Future-Proof Innovation | SAP Sapphire 2023 Full Keynote
Please welcome Juergen Mueller and Thomas Saueressig. Hello, Hello. Hello, everyone. Welcome. Thanks so much for joining us here in Orlando today.
So also hello and warm welcome from my side. 50 years ago, SAP has built the first ERP system. 30 years ago, actually, we made real time a reality. Ten years ago, we entered the cloud, and today we're actually innovating together with all of you to redefine enterprise software and also to future-proof your business. entering the era of AI. We've been alongside you, your businesses, and your industries with continuous improvement and continuous innovation along the way.
You have had a very long and full and exciting day already. So now we invite you to just relax. Listen in, lean back, and enjoy. We will have five customers with us on stage later on. But we decided to kick things off with two of our wonderful SAP colleagues. And with that, let us invite Lucy and Sangeetha on stage.
Hi. Welcome. Thank you. So welcome, Lucy. Welcome, Sangeetha. It is great to have you both here, us together on stage.
You both are rather new to SAP, actually, but can you give us a little information, Actually, why you've chosen SAP? Yeah, of. course. To me, in my career, having an impact is the most important thing. And that's really why I joined SAP. When I started, I was actually in consulting, but I think I always knew somehow I'd end up in software.
To me, software is the place to make an impact. Just think, SAP has helped to produce more smartphones than any smartphone manufacturer, connecting all of us. We've also helped to make and distribute more vaccines than anyone else during the pandemic. To me, that's impact.
That's actually a nice way of putting it also as well. Yes. When I joined SAP, I was in the security team, but I now work directly on the products because I've had so much opportunity here to grow in my Career. With SAP,
I'm confident that I have the opportunity to both impact my future and the future. Sangeetha, for you. I know the very ambitious sustainability goals SAP has was part of your decision to join SAP.
Walk us through that thought process. Yes, you are right. Sustainability is not just a buzzword for me. It's very close to my heart. We touch 77% of the world's transactions.
Just imagine if all big corporations come together with SAP for a sustainable world. That's huge impact. What really convinced me was that SAP aspires for a future with zero emissions, zero waste, and zero inequality. That's why I chose SAP.
That's why we started our sustainability journey, and we doubled down in 2020, already. but with conviction and even despite the pandemic, because we truly believe in it, and we delivered on it. So I'm so excited to saw the announcement in the morning about the green ledger as part of RISE and GROW. With that, we will be able to enable everyone to move from averages to actuals.
And we all know in order to get to a low-carbon future, you need end-to-end transparency and visibility across the entire supply chain because actually supply chain emissions are factor 11 higher in the supply chain than the Scope 1 emissions. And that's exactly actually where the SAP Business Network turns fragmented supply chains into collaborative, sustainable networks. And by the way, with 5 million trading partners, it's actually the largest of its kind.
But I always say seeing is believing. Lucy. Yes, of course. Have you seen those electric scooters that seem to be everywhere these days? Well, let's take a look at one of their supply chain as an example. Up on the screen, you'll see all of the product information coming directly from SAP S/4 HANA. You can see the upstream sales path as well as the downstream suppliers.
You can see the suppliers of their suppliers and also their suppliers. For those of you in the supply chain, you understand that these complexities are no joke. But take a look at that orange header up there. There's an issue with the wheel supplier Wheels and Co.
They're missing a sustainability rating. This is important because reaching sustainability goals is critical to delivering on strategy. But no worries. We can look to our partner Ecovadis to to upload trusted sustainability ratings. Now the CO2 footprint and the audit trail are consistent and easily traceable. I mean, what you've just seen is actually just a short glimpse about what's possible with the power of the network.
So also the announcement around the SAP Business Network for Industries is a key aspect, and we are working on many, many industry- specific data networks like Catena-X, Manufacturing, and the likes. But all of these networks are only possible if processes and data are seamlessly integrated. And this integration enables completely new possibilities such as synchronized planning. That is a closed loop between planning and execution.
It's automated and network aware, and our extended planning and analytics capabilities span across financial planning, workforce planning, demand planning, and many, many more because they belong together. And this allows you to see the impact of your decisions across all your lines of business. And with that, you of course, can plan much more holistically. Yes. And we know this planning is critical to future-proofing your businesses. Many trusts our planning and analytics solutions already, and I'm sure they're eager to hear what's new. But first, I really want to hear, Juergen, what you've been hearing from customers on this topic.
