Indus Community Procurement SIG, 29 Dec 2020

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From YouTube: INDUS Procurement SIG - Vision for the Next Generation Procurement

Description

In this meeting, we will be hosting James Marland (Global Vice President, SAP Intelligent Spend & Business Network) who is considered to be one of the top 10 thought leaders in the procurement field globally (https://www.thinkers360.com/top-20-global-thought-leaders-and-influencers-on-procurement-july-2019/)

In this session, he will share with you a vision for the Next Generation of Procurement, and the steps that SAP is taking to advance that vision and a road to help customers on their journey to that destination.

If there’s one lesson we have all learned recently, it is that visibility and agility are critical, and you as procurement leaders are centre stage for making that happen.

James will share the vision for the next generation procurement function and how SAP can help you achieve this vision.

You can follow James on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jmarland/) and on Twitter (https://twitter.com/JamesMarland).

#Procurement

A

Should I start again with cash? Well, anyway? No it's! Okay! You can just go on yeah. My name is james bar and I joined sap in 1994 when r3 was a boy, um so my first job uh was as an ab consultant. So uh if you uh are still still like, you still remember some of those some of those old lab terms. So um don't get me going on that, but I do remember taking bc 100 the introduction to ab class. um Fortunately I don't do too much of that anymore.

A

Many talk to cpos about what's happening in procurement. I also famously don't like slides. um So let me sketch out for you a couple of things so, first of all, I'm going to sketch out for you really how we all fit together in the sap world, so the the latest positioning from sap really has uh three layers to it, and so I'll keep things nice and simple, because sometimes sap you make things a bit more complicated.

A

So imagine that at sap we have in this area we have a series of applications.

A

And we have some, maybe some garment that'd be great and we have three types of applications right yep. So we have cloud and these are lines of business applications we have core- which of course is for these days and then we have industry. So we start to have applications that are specific for different industries that we have at sap. So those are the applications that we have at sap, we'll we're well known for our applications, but below that we have, of course, our technology.

A

So below that in our technology stack.

A

We have technology and there's several ways that we can. We can explain this, but um so we have technology here and I'm just going to use the general term that we now use sap for the fundamental stack that we have here, which is the business.

A

Oops, I need to do that. Try again the business technology.

A

Platform and the key thing here, I'd like to say about our approach: is it's an open platform? Okay, so it's uh sap in the old days was a little hard to get information into and out of now much more open with with cloud platform being the fundamental integration technology. But one of the things about about this.

A

The way I've drawn this is is the new diagram from christian klein at the top, and that's why I call this particular whiteboard by the way, the hamburger, because at the top of everything we have the idea of connections and one of the things we've learned recently is enterprises need to be connected to other enterprises, which is why we call this at the top here, the the business network. So here we have, if you like, a network connections to other businesses, uh so.

A

The business network sits on top here and who do we connect to? Well? We need to be able to connect to customers.

A

You'd be able to collect to external employees.

A

I mean to be able to connect to, of course, suppliers.

A

So this is a key part about procurement, of course, is the way that we we uh connect across companies and then finally, we're going to talk in a minute about procurement and the three main parts of procurement. I like to say. Obviously a complex business process is well, there is sourcing, then there's buying and then there's paying and the sap world, of course, everything's fully integrated together. So we draw this as a a loop here like that all right. So that's how I explain what sap is all about.

A

So again, just sort of summarize really- and this is positioning- I think you should see- I think throughout the rest of your uh sap presentations- is again this. I call this the hamburger and there are three layers to sap. We have applications, three types cloud core industry, a technology layer is a technology platform and then, on the top of that we have our connections to the outside world and then now we're going to go into more detail about the procurement business flow which, which I call source by pay all right.

A

Any questions. So far on what I've drawn, uh you can now use the chat window so where we have that available right phuket. So everyone uh use your little um chat window that'll be great uh to to uh if any questions about what I've drawn so far or how it fits in yeah.

B

Or or if someone has a question, you can also raise your hand, and I can.

A

There you have it lots of ways to do it, go on the camera and wave like this, whichever works.

