In an age where change is a constant and innovation an imperative, SAP solutions run among the most mission-critical systems around the globe while enabling businesses to leverage the innovation they need to achieve their purpose.
At SAP Sapphire Virtual in 2022, Lenovo joined a conversation with Chief Marketing and Solutions Officer and Member of the Executive Board of SAP SE Julia White on “Realizing the Power of Becoming an Intelligent, Sustainable Enterprise.”
With regard to the investments SAP makes in the area of digital supply chain, Yang Yuanqing, chairman and CEO of Lenovo, said, “I’m very happy to see the continuous enhancements for our supply chain solutions. Lenovo delivers over 150 million products a year, which means we deliver about five products every second to our customers around the world with an on-time delivery rate of 96%. SAP is key in this effort with its world-class supply chain solutions.”
“Together with SAP, Lenovo is building new, state-of-the-art smart factories globally. These new smart factories are running SAP S/4HANA on Lenovo infrastructure with end-to-end, order-to-delivery solutions connecting over 2,000 suppliers to billions of customers,” said Yuanquing. “That will definitely take Lenovo manufacturing to a whole new level.”
Scaling Operations and Investments to Meet Growing Customer Demand
Arthur Hu, senior vice president and CIO at Lenovo and CTO of Solutions and Services Group at Lenovo Group Ltd., remarked, “It’s critical to have the latest technology. Digital helps us achieve the efficiency and accuracy at scale and smart technology helps us take the latest operating models and incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) into our operations. SAP S/4HANA has been helping us power that journey and is one of our cornerstone investments in the modern, digital, and smart core.”
Sustainability Is Moving to the Forefront
Lenovo is seeing sustainability move to the forefront in communications with its customers across all levels and geographies. “This matches perfectly with Lenovo’s services-led transformation that we are driving,” said Hu. “Let’s take, for example, device as a service – DaaS. We are able to design sustainability into each step of the offering. We can think about how to deploy efficiently, maximize utilization during the asset lifecycle, and use recovery services for secure and responsible handling at the end of the useful device life.”
“By reimaging our services with sustainability in mind, we are able to do right for our customers and meet our sustainability goals. The right technology and services means being able to say yes to more things and the right things,” he concluded.
Transitioning from a Hardware Company to a Full-Service Technology Solutions Provider
In terms of transformation, Hu said: “At Lenovo, we know transformation because we are starting it and doing it ourselves. We call it ‘Lenovo powers Lenovo.’ We have revamped our entire company with a new services-led business model supported by modern digital infrastructure.”
“SAP has been on a long journey with us. Beyond smart factories and SAP S/4HANA, we are using cloud services from SAP to great effect,” he added. “We’ve got SAP Ariba solutions in the cloud to gain visibility into our procurement spend and we are using SAP Concur solutions to manage employee expenses and provide a better experience. On the frontlines of our transformation is Lenovo TruScale, which is our umbrella for offering everything on our portfolio as a service. That’s been a key trend.”
“To make it work, we needed the ability to engage our customers differently than in the traditional hardware sale, building by period, by service, by item,” said Hu. “And here we are using SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management on RISE with SAP powered by Lenovo TruScale. This allows us to rapidly bring new business offerings to the market in a scalable way.”
“We are working to identify innovation opportunities with SAP. We are taking what we are doing together on transformation, figuring out what other companies may require, and turning that into code and functionality as SAP solution components. This makes the entire community and ecosystem more valuable,” said Hu. “All this comes together to make an excellent case where we are using the combined power of our technologies to advance our transformation at speed and lead the way with new, compelling value propositions for our customers.”
Learn more about how to achieve resilient, connected, and sustainable supply chain management processes from design to operate here or listen to the replay from SAP Sapphire Virtual in 2022.
Karin Fent is senior director of Global Customer Success Digital Supply Chain at SAP.