in this new field.”
And so Vitesco was formed, headquartered in Regensburg, Germany but “born in the cloud” - to
quote Buck. The project ended in 2021, having begun just two years prior from total scratch.
“Continental itself did not own anything of Vitesco anymore, and that, of course, meant that we had nothing - no infrastructure, no valid contract, no valid license, nothing,” remembers Buck.
Taking a glance at the numbers bears out the true magnitude of the migration challenge: a then500-strong workforce covering 30 locations, a total of 300 applications, around 215 different licenses and contracts needing renegotiation, 34,000 mailboxes and 30,000 users, including Vitesco clients.
It took Buck and Vitesco a few months to set up a cloud platform. The same speed came as Vitesco went for a cloud network provider, implementing a secure access service edge (SASE) network with embedded security.
“Basically a software defined as a service-provided network,” Buck explains. “So we had a basic infrastructure consisting of a network and a backend platform in the cloud really quickly, so we could start migrating straight away.”
The hyperscaler of choice was Amazon Web Services (AWS) and built on the cloud foundation is a data platform as the basis for data analytics and artificial intelligence initiatives. Buck says Vitesco is currently building a GenAI platform on top of the data platform; but more on that burgeoning Industry 4.0 use case later.
Vitesco rises
Everything at Vitesco was moved onto the cloud, besides the one exception of its SAP provision. Vitesco was coming out of Continental with 90 SAP systems, with 20 different development systems. Buck describes this as a “very heterogeneous” landscape, “copied” over from Continental, with products such as SuccessFactors and Business Warehouse.
A few of these were moved to SAP’s S/4HANA, such as financial systems, with the rest moving once its RISE with SAP transition is completed by next year, as implemented with Vitesco’s migration partner, Accenture.
“In the beginning, we defined our target architectures: How many systems we would like to end up with, what the architecture should look like, what we want to have and what should disappear,” says Buck. “We started to develop templates for
our future S/4 systems. In between that, we started a discussion about cloud.
“Knowing about all the possibilities when it comes to automatic processes and things like that will support the speed of our transformation if we have our SAP systems in the cloud. And so, we started in parallel, evaluating what it would mean to move our SAP systems out of the data center to a hyperscaler.”
Buck was drawn to the RISE strategy, finding it made the most sense. “Running a lot of very different SAP systems that made the world very complicated for me doesn’t really add value to our company,” as he elaborates.
RISE presented Buck with the option of having SAP in one part of the strategy with a newer way of receiving updates, whilst also aligning with his plans to shift to a hyperscaler and bring in more automation. But it’s not just a matter of simplification when it comes to the cloud for Vitesco, as Buck believes it to be the best platform for Industry 4.0 business processes.
“When we are in the cloud, the speed of innovation goes faster,” explains Buck.
AI in Industry 4.0
The future comes up a lot in conversation with Buck, with the eager CIO already thinking multiple steps ahead with his new cloud setup. The concepts are cuttingedge, in keeping with tenets of Industry 4.0 as a whole.
With Vitesco Technologies representing a newer section of the automotive industry, it may not be a surprise to note its forward-thinking use of enterprise tech. Arguably the company’s headspace is more of a late 2020s/early 2030s setting than those of others in the industrial space.
An example is how it’s using artificial intelligence. A proof of concept comes in utilizing GenAI for requirements engineering in software development. This approach to platform orientation can quickly evaluate company use cases, with two generic examples defined for Vitesco from a set of 35 and tested on a public type of environment.
As Buck explains: “First, you can create chat-
bots for a number of different applications. And the other one is the ability to fill a generative AI with our own company data to address questions towards the company data. These are the most generic use cases where we have once implemented them; we have almost 90 percent of the certified use cases already there.
“From there we can scale very fast. If you take, for example, the engineering use case with the requirements engineering, it basically means we need to be able to upload and use the requirements data in the GenAI environment.
“It’s true for all the other use cases. So, once we have those use cases running, we can scale very fast
in all the 35 use cases [...] We’ve just started building up the platform and expect it to be ready in April.”
One potential scenario with the tech comes from comparing requirements, as customers use a variety of formats, languages and expressions.
“The generative AI can compare requirements and figure out what requirements are basically the same,” says Buck. “It could even tell us if we already knew the requirements from a former project, even from a completely different customer.”
The AI is made possible by a core platform from AWS, which centralizes data from SAP and other sources. AWS was chosen ahead of other hyperscalers for its better conditions, and for having been a long-time partner of Vitesco with “very good” results.
On the AI front, both Google Cloud and Microsoft were considered alongside AWS. Vitesco has both Azure and AWS integrated into its cloud, but not Google. AWS won out again with the “best offer” - but promising AI evaluations have prompted Vitesco to start to integrate Google Cloud in its cloud management platform.
Buck is keeping tabs also on the AI provisions available through RISE with SAP, keen on having access to the embedded AI technology offered by cloud.
“They will provide it in the cloud [...] and we have foreseen that AI technology will be a huge enabler, with everybody wanting it. It was part of the decision of RISE with SAP being the way forward for us.”
Sustainability 4.0
What is most interesting about Vitesco’s AI strategy is the dovetailing with its sustainability initiatives. In another bold example of what’s possible with Industry 4.0, AI helps the company manage its carbon footprint.
Buck gives a reminder that sustainability is the core of Vitesco’s business, the company representing the transformation from combustion engines to clean sustainable electric mobility. This thinking applies not just to the energy driving the vehicles it helps create, but also the manufacturing behind its technologies.
“You need to be able to provide the footprint of your product from cradle to grave, and this means across the borders of your own company,” notes the CIO.
For Vitesco operations, this requires sustainability reporting embedded in its overall company reporting. Such reporting is actualized by gathering data from all of its products, plants and providers. No
mean feat, as Buck explains, with data being variable in quality and open to different interpretations.
“It also needs to be mapped to the official tables that are available for CO2 data. There is no one-toone mapping, like having a certain number that can be mapped because our internal numbers cannot be mapped.
“So we thought that it should be possible, that if you don’t have a one-to-one mapping with a unique number, that a person can do it by comparing different data, different metadata, and then saying, ‘That’s the same product’. Of course, the official tables don’t reflect our serial numbers, but you know that’s the description, and that’s the size - so that’s the same product.”
Buck and his team figured that AI comes in handy here by sorting out this mapping, replacing a need for departments and buildings of data analysts to work on the problem (and without that automation, ERP Today notes, you may ironically be adding to your footprint through trying to solve it).
“So that’s what we did with AI,” Buck explains. “We have chosen a certain material area, collected all the products we had and tried the mapping supported by artificial intelligence. The result was close to 100 percent.”
The story doesn’t end there, though, as Vitesco has also used AI-created scenarios to improve its sustainability. This extends to drilling down to discover which of its providers result in a larger carbon footprint, and which countries the materials come from.
“It makes a huge difference if it’s produced in a country where energy is coming from coal versus where energy is coming from atomic sources,” Buck continues. “You can simulate certain scenarios with information like that and how our footprint would develop in that case.”
Buck sees scenarios that result from switching providers or keeping providers but delivering from a different country. For now, this remains an internal application, but the CIO looks forward to certifications from external sources which can help validate such tools for reporting purposes.
The industrial metaverse
The above innovations on cloud, AI and its push in achieving sustainability are currently very common marketing messages across vendors, but it has arguably meant less of a marketing effort for the in-
dustrial metaverse - that part of Industry 4.0 where one will find digital twins and extended reality (XR) in the factory or field.
While all the hype these days may be about GenAI, Vitesco has not abandoned the metaverse despite its own AI maneuvers. Buck reveals work on digital simulations of the production behind a product, even prior to a working prototype:
“We think we can ease the ramp-up of new lines with that. If you recognize very late in the process that there is some problem with the design of the product which makes it difficult to produce it, you have to go back to the design. That costs a lot of time, right?
“But if we connect engineering and manufacturing in the metaverse based on three-dimensional data, we think we can really simulate a lot and speed up our processes a lot.”
This has been proven by a digital twin of a production line which operates on real-time data in the metaverse, as built by Vitesco on a Microsoft platform. If extrapolated, it can solve the skills challenge of moving lines to a new plant or opening a new plant entirely with training completed virtually through cloud-based digital twins, instead of moving people around various real-world locations.
“IF WE CONNECT ENGINEERING AND MANUFACTURING IN THE METAVERSE BASED ON THREEDIMENSIONAL DATA, WE CAN REALLY SPEED UP OUR PROCESSES A LOT”
For CIOs curious about the metaverse, Buck advises to keep an eye on trends and ensure your team is motivated.
“You will find somebody in your organization who is very motivated to [manage such projects and] learn new things,” he says. “This is what everyone wants right? They want to get their hands on new technology. And then it’s on us [CIOs] to figure out where the benefit for the company will be.”
New technology sums up the Vitesco story well, and Buck and the team certainly have in their hands a next-gen and beneficial set of tools: AI, digital twins and a green ledger, as powered by a mixture of technologies from AWS, SAP and Microsoft. One could call it an electric transformation, born in the cloud to take on the electrified world of the 2030s.
Turning challenges into opportunities MANUFACTURING ROADBLOCKS
How can technological advancements in the industry help companies meet obstacles head on?
BY YOANA CHOLTEEVA
As the prominence of manufacturing, logistics and supply chains and their role in maintaining equilibrium became evident during the pandemic, exposing how crucial the industry’s function is, the sector has seen some ups and downs, impacted by further economic disruption, geopolitical shifts and change.
Now widely recognized as “the lifeblood of our economies”, more attention is focused on how manufacturing can become even more robust and futureproofed to not only stand the existing storms but become more resilient in the face of yet unknown challenges.
With the rise of Industry 4.0 ushering smarter manufacturing through technological advancements, the sector now has larger than ever before potential to fufil its goals.
Manufacturing
challenges –geopolitics and the image problem
Following the pandemic, the next crisis impacting manufacturing and supply chains has been the Red Sea crisis currently seeing more than 60 merchant and naval vessels in the Red Sea hit by air strikes by the Houthi movement linked to the Israel-Hamas war.
The ability to deliver, the speed of delivery and meeting those service levels can be a very quick switch for the customer relying on you as a supplier or they can go somewhere else
STEVE FEARON / FORTERRO
Despite a time lag of direct impact to supply chains, Steve Fearon, president of northern Europe at Forterro, shares that all of these disruptive events outside of the usual operational challenges in organizations are becoming a part of a “larger desire for the sector to have better visibility of its stock availability to promise that demand,” especially in the face of competitive pressure in the industry.
“So things like the ability to deliver, the speed of delivery and meeting those service levels can be a very quick switch for the customer relying on you as a supplier or they can go somewhere else. So that competitive pressure increases and acting on it is something really high on the agenda right now,” he says.
But Fearon emphasizes that it’s a mixed bag of considerations and challenges currently sitting on manufacturers’ plate: “If you just think about it in a manufacturer’s terms, you’ve got somebody who in a day has to manufacture or assemble certain items. They need the right level of stock and materials to build that. They can’t afford once they’ve produced that to then run out of stock because they didn’t understand where the demand was coming from,” he explains.
That’s what makes the visibility and joining up of those various components
in the supply chain so essential. Similarly, the manufacturing industry could be seen battling a long-rooted problem with its image and attractiveness to young talent.
Amid a myriad of challenges, the industry is also not immune to labor shortages and lack of motivation for young talent to embark on manufacturing jobs with nearly a quarter of the sector’s workforce being aged 55 or older in America as of 2017, according to the National Association of Manufacturers.
Often seen as an “old and traditional industry to be in,” Phil Lewis, VP of solution consulting EMEA at Infor, thinks manufacturing needs an image rebrand as many of its businesses are not oldfashioned or stuffy at all – “If anybody walks around the factory of Ferrari, for example, or goes to see the new Tesla factory, they’re gonna be blown away as it is incredible to see what these manufacturing organizations can do”.
Recognizing the need for an image uplift, Lewis says it is part of the industry’s PR mission to “make manufacturing cool again” with some industry leaders, among Musk, already out there doing that and opening younger people’s eyes to the opportunities of the ever-growing industry.
But in terms of the aging workforce
If anybody walks around the factory of Ferrari, for example, or goes to see the new Tesla factory, they’re gonna be blown away as it is incredible to see what these manufacturing organizations can do
PHIL LEWIS / INFOR
and actually filling that gap, again, it comes down to what enterprise tech companies can do with their work, “producing systems, user experiences, mobile applications and infusing intelligent decision making into everything that we do,” Lewis says, “so when somebody is in manufacturing, they’re not logging on some old green screen user interface running on an IBM AS/400”.
UK manufacturing growth despite global turbulence
Amid the bumpy manufacturing market, recent research showed that manufacturing in the UK returned to growth in March for the first time in 20 months in a largely competitive international climate where demand is still low and potential blockers like supply chain stresses remain.
