In the waves of change, we find our true direction. With preparedness and precision, we embrace the chaos with confidence. We can minimize risk, maximize opportunities, and emerge with greater strength than ever before.
SAP was founded nearly 50 years ago with a very clear purpose: to help the world run better and improve people’s lives. Now more than ever, you can count on us to help. In fact, just last month SAP supported the building of an app to repatriate stranded German citizens during the current pandemic.
But this crisis is affecting all aspects of our lives — health, society, economy. To survive, companies will have to define and focus on their core competence, drive deeper customer relationships, develop new business models, adapt their supply chains, streamline their operations, and manage their finances. Those that have an intelligent enterprise resource planning (ERP) backbone to support their business functions will be able to do this quickly and will emerge stronger.
I am proud to see how we are all working together as well as the care that SAP customers are showing in this crisis. They are rapidly changing supply chains to cater for emergency supplies, changing production lines to produce products that are in need, altering work patterns, and doing whatever it takes to deliver the services and products that their customers need. This means changing business focus quickly and includes a renewed reliance on data and business insights to rapidly take the pulse on business and react effectively. In short, we are helping our customers ensure business continuity and deliver results in these challenging times.
Business Continuity: Trust and Reliability
No matter what the situation, SAP has always been trusted to keep business running. Above all, this means protecting operations and managing change safely and quickly. SAP stands ready, by your side, to help as your business changes. We can help rapidly implement solutions, turn on existing functionality, and help ensure that it is all managed with long-term digital transformation in mind.
We understand the challenge of business disruption and remote work that all organizations are facing, and we support changes in business focus. This demands environments that are secure, accessible, and controlled to ensure business continues to run while also adapting to new needs.
As employees are asked to work from home, managing both internal processes and external customer and vendor relationships remotely presents a changed management structure that puts technology in the center. This is where SAP can help; for example, with cloud deployments, access to free openSAP courses about SAP S/4HANA to stay informed. We have also opened access to SAP Ariba Discovery to help buyers and suppliers connect amid the global supply chain disruption.
Keep Running and Adapt Quickly
Just as we see manufacturing companies take on new production lines to adapt to a changing landscape, others are refocusing on their core competence of design or innovation, using subcontract supply, production, and logistics to deliver product. This puts greater importance on being able to operate in a dynamic, virtual world with access to business networks and solutions such as Ariba Network for suppliers and SAP Fieldglass solutions for contingent labor. These solutions can be turned on quickly as extension of an intelligent ERP solution.
And as organizations change, so too, do their employees. Using intelligent technologies such as machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and robotic process automation (RPA) to act based on rapidly changing, data-driven insights allows organizations to continue to have operations run smoothly and allocate precious employee effort to more mission-critical tasks.
In addition, companies keep adopting new business models; for example, by offering value-added services in addition to products. This requires uniting business processes end-to-end with the real world and a deep domain expertise by line of business and industry.
SAP provides that scope of tools, the line-of-business coverage, and the industry expertise needed to carry you forward.
At the core of SAP is SAP S/4HANA, with 13,800 customers by the end of 2019. SAP and partners are supporting the acceleration of the move to SAP S/4HANA with rapid return on investment and high value returns in short times.
Together, Our Values Will Define the New Normal
I am proud to be part of SAP and know we can play our role in helping ensure your business continues, adapts, and thrives in this challenging environment. Never has speed, agility, and depth of service been more important.
SAP is committed to partner with you as we work together to make the world run better and improve people’s lives.
Jan Gilg is president of SAP S/4HANA.