Yeah, actually, let's see if what I've been hearing from customers resonates with this group here in Orlando as well. And let me ask you a question. Quick show of hands: Who of you knows companies that are extracting and replicating data from SAP systems? Relatively few hands up. I hope you are awake, full of energy. Then let me ask a different way.
Who of you would be interested by to reduce data extraction needs by 80 plus percent? Okay. There we go. Very good. We recently introduced SAP Datasphere to exactly help with that situation. Sangeetha, can you show us a little bit of that? Sure. I can see many are curious, right? What if I tell you, you can get a quick view of your data without any data replication. With SAP Datasphere, you can
create a data model consuming data from different sources like SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP BW for HANA, and non-SAP data sources like Google BigQuery and others. SAP Datasphere has a great graphical modeling feature. It helps you quickly create a data model with simple drag and drop. You can then visualize it in an SAP Analytics Cloud dashboard.
Perhaps you might be thinking, What's so special about this dashboard? There are two things that make this really unique. First, SAP Analytics Cloud can consume data from SAP Datasphere without any data movement from all of these data sources. Second, you can combine your planning data and actual data in one single dashboard with SAP Datasphere as the underlying data foundation. As you've seen, we can easily combine data from SAP system with non-SAP systems.
So, SAP is opening up more than ever. That's also why you have seen these amazing partnerships in this area, like with Databricks, DataRobot, Collibra, and Confluent. And for sure you all have seen Thomas Kurian from Google Cloud in the morning joining us on the party as an addition to the ecosystem because we truly believe in the democratization of data. Yeah, we do. SAP and our partners are committed to continuously innovating for you, our customers.
On the topic of data, I want to talk about something I'm personally interested and passionate about: AI. There's been incredible innovations in this space in the previous year, and SAP has spent the time to evaluate the business impacts for our solutions and for your businesses. I'm sure everyone in this room and online would love to know how SAP solutions are integrating with AI.
Juergen? We are partnering with Aleph Alpha, with IBM, and as you have heard this morning, also with Microsoft, and we are leveraging their technologies. But our key differentiator for you is how we use those technologies and embed these AI capabilities to reimagine business processes across all SAP solutions. I mean, there's no doubt SAP is an AI company and SAP’s AI is built into our system that power your business. As of today, we already have delivered 130 plus use cases embedded natively in the solutions. And also here, just to give you some glimpse about what we talk, I mean, with Concur Invoice management, we actually have processed last year 40 million of invoices automatically and generated a saving of more than 366 million for our customers.
And now generative AI is coming on top. And think about AI-powered examples like help functions, job descriptions, interview questions, product descriptions, queries for analytics. And we are working on more than 80 cases as we speak. But what is also critical that AI needs to be relevant, and this is because it's trade on our business data, and we know that actually the decisions you take in our systems are always business critical.
So responsible AI is absolutely key, and we are differentiating through a dedicated focus on ethics and reliability, making SAP AI trustworthy. And we want to invite all of you together with us to collaborate on many, many new cases. But also here, it's always good to see that, actually, what's the art of the possible. So let's have a look on AI-powered queries for analytics. Of course, we all know how important data is to our businesses, and it can be difficult to analyze complex data sets.
Wouldn't it be nice if, in a few keystrokes, I could quickly get all the information I needed from my data? Well, now SAP Analytics integrates directly with the natural language processing technology from Ask Data. Watch how easy it is to get analytical information from a chat-like experience. Using the underlying generative AI, I can quickly get the total gross margin sorted by location. I'm always amazed by how simple it is to quickly access and explore data sets.
And that's actually just one of the examples. We infuse AI everywhere and also enable totally new capabilities in our products. So Sangeetha, actually, do you want to give us a sneak preview actually, what's the future of analytics? Sure.
Future of analytics is autonomous. With continuous intelligence, we provide you with always-on analytical services. The service learns itself from historic data and informs you of trends and anomalies.
Anyone in your organization can notify immediately. If you have sudden spikes in orders, then the service notifies you. We plan to make this service as a beta service for SAP BTP customers, and we invite you to try it out. Oh. Now, let me draw your attention to another great use case of generative AI for development. Many of you are on your way to a clean core, and that is great. This means instead of modifying your system, you are using standardized APIs to build Future-proof extensions.