But what could the contributing factors to this success be? Overall transformations and strategic progress in the industry could have something to do with it, according to Tim Long, global head of manufacturing at Snowflake, who sees “significant pivots in direction for the entire industry, with leaders looking for ways to adapt, and data is seen as a core enabler of that transformation”.
Generous government support in the UK and emphasis on the importance of the industry could be another added element at play making the UK stand out from the rest. “We saw the chancellor allocate £4.5bn for some of these innovations moving towards net zero emissions. We know that the UK is moving up the ranks in terms of global manufacturing contribution being the ninth largest manufacturing nation in the world. So, a lot of exciting things happening in the UK manufacturing market,” Long shares.
Looking through the lens of some common challenges that usually stand in the way of manufacturers adopting technology that boosts their pro -
ductivity, Lewis also sees the UK as an economy on a constant mission of exploring, pioneering and experimenting: “You know, nothing’s off the table.” At the same time, UK manufacturers have learnt to embrace change in technological aspects where industry misconceptions are not uncommon.
Referring to cases where manufacturing customers keep altering the scope of what they expect from the vendor when assigned to a project, Lewis details how in some cases, organizations still expect multiple modifications and customizations as opposed to an out-of-the-box
solution, which you just can’t do in the cloud. “This new era has brought the need to make sure that that system is configured, set up for the industry and then give tools to customers that enable them to fine-tune and make it fit like a glove. So I think that mindset has already changed in the UK,” he says.
With cloud providers like Salesforce being the dominant CRM vendors around the world, especially in the UK, and Workday doing incredibly well in the country, it seems that UK customers are embracing all native cloud applications and “they’re happier to use tech -
nology in a different way because they understand how they can improve their businesses by using that innovation as it’s delivered to them,” Lewis explains.
While historically very protective of their data due to concerns around intellectual property loss, Long shares that they are seeing that tide shift at Snowflake with manufacturers beginning to embrace the idea of the cloud not just for traditional IT data, such as the ERP data, but also for shopfloor data.
Solving challenges in Industry 4.0
Especially crucial to manufacturing proves to be the Industry 4.0 concept, leaning on smart manufacturing – the focus on digital transformation of the field to deliver real-time decision-making, revamping the way companies work.
Some of the components driving Industry 4.0 include technology such as IoT, cloud computing and analytics, AI and machine learning, embedded software and robotics to streamline the way organizations gain insights and streamline operations.
For example, IoT provides a richness of inputs within manufacturing through sensors, being able to give the right feedback on how the various machine parts are working and break that down into what’s going on from an internal perspective.
This especially adds value when it comes to internal operations efficiency, but also for some of those companies that are building products and potentially getting new revenue streams and services using the technology.
Similarly, Fearon predicts that GenAI could very soon be successfully used to write a production schedule for an injection molding of a certain set of products with the current stock trends, with particular market demands within a set of disruptive activities: “That’s where I can see the manufacturing world going with generative AI”.
We know that the UK is moving up the ranks in terms of global manufacturing contribution… So, a lot of exciting things happening in the UK manufacturing market
TIM LONG / SNOWFLAKE
But making use of the relevant technologies doesn’t have to be a tick-box exercise as manufacturing customers can’t be expected to just to know what they’re going to do with new tech like blockchain. “I think we actually need to come along and give them the use cases and the finished result, which is, here’s a blockchain routine for your supply chain or an AI algorithm for your invoice processing. So we’re giving that to our customers,” Lewis says.
As one example, multidirectional forklift manufacturer Combilift detailed how Infor has helped it in tackling some pertinent problems.
“With regards to supply chain quality, Infor has guided us in the creation of Birst dashboards which makes tracking vendor performance and quality a much simpler task than before. The supply chain team used to use databases and spreadsheets separate from Syteline but now they can have all this information at the touch of a button,” Fearghal McCorriston, IT manager at Combilift, tells ERP Today.
In a similar way, skill shortages are no longer an issue for the technical team dealing with spare parts. McCorriston notes an AI-powered product recommender which can suggest additional parts required to be sent for jobs and in turn reduce incorrect dispatches and increase first-time fixes.
“It also means that the technical agent dealing with the customer does not need to have complete knowledge of trucks and parts as the system takes this responsibility and executes it with ease,” he explains.
Looking ahead to what the future of manufacturing can offer, all share that growth is the most common business driver they hear from manufacturing customers so it’s not as much a technological but a business focus of the growth mindset leading the way.
This involves customers looking for market intelligence, the next opportunities where they should be investing and how they ensure they are aligning their products and services with their customers as best they can.
Responding to these demands, Long says that Snowflake Data cloud, and Marketplace in particular, works with many of those insights “whether it’s market, economic statistics, data that can help you better understand your customer base or potentially data to help you price your products more intelligently – all of those are levers that we see our customers pursuing to help them drive their growth strategies”.
In addition, another macro-level transition can be seen where manufacturers aim to become more digital companies and monetize their data in strategic ways.
Some global manufacturing organizations have created digital solutions for their own production environments and are looking to market and sell those services to other manufacturers. “In some cases they are looking to platform those on [our platform due to it] being cloudnative and running globally across clouds. So that’s an exciting trend,” Long concludes.
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Each channel contains daily news, analysis and articles covering the key topics from each vendor with guest contributors and industry experts sharing their views and opinions.
AI IN HR AI IN HR
THE TIGHTROPE WALKER OF RECRUITMENT
CAN AI OFFER BUSINESSES A STREAMLINED YET ETHICAL RECRUITMENT FUTURE?
BY EKATERINA DUDAKOVA
Astring of media outlets and research reports today are discussing the crisis in the global job market, with employers struggling to find talent and more candidates finding themselves without a job.
According to the recent Talent Trends 2024 report conducted by Michael Page International, the biggest challenge in the last 12 months for 73 percent of employers has been finding candidates with the right skills and for 65 percent - a lack of applicants in general, with 54 percent of businesses struggling to match salary expectations.
On the other hand, according to the most recent report by Sage, “95 percent of HR leaders say working in HR is simply too much work and stress.”
With the need to channel and streamline efficiency and
growth, organizations cannot afford the human factor to be an obstacle. Instead, contributors to the Sage report say, “HR leaders need to up the pace when it comes to HR tech” which could “take away a lot of that transactional and tactical burden for them.”
This is why AI became one of the major topics of discussion around the possibilities of HR enhancement.
If you closely follow news about AI, you may have already seen various articles and research that explore all the risky and unpredictable consequences of AI deployment in HR and recruitment. Of course, the negativity and caution around the topic are not uncalled for - the research-based evidence has already proved that ethical considerations are some of the primary concerns in AI recruitment today.
However, the fact that AI is not going anywhere, becoming a larger part of our lives is undeniable. Soon enough, every grow-
ing business will find itself at the point where AI-powered HR processes will become not just convenient - but essential. The balance that AI software developers and users have to master to be able to increase efficiency without imposing risks of bias and unethical practices is the tightrope walker dilemma that this article explores.
Deploy automation so you don’t fall behind
The way AI can be deployed in HR processes is widely considered by recruitment agencies. Among them is Kelly, an HR consulting services company specializing in connecting STEM candidates with employers via its automated platform, Kelly Arc.
Through a partnership with UiPath dating back to 2017, Kelly designed the platform to enhance traditional recruiting processes. According to Ed Pederson, VP of innovation and product development at Kelly, normally, the process can take up to 30 to 45 days, with additional time given to interviews. With automation, however, a completely different experience can be achieved.
“The concept that Kelly Arc is born around is [that] talent and the hiring managers are interacting with each other almost live. There’s a matching technology that understands the profile of the candidates, like what their skill sets are, their profile interests in terms of geography and pay and their ambitions. It matches them to job descriptions on the platform.
“AI WILL NEVER TAKE OVER HR. IT WILL NEVER BE 100 PERCENT AUTOMATED. WHAT AI IS ACTUALLY DOING IS PUTTING THE HUMAN BACK INTO HR. IT’S ALLOWING US TO SPEND MORE TIME FOCUSING ON WHAT MANY LIKE TO DO”
“Hiring managers, once they post a job description, can immediately start to see candidates that fit the profile just by virtue of that matching technology, and vice versa. The talent can also see job descriptions that are directly applicable to them as opposed to having to weed through [uncertainties] like: ‘Does this really match what I want, that type of company?’”
So, the benefits are clear: AI and automation in recruiting offer speed and efficiency and, in the words of Pederson, the possibility of “a more modern user experience.” Compared to legacy technology where you had to provide your staff with a training manual, the use of these platforms can be more intuitive and instant, making the adoption process easier and faster.
“So, that’s the value of it, where you’re getting people connected to jobs much more quickly and it’s an experience that’s more consumeristic”, Pederson adds.
Channeling global accessibility with AI DHL Group, the global leader in the logistics industry, also shared why the deployment of Phenom AI in its HR processes has been crucial for its continuous success today.
As an international company, DHL processes approximately 180,000 applications across 220 countries and territories each year. According to Meredith Wellard, VP of group talent acquisition, learning and growth at DHL, what the company usually struggled to balance was the need to have a single solution that would be agile enough to adapt to the local requirements of each territory, country and business sector, such as languages and the supply and demand of top talent.
Before adopting the software, Wellard says, terms of the way we position our brand, the
Before adopting the software, Wellard says, the company struggled to “get consistency in terms of the way we position our brand, the way we market ourselves in the local environments or even the way we describe the experience that you might have as an employee in our business.”
Wellard adds that the company’s recruitity that would prioritize a “candidate-centric
Wellard adds that the company’s recruitment lacked the overall necessary level of agility that would prioritize a “candidate-centric talent acquisition experience”: Managing multiple departments in many different countries led to the creation of over 200 websites which made it very difficult for candidates to access or be flexible with their job search.
Thus, when the DHL Express division first found Phenom offering solutions to address
those challenges and implemented Phenom AI, it didn’t take long before the rest of the organization said, “‘This looks very interesting,’” Wellard says. “And in 2020, we took it and expanded it globally.
“So, over the following couple of years, we reduced the number of career sites down to - need a drumroll here - just one! That was a big step. And at that point, we started to see the huge benefits of how much that can impact our visibility in terms of search engine optimization, our visibility on job boards and so forth, simply because everyone’s contributing to that single name, descriptor or a URL and not all fighting for the airspace,” Wellard adds.
The uncomfortable question
While the passion for AI among HR leaders is clear, Ruaa Alsaleh, senior director of global HR at UiPath, points out that the most important strategy for its deployment is understanding it. That is, HR leaders need to know how to leverage it, what the pathway to its deployment looks like, how it is regulated and what the compliance procedures are. The crucial point here is, she explains, how to do it responsibly.
“It’s important to understand that you have to develop a governance and it’s multifunctional. […] Typically, what happens [is] almost 60 percent of automation projects with AI fail. And they fail because of poor change management and poor governance that has to be peopledriven.”
“WHAT WE’VE LEARNED IS THAT THE BIAS AND PROBLEMS THAT POTENTIALLY EXIST IN AI ARE LESS ABOUT THE MACHINE AND MORE ABOUT THE USER.
and ethical AI and put checkpoints in which […] we’re auditing the outcomes.”
Alsaleh specifies that this means that it is possible to “leverage AI to analyze the algorithms and the output to dictate: ‘Am I rejecting more females? Am I rejecting more minorities? Am I rejecting more people over 65?’ And in that way, we’re actually allowing AI to not only help us accelerate hiring but also leveraging the analytics behind it to determine [whether there is] bias and [whether] we need to reset the algorithm or the role-based decision-making in the background. So, it’s very imperative with the governance model that we have those checkpoints in the auditing.”
She adds: “I’m not gonna sit here and tell you [that] AI is never going to be biased or all the input [will be] as good as the output. […] When you feed into the AI model what you’re looking for per requisition, it’ll look at a job description and look at years of experience in the industry, but sometimes what we’re looking for also has a bias. So, it’s constant auditing that needs to happen. And we’re seeing it not only in recruiting but also in the employment cycle. It’s definitely a journey.”
But how do the users address this concern? Speaking to Pederson and Wellard, two clear examples can be identified.
“What we’ve done as a company is we [created] an AI Council which focuses on five different things”, says Pederson. Among them is
Instead, she says, the mindset should be focused
Expanding on that, Alsaleh explains that particularly in recruiting, “bots and AI should never dictate a candidate’s disposition of whether they’re moving forward or if they’re approved.” Instead, she says, the mindset should be focused on the utilization of AI as “digital assistants” which would allow the recruiter to expand their requisition and have “an aggregated view into the talent pool.”
Apart from establishing the right governance and compliance, no discussion about responsible AI is possible without considering ethics. When ERP Today enquired about the growing ethical considerations in the deployment of AI in HR, Alsaleh did not hesitate to be honest about it.
“Now, it’s a valid concern and it can happen, right? It happens today with humans - we have an unconscious bias, whether we like it or not. And depending on how we set the algorithm or even machine learning, it can happen. What we want to do in this [is to go] back to governance
external scanning which analyzes what is happening in the world “from politics to new technologies”, an internal use case development group, a technology lead that assesses the different technology partners, risk in which “robust AI ethics set of principles is adopted in the training of the entire company” and impact “which is tracking the trials we’re doing.”
