SAP Industry Knowledge Exchange: Building a Better Tomorrow

Let’s dive in and take a closer look at all the interesting details of this incredible summit.

The Age of Digitally Native Hypergrowth Unicorns

As we completely immerse ourselves into a new digital world, modern tech-savvy startups are promptly becoming enormously successful enterprises with their ability to identify and quickly act upon game-changing ideas. This capacity for constant innovation is helping startups create massive opportunities and disruptions in the industry. Fitting to the status quo, the first topic of discussion was on unlocking the secrets of building a unicorn startup.

What does it take to build a unicorn? While many answers came to the fore, the panel agreed that if it’s a big problem and one can solve it in a way that has not been done by anyone else, you have the genesis of building a great company. Everything is about solving a significant enough problem.

The summit offered a detailed look into the necessity of exceptional digital experiences for modern-day customers. Similarly, the different roles required for a startup to prosper were also widely talked about, with special emphasis being placed on the roles of CFOs. For a startup to truly become a unicorn, a resilient and agile company culture is highly imperative. Kislaya Srinvastava, CFO, Bookmyshow discussed the current working environment of CFOs and said, “It has been a transformation journey for me personally and from a CFO role standpoint. I think it is a very challenging, yet exciting, time for professionals like us where we learn things we had never heard about, especially technology and new concepts. The expectations of the CFO is that you keep changing, keep learning, keep growing and keep contributing. It is a journey and you need to be a part of the journey. ”

Throughout the discussions, it was made clear that technology plays an immense role in driving the success of modern startups. Saunak Ghosh, CMO of Turtlemint, used the example of his own enterprise to explain it best: “We have an app that has a bunch of content that allows the agents to interact with end customers. We have a learning and development platform as well. We realized it is a finite segment, as players in the ecosystem we also have to grow the ecosystem. We have to empower guys who are coming in now.”

For startups to make it big, fundraising by successfully pitching ideas to investors is immensely important. Sharing his experience on this topic, Karan Mehta, Founder & CTO, Kissht and Ring, said, “One of the things that has always stood out is that the biggest key of fundraising is to be extremely social. You have to be very good at networking. You have to be someone that talks to people, listens to ideas, shares ideas. As founders, all you can do is identify a problem and then truly solve that problem. The fundraising part will automatically follow very naturally. ”

Key Takeaways

• Sumeet Mehta, Co-Founder & CEO of Lead School, discussed the ability to find simple solutions for complex problems by giving an example of his disruptive edtech solution.
• Naiyya Saggi, Co-Founder of Good Glamm Group, explained the necessity of communicating a strong value proposition through a digital ecosystem.
• The critical necessity of a robust and scalable technological platform to engage customers and generate leads was highlighted by Pankaj Bansal, Chief Business Officer of BankBazaar.
• Suraj Shetty, Head Of Customer Experience, Kissht, emphasized on the necessity of adopting modern technological tools to empower employees.
• The roles and duties of the modern CFO were extensively discussed with industry leaders all agreeing that CFOs must play a pivotal role in the success of digital natives.
• The final discussion was centered around the critical necessity of a winning company culture to drive the success of startups. Sheetal Bhanot, CHRO of Inframarket, talked about the infinite potential that startups can reach by just embracing the right vision.

Click here to view some of the highlights

Driving Growth in CPG and Retail

The CPG and retail industry has been constantly evolving after the COVID-19 pandemic as global trends in customer behavior radically shift. This has opened the doors to a highly customer-centric approach for businesses looking to nurture a loyal following in the face of uncertainty. The future of CPG revolves around a number of prominent topics. The objective here was to talk about the future of the retail industry. So panelists, speakers, and delegates went through a host of topics relevant to our future. For example, they identified the modernization of routes to market in a true omnichannel world, how to enhance resilience and agility of the supply chain given the uncertainty of the overall geopolitical situation, and the uncertainty of demand as critical points.

Our panel of industry experts started the discussions by explaining how brands can drive customer loyalty in an omnichannel world. This conversation revolved around how customer centricity should involve personalized experiences across various touchpoints. Similarly, by embracing modern innovations and platforms such as the Metaverse, CPG can reinvent itself as an even bigger industry in India’s Amrit Kaal.

Dr. Kamal Karnatak, Group CIO, RJ Corp, discussed what the new normal looks like in the CPG space after the COVID-19 pandemic. Giving his own experience as an example, Dr. Karnatak said, “Pre-pandemic, we were doing 30-40% deliveries in Pizza Hut, now it is 60-70% even after the lockdown opened. So, a lot of demand planning exercise needs to be done for delivery. When we were designing our pre-pandemic supply chain, we thought there had to be a centralized supply chain. But during the pandemic, we realized that a centralized model would not work. So you need to resort to this centralized plus decentralized model.”