A

uh Okay, so before we follow that one observation on this is, I came from the ariba world and of course my colleagues at sap come from. You know the s4 world, but on this diagram, you'll see that it's one technology platform now so what was previously written in uh ariba or field glass, which of course were acquired companies with their own technology stack, is now being uh re redone uh onto the business technology platform. So that means things like fiori. It means cloud platform.

A

It means the protocols that we use at sap for security for localization all that kind of stuff. That's all built into the business platform, are now common, whether you are talking about ariba or fuel, glass uh or hybris, or anything else. Quite frankly. So that's a great step forward for us who have to support sap is this technology platform? Is the same uh all right. So now, we've seen a little bit about how this fits in I'm going to switch gears a little bit and talk about what customers are saying uh about procurement.

A

So let me just go on to that.

B

A

All right, so I call this next generation procurement and the way I explain this again, I hate slides so again using uh my whiteboard here. um So the first comment really is about this importance of the network. That's why that's why it's so exciting that christian klein has been talking about. In fact he has a blog about this on linkedin on uh yesterday. I think uh about how business networks have been key.

A

um So one of our leaders in apj scott russell said that a network business is a resilient business, so think about that for a minute we're all living through uh the challenges of the pandemic and different people are responding different ways: different countries responding different ways by the way top news from england. Today we gave our first vaccine at seven o'clock this morning, so they're saying it's v-day, our first um uh population was was vaccinated this morning, just one person so far, but hey where's, the stuff.

A

So we're all we're all learning about how to work in this new environment and customers are also finding their supply chains are affected, and so this concept of one way to overcome that is to have a networked business. So if you are a business that speaks digitally to your suppliers and your customers, you are naturally more resilient to changes in demand.

A

Employees affected contractors, confected and so on, because you have more options. So that's a key comment there from scott russell network business is a resilient business all right. So when I draw this out here, I start off on the left and that's when we're going to talk about what are the challenges that we see in procurement, and so the first is you know this. I just mentioned: supply chains are under pressure. Now, we've all seen this in the last six months I mean: did you have a run on toilet paper?

A

No, we did right and suddenly everyone's talking about supply chain, I go to the supermarket, and people are actually using the word supply chain where they never used to do that. They never used to worry about how things showed up at the supermarket and now everyone's talking about it, because logistics networks, they're under strain raw materials, are being diverted into other products and supplier factories may not be working at full capacity.

A

I actually spoke to a company about this earlier on in the year and they they had this very interesting insight and they said well james, it's kind of like an iceberg. So what do you mean? It's like an iceberg? Well, an iceberg. You can see the part above the water, but that's only one tenth of an iceberg volume above the water, nine tenths of it's below the water. It's really hard to see.

A

Maybe you can see it if it's clear weather, but if it's story weather you can't and that's true with supply chains. Okay, you can see one level is the supply chain, but you can't see the supplier's supplier. You can't see how he's getting his raw material. You can't see how his access to labor, you don't know what his workers are going through, and so this ability to have more visibility beyond.

A

What's just above the water line, I think is, uh is really important uh and one last thing on this little metaphor of the iceberg is we've all seen the movie titanic right, yeah, but which part of the iceberg was it that sang the titanic yeah the part below the water? Okay. So the thing that causes companies trouble is not what they know from their suppliers. It's what's been done beyond that. What are the suppliers experiencing?

A

So that's, obviously very important top of mind for many companies right being able to have access to uh you know a resilient supply chain, but at the same time, consumers are not giving customers an easy time right, so they still need access to innovation. Customers still want innovative products, and these still private product life cycles are still compressed in high tech. We all know that there's a new iphone out, there's always a new iphone. Now there's a new gadget out for christmas. There's, always you gadget christmas. Kids want you trainers, they want new shoes.

A

uh People want new fashion items, so consumer life cycles are getting smaller, but the innovation- and this is the key part of this innovation- comes from suppliers. Mainly this is kind of strange right. You might have thought that apple had a bunch of apple technical people, designing screens design that they don't right. The innovations for screens are done by a supplier, the gorilla glass, which is the the glass they use for the touch sensitive developed by a supplier nespresso right.

A

They have a great business model because they take coffee and charge like a hundred times more for it. By putting it in an aluminium, capsule, great business model wasn't their invention. Supply came up with that idea. I spoke with ford, but the cpo of ford. um uh What's her name lisa and she said that 60 of the innovation of a motor vehicle these days comes from suppliers, okay, so being able to have access to that is critical, and so you need to have good relations with your suppliers.