“It’s definitely something that you can’t avoid,” Pederson adds. “You need to be aware of it and you need to work with partners who are intentionally working to solve those problems.”
Wellard shares the sentiment of Alsaleh and Pederson but describes a different approach to the issue. Although DHL does not have a dedicated committee, the company pledged to stay “selective” and only adopt AI where it could help efficiency.
“We take the topic of AI being a new technology very, very seriously. We as an organization are on a journey to understand the opportunities [it presents] not just in HR and recruitment, but across all of our business. But we also understand that while we don’t want to be slow, we want to be sensible about it. We want to make sure we know what we’re implementing”.
On the subject of bias, Wellard adds: “What we’ve learned is that the bias and problems that potentially exist in AI are less about the machine and more about the user. Until we know how algorithms work, how they will be used and what the implications are from privacy, compliance and other [perspectives], we won’t use them.”
Bringing joy back to HR with balanced tightrope-walking
So, what awaits the future of HR? According to Alsaleh, implementing AI in business will lead to an expansion of the job market and a large part of that potential is played by reshaping the employee experience.
“AI will never take over HR. It will never be 100 percent automated. What AI is actually doing is putting the human back into HR. It’s allowing us to spend more time focusing on what many like to do, which is [building] the strategy in the big picture, [i.e.] how we get the company where it needs to go from a people perspective,” Alsaleh explains.
“HR is shifting dramatically… McKinsey Global Institute estimated that by 2030 AI is going to contribute to the creation of one million to 50 million new jobs globally. These are higher-paying jobs. These are more exciting jobs
“[IN THE FUTURE], YOU’LL HAVE A TEAM OF DIGITAL WORKERS OR AI THAT HAVE BEEN WORKING FOR YOU OVERNIGHT WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING”
that will be a lot more lucrative”, she concludes.
This thought is echoed by Wellard who believes that with AI, recruiters can “bring back the joy to HR” that used to be there “before technology-enabled platforms came along.”
“You know, I’ve been in HR for over 25 years and when I first joined, the recruiters were like the rockstars of the HR organization. Today’s platforms definitely made recruiters’ lives easier… but they did turn recruiting into a process. So, [it] became all about time, cost and efficiency, and we saw recruiters shift from being creative and inspiring to being administrative and process-driven. And that’s perfectly fine. But it is different.”
So, what Wellard is hoping for with AI appearing in the arena is that it will take over some of those administrative tasks and give recruiters the space to go back to “being more creative.”
“My theory is that it will become a lot more fluid than it’s ever been before, and I think that’s exciting,” she adds.
In his own vision of what’s to come, Pederson adds a few more points of AI potential: In the future, “You are going to walk into the office or [whatever you are using] and you’ll have a team of digital workers or AI that have been working for you overnight while you were sleeping.” They will, he argues, lay out all the technical aspects in front of you, such as the right candidates that you need to speak to, and give you the space to spend more time on “human activities” like training your workforce or cultivating relationships with the hiring manager.
“So, it will allow them to do more with these available technologies, but it will be much more conversational and relational in general,” Pederson says.
It is clear that ethics and bias considerations are not going anywhere. Companies view it as an ongoing issue that needs to be discussed collaboratively. Continuous auditing and the ability to point out the issue and learn from it is crucial to ensure the fluidity, ease and creativity that AI could bring to recruiting.
As long as software developers and users continue to have that open conversation, develop compliance and governance policies and ensure that the weight of wish for efficiency does not outweigh the balance of ethics on the tightrope, the walk should feel smooth and safe. However, whether this becomes a reality where recruitment is bright and fair is up to all parties involved to decide.
AUTOMATION &
The technology recipe for factories: Amongst a melting pot of AI project outcomes, one chocolatier gives a taste of how the manufacturing industry can create smooth quality assessment, predictive maintenance and information management with the right solution mindset to reduce the heat on workforces.
BY CHRISTINE HORTON
he very nature of manufacturing tasks is evolving, with organizations today requiring a smooth blend of traditional and digital skills. To find out more from the factory floor up, ERP Today spoke to global chocolate and cocoa product manufacturer, Barry Callebaut.
For over a century, Barry Callebaut has manufactured chef-grade Belgian chocolate, and now champions the promise of 100 percent sustainably sourced cocoa beans to manufacture chocolate products for chefs’ standards with “workability that never fails.” From its chocolate products to its operations, it’s a message that the manufacturer is keen to carry throughout the business.
Now operating “in a very disruptive external environment,” the Group’s CEO, Peter Feld, shared the firm’s bid for increased resiliency back in April. Welcoming an “integrated and diversified business model,” Feld says Barry Callebaut aims to get “even closer to [its] customers, streamlining operations and accelerating digital transformation.” But, where is the biggest blocker for this
chocolate factory’s success?
“Talent is one of the most important challenges we face,” explains Bram Van Genabet, digital strategy director at Barry Callebaut. “The labor force is aging. People with 30-40 years of experience are retiring. A lot of that knowledge historically was paper-based.”
It’s a common challenge, as some 36 percent of vacancies in manufacturing are proving hard-to-fill with applicants lacking the appropriate skills, qualifications or experience, compared to an average of 24 percent across all industries. For their shop floor operations in particular, firms are struggling to find the right people, as employees retire or leave their roles, taking their knowledge with them.
Replicating operator performance
Faced with this lack of new upcoming skills, manufacturers like Barry Callebaut are seeking answers in technology, leaning towards automation and predictive AI as a way to ease the pressure on their over-loaded workforces. For Van Genabet, that means putting paperbased information into a predictive AI model, which the company can make
accessible to the rest of the organization.
“We can create tools that make sure the performance of the best operator is replicated,” he says. “That helps us when experienced operators are unavailable or during summer peaks when we have more junior operators running the lines. That’s where you get a lot of learning experiences as well.”
Elsewhere, Van Genabet points out that new workers joining the industry have certain expectations. He explains manufacturing environments can be harsh - it’s loud and there can be high temperatures, making it difficult to find people who wish to work in those conditions. Here too, automation and AI, fueled by IoT data from sensors, is helping to create a more desirable environment for employees - and potential employees.
For Van Genabet, deploying a network of technologies can help to transform the factory floor working environment: “We are into development and application of advanced and smart sensors, and leverage AI to build predictive models to tell us where we need to make modifications. It’s this combination that will allow us to bring operators out of these
“To bring operators out of these loud, hot conditions, and into more desirable air-conditioned control room environments from which they can control multiple lines - this is an evolution where we’re going to need people, technology, data and processes to make it possible.”
loud, hot conditions, and into more desirable air-conditioned control room environments from which they can control multiple lines.
“This is an evolution where we’re going to need people, technology, data and processes to make it possible,” he says. “That’s going to be an important trend for the blue-collar worker.”
Freeing up employees
Industrial manufacturing software from AVEVA was Barry Callebaut’s solution of choice. Speaking to Jim Chappell, AVEVA’s global head of AI, he shares how the technology looks to help manufacturers in areas such as quality assessment, predictive maintenance and information management.
For example, utilizing predictive analytics capabilities, manufacturers can start to flag flaws in machinery and optimize maintenance schedules to minimize unplanned downtime, as well as the human time spent on repairs. Additionally, the AI
technology can process data and produce valuable insights in a fraction of the time that a human worker could, freeing them to act on that information.
The technology can also improve a factory’s safety for its workers, says Chappell: “With AI-driven vision using digital cameras, it can detect safety and quality issues, improving the work environment and resulting manufactured products.
“And with the power of generative AI and large language models, workers will be able to ask questions like ‘Why is this machine less efficient now than it was last week?’ and get an answer they can act on swiftly,” he continues. “In the past it might have taken several hours or even several days of work to get to that conclusion.”
For the AVEVA AI head, the technology is also making it possible for workers on the shop floor to continually gain new skills and adapt to the needs of a changing industry.
“No one can be an expert on everything, and as the manufacturing industry evolves there are ever more manuals, spec sheets, maintenance data, etc. for workers to try to keep abreast of to do their job well. AI can distill that information down and make it easier for them to get up to speed, get to the informa -
tion they need, and optimally maintain factories,” says Chappell.
A taste of manufacturing’s future - the role of humans
With the advancement of AI, it is natural to wonder what role humans will play as we forge a path toward an Industry 5.0 future. Certainly, in manufacturing, experts agree that AI is not a replacement for human intellect. Instead, it extends human capabilities, teaching and helping them become better at what they do.
“Humans are needed to both shape and train AI and to interpret the output,” says Chappell. “For example, over the last few years, we’ve seen the emergence of the prompt engineer, a job that was unheard of five years ago but is now something that is critical to implementing an effective generative AI solution.”
Van Genabet agrees: “If you look at aviation, you still have a pilot running the airplane - even if the vehicle is on autopilot. The role of the operator will be more like this. They’ll have the right tools to tell them how things are running but still need to be able to act and inter-
“Workers will be able to ask questions like ‘Why is this machine less efficient now than it was last week?’ and get an answer they can act on swiftly.”
JIM CHAPPELL / AVEVA
BRAM VAN GENABET / BARRY CALLEBAUT
“50 percent of projects fail and 78 percent stall prior to deployment. Companies should take the time to understand why AI is needed and the benefits it brings, not just roll-out AI for AI’s sake.”
GRAHAM UPTON / CAPGEMINI
vene in the process when something is going wrong.
“Sensors might fail. Systems might make an unexpected prediction. They need to have the right tools and knowledge to override the technology - becoming more focused on managing the exceptions than running repetitive operational tasks.”
Manufacturers need quality data for hungry tools
However, one of the biggest challenges that an organization faces is that AI is only as good as the data feeding it. In a recent Advanced Manufacturing Report from industrial technology company Hexagon, it was found that 98 percent of manufacturers struggle with datarelated issues, hindering the adoption of advanced technologies.
“While AI is a very powerful tool, it’s also very data hungry,” says Tim Gaus, principal and smart manufacturing business leader with Deloitte Consulting.
“The data readiness of companies and their ability to integrate and then main-
tain the data sets required for meaningful insights continues to be a challenge. Most companies have partners to create the right model or a similar internal capability, but it’s the management of a heterogeneous data environment across locations and the inevitable changes that come to that data set that pose the largest challenges.”
But while getting the data right is critical, it doesn’t mean that the data needs to be perfect. For Gaus, companies need to find the proper balance between risk and accuracy that fits their application.
Half of AI projects fail
Graham Upton, head of technology and innovation, and chief architect, Intelligent Industry at Capgemini, also points out that “establishing a good data foundation and putting the right architecture in place - including having the right skills and resources to do it correctly - is essential to make AI effective in manufacturing and maximize its potential.”
Upton also urges manufacturers to “stop and think” before acting on their AI plans.
“We are seeing a lot companies failing to implement AI effectively. Indeed, 50 percent of projects fail and 78 percent stall prior to deployment. Companies should take the time to understand why AI is needed and the benefits it brings, not just roll-out AI for AI’s sake. Ensure that the training datasets have the right information in them as there is a
risk that poor input equals poor output - and rogue data can bring undesired outcomes. Therefore, select those AI projects that will provide the best return on investment for your business.”
From the director of the chocolatier’s digital strategy, Van Genabet’s advice to manufacturers looking to implement AI into their operations is also to have a clear goal. Know what it is you’re aiming to optimize - then do it in small and iterative steps.
“We ran our first project like this, just one process line with one specific KPI that we were trying to improve. We ended up going through several iterations and the key learning for me was that even though we took a relatively small scope, there was lots of complexity and we encountered challenges.
“Another observation is that the improvements we did in the process were often easy fixes that in some cases took less than an hour to implement,” says Van Genabet. “But without the predictive model and insights from the data, we would not have been able to identify the improvement opportunity. We need technology and cross-functional teams for solving a real business problem, not technology for the sake of technology.”
“While AI is a very powerful tool, it’s also very data hungry.”
TIM GAUS / DELOITTE CONSULTING
AI: a golden ticket?
From the end-user perspective, a successful AI implementation can improve business productivity for both experienced and new employees. It can seem like a golden ticket win - for your skilled employees, you need ways to automate what they do to free up their time, while new generations of workers need ways to achieve more without extensive training and experience.
However, AVEVA’s Chappell warns organizations not to get swept up in the hype around AI, as it must bring tangible benefits.
“Potential risks must be understood and managed, as well as the rewards,” says Chappell. “For this, organizations must ensure they have clear aims, and a clear definition of what success will look like. It’s also important that anything that is implemented is easily managed and scaled; any AI project will fail if it’s too difficult or too complicated.”
Given the current noise around AI across all industries, it will come as no surprise that 75 percent of advanced manufacturing companies still say that adopting technologies such as AI is their top engineering and R&D priority, ac-
cording to research by Bain.