From the panel discussions, we can understand that the pandemic has drastically changed the CPG landscape. Organizations have had to reinvent themselves and their supply chains in order to survive in the industry. On this topic, Vijay Kannan, CDIO of Godrej, gave us a look into the volatile new relationship between resilience, agility, and cost in our post-pandemic environment: “If you look traditionally at the last 15–20 years, you have been trained to optimize for cost. I think what COVID-19 has taught us is that resilience and agility trump cost. Now, how you find the right balance between resilience, agility, and cost has become an even more complex optimization decision. How do you use the vast amounts of usable data that we can now collect, be it from our own internal operations or from the broader ecosystem? How do you put the data to best use to get to more optimal decisions between cost, agility, and resilience? This is what organizations are grappling with.”

The discussions then shifted to the necessity of responsible and sustainable practices across the supply chain in the CPG industry. In an age of conscious consumerism, green practices and sustainable approaches are crucial for progress. Srinidhi Rao, Head of Sustainability and ESG at Waycool, gave us an example of his own enterprise’s green efforts: “For us, being in the food supply chain space, decarbonization opportunities happen to be in different phases of this value chain, right from the food production to the supply chain, the operation as well as the distribution. Most of our climate smart interventions deliver both carbon mitigation and carbon removal in each of these phases. For example, the root optimization and strategic sourcing points, if I just take the case of onions and tomatoes, in the last 6 months because of this intervention we avoided about 4.500 tonnes of wastage which otherwise would have happened.”

Key Takeaways

• Industry leaders emphasized on the extreme importance of improving customer services to progress in the CPG space.
• Forecasting has become increasingly difficult in the post-pandemic era without adequate data.
• The experts acknowledged a prominent shift in consumer behavior with customers now demanding ideal experiences across the board.
• The industry experts agreed that some of the most notable challenges in the modern CPG industry include volatile customer demands, increase in competition and a decrease of revenue.
• Innovative technologies such as cloud, data-driven insights and AI are playing a significant role in reshaping the CPG market by promoting sustainability and increasing efficiency.

Click here to view some of the highlights

Reshaping the World of Manufacturing and Supply Chains

The quest of becoming the world’s largest manufacturing hub has led to monumental reforms in India’s enterprises. With hopes of attracting foreign investments and gaining a significant share of the global supply chain, our government has been pushing incentives like PLI whilst facilitating the process of conducting business. Becoming a global auto and manufacturing hub was extensively discussed in the recent Industry Knowledge Exchange Summit.

When discussing how supply chain planning has evolved over time, Mukesh Kumar, Head of Industry and Customer Advisory, SAP said it best: “Considering everything, supply chain planning is now an enterprise-wide function, working towards servicing the customer rather than a very departmental, siloed thing we had earlier. Secondly, decisions are now made in real-time, much faster using the data that we have. Essentially, we listen, we engage, and we react much faster. Beyond cost and responsiveness, we are also focusing a lot on sustainability. Obviously, technology is still the backbone and it is constantly accelerating. ”

As the discussion revolved around the most pertinent disruptions currently plaguing the industry, Pidilite Industries’ Pankaj Bhargava gave us his expert opinions: “If we look at the disruptions, we can classify them into three types – the whole demand side, the supply side and the supply ecosystem. If we look at the demand side, we saw a complete destruction of demand during the pandemic, everything closed down. Then there was a massive bounce back of demand and the volatility remained. On the supply side, people struggled to adapt to this volatility, the suppliers were affected by availability issues. Thirdly, the supply ecosystem could not gear towards the volatility that we had seen. Ultimately, if we look at the impact, there was volatility in demand, uncertainty in supply and the supply ecosystem could not manage.”

Concepts about the digital factories of the future were also heavily talked out during the SAP Industry Knowledge Exchange Summit. Immersive technologies such as XR are being leveraged to redefine the way enterprises design, build and sell their products. According to Navin Nathani, Head IT & Transformation at Hindalco Industries, “Digitization has always been a very critical enabler for all manufacturing organizations. I think the resiliency of the supply chain has improved drastically over the last couple of years and organizations have started taking a lot of digitization activities in order to activate the pent-up demand that was there.”

Topics such as managing supply chain disruptions through synchronized processes and the impact of the National Logistics Policy were also major parts of the SAP Industry Knowledge Exchange Summit.