And this means now with SAP. BTP, actually, we are embedding generative AI capabilities, and I actually would still feel comfortable to help you with building an extension on BTP. And I think I'm not coding anymore every day, but maybe it would take me like two hours or so with a little help of my colleagues to build you an extension on BTP. And that is very efficient already. But now imagine this. What if instead of coding myself, I could simply describe what I want and SAP will take care of it.
So wouldn't that be cool? We are actually making this a reality with generative AI. It is still a prototype, but let's have a look. I can request something like, develop a business app for a ticketing system that enables our customers to submit tickets and agents to handle and resolve them efficiently, and with the help of our generative AI prototype prototype, it simply happens. Just in a few moments, actually, you can test your new application and see how it works. Generative AI from SAP provides the scaffolding for your SAP extensions just in a couple of minutes.
Maybe your teams will be 100 times more efficient than before. And imagine what an impact that might have on your organization. And the power of AI actually goes far beyond efficiency. Yeah. And as mentioned, the power goes far beyond efficiency. We leverage AI also to reshape the experience between humans and machines because we believe it's a duet and not a duel. But let's switch topics a little bit.
I mean, Lucy, you're a digital native and have high expectations about user experience. Then what do you think about SAP's user experience? Yeah, well, I have heard the comments that SAP's user experience is not the prettiest, but those are often old systems. What I really love about SAP's new user experience is that it's intuitive, easy, efficient, and it's also beautiful with the new Horizon theme. More importantly, it helps me get stuff done.
For those of you that haven't seen the preview, I'm going to show you one now using SAP Mobile Start. So here on SAP Mobile Start, we have our dashboard that has applications to do’s, content, and notifications. I can access purchase requisitions, job postings, and invoice approvals. It doesn't even matter what system they come from. I can quickly go ahead and execute an approval and, from there, jump directly into an HR chart in SuccessFactors. There we are. And it all also works on an Apple Watch. Right, Thomas? I think so. No, actually, everything is working on the Web, on the mobile, and the watch.
And also that you can see that it's no fake here. Let's try that out. So that we can actually also see all of the business workflows, all the KPIs on the watch itself. And with that for sure also then can Approve, actually. Let's take this time sheet for an example, directly from the watch.
And actually thank you. But actually, what you've seen, this is not the classical ERP anymore. And with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, our customers experience all of these benefits immediately.
So it's a call to action to everybody. Don't be late to the party. It's time to move now.
And also, actually, what we learned during the pandemic, and we learned about collaboration and virtual settings, that this is also certainly something which should be a key part of our portfolio. Yes, of course, we have all learned how vital collaboration is these days. To streamline our collaboration at SAP, we've integrated our business applications with Microsoft Teams. It's kind of like a coworker leaning over your shoulder to work on a file together. Tackling business problems is important, but I'm also interested in one level deeper. How do we optimize those processes? Juergen, I'd love to know, How do we know if our business processes are running smoothly? That is a question that is often asked in customer conversations, and we have an industry- leading solution for that: SAP Signavio.
It's all about giving you the power to work with the CXOs in your organization to optimize your business processes. Sangeetha, why don't you show us a little bit of that? Of course. Lucy, you just asked, How do we find if the processes are efficient or running Smoothly. With SAP Signavio. it's like having an X-ray vision of your business processes. In just less than 14 minutes, you can identify the different steps in your process and also the inefficiencies and delays and manual efforts here. As an example, you can see the process steps detected by SAP Signavio for onboarding a new hire. For example, you want to get the right equipment for your new hire, assigning all mandatory trainings and getting all system approvals for them from day one.
You can quickly adapt the standard process according to your unique needs. For example, you want to add a home-office package for your new hires. And for sure, insights are important, but they are not sufficient because at the end of the day, we need to be able to act and to be able to change business processes because agility is key. And as a former CIO, I absolutely know how overwhelmed sometimes the IT organizations are with so many, so many requests they have.
That's also the reason why we need to rethink how business users can actually help solve business processes themselves and automate where needed. So, Sangeetha, can you show actually how we do that? Yeah, sure. Thanks to SAP Build and SAP Integration Suite, we can bridge the gap between business and IT. Of course, the starting point was SAP Signavio.