“The time to act is now,” says Guido Vetter, partner and member of Bain’s Advanced Manufacturing and Services practice. “AI is no longer a choice: It’s a pressing reality that is disrupting business models and industries virtually across the board, and, therefore, is a CEO and board-level issue.”
deliver a true paradigm shift.”
For Vetter, it’s a question of refining what good tastes like at scale and placing your bets on the best mechanisms and checks to achieve it: “The question organizations are gearing for is how to really establish AI at scale and leverage it for value generation and differentiation from the competition. That means fully understanding the technology and its uses, while still placing considered bets on where AI implementations will
He firmly adds, however, that “Companies which are not acting now will face a serious competitive disadvantage in the near future.”
What’s clear is that a straightforward golden ticket to success isn’t guaranteed when it comes to undertaking a manufacturing automation project. But, an implementation is also thankfully more than just a game of chance; supplying the right mindset, support and strategy, manufacturers are surely in it to win it.
BOOKS BALANCING THE
CAN ERP CASH
BY ADRIAN BRIDGWATER
It’s time to cash in and balance the books. Experts from Workday, Red Hat, Nutanix and more talk about FinOps’ influence on ERP.
As organizations embrace FinOps evolution and take proactive steps to really count the cost of cloud computing and its ancillary IT services, how will FinOps evolve next? What questions do we need to ask of the platforms contending for share of voice in this space, how will key ERP metrics in spend management and procurement management be impacted and, come to think of it, how will we balance the books better once commercial enterprise really gets its head around the FinOps mindset?
FinOps borrowed its naming convention from the portmanteau-style coming together of developers and operations teams in DevOps. Although possibly misleading in its name, FinOps is not the provision of operations practices (system administration, database management, application testing, quality assurance and so on) for financial professions; it is Ops in a cloud-native world with a view to controlling spend on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools, services and all related functions.
As we ride the buoyant wave out of the CapEx-centric era of pre-cloud into the OpEx epoch of cloud itself, FinOps seeks to unify the finance function’s role, interest and goals with the work carried out by the business and technology teams, and to establish cross-discipline workforce units dedicated to collaborating on making the best decisions regarding performance, quality and cost. The core philosophy stemming from FinOps
is the need to make the “best” technology investment decisions in terms of operational, functional and environmental excellence, not just the cheapest ones. With those defining cornerstones in mind then, how will we balance the books with this new, more important than ever technology practice and how will it impact key ERP metrics in spend management and procurement management?
Balancing deadweight economy turbulence
To Tim Wakeford, VP of financials product strategy at Workday, the impact of FinOps is already here, if enterprises can grab it: “FinOps has been in the ascendancy for much of this decade (if not before) and now stands at a point where it impacts modern enterprises’ ‘cloud stacks’ to drive both financial and operational efficiency. This is perhaps no surprise as CFOs and finance leaders with ERP responsibilities are prioritiz -
“Integrating FinOps practices with ERP systems will enhance key metrics in spend management and procurement, improving accuracy and enabling real-time financial oversight”
BRIAN
ADLER / FINOPS FOUNDATION GOVERNING BOARD
ing collaboration within departments on fair-cost technology that enables agile decision-making.”
It comes as a recent survey from Deloitte suggested that given the turbulence experienced in a “deadweight economy” across many world territories, CFOs are maintaining a defensive strategic stance, with over half (56 percent) of finance leaders rating reducing costs as a strong priority and four in ten (43 percent) rating increasing cashflow as a strong priority.
“Taking these realities in the context of procurement and deployment in the ERP sphere, CFOs now need FinOps to enable them to optimize system deployments in terms of cost first, but without compromising performance or scalability. On top of this, given wider changes in our economies, many leaders want functions in FinOps to promote data analysis supported by AI, across purchasing, finance and other cloud integrations,” Wakeford says.
But as financial leaders tackle their FinOps strategy, ensuring compliance is increasingly important for ERP in a world of increasing regulatory compliance restrictions. “In a competitive marketplace, with many companies onboarding AI-enhanced capabilities, safely navigating a complex regulatory landscape in the context of the EU AI Act, as well as other legislative controls, will be mission-critical,” he advises.
Despite economic growth indicators slowing, management analyst house Gartner found around 90 percent of
CFOs projecting higher AI budgets in 2024 - and, in fact, none are planning a reduction. Wakeford says that this echoes Workday’s research into so-called “AI pioneers” - including CEOs and the heads of finance, IT and HR - with more than half of FinOps-focused AI innovators in this space calling the technology a gamechanger for the finance industry, demonstrating the long-term value finance leaders are seeing with AI and automation.
“With all of these thoughts in mindand with the intersection between ERP and FinOps implementation at the heart of this story - we know that ultimately, CFOs want the right FinOps strategy at a fair cost, but with a higher focus on delivering ROI while not introducing operational difficulties,” states Workday’s Wakeford.
“CFOs are looking to bring financial, IT and DevOps leadership together to successfully manage the total cost of cloud deployments collaboratively across the enterprise while mitigating risk for rising litigation-related challenges. They are also battling shrinking EBITDA [earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization] margins and want robust FinOps that won’t put them in the red while providing scalable outcomes from digital investments with clear paths to identifying new growth opportunities, financial management strategies, datadriven insight and market forecasting.”
Opening up SaaS software’s secret costs
As the discussion in this space develops, commercial organizations and public bodies running substantial cloud computing deployments are perhaps starting to reevaluate the “flexibility and convenience” messages they were sold at the early onset of the cloud computing era.
This is not to suggest that cloud computing is going the way of X (formerly Twitter), i.e. adoption, expansion and diversification practices are still increasing, obviously. Still, there may be a more direct validation for FinOps practices if
“As FinOps evolves - especially in the ERP space where core procurement management practices are fundamental to business health - I expect more emphasis on identifying areas where cloud computing needs to be compared to alternatives”
MARK KHAVKIN / MINIO
businesses are going to be able to tackle spend and procurement management in a more wholly digital-first sense. As a member of the FinOps Foundation governing board, Brian Adler puts his weight behind this notion.
In addition to his FinOps board role, Adler is senior director of cloud market strategy at IT cost and operations management platform company, Flexera. He thinks that the future of FinOps in the ERP space and elsewhere will be shaped by addressing the hidden costs of SaaS software and the blind spots that enterprises face with Bring Your Own License (BYOL) software licenses in the cloud.
“As FinOps evolves and takes on more essential accountability roles across the spectrum of ERP, the next steps will involve deepening visibility into an organization’s entire hybrid IT estateincluding SaaS management and cloudbased software contracts - to uncover and manage obscured cost structures and usage terms,” advises Adler.
“Integrating FinOps practices with ERP systems will enhance key metrics in spend management and procure -
ment, improving accuracy and enabling real-time financial oversight. This integration empowers businesses to track, predict and manage cloud and SaaS expenditures more effectively. The result is a more strategic approach that is informed by comprehensive insights.”
Adler’s thoughts here suggest that FinOps plus ERP multiplied by financial management fundamentals (possibly also divided by responsible AI practices) can drive organizations towards achieving optimized spend and maximized value throughout repeated business cycles. If all the forces are aligned in unison, the virtuous circle sees firms drive better financial health and operational efficiency in increasingly cloud-centric business environments. The onward benefits experienced in environmental and social governance (ESG) and workforce well-being complete the circle, but that’s a story in and of itself.
Better books with cloud computing, or an alternative?
An important question starts to arise at this point: Is FinOps good news or bad
“Ultimately, CFOs want the right FinOps strategy at a fair cost, but with a higher focus on delivering ROI while not introducing operational difficulties”
TIM WAKEFORD / WORKDAY
news for cloud service providers (CSPs)?
We know that the official line from the big three hyperscalers would be something along the lines of “all efficiency in cloud deployments is good”, or some such platitude. But actually, there could come a time when FinOps enables some organizations to look for cloud alternatives.
“By instilling the practice of forecasting and analyzing variances - good and bad - FinOps helps software engineers and data analysts to improve their craft significantly. As FinOps evolves - especially in the ERP space where core procurement management practices are fundamental to business health - I expect more emphasis on identifying areas where cloud computing needs to be compared to alternatives due to various engineering, compliance or scale considerations. I also expect additional frameworks to emerge that showcase those tradeoffs. Within the area of cloud spend specifically, I expect an additional emphasis on understanding and forecasting the costs of AI/ML workflows and associated data infrastructure costs (storage, backup, retention, etc.), in addition to compute costs,” says Mark Khavkin, CFO MinIO, a high-performance object storage company that caters to the AI data infrastructure space.
Where do we go next? The answer in FinOps land is always the balance sheet. Ask 99.99 percent of IT managers where the IT balance sheet is most profoundly
impacted from a profit and loss perspective over the next 18 months? They’ll respond with two words: Artificial intelligence. The cost of AI and how it is implemented productively, profitably and prudently is where ERP-centric FinOps can have its most important impact.
This is the view shared by Dr. Kjell Carlsson, head of AI strategy at Domino Data Lab. Carlsson insists that while there are plenty of opportunities to use AI for better FinOps, the real opportunity lies in using FinOps to efficiently manage the costs of an organization’s AI strategy.
“Every organization needs to embed AI technologies to survive and compete but training and operationalizing AI models - not to mention storing and processing the necessary data - can be extraordinarily expensive,” states Carlsson. “Managing that cost is critical to boost AI ROI and adoption. Unfortunately, it is particularly challenging to track costs across the fragmented ecosystem of rapidly maturing AI technologies.
“Therefore, it is important that companies implement FinOps capabilities that provide visibility across AI expenses and track and control infrastructure spend without the need to manually tag assets and reconcile cloud bills,” Carlsson continues. “Sadly, general FinOps solutions today do not have these capabilities for AI services, technologies and infrastructure and they are unlikely to
“Every organization needs to embed AI technologies to survive and compete, but training and operationalizing AI models - not to mention storing and processing the necessary datacan be extraordinarily expensive”
DR. KJELL CARLSSON / DOMINO DATA LAB
be able to catch up to the rapidly evolving and expanding AI landscape.”
In Carlsson’s view, for the foreseeable future, companies will need to rely on integrated AI/ML platforms - that streamline access to these AI technologies - to provide these FinOps capabilities. On the plus side, they also offer the tools necessary to analyze and predict your FinOps costs.
Given where we’ve got to thus far, if organizations are starting to embrace FinOps evolution and taking more proactive steps to really count the cost of cloud computing and all related ancillary IT services, how will FinOps evolve next? Monica Sasso, digital transformation lead, global financial services at Red Hat, wants us to get granular. She says that firstly, it will be about getting to the cost of each application, not just at the container level, but at the app level. From its perspective, the Red Hat team thinks it will also include CO₂/kWh consumption at the app level as well.
“The bottom line is that lines of business need to see how much their applications cost them so they can make decisions about where their applications run. This is about using all the data we have to make the right decision at the right time at an application level,” says Sasso. “It could also be about reducing complexity of an IT estate and simplifying it so that firms can have a single pane of glass for their entire estate. The open hybrid cloud provides that common, unified layer across all environments to be able to compare like for like, bringing not just technological observability but also cost observability.”
For the impact on key ERP metrics in spend management and procurement management, Sasso thinks that when executed properly, FinOps will be able to shine a light all the way from the application to the operating system. Firms and lines of business will be to make data-based decisions about where an application is run instead of relying on sentiment or gut feeling.
Three core technology pillars
“The bottom line is that lines of business need to see how much their applications cost them so they can make decisions about where their applications run”
MONICA SASSO / RED HAT
Steen Dalgas, hybrid cloud leader, UK and Ireland, Nutanix, is also a senior cloud economist. Dalgas says that technology leaders are being tasked with three key pillars in 2024.
“Firstly, they need to become true partners to the business in enabling innovation. This is achieved primarily through supporting the work of the application development team to be able to add new application features which drive revenue. Secondly, they are being asked to bring down the cost of IT by better managing people and technology resources. Thirdly, they are being tasked with making sure the business is secure, agile and adaptable to change,” says Dalgas.
The Nutanix view is that a key strategy to support these outcomes is the building out of a “Cloud Center of Excellence” in every business. The primary staffing
role needed within is the FinOps team, aligned closely with the three key pillars to save the company money, enable innovation and future-proof the business.
“To meet the objective of enabling innovation, the FinOps team should be focused on supporting the needs of the application development team,” advises Dalgas. “Eliminating process friction, including time delays, is critical. The application team wants access to IT resources on their timescales. These are typically expensive and scarce resources so enabling their success should be a high business priority. We support these objectives through our data services features which enable self-service access to database clones for example, and infrastructure as code to meet resource requirements on a timely and consistent basis.”
Dalgas further notes that achieving cost reduction in the cloud is hard
“Understanding the portfolio of product costs - particularly which products help your gross margin and which ones hurt - will change the strategy of the entire organization”
SIVA PADISETTY / NEW RELIC
due to the complexity of managing hybrid multi-cloud. The FinOps team is typically responsible for managing IT resources associated with day two operations - which are subject to almost daily changes and often need to learn skills to deal with different cloud vendors. FinOps has to deal with consolidated invoices from hyperscalers that can run to thousands of line items. Managing these costs is a huge task.
