If you want to be a doctor, you go to medical school. But where do you go if you want to get the skills and knowledge needed to drive change in a digital world?
The best place is Hyper Island – the “Harvard of digital” and, according to CNN, one of the most interesting learning spaces in the world if you want to keep up with innovation.
Communicating the Whole Story
Customers that attended the recent SAP Select in São, Paulo, Brazil got the very best.
“We chose Hyper Island because, until now, the SAP Select events were very IT driven,” says Ricardo Kazuo, Chief Marketing Officer, SAP Brazil. “Now, after listening to customers, the team in Brazil decided to make the event more business driven. We want to strengthen SAP’s reputation with leaders in the various lines of business at key enterprises. This effort will help prepare the ground at the customer, get the LoB heads to ‘open their minds’ and be more receptive toward SAP’s end-to-end solutions. It makes it much easier to have discussions about holistic transformation across the entire business.”
SAP is helping customers move from a legacy mindset to a digital mindset
At the event, 250 C-level executives from 120 key accounts mingled with SAP CEO Bill McDermott and other digital experts to learn about new ways of thinking in the digital era.
The main mission is to help customers move from a legacy mindset to a digital mindset. To achieve this, SAP is starting to communicate with the companies in a holistic way instead of approaching the different lines of business in the enterprise individually. This will help all players to view themselves as travelers on a long-term journey that requires a proactive, collaborative, and open-minded approach.
Learning from the Pros
“Technology is ready now to support consumer needs,” says Cristina Palmaka, president of SAP Brazil. “The world is divided into companies that adapt and transform, and others that don’t. Our mission is to unleash the potential in our customers!”
Early adopters were on hand to share their stories of digital change.
Cirque du Soleil CEO Daniel Lamarre explained how SAP helps simplify information about 27 bank accounts in 26 countries, 16,000 suppliers, 4,000 employees and 12 million tickets sold each year. SAP is enabling digital transformation in all functions – procurement, HR, finance, marketing, logistics, sales, and distribution – to move its business forward.
Jonathan Ridgwell, Global Supplier Services Operations Director at JP Morgan Chase, described how the company uses the SAP Ariba Supplier Network to create a simple, seamless procurement process. Now they are able to find more goods at better prices and still stay within contractual terms, thereby creating better supplier relationships.
Guilherme Machado Rabello, Marketing Intelligence Head at INCOR, Brazil’s top cardiac institution and one of the world’s top five for heart transplants, revealed how doctors and hospital administrators teamed up with SAP Labs Latin America: “We needed a platform that would integrate and display data on one big dashboard where all medical staff have one view of all patient data. With the right signals in our hands we can get early indicators of a heart attack 6 hours before it happens. This is a lifesaving application!”
Ricardo Kazuo is convinced that true transformation is something that goes beyond products and services: “It starts with empathy and a creative mindset and requires a new way of communicating with customers and employees. In this digital era, innovation comes from everywhere. It’s a multi-directional, fluid process for exchanging ideas between HQ and local market units. This new paradigm fosters business agility. Let’s learn and empower the team.”