A

You need to understand what they do and this kind of gets into the key part about sap. If someone asks me so, what's sap all about at the highest level, so when I, when I just drew this um this picture here, what's sap about at the highest level- and I sometimes say well, it's about having employees having people do interesting things and have machines.

A

Do boring things. That's actually quite insightful, say it again. So we want to have people do interesting. Things have machines, do boring things, and so all of our efforts about automation and about machine learning is to allow our employees who are skilled and expensive to do interesting work, whether it's value-add so in procurement. That would be things like researching new suppliers uh coming up with new ways to communicate with suppliers, uh auditing suppliers coming up working with them on innovations not pounding through spreadsheets of rfps, not running mindless surveys and copying information from one system.

A

So everything with sap is about automating boring tasks, so things like rpa come in there as well. Okay, so that's access to innovation.

A

Another thing I been talking to cpos about is this idea of the changing nature of work. Speak about my father, my father he's old, now he's 85., uh but he worked for one. His whole life worked for ibm. His whole life right, came out of college, went in there and then he retired.

A

Now people don't do that anymore. My kids, my daughter's on a third job already, and so people are on much faster cycles and they're doing many. Many more things the same time, there's a lot more gig work, more consulting and so on. So the old idea of we need to manage my employees on payroll. They go through training and hiring. That's not true, since in most companies, an interesting stat here from oxford economics is that 42 of the work that is done by companies is done by non-employees by out sources of different type.

A

So I know that many people outsource work to india for all sorts of reasons. There are call centers and so on, but also higher value tasks like we outsource a whole project to infosys right. um So the idea of working with temporary workers with contractors with suppliers who are giving a managed service is super important.

A

Okay, and so we have to make sure that we are treating that the same way, that's also part of procurement, because some ways you are buying a service- and so we talk about that and so bringing that in is uh is important as well.

A

I'll. Give you a little insight into that, so uh two customers that we have you know very similar businesses um in manufacturing, automotive and when the pandemic hit in march, one company had field glass and within four hours they knew exactly who everybody was on the site.

A

So they could all have the right information about working from home have the right information about what was going to happen to them, access to the appropriate masks or whatever right within four hours, the other company very similar company didn't have field glass, took them weeks to figure out who actually comes on our site. Who comes here? What do they do?

A

Who do they work for how to get in touch with them, and so it became very difficult for them to communicate so something small such as who actually comes to my factory in a given day, because most people do that are not. My employees becomes fundamentally important when something like pandemic is.

A

Social responsibility we hear more and more about this. My ultimate boss at sap is a dare fox martin. This is this is key to her. She wants to show that sap can be a company that does good in the world that one of our mottos is uh mukesh. Give us the sap motto uh to run better and do uh health companies run better and do and do good.

A

So how can we do that procurement? Well, actually, it turns out the procurement's a big deal here. What who companies buy from is actually critical to how much uh carbon footprint there is, how much energy they use? What type of supplies they engage with, what those suppliers do, how they're involved with apprentices and so on? Most of those decisions come through the procurement department.

A

So if your company wants to change in any way it's ethical or social footprint, they need to speak to procurement and at sap we have now tools to help them do that, for instance, you can go through a network and say I'd like to put this out to bid and make sure I have in the us a minority supplier bid for it. Okay, I'd like to search for somebody who is local to this factory. I don't want a multinational.

A

I want to find a local supplier, okay, so these are um uh things that are now more and more important and, of course, at sap. We don't inherently know this. We use partners and this is a very scalable model, so we use partners for different ways to certify and check suppliers, so whatever you're looking out for whether that's making sure there's no uh unethical labor practices or using indigenous populations correctly or efficient energy, whatever the thing is, there are partners who can help certify that that can help you in rfps and so on, and then.

A

Finally, in procurement, I've been in procurement a long time. This one never goes away. Okay, I call this. The old normal got to save some money. Okay, so that's the old, the old normal all right. So there's a lot going on in procurement. Again I speak to. I spoke to a cpo of lloyd's bank group, one of the largest banking companies that we have in the uk.