“The future of FinOps in the ERP space and elsewhere needs to see an evolution of those teams to move away from collating and managing resource consumption data and more towards analyzing the data, drawing on insights and adding value to the business. But without simplifying the messy layer of cloud infrastructure this will be much harder to achieve,” he added.
New Relic CTO Siva Padisetty agrees with these sentiments and says that the evolution of FinOps will require more strategic modeling that includes product and sales approaches.
“As a baseline, most have come to understand FinOps practices that convert usage to costs,” says Padisetty. “Engineering and finance teams have aligned on how the final cloud bill gets calculated and why it changes. The missing piece of the puzzle is the integration with product and sales teams. Understanding the portfolio of product costs - particularly which products help your gross margin and which ones hurt - will change the strategy of the entire organization. Perhaps some products are loss leaders and others are cash cows, but understanding how that pendulum swings will greatly impact how you view your total cloud costs as ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ Adding that context will help all leaders make better decisions on where to apply pressure in cloud cost optimization.”
Expenses transformation with AI
Alex Antonov, managing director of ecommerce solutions Unlimit, follows the consensus here. He says that machine learning technologies have long been
“CFOs will be able to define goals and set tasks within FinOps systems much like they would with company specialists, receiving outcomes (such as cost reduction recommendations) in natural language”
ALEX ANTONOV / UNLIMIT
employed to manage cloud expenses. However, the rapid advancement of generative AI technologies will soon make the application of FinOps practices more straightforward.
“Specifically, cloud resource expenditure optimization management will be driven by business objectives set in natural language. CFOs will be able to define goals and set tasks within FinOps systems much like they would with company specialists, receiving outcomes (such as cost reduction recommendations) in natural language,” says Antonov. “This shift will lead to greater automation in managing cloud budgets, positively impacting company costs. Fewer FinOps specialists will be needed to support these automated processes.”
In Antonov’s view, AI should fully take over transforming business goals and tasks into specific requirements for cloud architecture, suggesting possible configurations of cloud services that meet the requirements, business tasks and load change plans. AI can also play
a role in modeling operations and calculating infrastructure costs based on plans and forecasts, and ultimately delivering an optimal solution based on functions, budgets and business requirements.
“Such advancements will not only streamline financial operations but also enhance the strategic capabilities of CFOs, enabling more dynamic and effective financial management in cloudcentric environments. Deploying AI for FinOps will require more than a leap of faith in procurement management; AI will need to ‘show its working’, transparency and explainability will need to be built in, with the ability to drill down into the detail to demonstrate the cost benefits of each option explored.”
There is much to take account of (pun intended) when it comes to the application of FinOps in the ERP sector and the increasing complexity of cloud is sure to make organizations now look for more accountable (pun again intended) methods for procuring and deploying cloud computing in the near and immediate future.
“To meet the objective of enabling innovation, the FinOps team should be focused on supporting the needs of the application development team. Eliminating process friction, including time delays, is critical”
STEEN DALGAS / NUTANIX
MUNCHIES AND
BY SHANA BRIDDOCK
WHAT DOES A SNACK COMPANY AND A MOTORCYCLE COMPANY HAVE IN COMMON?
It’s what virtually every business small or large is facing in our modernized digital world – Intersnack Group and Triumph Motorcycles are each set out on an innovation journey. Innovation starts with upgrading ERP systems and these companies happen to have something else in common, they’re on this journey with Infor.
Relatively, Infor is a smaller player in the ERP market, dwarfed by SAP, but it has been gaining traction in recent years with niche industries, like CPG and automotive in this instance, where its personalized expertise and tailored solutions give it a competitive advantage with SMEs fighting to stay competitive in an AI-crazed sector.
The Infor Velocity World Tour 2024 brought together attendees from all kinds of industries to discuss common ERP challenges and how working with Infor on their innovation journeys has helped them eat away at modern challenges and drive into innovation success.
Among many notable speakers, including Infor’s CEO Kevin Samuelson and CTO Soma Somasundaram, the Infor Velocity World Tour event hosted a fireside chat with Intersnack Group and Triumph Motorcycles to get a deeper look into the ERP challenges of such differing industries and how similar their goals can be.
Intersnack’s ERP crunch time
Let’s go back a bit and dive into Intersnack Group’s ERP journey with Infor. The brand is a leading European manufacturer of savory snacks, and has long been committed to upholding the highest standards of quality and safety in its products. However, a few short years ago, it was faced with disparate ERP systems complicating operations. Its journey towards digital transformation needed guidance and a personalized solution.
Christoph Laufen, head of CoE at Intersnack Group, said of his company’s much needed system transformation: “It’s the most important topic because it goes hand in hand with product safety and quality.”
Intersnack’s digital transformation began with a vision to streamline operations and enhance product quality across its diverse portfolio of brands.
Tasked with replacing 17 disparate ERP systems, Infor became the partner of choice in 2020, offering a comprehensive suite of solutions specific to the food and beverage industry.
As Laufen elaborated at the fireside chat: “Having good processes in place, well-trained people executing these processes and then selecting and picking the most suitable software to support this,” became the cornerstone of Intersnack’s transformation approach. With Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage at its core, Intersnack embarked then on a journey to harmonize its global processes, from procurement to supply chain management.
The deployment of Infor solutions not only facilitated compliance management but also empowered Intersnack to drive growth and expansion in a rapidly evolving market – just as GenAI began to take center stage. With a digital transformation team at H&L Digital and AI capabilities via Infor Coleman, Infor took deployment to the next stage, providing Intersnack with a framework to drive automation and then AI.
At the Infor Velocity World Tour event, Laufen was passionate about the importance of data integration as it pertains to upcoming innovations like AI: “Utilizing data from various systems into one is instrumental in unlocking valuable insights.”
With one seamless data system, Laufen suggests that: “GenAI can help us learn how to set the machine to the best possible parameters.”
To provide further context, it’s important to note that the food and beverage industry is a highly competitive beast, with stringent regulations governing product safety and quality. By streamlining processes and centralizing data with Infor’s ERP solutions, Intersnack says it was able to not only ensure compliance but also gain a competitive edge in the market.
Additionally, with a diverse portfolio of brands and a presence globally, standardizing processes with Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage enabled Intersnack to achieve greater operational efficiency and agility, positioning the company for success in the years to come.
Triumph Motorcycles open road to Infor Triumph Motorcycles is an iconic British motor-
OTHER THAN WHAT SOUNDS LIKE MY KIND OF ROAD TRIP.
cycle manufacturer with a legacy spanning over a century. The company faced its own set of challenges in modernizing its operations. James Davies, director of global business systems at Triumph, agreed with Intersnack Group on the need for agility when adapting to changing business landscapes, urging users: “Don’t be stubborn. Don’t be afraid to tear things up and start again and restructure your whole approach to the project.”
Triumph’s legacy of innovation and craftsmanship meant they were looking for a bold ERP transformation aimed at revitalizing their brand. Faced with the challenge of navigating a rather complex web of systems, Triumph sought a partner capable of delivering end-to-end solutions tailored to the unique needs of the motorcycle industry. You guessed it – they chose Infor.
Infor offered a suite of solutions designed to optimize manufacturing processes and streamline supply chain operations for the automotive group. Triumph Motorcycles ended up with approximately 160 to 170 different systems that were serving various purposes within the business; its goal was to simplify its systems landscape to end up with a core, end-to-end system which supports most of the operational work for the business. Similarly to Intersnack Group, the motorcycle company was looking for one platform to rule them all. This is why they were brought together at Infor Velocity World Tour.
Davies said: “The aim really [of] having a centralized data warehouse or data repository is to remove misunderstanding, it’s to speed things up.”
The phased rollout of Infor LN and PTC Windchill empowered Triumph Motorcycles to achieve agility and efficiency across its global operations, from shop floor scheduling to boardroom strategies. Realtime data insights and improved visibility enabled the company to enhance product ordering and better communication with customers.
“Data comes in many different forms, be that objective, subjective, real-time, retrospective and it can be very difficult to sift through all that and not get lost in the noise.” Davies continued: “Ultimately if you invest that time early on, it’s much, much easier to use that time and time again for different possibilities.”
What’s next for snack bars and handle bars?
For Intersnack Group, the future lies in further harnessing the potential of AI and data analytics to enhance product quality and drive market expansion. Laufen said: “People eat our products. Obviously, that’s the most important thing. We’re focused on what’s at the end of the rainbow, that’s to simplify people’s lives.”
Similarly, Triumph Motorcycles is set to embark on the next phase of its ERP journey, leveraging Infor’s cutting-edge technologies to streamline manufacturing processes, enhance customer experiences and drive global growth.
With a clear focus on data-driven decisionmaking, Triumph Motorcycles aims to cement its position as a trailblazer in the motorcycle industry and Davies thinks AI is going to get them there, he said: “AI is here to stay, the next industrial revolution without a doubt. It’s an opportunity to refresh your business model and what I find interesting about the emergence of AI is that it is a disruptive technology, or more accurately is a group of disruptive technologies.”
“I think the next few years are going to be incredibly interesting for the motorcycle industry.”
Whether providing us with a little munchies relief or setting us out on the open road, businesses in every industry are aware that the future is inevitable. Integral operations, from supply chain to safety initiatives, are going to be enhanced with innovative ERP solutions – AI is not coming. AI is here.
Events like the Infor Velocity World Tour provide invaluable opportunities for knowledge exchange and through this fireside chat it shows that industries that seemingly have nothing in common are actually set on the same challenges and the same goals.
Innovation is not merely about adopting new technologies - but rather it is about embracing a mindset of innovation and collaboration. That’s what Infor was trying to say by bringing Intersnack Group and Triumph Motorcycles together.
So pick up a quick snack at the transformation station before you set out on the innovation highway.
Nobody wants a leak
Getting cyber-secure in manufacturing Manufacturing businesses are advancing their stacks, but openings have sprung for bad actors. How can businesses kick the bucket on cyber risks?
BY GREG NOTCH
It was recently predicted that two in five manufacturing businesses will experience a supply chain cyber-attack by 2025.
Though alarming, these are unsurprising statistics given the transformative period manufacturing has undergone in the last two decades. Manufacturing businesses have been pushing towards automation for greater efficiency and productivity, but their operational technology (OT) tends to have very long, useful lives, making support and maintenance like patching difficult and expensive.
While the industry has mostly moved away from legacy equipment and integrated with advanced technologies, it has expanded its threat landscape in the process. New doors, or holes, have opened up for criminals to disrupt operations and the potential for third-party risks has increased. The result for organizations is a need to prioritize cybersecurity measures to keep pace. Let’s take a closer look.
The impact of IT/OT convergence
but also leverage AI for predictive analytics, becoming foundational to the modern supply chain.
Because these efforts to drive efficiency require specific skills, many organizations have turned to third-party integration and partnerships, bringing in specialized expertise and resources to drive efficiency and innovations. While this shift has been critical in helping businesses stay more agile, it has also introduced significant vulnerabilities.
Adding to the complexity, these vulnerabilities live upstream and downstream of the company in the supply chain, making them hard to detect and, in some cases, impossible to remediate directly. As IT and OT systems become inextricably linked, the complexity of the cyber threat landscape also expands.
Vulnerabilities in manufacturing cybersecurity
The manufacturing sector has become a prime target for cybercriminals seeking to exploit vulnerabilities in third-party integrations to steal sensitive data or disrupt operations. These attacks are fueled by various vectors, including legacy infrastructure that’s interconnected with recent technology, and new control systems for existing software, creating multiple potential entry points for malicious actors.
“VULNERABILITIES LIVE UPSTREAM AND DOWNSTREAM OF THE COMPANY IN THE SUPPLY CHAIN, MAKING THEM HARD TO DETECT AND, IN SOME CASES, IMPOSSIBLE TO REMEDIATE DIRECTLY.”
As organizations strive to modernize their supply chains, adopting a digitalfirst strategy has become an imperative driven by both internal and external factors. Internally, stakeholders are driven by the need to reduce costs, increase operational efficiency and continue to innovate. Externally, organizations need to meet the evolving demands of clients and improve customer experience.
This push for digitalization has resulted in the convergence of IT and OT, two traditionally siloed systems. The modernization of legacy equipment, coupled with the adoption of third-party integrations and the incorporation of AI-driven analytics, has reshaped how manufacturing and OT work from end to end. These integrations not only support the automation of processes
Another contributing factor to manufacturers’ vulnerabilities is a lack of deep understanding of their own threat surfaces, often leading to a false sense of security. Many companies may believe they’re adequately protected, only to discover vulnerabilities when it’s too late. Moreover, the sector’s reliance on thirdparty partnerships introduces additional risks, with experts predicting that issues within these partnerships could account for up to 60 percent of security incidents.
