SAP Business Technology Platform is helping SAP partner delaware to deliver future-ready portals for its suite of business-to-business (B2B) customers.
The award-winning partner company has perfected its pitch when selling the platform to both existing and prospective clients, painting a picture of how SAP BTP can provide slick, time-saving solutions both now and in the future.
Jonathan Belliot, SAP BTP sales manager at delaware, explains how the team convinces customers to invest in the platform.
“We noticed that comparing SAP BTP to lightweight software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions was a difficult win with customers. So, we created the ‘road to the Intelligent Enterprise story’ – it tells how SAP’s strategy has shifted and how SAP BTP is now the pillar behind everything SAP does, both today and in the future,” says Belliot. “Every time we highlight a different functionality, we explain that it has been enabled because of the platform, that we’re working with the ’best-of-breed’. This is all about strategic transformation for the customer and SAP BTP being the enabler of that transformation across the entire tech stack.”
In addition to selling the story, delaware ensures the right stakeholders are in the room when positioning SAP BTP. “You have to talk to the decision-makers across the business, so they can clearly see the advantage that the platform can bring to them,” adds Belliot. We think ahead, giving them tangible examples of other things they can do with the platform when the time comes. We emphasize the value of SAP BTP in the broader sense.”
It’s an approach that’s proving to be a highly successful one, as a series of recent customer wins attests. One, a Belgium-based food distributor, has adopted delaware’s SAP BTP B2B portal to reduce manual labor and streamline the process around certification.
“Certificates of origin and quality are key in the food industry but, up until the portal was introduced, our customer was spending a lot of time using a clunky old system for the storing and sharing of certificates. They were all saved on a server and then downloaded and e-mailed to clients as and when required,” explains Belliot. “The new portal gives both our customer and their end-customers instant access to the certificates, which they can download immediately. They can also track and follow up on orders and deliveries. Plus, they can connect to their company SharePoint system from the portal, creating a hybrid environment – all possible with SAP Integration Suite.”
The second success story is that of a customer supplying blood pressure monitors. Each monitor is supplied to patients with a license key, which the patient registers online at home so they can access their device and the medical staff can know which device is linked to which patient.
In the past, it was someone’s role to manually supply each patient with their serial number and input that data into a master spreadsheet. As the customer already had a RISE with SAP contract in place – and therefore there was no development project – delaware came in and created a one-time-use business-to-consumer (B2C) portal. The portal is now the centerpiece of a completely digitized process that allows the patient to submit their serial number, keeps everything logged in one place, removes the need for e-mail communication, and isn’t blocked when someone is away.
“The beauty of our architecture is we can apply it to create these small applications,” explains Belliot. “And the beauty for our customers is that, with just a few extra licenses, they can start using SAP BTP. They have it in-house and it means that, as and when they need any additional extensions, the platform is there to support them. This is exactly how we will land and expand.”
Tim Leys, SAP development lead at delaware, says SAP BTP is key to the partner remaining a lead player in the market; it’s key to driving innovation and to selling additional SAP licenses as well as additional services.
What’s more, SAP BTP is the right platform to attract and retain the right people.
“The war for talent is key for us,” adds Leys. “And this platform allows us to attract and stimulate young potentials. It’s a tech stack with proven tech that’s exciting and sexy. That’s a tremendous benefit to us, our people, and our customers. It allows us to build consumer-grade solutions that we’ve all come to expect in our day-to-day lives, but for the corporate world. For a traditional SAP customer, this is mind-blowing.”