A

uh So uh george george booth, he said that you know it's raining and you can complain about the rain which you know it's terrible this year, 2020 really sucks, or he said you can learn to dance in the rain. Okay, so you can treat 20 20 years away. You know what we had. We give opportunity to fix up things. Okay, so our employees are more empowered, we're now working from home, we're using more remotes and so on.

A

All right so where I designed this is red is bad on the left. So that's not great. So what are the enablers that we have to help us some of these challenges and so the first one? I think that already is the idea of we call the term autonomous procurement. Sometimes you can call this rpa, which tax for remote, no robotic person's authorization um and this sort of summarizes what we're about- and you know so, the gentleman from henkel right angles: big chemical company, good sap, customer based in germany and uh his cpo bernard says.

A

You know we need to simplify our work and and focus on what really matters. That's a good thought! Isn't it? What time do you think might work so complicated again? This idea of have people work on tasks that are value-added.

A

Everyone has strategic projects, and this is certainly true in procurement. We have things we never quite get to because we're swamped with mundane stuff, so we can have that put off to one side. Then there are projects that we could get to, such as filing new suppliers or finding ethical uh ways to do business or getting more uh innovations from suppliers so autonomous about freeing up the capacity of people.

A

So, following on from this uh once we through a bit of time, you know the intelligent enterprise which we all know is what sap is all about.

A

The enterprise can now get to work and we can get insights from right across the company, so one of the great things about working for sap, which I've never had in the old days when I was at ariba, so I came to sap from arena- was that if we had an insight such as this supplier, he should be put on hold it's very hard to make sure that happens across the whole enterprise, but with the italian enterprise it is possible.

A

um So it gives you opportunity to see patton say in your sales data or your inventory levels, or your cash management and use that to drive activity in procurement. That's one of the great things about s4 and s4 has analytics in the context of the transaction. So in the old days again, my old days of r3, you came out of r3, you, cracked up the business warehouse. You waited some time and then you did some analysis and then you kind of forgot.

A

Why you're in in the first place, you're supposed to go back to r3 and kind of do some? That's not how s4 works. S4 has analysis in context with the transaction, and so, if I see something I now have the tools to be able to act on it straight away. Sometimes we call this the insight to action lag so, having seen an insight. How quickly can I act on it? Hey my customers are buying more of this. That's great!

A

Well, I gotta I gotta make some more well. How quickly can I get that done? There's nobody having the insight that customers are buying it more. If I only have one factory and he's maxed out so a more collaborative approach, would you can imagine the story, but this idea of insight action, I think, is important again. It's another big theme of sap, now an old old story and I spent two channels, this end-to-end integration.

A

So when something happens in one part, the system is integrated, but in the world of procurement there are actually three ways that this happens. So this sort of instructive on the previous diagram that we had so integration is a big deal where we talk about integration between these okay between our own stuff, all right, so that does the supplier master in ariba the cloud application work with the supplier master in s4, okay and yes, we're moving much more towards that.

A

So this one technology platform means that the cloud and the core work better together and even for customers shop, horror that have non-sap back-ends. I know I know it grieves me as well, but there are some out there. The ability to have integration to their erps is something that we are working a lot with with partners on. So that's one type of integration.

A

The second type of integration is across the flow here, source by pain. I often draw this picture and I say you know what the most important part of this diagram are actually here, they're actually between the chevrons. As I say here, okay, so when I create a sourcing event and I award a contract, can I immediately buy from that? Otherwise, it's kind of a waste of time. I'm doing all these great contracts and no one knows that's like the old days of paper, when the only guy in procurement knew who the approved supplier was.

A

You had a filing cabinet full of contracts, and nobody else knew that's not good, and the reverse problem is that people are buying over here uh from things that aren't sourced okay. So whatever you draw, this is a nice little tip and if you draw chef problems in sap world always say, the most important part is the space between the shepherds. How well things integrated like that?

A

That's two, okay, so one is to erps, and one is here and there's a third super important type of integration yeah to the suppliers right, I got integrated those guys too right. They have machines. I know they have computers, so why don't we integrate directly to them? Okay- and this is the great idea of integration, so integration.

B

A

Is the goal right to the erp across the end to end and then out to the supplies.