It’s also worth noting that there is sometimes resistance to modernizing legacy OT systems, largely due to the very specific use that these systems provide (think: interconnected control systems (ICS), to control dispersed and distributed assets and, within that, supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems, used for controlling, monitoring, and analyzing industrial devices and processes). Given their specific purpose, these systems can be sensitive to vulnerability patching. There’s a risk that the business will be nega-
tively impacted, perhaps even taken offline completely if the changes don’t execute properly, leading to further hesitancy to update and patch.
The alternative? Air-gapping and isolating systems as much as possible from the rest of the network. However, this presents its own operational challenges, requiring most maintenance and monitoring to happen onsite.
These points of exposure leave the manufacturing sector susceptible to various types of cyberattacks, including hardware, software and third-party breaches.
Plugging the holes
In response to the evolving security landscape, manufacturing enterprises should be looking to implement additional cybersecurity measures to protect their digital assets and maintain operational resilience - therein plugging the holes. Many professionals are already leveraging advanced detection technologies to bolster their cybersecurity posture. Endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions, for example, enable organizations to detect and respond to malicious activities on individual devices, providing real-time visibility and control over potential security incidents.
Elsewhere, network detection and response (NDR) technologies focus on monitoring and analyzing network traffic to identify anomalous behavior and potential security threats. By continuously monitoring network traffic and analyzing patterns, NDR solutions can detect and respond to cyber threats before they escalate into full-scale attacks.
Additionally, user behavior analytics (UBA) solutions analyze user activities and detect deviations from normal patterns to help organizations identify insider threats and anomalous user behavior. Leveraging machine learning algorithms and behavioral analytics allows UBA solutions to identify potential security risks and enable organizations to take proactive measures to mitigate them.
Implementing a combination of these detection technologies can aid manufacturing enterprises in enhancing their cybersecurity to better defend against a wide range of cyber threats. This helps safeguard their digital assets and maintains operational continuity while still allowing them to fully utilize third-party systems.
Additionally, implementing a zero-trust architecture - an approach that assumes no implicit trust for any user or device - can also significantly enhance resilience for manufacturers. Common in the OT space, zero-trust requires stricter identity verification, giving organizations more granular control over their networks and reducing the likelihood of an incident.
The manufacturing sector is experiencing a profound transformation driven by rapid technological advancements and the convergence of IT and OT systems. Manufacturers are embracing novel and advanced technologies to improve efficiency and meet evolving market demands. However, because many of these advances leverage third-party integrations, they face heightened cyber threats and vulnerabilities. Simultaneously, cybercriminals are increasingly targeting manufacturing organizations, exploiting weaknesses in digital infrastructure to disrupt operations and steal sensitive data.
“INSTITUTING THE RIGHT MEASURES, CONDUCTING REGULAR RISK ASSESSMENTS AND INVESTING IN EMPLOYEE TRAINING CAN HELP MANUFACTURERS SAFEGUARD THEIR OPERATIONS.”
As supply chains become increasingly interconnected and reliant on these third parties, the potential impact of cyberattacks on manufacturing operations and global supply chains cannot be understated. Meaning - manufacturers must prioritize cybersecurity as a strategic imperative.
Managed detection and response (MDR) providers can also be a valuable solution. MDRs serve as an extension of an organization’s internal IT and security teams, augmenting staff with continuous monitoring, extensive expertise and incident response to rapidly contain threats and mitigate risk.
Instituting the right measures, conducting regular risk assessments and investing in employee training can help manufacturers mitigate cyber risks and safeguard their operations against emerging threats. In doing so, they not only protect their digital assets but maintain operational resilience and ensure they continue to realize the wealth of benefits that come with digitalization.
Greg Notch is the chief information security officer at Expel
THE TRAIN OUTTA CYBER TROUBLE IN THE SMART
CITY SMART CITY
WHEN WE RELY ON A GROWING NETWORK OF INTERCONNECTED SYSTEMS TO HELP OUR URBAN SOCIETIES FUNCTION, HOW CAN WE KEEP THEM CYBER SECURE?
BY YOANA CHOLTEEVA
Urban populations are increasing, and our societies are becoming heavily reliant on the interconnected systems that help them function effectively and safely. However, these very systems are also susceptible to cyberattacks, and service providers are quickly discovering what’s at stake.
Ransomware attacks on integral digital infrastructure in cities can have severe consequences. Recent instances include the hacking of multiple public-facing portals that disrupted services for the citizens of Potsdam, Germany, while an Alabama hospital ransomware attack reportedly contributed to the death of an infant. In another case this year, UK security services confirmed that hackers backed by Beijing conducted a cyber-attack on the UK’s elections watchdog and carried out surveillance on UK politicians.
While our connected systems are becoming ever so crucial for public safety and security, it’s large-scale cases like these which demonstrate how our digital integrations can create a negative impact when not bolstered sufficiently, going be-
yond the traditional data and financial losses, but now also affecting human life.
With recent World Bank statistics predicting that 70 percent of people globally are expected to live in urban areas by 2050, a two-fold increase in the urban population over the next 25 years, what can make this rapid urbanization more sustainable and cyber-safe?
More people, more problems – smarter solutions
As surges in population put pressure on the current infrastructure and resources available in urban centers, Piyush Pandey, Deloitte’s global and US smart cities cyber offering leader, argues that this pressure is an indicator that resources and infrastructure will need more technological help and smarter thinking to cope in the future. Plus, beyond just coping, there are surely many great benefits
to be had from integrating technology into everyday services.
If you were to look up the smartest cities in the world, Zurich, Oslo, Canberra, Singapore, Beijing, Seoul and Hong Kong are often named in statistics, ranking high from the extent to which they use technology to address challenges and uplift quality of life. Some main areas include optimized energy usage, clean mobility, public transport, congestion, housing and employment, to name a few.
Recognizing the benefits to be gleaned from technology services, but also the risks if the services are suddenly halted by bad actors, governments and large organizations can be seen renewing their focus on protecting this critical infrastructure as reports of cyberattacks are becoming more prominent.
It’s a positive trend that Deloitte’s Pandey has seen too: “We are seeing the
“ACROSS THE GLOBE, GOVERNMENTS ARE STARTING TO TAKE ACTION, PUTTING TOGETHER REGULATORY REQUIREMENTS AND DEMANDING THAT CYBERSECURITY IS MADE PART OF THE INFRASTRUCTURE DEVELOPMENT CYCLE, RATHER THAN BEING AN AFTERTHOUGHT.”
PIYUSH PANDEY / DELOITTE
changes across the globe where governments are starting to take action, putting together regulatory requirements and demanding that cybersecurity is made part of the infrastructure development cycle, rather than being an afterthought.
“I feel that this is positive and will make a tremendous amount of difference in how we see cybersecurity.”
For example, the US Department of Energy (DOE) recently announced a $45m fund for 16 projects across six states to protect the nation’s energy sector from cyber attacks, helping develop new cybersecurity tools and technologies designed to reduce cyber risk. The European Union has also started assessing critical infrastructure and cyber resiliency to benchmark the progress towards its 2025 resiliency targets set earlier this year.
Smart thinking: a cyber-first approach
For Deloitte, the increased convergence, interoperability and integration that is excitingly emerging between IT, operations technology (OT) and IoT in smart city ecosystems, also comes hand-inhand with a hearty investigation of the potential cyber risks.
Pandey points out that cyberattacks targeting three critical features of our increasingly connected world demonstrate the need for a cyber-first mindset for cyber safety:
“So what is needed here is a solution that will help this limited amount of infrastructure, resources and operations that are required to manage this urbanization in the most efficient way, and that’s where the smart cities promise comes into play.”
“LIFTING AND SHIFTING COULD BE MOVING THE PROBLEM FROM POINT A TO B. IF ALL YOU’RE DOING IS TAKING BAD AND PUTTING IT INTO A GOOD AREA, YOU ARE STILL GOING TO HAVE A PROBLEM WITH YOUR DATA, SO WE LITERALLY STARTED AGAIN.”
PETER GRIGGS / TFL
Smart cities ultimately allow the integration of data and technology and digital transformation to bring forward the collective intelligence to use these resources. But as it allows interconnection and exchange of data between various disparate systems and infrastructure, this creates a hyper-connected world, where cybersecurity is absolutely essential to prevent catastrophic disruption.
For this reason, when performing critical infrastructure work - for instance, transport-related work when securing clients’ tunnels and bridges infrastructure from the OT perspective, or integrating IoT - Deloitte adopts a cyber-first approach to secure the smart ecosystem from the planning phase.
The teams look into the processes that are going to be modernized, the systems that need to be interconnected and how they will manifest into the rest, in addition to the underlying privacy risks and issues.
Pandey explains the process: “So, the understanding at the time of conceptualization during the planning phase is step number one, and then you have to move towards this system as smart ecosystem development starts to take place. The building of the security solutions, the integration of those security programs as part of the process, the management of vulnerabilities and the management of the security of the systems and devices as part of that are critical.”
Then as they move to the final, operational phase, teams make sure there is a continuous evaluation and risk assessment due to the element of ongoing growth of smart cities - a constant as ur-
banization prompts the addition of new systems - making sure the cyber considerations are part of that right from the beginning.
Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission is an example of a company updating its infrastructure to facilitate smarter cities, led by the principle of greater cybersecurity, as it went on to innovate America’s first superhighway which spans 552 miles and serves more than 500,000 daily travelers.
Pennsylvania Turnpike, the nation’s second longest toll road, has been heading towards a future vision of supporting connected vehicles, using AI for preventive maintenance, traffic prediction and driver alerts, deploying IoT networks to help monitor roads, bridges and tunnels.
In a shift from a traditional castleand-moat approach to cyber defense - focused on building firewalls and patching security holes as they emerged - the company first pivoted to a more strategic approach in 2017.
In collaboration with Deloitte, leaders created a roadmap for a more resilient and cybersecure enterprise, developed through a series of strategic planning sessions. The roadmap helped commission executives to fine-tune their vision for the future and identify and understand risks to the organization.
As part of the planning, leaders focused on adopting cyber practices and capabilities like bolstering identity and access management (IAM) to ensure that the right users within the organi-
“IF GOVERNMENTS AND ORGANIZATIONS KEEP CYBERSECURITY AS AN INTEGRAL ASPECT IN EACH AND EVERY PHASE, THIS IS GOING TO BE THE MOST IMPORTANT PART OF MANAGING RISK.” PIYUSH PANDEY / DELOITTE
zation had access to the systems they needed to do their jobs. The team also tapped Deloitte to roll out privileged access management (PAM) capability that provides system access for users such as systems administrators.
To make its new approach to cyber even stronger, the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission worked with Deloitte to put in place new technologies and processes for cyber incident readiness, response and recovery (CIR3).
Deloitte also assisted the $110m modernization of a mile-long tunnel through the Appalachian Mountains - a project requiring deployment of connected environmental sensors, as well as automated ventilation, lighting and video detection systems.
Throughout their collaboration, Deloitte also provided critical cyber support during the design phase, including professionals with multiple specialties and skillsets - such as a consultant with a deep understanding of industry-specific engineering requirements for critical infrastructure and leading practices for cybersecurity, network infrastructure and business requirements.
Transport for London minds the cybersecurity gap
Another smart city example is the large transportation system network, Transport for London (TfL), which recently rebuilt its security operations from the ground up.
With just the tube section of the network alone transporting up to five million passengers per day in the UK’s capital, the company facilitated an AWS cloud migration to become a more cyber-resilient organization for more secure journeys.
Starting from traditional Splunk Enterprise deployment and an AWS-hosted on-premise/private cloud, TfL’s existing system encountered a number of challenges with availability and throughput as upgrade paths to additional capabilities were also difficult.
Continuing its journey with Splunk, a cybersecurity vendor offering solutions to help search, monitor, and analyze data, Peter Griggs, principal cybersecurity engineer at TfL, detailed how the team decided to adopt Splunk best practice for all existing architecture.
This meant data could be imported from the nearest point (e.g. SaaS services via the IDM/Cloud Stack) rather than pulled on-premises and pushed back up. The transport network also decided that only vendor-supported technology addons would be installed moving forward.
As part of this strategy, Griggs explained that they made sure all apps pass a vetting process, which prevents installing apps that could break the platform. Moreover, to avoid existing issues, the TfL team opted to avoid a simple lifting and shifting of data to the cloud.
“If you have challenges within this environment, lifting and shifting could be moving the problem from point A to B,” Griggs says. “If all you’re doing is taking bad and putting it into a good area, you are still going to have a problem with your data, so we literally started again. We had two platforms running at the same time, which we felt was a big game changer.”
As part of this migration, the team managed to implement a Splunk Enterprise Security in just five days, with all foundations/data ready to go. Alongside this, modular syslog configuration with a separate port per vendor shaved off 50
percent of TfL’s time to onboard data with the positive outcome of strengthened cybersecurity along the way.
The future of smart cities management
Pandey emphasizes that as cybersecurity is more progressively seen as not just a step in infrastructure development as part of smart ecosystems, but as an integral part of the conceptualization and a cyclical part of infrastructure improvement, smart cities have an increasing ability to avoid compromised security.