You just saw. Right. There were manual delays and inefficiencies. Let's take the same example of automating the new hire workflow. So you want to automate various steps in this process and you can quickly adapt with SAP Build Process Automation with simple drag and drop, no coding required.
This empowers you as business users to drive change in your organization. We enable this enterprise automation with SAP Signavio, SAP Build, and SAP Integration Suite because we know that you are under a lot of pressure when it comes to efficiency in your organizations. And with enterprise automation, you can continuously identify and improve processes. You saw how you can use SAP technology to adapt your end-to-end business process to fit your company needs. And you can actually check out api.sap.com to see our predefined content packages for analytics, for automation, for integration, and many others.
It's very likely that what you have in front of you, we have already done for you, and this gives you like an 80% start, saving you 80% of your time compared to building everything from scratch. That's so awesome. I know customers can and do benefit from solutions like this, but I also know migrations can be difficult with complex legacy systems and custom code.
For those of you in the room that can relate to this, we know you want to take the next important steps for digital transformation. Thomas, how can SAP help them do this? That's actually the reason why we have launched RISE with SAP, a concierge service for your business transformation. And it's our ambition to support you on your individual journey with the best tools, latest innovations, but for sure also with the largest infrastructure configurations, but also best SLAs and security. And one aspect of this ambition is for sure that we actively support you in helping you going back to standard to allow for more agility.
And you can keep the core clean by extending your business processes and still benefit from all the goodness and updates and innovation we release as part of our standard applications. SAP BTP supports you every step of the way. Sangeetha, can we show our customers a little example in the context of S/4 HANA? Yeah, sure. Let's take an example that we are a logistics company, and we want our truck drivers who are always on the road to
create maintenance orders. You can use SAP Build Apps on SAP BTP to create an application with simple drag-and-drop capabilities, and IT can support if needed. Our truck drivers can now enter maintenance orders on their smartphone, and this is reflected in the SAP S/4HANA back end in real time. As you can see, this way you can adapt SAP best practices to your custom needs in a secure and reliable way. You see, Sangeetha, this was a real firework of innovations that you presented today. Yeah, you did give us a fantastic insights actually into the glimpse of the next generation of enterprise software, which is intelligent, networked, and sustainable. So big thank you to you.
Thanks for your support. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You have seen the many innovations we have released, and some of them will be coming soon. But now let's hear from one of our customers, the Schwarz Group.
And for that, please, let's welcome the chief digital officer of Schwarz Group, Rolf Schumann. Love come into our middle here. Hi, Rolf. Good to see you.
The Schwarz group is not yet known to everyone here in this audience. I guess so. Tell us a little bit more about your company. Look, this group, we have more than 550,000 employees in 32 countries. And with a revenue of roughly 150 billion U.S. dollars. So we are the European's largest retailer and the number four worldwide.
Our headquarter is based in Neckarsulm. Neckarsulm is just 30 miles south of Walldorf, and from there, you may know our retail Brands: Lidl, or as we call it Lidl, and Kaufland. And you must imagine these two brands, they have 13,500 stores, retail stores, and we support them with 242 warehouses.
So when you look on our IT our IT never stops because when the stores open, high peak time for the stores; when they close, it's absolutely peak for our warehouses. It's always impressive to see that scale of the Schwarz Group, but actually, how do you manage it? How do you run your business? Look, when you look on our business, what you need is all processes have to be managed in the best possible way and the most efficient way. And we wanted to look not only for back-end processes; we wanted to have a real-time process platform, and this is why we have chosen SAP S/4HANA as a fully integrated system.
So our systems is a fully integrated retail system from the stores, from all processes to all warehouses. And of course, our business is not only a retail business; it's omnichannel. So this means this is the foundation of our marketplace, online shops, loyalty cards, and everything we have there.
But besides our retail business, we have our own food production division. And just to give you a little bit of flavor, what we do there. So we are producing three, 2 billion bottles of water. So we are the largest water source in Germany. We are producing 1.5 billion baked products in our bake off. We make 50,000 tons of chocolate.
This is just 2,000 bars per minute, 24x7. And of course, 66,000 tons of dried fruit and nuts and 1.2 billion pieces of ice cream. But the most important product we produce is the most important thing for software and IT industry.
