Successful technology deployments need a guiding star to help keep them on track. That’s why the process to get started with SAP Leonardo begins by exploring your business problems — together with you — ensuring that you get exactly what you want.
“It’s to make sure the customer need is being fulfilled,” Raul Bellina, localization driver for design thinking at SAP Labs Latin America, said in a video (see below), “and at the end of the day that the look and feel is great, and we are providing in good quality.”
The process begins with the explore phase; SAP collaborates with customers to prioritize which business problem needs solving first. Preceding three other phases — discover, design & prototyping, and deliver — exploration can be a tough but crucial first step on an organization’s digital journey.
Explore Every Avenue, Solve One at a Time
“Regarding SAP Leonardo… starting this process of problem identification and solution development was very difficult,” retail giant Liverpool’s Ina Flores said at SAP Leonardo Now in SAP Labs Latin America. “That’s why we’re here at this event, because it helps us to see how we can identify and solve our root problems.”
This often begins with a one- or two-day explore workshop in which you meet with SAP to discuss your objectives. It usually includes 10 to 15 people from across your organization, which helps ensure a holistic solution that doesn’t focus on a single department.
“I’m sure if I ask you ‘What’s the innovation priority? What’s the problem to resolve?’, you’d have a list of problems, but you probably wouldn’t know where to start,” Matheus Souza, innovation lead for SAP Labs Latin America, said at SAP Leonardo Now. “And that’s exactly why we have the explore workshop, where the SAP design team will find 10, 15, 20 opportunities for business, and then prioritize.
“I’m talking about a focus on clients’ financial returns,” Souza said. “I’m talking about market differentiation.”
But nothing more can happen before drilling down to a specific issue.
Identify, Prioritize, Solve
“We have to first make sure that the entrepreneur understands which business problem they’re trying to solve… which business process they’re trying to optimize,” Mala Anand, president of SAP Leonardo and Analytics, said in a media Q&A before SAP Leonardo Now. “Don’t make it too big — but constrain the problem.”
Liverpool accelerated its digital journey at Innoweeks, an SAP Labs Latin America contest that teams up SAP users and partners with university students and SAP experts to co-innovate and solve a real-world business problem. The event helped Liverpool designate its first business problem to solve, according to Flores, who is responsible for the Mexico City-based department store chain’s delivery and logistics.
“We started with 10 or more issues … and we were able to identify the main ones, so this helped us very much,” Flores said. “We expect SAP Leonardo to be a full-time facilitator that can be integrated in the experience we already have in the industry.”
Innovating to Run at Your Best
According to Anand, the three biggest benefits to using SAP Leonardo intelligent technologies are:
- Machine learning: automating repetitive tasks, resulting in optimized business processes and productivity savings
- Inventory management: Increasing revenue by keeping best-selling items in stock
- Customer experience (CX): Personalization through advanced data analytics
“The best way to get started is, like you are all doing here today, visiting our SAP Leonardo Centers,” Anand said at SAP Leonardo Now. “These centers are where these innovations come alive… You can look and feel — not just the technology — but the speed and the agility. And you can come and co-create these capabilities, these solutions together with us.”
Solving a business problem with SAP Leonardo starts with four simple steps, which produce a high-quality, high-tech solution that looks and feels great, according to SAP’s Raul Bellina at SAP Labs Latin America. There are even a couple of key steps to keep everyone on track.
Follow Derek on Twitter: @DKlobucher