“As they start looking into smart ecosystem development, if governments and organizations keep cybersecurity as an integral aspect of that in each and every phase, this is going to be the most important part of managing risk,” he says.
Even more, as technology continues to advance, certain events could be foreseen long before any indicators for that event are present, resulting in key detection mechanics down the line. At this stage, AI is able to help, as it assists in evaluating threatening actions and creating a plan of action to prevent attacks from happening in the future.
“And so AI is really going to play a major role in threat intelligence, threat monitoring and proactive detection to further halt and manage the cyber risk associated with smart ecosystems,” Pandey concludes.
As the future of cities looks to get ever more dependent on technology to connect our journeys and services, the takeaway is that cybersecurity needs to be woven into the implementation of these smart city systems from the beginning, ensuring a safer solution, and a smooth ride outta cyber trouble.
ESG
spaghetti
NO SINGLE THREADS IN ESG SOFTWARE SUPPLY CHAINS
Software is part of your supply chain too. Debra Lilley untangles an inside view of vendor, integrator and user sustainability relations.
BY DEBRA LILLEY
In the ERP vendor world, there is so much providers can do to facilitate transformational supply chain management (SCM) for customers, but I’ll leave that to the vendors who will write their own articles and hopefully share great customer case studies.
Instead, let’s explore how software providers in this industry, from vendors to system integrators (SIs), are actually part of that very supply or value chain for their customers and the steps taken in any software partnership to ensure you can build a successful foundation in your software and services suppliers.
While a traditional supply chain is about the process of sourcing goods or raw materials through to delivery to the customer, today these materials can be as abstract as a piece of cloud software; when used as-a-service, they may not exist in a physical or material form. So, what do you need to measure and account for?
Operating in circles, supplier sustainability and ethics
More recently, the scope of SCM has grown to ensure those in the supply chain align to an organization’s values, such as sustainability and ethics. This has been driven by customer demand for sustainable goods and services, but knowing your supply chain meets certain demands can also lessen the chance of problems while contributing to a better planet and people.
This can look like creating and maintaining processes that are environmentally responsible, socially equitable and economically viable over the long term, or else placing greater focus on the ethics of decision making, requiring transparency, integrity and accountability.
Interestingly, a growing number of individuals care about their own supply chain, looking at the sustainability and ethical manufacture of the brands they choose to buy from. In 2024, when
we buy clothes, we are far more conscious of whether ethical labor and sustainable fabrics have been used in the manufacturing process. Now, in this internet world, it is much easier to research organizations. We buy fair trade coffee because we care about the farmers at the start of the value chain.
But, while many hide their heads in the sand until a brand has bad publicity, then become indignant and veto it (and ignore the fact they as customers didn’t do the due diligence first), this behavior won’t wash in business.
It is a long way from the rigor we’re starting to see today in many organizations - the process is quite circular in a way. Speaking from the SI perspective for instance, we are a small yet important part of our customers’ supply chain, but we each have our own supply chain, which in turn have their own, and so on. Our customers care about who they buy from; they want to know we are ethical and sustainable, and that includes the organizations further down our chains.
Speaking to a fellow member of the Institute of Directors in Belfast and discussing “the living wage”, it was surprising to find that, where I live in Northern Ireland, there are so few organizations signed up to the initiative. Surely many organizations are happy to pay the living wage? He explained that the initiative is about more than simply paying your staff well - you have to show that everyone in your supply chain also pays the living wage. He owned a marketing company and in theory, he had a small supply chain, but he commented that he even had to check how much the window cleaner he uses gets paid.
From providers to partners
was their procurement; starting from almost no processes, the cost savings alone in this area could save enough to pay for the whole implementation.
To be their systems implementor, we had to not only sign up to their values but understand their very public brand and take steps not to compromise that in any way. Once the project went live, we wanted them to talk about it, and to protect that brand I even had to do a short course with them before I could use their individual font in the presentation. Even though we were not part of the organization, we were an extension of the brand at that point.
No one link fits all chains - KPIs are in flux
When one of our current customers sends out a newsletter to its supply chain, they talk about how they are doing on their KPIs, and one I look at with interest is how promptly they pay their suppliers. I look at this because I know their new ERP is key to their improvements. Before their ERP project, they had good prompt payment statistics but not necessarily as good a process behind them.
The problem came when looking for the right KPIs. Like most organizations, “No Purchase Order, No Payment” was a key requirement of the system, but it proved a big challenge when they first went live as they had underestimated how much purchasing in progress had bypassed this.
So for potential technology partners bidding for a piece of work, it’s no longer good enough just to say “I can do what you’re asking” for every business. It’s asking more about the way they’d operate as a partner - what their sustainability values are - because you have to consider their part in your supply chain ecosystem too.
In the ERP world, our customers are particularly interested in how we work, and we see whole sections in tender documents. As a systems implementor, the vendor is in my supply chain and I need to give answers about their sustainability and operations. But that isn’t enough - even if my contract is just to implement that software - I also have to talk about our company, what we do for sustainability and so on.
Customers often nurture their supply chain and the relationship with their suppliers becomes more one of partners, who together achieve their values. A customer I worked with a few years back wanted to transform their ERP. One key area
“IN THIS INTERNET WORLD, IT IS MUCH EASIER TO RESEARCH ORGANIZATIONS. WE BUY FAIRTRADE COFFEE BECAUSE WE CARE ABOUT THE FARMERS AT THE START OF THE VALUE CHAIN.
It’s certainly not a unique occurrence; however much a customer is warned, it catches many of them out. Once they got over that challenge, the ERP now ensures not only correct process but facilitates those prompt payment KPIs as well.
Recently another US customer held a Technology Partner Summit, where all its technology supply chain was invited to see the business and hear the vision for its brand.
I don’t think I really understood how much this was part of the procurement cycle. Becky Harris, from our bid support team at Inoapps, enlightened me. Naively, I thought we invested in a corporate response which we could use for each tender.
There is no single answer or standard you can attain. They differ by industry and region and customers want detailsthey rarely simply say, you must have a certain certification
- and there is no guarantee that the next business will use them as pre-qualification or even accept them as an answer. It’s hoped that the new Procurement Act, due to go live on October 28, 2024, will be a step in the right direction here.
Industry requirements tend to be around what’s important for that industry. In the public sector there’s an emphasis on value for money and giving back; in more regulated industries such as financial services it’s around security and policies. Within the energy sector meanwhile it’s more about ESG and the environment; there will be synergy within the goals of the industry.
Those organizations where profit fluctuates such as energy and utilities know that it’s perhaps the norm to ask their supply chain to reduce their costs when times are hard and even ask to have the right to negotiate in contracts. We see this every day in supermarkets where food suppliers are forced into ever smaller margins so prices can stay down.
Often the unseen side of bid management is answering the questions on an individual request for proposal (RFP). For SIs, telling your story the way the customer has asked may be an onerous task, but better that the RFP is transparent, and you know what to expect, rather than for a nugget of complication to hit you later.
long-term customer contracts mean annual attestations, with examples including insurance, 2050 carbon neutral journey progress, SOCs reporting and credit scores.
Some things you can do in advance, some industries are more rigid in their requirements and if your business strategy includes them, then there are investments you can make upfront to be prepared.
An example of this: We do a lot of work in the construction industry, and they even have a Supply Chain School that looks at all the aspects. Worth a look, full of ideas and a great diagram that shows the why, the what and the how. ERP is a “how”, an enabler. Much of it is free - it’s as much about education as certification - and they happily allowed me to use their graphic here (Fig 1).
“WE ALL WANT TO BE ETHICAL AND EQUITABLE. THERE’S VALUE IN KNOWING AND HAVING A GOAL AND TRACKING IT, BUT IT’S NOT A SINGLE THREAD.
Incoming - sustainability standardization?
There is a buoyant sector that provides support for these subjective standards like Health and Safety, ISO etc., and supply chain, and it’s definitely a growth area. Companies like Achilles or B Corporation will assess your organization, and some customers will preapprove you for a tender if you comply. For smaller companies, this can be expensive, but if a customer or supplier demands it, you have no choice if you want to be part of it.
This supply chain scrutiny doesn’t stop at procurement -
Focusing on the built environment industry, it aims to equip industry professionals with the knowledge and skills needed to integrate sustainability practices into their supply chain operations.
We all want to be ethical and equitable. There’s value in knowing and having a goal and tracking it, but it’s not a single thread. For SIs and vendors, opening an RFP is like opening a Pandora’s Box; it can be a big part of pre-qualification and due diligence is really important at this point, you may choose not to be involved with a potential customer if their values don’t match your own.
Ultimately, embracing sustainability and ethics in supply chain management is not just about compliance or risk management; it is about creating value for all stakeholders and ensuring the long-term viability of both businesses and the environments in which they operate.
Debra Lilley is vice president of customer success at Inoapps.
FIGURE 1
NEXT ISSUE AI THE AGE OF
USERWINS
GRIFF AVIATION
Upgrades its manufacturing arm with RamBase Cloud ERP
Within the aerospace industry, staying ahead is not just about innovating in the skies but also on the ground.
BY CHARLES WHITMORE
Within the aerospace industry, staying ahead is not just about innovating in the skies but also on the ground, specifically in the realms of production and operational management. Griff Aviation, known for its versatile modular drones, faced this exact challenge.
Griff Aviation is a Norwegian drone manufacturer, specializing in manufacturing high-capacity modular drones. Designed for rapid payload and battery interchange, these drones boast impressive specifications: a maximum payload of 60kg coupled with up to three hours of flight time, and target sectors where precision and reliability are paramount, such as defense and offshore operations. By 2022, the company found itself at a critical crossroads. The existing infrastructure, though functional, was not optimized for the scale and complexity of operations that Griff Aviation was experiencing. The lack of integration and the reliance on localized, manual systems led to operational bottlenecks, impeding growth and efficiency. Recognizing the urgency to adopt a more cohesive and scalable solution, Griff Aviation embarked on a quest for a Cloud ERP system that could address these challenges head-on.
The search for a solution led Griff Aviation to partner with Arribatec and choose the RamBase Cloud ERP system. Implementing RamBase marked a turning point in their operational capabilities. The system offered an end-to-end supply
“We
chain visibility, sophisticated handling of complex bill of materials, and item-level traceability –crucial features that Griff Aviation needed. Beyond its industry-specific functionalities, RamBase promised military-grade cloud hosting and toptier information security, ensuring that Griff Aviation’s data remained secure and compliant with industry standards.
were looking for a flexible system that could help us manage our critical business functions.”
Leif Johan Holand, Griff Aviation
The decision to implement RamBase Cloud ERP required the close collaboration of functional managers across various departments, guided by Griff Aviation founder, Leif Johan Holand. Their collective commitment to the project facilitated a remarkably swift and effective implementation process, completed within a remarkable brief timeframe of only four months.
RamBase’s efforts resulted in a 200 percent increase of production capacity, with Griff Aviation achieving 100 percent inventory accuracy – allowing for
significant reductions in waste and inefficiencies.
Leif Johan Holand, founder of Griff Aviation, reflected on the decision, stating, “We were looking for a system that was suitable for our business and that was flexible and could help us manage our critical business functions and support further growth. After considering several options, we realized that RamBase Cloud ERP was the best.”
The RamBase Cloud ERP integration offered a range of advantages for the drone manufacturer. With minimal downtime, and complete data integrity and security, Griff Aviation could conduct a full migration of all current and historical business data into a complete cloud ERP solution. The solution is now end-to-end, covering all the company’s business processes, with no future requirements to upgrade to new systems.
RamBase Cloud ERP scalability and comprehensive coverage of business processes mean that Griff Aviation is now well-equipped to navigate the complexities of the aerospace and defense industries, including compliance with regulations and managing operational risks. This strategic implementation has not only optimized their internal operations but has also attracted investor interest and government funding, setting a solid foundation for future growth.
STAR AUTOMOTIVE HELLAS
Critical data migration journey with DXC
The team had the task of extracting the necessary data in a human-readable format and finding a suitable method to retain and archive the information needed.
BY STEPHANIE BALL
Before becoming Star Automotive Hellas, the Greek firm providing maintenance, repair, bodywork and painting services for commercial vehicles was owned by Mercedes Benz Hellas, until its acquisition by Swiss group Emil Frey in February 2023.
During the integration project as part of the change in ownership, the company identified its need to establish a transition service agreement for specific applications, one of which SAP, as the local tax authorities required some data to be retained for ten years for business and tax audit purposes. However, Mercedes Benz as the seller could not agree for the firm to retain full access to the system for the lengthy time period.
Poised with this challenge, the team had the task of extracting the necessary data in a human-readable format and finding a suitable method to retain and archive the information needed.
This was a high-level requirement stemming from the business unit and the accounting department, as the company also had to extract information about several use cases from customer services which prompted it to go on a search for the right technical solution.