It's the 50,000 tons of coffee beans and coffee. So, furthermore, Beside the coffee to keep you awake, we have a division called PreZero. And PreZero is our waste management and recycling division. So you must imagine the bottles are set before the PET bottles is the only 100% PET bottle, which is 100% recycled. We call this circular bottle, which means bottle becomes a bottle, becomes a bottle, becomes a bottle, becomes a bottle.
So you get the idea behind. And this makes the Schwarz Group so special because we are not just a retailer with the full end-to-end value chain. We are also thinking in recycling from production, selling it via retail, online, offline, complete recycling, and thinking in circular business.
Again, the scale is so fascinating actually. And for sure, we're very proud that you trust SAP to help you grow and scale even further. But you’re also one of these customers always choosing the latest and greatest of our solutions.
And you've mentioned your life on S/4HANA globally, but you're also running a fully digital factory, end-to-end integrated with SAP Digital Manufacturing Cloud, and for sure that also we share the same passion on coffee actually. So can you tell us a little bit about the benefit of a truly digital factory? When you talk about digital factory, everybody talks about digital transformation, and we came to the point we wanted to do just one thing. We have more than 15 plants, and the idea was, how can we connect the manufacturing plants in real time to the business process platform SAP 4? I said before, this was the gap. And at this point, we said we start with the coffee factory, and it was finished last year in spring and went live. And you must imagine all processes are fully digital.
And when I say fully digital, we operate in two shifts with just 100 people to produce 50,000 tons of coffee beans and of course the whole filter coffee. And the missing piece, the link between the shop floor and the business process platform was closed by the DMC because this was what I can tell you to connect in real-time back-end processes with the manufacturing. I think it's such a fascinating showcase, making the reality from the shop floor to the top floor. But also, I mean, we talked the entire day about AI and also here in Digital Manufacturing Cloud, we infuse AI, like, for capabilities, like a visual inspection. And for sure, running Digital Manufacturing Cloud optimizes your processes globally.
But we are also announcing and leveraging actually SAP Digital Manufacturing Cloud for edge computing to ensure the highest level of availability. Next to availability, security is of highest priority for our customers. Rolf, you run a hybrid environment. How do you go about security? Look, here's the point. You should not see the Schwarz Group as a single company. We are really more an ecosystem. And I say ecosystem. I say 13,500 stores, 90,000 suppliers, more than 600 financial institutions connected to
this, 10,000 dealers. So you understand this is a huge own world. And then we have constant changes.
Everything is connected, and we have multiple thousand changes a day. So we came to the point that the classical way and the mindset to make cybersecurity happen doesn't work anymore. And this is why we in 2021 in November found new friends and got the Israeli company XM Cyber as part of our family. What does this mean? They offered us a cyber management platform where we could see the first time our complete network through the eyes of the hacker, which means it didn't matter if it's cloud or on premise. And we only focus now on the vulnerabilities which really can harm you and can attack your critical assets, which we call the crowned jewelries. So in other words, what we do, we only focus on 2% of all vulnerabilities to protect 100% of our critical resources. So in 24x7 real time, we are looking on our permanent changing network to get the right vulnerabilities out of
the full crowd, identified, prioritized. And then we go for them. And this is how we secure this ecosystem. And I can tell you, we got rid of the so-called alert fatigue. And you actually would not associate Schwartz Group also as a typical partner for SAP.
But today, I'm happy to announce our strategic partnership in the area of cybersecurity. So going forward, SAP will use XM Cyber in our own infrastructure to further increase our resiliency. But as we are so excited about that partnership, XM Cyber is also now available on the SAP Store so that all of our customers can have the opportunity to also extend cyber protection from SAP into the existing landscape.
So Rolf, thank you so much for joining us here on stage. Thank you. Thank you. That was great. Thanks. And now actually, we are excited to speak with even more customers who will share their journey with SAP.
So let's welcome Kris from Topcon, Michael from Henkel, we have Micky from the Women's Tennis Association and Chris from Nestle. Hello. So good.
So thanks for joining us here on stage. And let me start with with you, Chris. I mean, Nestle, SAP, we go back for quite some long time in history and actually we talk so much about RISE with SAP. And I think it's a best-kept secret that actually together with Nestle, we even innovated on that model what that really means in your life with Nestle on RISE with SAP. Can you give us a little context about what's the benefit you see and why you've chosen RISE with SAP? And I can't pass this question to the other Chris. No, I think indeed it's been a long journey.
