Explaining the Smart Enterprise, Dealing With the Business Technolog Platform

In this lesson, you will learn to understand what smart enterprise is. You are dealing with the Business Technology Platform.

The strategy lays out a framework that showcases the three technical components that every company must have to become an intelligent enterprise.

In the figure The Intelligent Enterprise and the Experience Economy the numbers correspond to the following:

1: Intelligent Suite

An integrated, yet modular suite of Line-of-Business (LoB) applications that enables our customers to share insights across functions to better manage stakeholders and their day-to-day operations. This suite comprises SAP S/4HANA, SAP C/4HANA, and others.

2: Digital Platform

Data management and cloud platform technologies to dynamically orchestrate the growing volume of data and business processes across an intelligent enterprise, so that customers can make sense of their data in real-time. The digital platform forms the foundation of all intelligent activities.

3: Intelligent Technologies

Tools and technologies that turn intelligence into business outcome such as analytics, machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), the internet of things (IoT), and blockchain. They are delivered through the digital platform, embedded within intelligent suite applications, and applied to processes that integrate both SAP and third-party data and applications.

In an era in which data plays a vital role in all decision-making and in every business process, having the ability to manage big X-data and O-data, gaining new levels of business insights, and turning them into impactful actions is an absolute key to customer success.

As business data volume grows exponentially, and as enterprises have access to an abundance of new intelligent technologies, customers have countless opportunities to influence experiences and reimagine their business processes through data-driven innovation.

Reimagining business processes is more than adding modest improvements to an existing process. It can create digital disruption, which adds unique competitive advantages for a company, and can even change the game for an entire industry.

The following outlines two examples of the opportunities in reimagining business processes:

Example 1: Drive a step-change in productivity

A global clothes retailer collects big and diverse data from SAP C/4HANA including X-data from Qualtrics software and from third party sources such as comments on social media. This data is streamed into a data lake integrated with SAP HANA and dedicated to a customer behavior analysis project where intelligence is applied by building ML models to predict changes in customers' buying preferences.

The results are streamed in real time to SAP C/4HANA marketing campaigns, where a new campaign is automatically triggered via SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation (RPA) whenever a change in customer preference is identified. This significantly increases marketing productivity leading to additional revenue.

Example 2: Build new business models

A lighting hardware company uses SAP IoT, SAP Analytics and SAP Integration Suite to deliver a light-as-a-service business model. By connecting the lighting hardware to sensors, and orchestrating and analyzing its data streams, customers can receive a variable bill based on usage instead of paying for lighting upfront.

In addition, customers can gain insight in costs and usage with an intelligent solution that is able to predict future costs. This solution helps users to make better informed and confident decisions, drives operational efficiency and saves energy.

You have a variety of services, tools and products to support you in finding the fastest way to turn data into business value.

These include:

• Frictionless integration of intelligent suite with third-party solutions.
• New customer and partner business applications.
• Simple extensions of intelligent suite, with customer and partner innovation.