They chose the JiVS intelligent endto-end information management platform for data migration and application retirement which boasts several benefits
However, those pain points were discussed during the project or separately via emails and the issues were successfully addressed and resolved by DXC at the end. “The learning curve for the environment was very low. So we quickly got acquainted and retrieved the data from the environment which met our initial target of having a solution for the end users,” Efstathios says.
“The learning curve for the environment was very low, so we quickly got acquainted.”
Efstathios Skaris
Star Automotive Hellas
“So we were seeking a solution that by design can archive data from SAP and also can provide to our end users the look and feel of SAP, so that they can easily interact with the interface of the application and search the data, export it and provide the information in the same format they were used to,” Efstathios Skaris, Head of IT, Mercedes Greek & Star Automotive Hellas, tells ERP Today.
among 2000 predefined objects (SAP and non-SAP), multiple cloud servers/databases and retention management for GDPR.
“The user-friendliness and the similarity between the JiVS interface and SAP were some of our reasons for selecting the solution,” Efstathios explains, while opening up about some difficulties: “When we actually saw the first reports, we had some minor hiccups in the use of the tool by the end users, because they had to use [a particular] filter criteria.”
The teams kicked off the project at the end of September with the biggest emphasis on the preparation of the infrastructure, which was also delivered on time and on budget. DXC then had to set up the JiVS IMP environment which played the role of the interim environment as they also provided instructions for the SAP team to install the client IMP tool so that they could extract the data. This was tested and confirmed to be successful.
Upon embarking on a journey with it, JiVS usually promises heavily reduced operating costs and lower migration efforts. But in Star Automotive Hellas’ case it wasn’t a matter of added revenue, but instead, eliminating or minimizing the risk of penalty audits and lost functionality in business processes that served the needs of their end customers, providing tax statements, for example.
“So we knew that there was a high risk and it was very time sensitive, so the investment versus the coverage of the risk definitely justified the investment we did,” Efstathios concludes.
USERWINS
THE CHEEKY PANDA
Take matters into your own hands: The Cheeky Panda’s success story
We speak to
David Carter to hear of the company’s
WMS Oracle NetSuite implementation
BY EKATERINA DUDAKOVA
The Cheeky Panda is a sustainable bamboo product manufacturer leading the way towards an eco-friendly future of household product use. Established in 2016, the company soon realized it had to consolidate all its data and inventory planning to improve efficiency, communication and go-to-market rate. This is how it discovered Oracle’s NetSuite solutions.
David Carter, chief operations officer at The Cheeky Panda, sits down with ERP Today to discuss the company’s successful implementation journey.
Avoiding constant “interfacing”
“We have lots of markets and lots of channels. We are ready for growth”
- David Carter, The Cheeky Panda
When he joined the company in 2022, Carter saw that The Cheeky Panda was using a variety of logistics providers and had to manage all their software simultaneously. This caused complications around data management, especially with the company operating across seven warehouses at the time. The whole setup required a lot of “interfacing”, as Carter calls it, to ensure the systems get updates.
Therefore, considering that the enterprise was already using the Oracle NetSuite ERP system, Carter decided to pursue further opportunities that the provider offered.
Taking matters into your own hands
After visiting a NetSuite customer’s warehouse that already uses the NetSuite Warehouse Management System (WMS), Carter convinced The Cheeky
Panda’s CEO that implementing that software (among other NetSuite solutions) would be the best decision.
Another curious fact about The Cheeky Panda’s digital transformation is that it had no IT team or implementation partner - the whole transformation was conducted by employees themselves.
Carter explains that the company decided to implement software this way because of the availability of NetSuite’s trial period - which proved to be very convenient for the company to test the software functionality - and the wish to accelerate the deployment process.
He adds that another reason behind it is that the entire company’s software is cloud-based. For instance, apart from NetSuite, The Cheeky Panda uses the Monday.com, Shopify and Sandbox platforms as well as SplashBI for AI automation. All strategically adopted to keep things “really, really simple,” Carter shares.
Thus, the implementation of NetSuite solutions took the Cheeky Panda about
three to four months to complete.
Nevertheless, Carter described that going through the process of understanding the system and how to apply it to the company’s logistics, especially in the case of WMS, was “probably the biggest challenge.” This was felt especially strongly due to the lack of other examples of NetSuite WMS implementations in the UK. Because of that, the company leaned on case studies based internationally and learned everything from scratch.
However, “These were not really problems… it’s more about learning,” Carter believes.
Further gains and plans for the future
In terms of the gains that came from the digital transformation, the COO highlights how important WMS turned out to be for the company. Specifically, the solution delivered stock accuracy and now “everything else flows nicely”.
In fact, after implementing the solutions, the company managed to bring the number of its warehouses down to two, as well as increase its revenue to £12m.
He adds that the software also improves resilience in terms of organization for the team. This way, the employees do not have to give each other manual reminders about certain tasks or check-ins on the progress – the system does it automatically on its own.
In the future, the company hopes to see how technology could be utilized to further businesses’ sustainability efforts, including carbon calculation enhancement as well as seeing how AI could assist with things like flexible pricing, since “it’s an interesting new warehouse environment,” Carter explains.
USERWINS
SPLASHBI
Adding “tech” to “academic”: Oxford Uni’s story of improved reporting
Here is how SplashBI helped Oxford University transform its financial reporting systems with collaboration and teamwork
BY EKATERINA DUDAKOVA
The University of Oxford is famous for producing groundbreaking research and bringing the world its best scientists, writers, researchers and many more. However, it is no secret that even the most prestigious establishments must keep up with the world’s progress and changes to ensure success. To find out about the university’s digital transformation journey, ERP Today spoke to Monika Klim, reporting manager of financial systems at Oxford.
There was no “us and them”, we all worked hard together to achieve [our goal]
Klim states that in early 2020, due to increased performance demands from reporting against the Oracle EBS system, the management decided to pursue “a more flexible and modern reporting solution.” She explains that the new product would need to cater to reporting across data sources.
- Monika Klim, University of Oxford
starting in January 2020, it migrated most custom reports from EiS eXpress to Splash Version 4 in June. Then, the remaining reports were migrated during the upgrade to Splash Version 5. The final stage of the project was to remove the Oracle FSGs and replace them with GL Connect reports which went live in April 2021.
“The university wanted to seamlessly transform its reporting systems into a modern future-proofed, easy-to-use and, most importantly, easy-to-train solution. [...] EiS eXpress was implemented in 2013 as part of the move from Discoverer to Oracle 12.1. Considering that SplashBI had EiS Express migration utility, their users would be able to seamlessly move their reports from EiS eXpress to SplashBI – so those are the reasons [for our choice].”
How channeling collaboration can lead to effective results
The project had a three-phase structure:
Klim emphasizes that it was the collaboration between the university IT team, Unix platform services and SplashBI that helped tackle all challenges. For instance, the project was conducted during one of the most challenging periods in modern history – the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, the situation proved to help accelerate the resolution of defects – with the team adjusting its approach and becoming available for a call as early as 7am or as late as 10pm.
“There was no us and them mentality, we all had one goal in mind and we all worked hard together to achieve it.”
Additionally, users received “How to”
videos on SplashBI functionality, created by the university’s in-house training team. Having step-by-step instructions helped users find the process easy to understand and follow. Klim adds that the project had “great support” from both the central team and the users from the wider university departments during the UAT phase testing.
Reaping the benefits and looking forward to a bright future
Among the benefits gained, Klim lists system availability, stability and increased performance. She adds that GL Connect is one of the most popular tools among users, as it allows them to create their own reports within Excel to report on the general ledger. At the moment, Oxford has 1500 SplashBI users and approximately 350 GL Connect users and looks to grow these numbers as “the university expands its portfolio.”
Looking ahead, Klim shares that the university is considering expanding additional cross-service reporting with Power BI to provide insight by combining data from different systems. Nevertheless, this is still under investigation to determine the most suitable solution.
One thing is clear: However excellent the type of work you produce is, it has to be sustained by a technological stack that is just as excellent. Deploying SplashBI within its financial reporting system has accelerated the University of Oxford’s journey toward technological advancement, paving the way for even more ambitious projects and growth in the future.
CO-OP
Co-op feeds off SAP Cloud for CX at SAP Sapphire Barcelona
Retailer Co-op announced at SAP Sapphire Barcelona that it has made the plunge into SAP’s cloud solutions.
BY SHANA BRIDDOCK
Retailer Co-op announced at SAP Sapphire Barcelona that it has made the plunge into SAP’s cloud solutions. Notably using SAP Predictive Replenishment and SAP Order and Delivery Scheduling, this strategic leap aims to supercharge customer satisfaction at Co-op’s distribution centers.
Previously running on SAP ECC, Coop faces a ticking clock with the 2027 deadline looming. Ian Cox, director of technology for SAP & Colleague products and platforms at Co-op, confided to ERP Today: “We were very worried about the approaching maintenance deadline. That is the thing that is driving us to SAP S/4HANA.”
Cox also shared a peek behind the curtain about Co-op’s journey with RISE with SAP. To all the SAP users still on SAP ECC, sweating the migration deadlines, he offered some advice: “So we have only been live on RISE with SAP for a few months and the whole migration journey was pretty slick right? I don’t want to say it was straightforward because there was quite a lot involved, but it really was a lift and shift.”
“However, since being on RISE with SAP, the things that we have bumped into are related to operations. There was a period when we needed tweaking to be done, so we went back to SAP. I would really advise people to invest quite a lot of time in working out, once you’re live, what the operating model will look like. Because that’s what’s going to drive success as you move forward.”
Co-op’s enduring partnership with SAP has sparked several co-innovation projects, like rolling out SAP Replenishment Planning in stores. This solution, powered by machine learning for demand forecasting, has already boosted sales and slashed waste, in line with Coop’s green goals. Shoppers can expect fresher products and a wider variety, all while Co-op keeps shrinking its environmental footprint.
In the realm of AI and security, Co-op has tackled a 44 percent spike in retail crime by deploying advanced AI-driven security measures. The retailer has introduced 200 secure till kiosks, locked cabinets for high-value items, and AI to monitor self-checkouts. Last year,
undercover security detained 3,361 individuals for offenses like burglary and harassment, underscoring Co-op’s dedication to a safe shopping environment with use of AI innovations.
And the journey doesn’t end there. Co-op plans to extend these innovative solutions to more product categories and synchronize store and distribution center replenishment. By leveraging aggregated store order forecasts, Co-op aims to roll out a supply chain planning system, further sweetening the collab.
Co-op is seeing success with its decision to move to SAP cloud solutions, but with some environments still on SAP ECC, the retailer is moving towards innovation – but at its own pace.
“I would advise people to invest a lot of time in working out what the operating model will look like”
- Ian Cox, Co-op
SIGNING OFF
THE COMING OF THE COMPOSABLE AGE
Even before Gartner coined the term ‘composable enterprise’, back in 2014, the idea had been implemented throughout technology. Fast forward a decade, and the thinking has been seen in the rise of composable software that has agitated the traditional, monolithic, software vendor model, threatening its dominance in a few key ways:
Improved business agility: Instead of being locked in to an inflexible, out of the box from a single vendor, composable architectures empower businesses to choose best-of-breed solutions for each function. This dismantles the vendor’s control over the entire software stack, making them replaceable for specific components.
BY CASPER RASMUSSEN
The secret weapon is the rapid evolution of composable technology
Faster, more collaborative innovation: Traditional technology vendors struggle to keep pace with innovation across all functionalities within their offering. But composable architectures thrive in such a dynamic ecosystem. More agile, composable vendors focus on specific functionalities and iterate rapidly. Businesses can then integrate these best-in-class components into their workflows, accelerating their own innovation cycles.
Reduced switching costs: Locked-in customers are a cornerstone of the legacy model. Composable architectures break this confinement by allowing businesses to seamlessly swap out components for better alternatives. This flexibility has forced a reduction in switching and re-platforming costs, making it easier for customers to replace failing suite vendors.
Perpetual licensing models under threat: Composable
solutions commonly follow a subscription-based model. SaaS pricing models are a stark contrast to the perpetual licensing of monolithic platforms, where hefty upfront costs and fixed terms are a substantial burden.
Valuing the long tail: Monolithic platforms advocate a one-size-fits-all approach. Composable architectures counters this by enabling the easy and quick integration of necessary functionalities, delivered via APIs. This caters to the long tail of changing business needs that legacy suites cannot adapt to.
The secret weapon in all of this has been the rapid evolution and maturity of composable technology. Our group has been a key part of this story since 2020, advocating for Microservices, API-driven, Cloud and Headless technologies with a resolutely end-user focus.
It has been this focus on end-user demands and needs that has enabled composability to dismantle the walled gardens created by legacy platforms. It fosters a more open, best-of-breed landscape where businesses can assemble the optimal software stack for their needs, driving innovation and reducing vendor lock-in.
Of course, legacy platforms will still have a place in the market. But these vendors will need to adapt by offering more modular solutions and prioritizing a focus on user needs in a rapidly changing software landscape.