In fact, my journey probably started. I'm as old as SAP, so and I started working with SAP in 1995, but in the early 2000, we decided to globalize. That was the start of our really big global journey together, creating one set of business processes, one set of data, one set of systems supporting it, and the core of our operations run on that today. But then we jointly committed to start on the SAP RISE journey Christmas Day 2019, I think, and we started that journey early 2020. I don't think we knew exactly how we'd make the journey, but we had confidence between ourselves and also with Microsoft we could do so. The journey itself, I think we went through a lot.
We learned how to do operations much better. We learned how to do cutovers of huge systems in less than ten hours. That was critical to our our business from a resilience point of view, from an availability point of view. And then we completed that.
We completed that journey in time, on budget, and we are indeed seeing the benefits from it. One of the key ones is what I touched on just a minute ago, is the resilience. We hit 99.97% availability on enormous SAP platforms, and that matters when you've got 350 factories, when you've got sales approaching 100 billion, any downtime, any outage is immediately impacting. So number one, resilience. Number two, it gives us a platform to build on for the future.
And you see here today many of the future aspects of some of the capabilities coming. Being in the cloud is allowing us to adopt those faster, allowing our people to connect with them better. We've still got a journey to go, but but we've come a long way. And and that move to RISE for us has been highly valuable.
I think we moved 1200 terabytes of data onto the SAP RISE platform, and we've been closing our data centers. So also just that simplification of our landscape, making our landscape more cloud ready, enterprise ready for the future has been has been really key. Absolutely impressive journey. Yeah. Thanks, Chris. Micky, Business,
businesses are competitive, but tennis is so brutal. In the Grand Slam, you have 128 players. Every game is a knockout game. And then you decided to actually help with data. So, what was the what is the story about there? Well, it was a match made in heaven that started in 2013, our journey with SAP, and we started by implementing on-court coaching.
And that gave us very interesting results because it did many things. In life, in tennis, in business, you have to make a series of decisions. And the more you can avoid the wrong decisions, the better you're going to do. And data enables you to do that.
So for our players to be able to look at visualized ball tracking. The coach could establish patterns, things that the players were doing over and over again that were not leading to good outcomes. So another German called Albert Einstein, he said that the definition of insanity was to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result.
So I also credit SAP for avoiding a lot of insanity in the world and definitely in WTA world, because the players could look at objective information and make changes that increase their performance outcome at the end of the day. Thanks for sharing that. You, Michael, coming to you: What value does SAP bring to you, bring to Henkel? Yeah, maybe quickly.
We are working in two business models, business fields. One is industrial B2B, and the other one is consumer products goods. And in both business models, we have substantial change happening.
So the dynamics of our industry is fundamentally changing. Just to give you two examples, you all know the platform economy, so the huge CPG companies, they all missed out the platforms. That's why we have the Amazon and so on. So we missed out the digital commerce side.
And secondly, to give you another quick example would be we call it a gravitational shift of consumer behavior, whereas you would go in the past to a store and pick and choose a shampoo of Henkel, you want to now have a convenience model, you want to have it personalized and you want to have ideally shipped it into your home door. Substantial change in the go-to-market side, but also in the entire value chain. So you see how important software is for us, coming back to Chris’ point, you need to have a solid, super-robust, large But on the other hand, we also needed to have a great innovation platform, a software innovation platform. And now that was really the great part of it. And I'm not saying that because they gave me this t-shirt.
I'm really a big fan. I'm passionate about the Business Technology Platform. I was working in the field for 25 years, and I was always looking for something. Having a business process platform, which is the core SAP, 50 years of experience, domain knowledge in that field. But then having a software platform which is allowing you to do on top.
SAP is calling it side-by-side development. So we are using that on a very, very large scale since about four years. We have one very fundamental application.
Just to quickly elaborate on that, it's called trade promotion management. Super-important for the consumer products goods business. We spent just that, you have an idea multibillions every every year on trade promotions, and with BTP, you have the convergence of a memory technology cloud, but also AI infused, as we heard today already for about four years. I'm always explaining it in a way of you are building your applications and you have the 0ver-the-air capability, which makes it future proof. And with this kind of convergence of new technologies, we were able to manage that big kind of computer science business problem.
So that's really what we see how SAP can help us to move forward now. And also, Kris, actually, I mean, Topcon adopted S/4HANA Cloud, public edition in 2017. So basically you’re live six years with the public cloud. So what does actually future-proof mean to you? Yeah, so that's a great question. And I would honestly say that if I had really understood how early adopter we were, I don't know that I would have approached it quite the same way. But for those of you that don't know, Topcon is a technology company.
We provide innovative solutions for productivity, for commercial construction, Agriculture, and associated industries, and we're a very vertically inclined company. And through a lot of historical decisions, we we had a very fragmented ERP landscape, and we made the decision to take our vertical go-to-market chain to public cloud in the very early days. And the partnership went through some hurdles and some hiccups as we both learned how to not just deploy, but to operate a true public packaged cloud solution. And one of the things I would say is that, as has been talked about, it's critical to standardize. And that was the first, the first, let's say, evolution. We're now in 11 countries.
We've been running successfully for a number of years. And coming from a traditional IT background, if you had said to an on-prem ERP customer, Hey, we've upgraded 20 times in five years, they would just opt out and go home. Right? You just don't do that. And now it's become like second nature, you know, and it's built into our DNA to to be able to manage the releases and to understand what's coming. And now we're at that second wave where I would say we, you know, we don't do deep requirements. We do high-level requirements.
We go look at the catalog; we see what's available. We deploy it in a sandbox, we see if it works and it matches close enough, we turn it on. And in many cases, you know, we're able to then move from that concept to deployment in, I would Say, under 6 to 8 weeks. If it's something that the users can choose, then we actually turn it on and then we let what we call user-driven deployment, right? If it's adding value, they use it. And if it's not, it's it's there.
And it's not something that interferes with the way they work. And that's now finally aligned with what we consider to be a strategy that says govern the core and accelerate at the edge. And that's really kind of helped us formulate our strategy going forward. Very nice. Micky, you shared already a little bit about how you helped with the data.
And I also know you had a lot of different data silos, like probably many here in the audience as well. When we discussed about SAP Datasphere, you made the connection to the Orlando International Airport. Might you, would you want to fill in the audience? Yes. You're going to ask me how I saw the utilization of the SAP Datasphere for us. And what we were dealing with was a lot of data silos, data feed silos. So, for example, we had our operational systems, our HR systems, and then our player education platforms, our player information platforms, our performance player performance center, and the same thing on the tournament side. So it was very, very divided.
And I said to Juergen, it's like the main terminal at the Orlando International Airport. That's the SAP Datasphere. And then we have all these different data planes that come in and get managed in the center, and now it's no longer siloed, but all the information can be consumed and acted upon together. Thanks for sharing. That's a nice picture. Absolutely. But also thinking about the SaaS mindset, we talked often about what's the SaaS mindset in this regards? And Kris, I mean, leveraging the beauty of of the public cloud and SaaS across all of the estates, how do you see actually the benefits from not only leveraging all these great innovations we deliver now to a point in a constant manner, but also the integration part of it from the S/4HANA public cloud to our cloud solutions.
Yeah. So we've been doing Application-level SaaS for 15 years now. And it's really interesting because we have it across the landscape. We have Sales Cloud, we have Commerce Cloud, we have Analytics Cloud, we have IBP, we have really the full suite.
And our strategy here is actually playing out. One of the nice things is I think we've set ourselves up for moving beyond deploying products to trying to deploy processes. And so now you're looking at multi-cloud, multi-application process architecture. And by working with SAP on that, we've really positioned ourselves to be able to be, you know, a primary consumer of the AI that comes out the, the, you know, the, the additional productivity solutions that you're looking at across the entire landscape, the ability to render, you know, all of the in-time KPIs across the architecture.
And that's been critical. And the one piece that I would emphasize is that, you know, while we have it across the landscape, we've really focused on areas that touch our customers and our brand. And that's because we want to link the experience of interacting with Topcon back to the operational core. And, you know, it's been a great partnership so far. Thank you. That makes a lot of sense. Kris. Michael, back to you. We, a couple of weeks ago, formed a new transformational partnership.
Can you share a few more details about it and what does it mean for you? What are your expectations? Yeah, super-happy to do so actually. We are super-excited about the partnership because it's not what we would call traditionally a strategic partnerships. You guys know there's many partnerships around. Everyone is calling when they sign a deal with a big tech player. We have now a partnership in place.
This is really fundamentally different, and we invested a lot of time from both sides to make it fundamentally different. So first of all, we call it digital leapfrog. We jointly want to help on the one hand, Henkel, but maybe even going broader, the whole industry to to move to the next level, to stay ahead with technology.
I talked about the megatrends, the changes. So, we need to catch up in certain areas. In other areas, we need to we need to protect our, let's say, frontrunner position. And that is really possible because we joined forces. What is so specific about it, I think, is a level of trust we have reached was the openness of SAP to listen to us and to really build that into it.
So we call it the Macintosh approach. We have that on the top level commitment on both sides. But we have also cascaded it down to the execution teams, which are really working in one team effort. We have access or at least influence to some extent to the SAP product road map.
On the flip side, you guys benefit quite a bit from having a big domain player willing to innovate, willing to go ahead of the curve. And that is really fundamentally different, and it's very important for our digital transformation journey. Thanks, Michael. I mean, we cannot we cannot have a Q&A session without the topic of sustainability, obviously.
And one of the key aspects is circularity, a circular economy. And as we all know, we only have 7.2% of the world's GDP in circularity. And that's also the reason why Nestle and SAP, we work intensively about that topic. But for sure you also have a huge ambition on that topic to avoid basically waste.
So what is the ambition of Nestle, and how do we tackle that one? Yeah, I mean our broad ambitions on the overall sustainability, there's many, many topics. I think two that I'll call out in particular. One is on the carbon impact where we're, we have an ambition to reduce by 20% by 2025, 50% by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050 now. And we want to do that not just on type one, type two, what's inside our company, but on type three.
And the vast majority of our carbon impact is actually the type three. It's what we buy; it's the sources of our ingredients. It goes right back to the farms, understanding, first of all, where the impact is. This is huge. And today, our core ERP systems give us a lot of the data to help us calculate that. That's point one.
So it's made our core ERP implementation more important. Secondly, we've had to extend things like PLM, the way we think of recipe management. We have to now design recipes with carbon in mind or with packaging in mind.
So we need to collect more data, we need to add more data to our core systems, and we need to optimize using machine learning and AI to adapt the recipes in different ways to hit those goals. And we need to do that all the way through the supply chain, right back to individual farms, all the way, all the way from the farm to the fork. We need to act at every level. So sustainability is making our existing implementation, our existing data, our existing platforms more important because they're a key part of tackling the problem. Once you understand where that problem is, though, you then need to act on it.
And here we got a second goal, the second really, really important goal I'll touch on, which is packaging. Obviously, packaging is very important. 30% of food, produced food, goes to waste.
Now packaging helps to avoid that, helps to protect it, helps to drive quality, helps to drive longevity of food. But we've set an ambition to have 95% of all of our packaging designed for recycling by by 2025. And the goal also to ambition to reach 100%. Now that means a lot of changes. Again, this reinforces the need for things like PLM.
The need for good master data. But it also needs new solutions that drive circularity and reusability. And here, solutions like the Responsible Design and Production is absolutely key.
And that's just one of the areas where we've been working with SAP on jointly designing a solution that we need for the future on top of our existing platforms. And I'm sure there'll be many others as the regulations, the demands evolve over the coming years because this is a very fast-changing area. No, absolutely. And you see how holistic we need to tackle sustainability. So to all of you, thank you so much actually, for the for the insights sharing.
So thank you so much very much. Thank you. What a nice session. We had Lucy. We had Sangeetha.
We showed a lot of live demonstrations of our software at work. You have heard from Rolf Schumann from the Schwarz Group as well. And we had the very nice panel that was just finishing. And yeah, Topcon was there. WTA was there. Henkel, Nestle, all different ways of using SAP and how to innovate and how to future-proof their businesses.
And I mean, to summarize all these innovations, we enable risk-resilient supply chains. We connect your business to a broader network. We help you plan across the business. We infuse AI across the whole portfolio of SAP, and we want to provide you with a new intuitive user experience and collaboration capabilities, all enabled by our leading platform, the SAP Business Technology Platform. So enjoy the rest of Sapphire, and thank you very much.
Thanks a lot. Take good care.
2023-06-02 23:49