A

Okay, so I'm not gonna spend too much on the next one, because it's not really my thing, but the architecture of the business intelligent platform is something we're taking more and more um advantage of again. In the old days of reaper, we had to write our own stuff, we built our own chatbot a couple years ago and now what that was a waste of time.

A

Let's just use cloud platform, okay, so a lot of things that we were doing on our own makes no sense, but part of sap, so we're now able to migrate those things to the technology plan.

A

So um the important thing for our customers is. This is happening ongoing, so one one thing we did in the last couple of years was a lot of work and nobody knew is we migrated the whole thing to the house to the hana database.

A

That's pretty good, a lot of work right. Did anybody know not really, and so that's the great thing about being cloud is how we actually construct. Things is not that important, but obviously for internal reasons, it turned out to be very powerful because then we can roll out cloud platform.

A

um So it's a bit like having a building. If you have the builders in you know, while you're living there, it's difficult right so and that's happening right now, so we've got the builders in. If you like uh in procurement and we're, you know changing a few things around, but the people.

B

Still living in the house.

A

So we can't we can't just knock it down and start again, so um we uh it's always more difficult to to work on things with people around you. Here's an example. So in britain you may remember, we have a beautiful houses, a parliament building it's in central london.

A

It's actually really falling down and full of mice wow, like that's, not great. Well, we need to renovate it then all right. Well, if everybody moves out, then they can renovate it in. I don't know three years right, it's good, but if people had to stay in it it takes seven years because it's just harder and that's what we are with with with our become system, people still have to live in it. So we're making these changes around people running it. Welcome to the world of cloud right.

A

We have thousands of customers using us every day and we're re-architecting it as they're living in it last one user experience. So this um is one of the ways that you know christian klein's technology guidelines come into play. So, although ariba s4 and field glass have different heritages with the latest user experience, which is fiori 3.0, if you like that kind of thing, um you really can't see the joins between field glass and reaper and s4. So now I do demos and people used to say. Are you infield blast? Now?

A

I can't tell yeah you're right. You can't tell at some point to some extent the question am I in field glass becomes slightly meaningless, it's like being an s4. Now I'm saying is that mm or sd?

A

You know what it doesn't really matter, although those products to some extent have some heritage code behind the scenes, probably we don't really sign out of mm and go into sd or go into sd to pp like in the old days of r3, but now, uh if the same is true across the procurement stack as well and so user experience. Of course, uh one of the aspects of that is for the casual user- and I quote here from woolworths, so phil who's in australia.

A

He says that they have a program called simpler for stores. Woolworths is a big retailer in australia and they went live with eleven hundred stores. That's a lot right and they had a one-page user guide. Imagine a one-page user guide and they had 90 percent compliance to the right channel straight away. Okay and it's interesting one, 85 percent of catalog service of searches were found. So when people typed in 85 of the time they were finding the right supplier, which is pretty good.

A

So that means that just one page user guide, all the stores are buying their goods, not for retail stuff like signage and security and cash registers and freezers. Whatever else they were um all um with 1100 stores, with one page user guide, all right, so we've got bad news. Is red? We've got the enablers, these blacks, let's have some good news. So what are we seeing? That's in green? So what are the business outcomes?

A

So? The first is a persona led experience. So this is one thing. Is that we've done a lot of work with? Is the different types of people touch procurement? There are contract managers. There are academy managers, there are people doing accounts payable. There are senior managers supply chain people they all want to do something slightly different, so we're building um persona-led experiences, so we're actually looking at a single use case.

A

So in the oil and gas space, for instance, we've got a whole set of data around a maintenance engineer, somebody who goes out to an oil well or and looks at some kind of drill, and has to assess it and look at the past and do a test and maybe run a maintenance, something or other and bring in an engineer all those kind of things, and so what kind of interface is right for him? Okay, well, a laptop where he searches for things isn't right how about taking a picture of a part?

A

Well that sounds interesting: how about a mobile app where he entered where the contractor enters the hours? That sounds more important, how about making sure the hours are booked to the right fixed asset in asset management? Well, that sounds important. How about making sure when the supplier promises to deliver an item that gets put into the enterprise asset manager? And so, when I do a maintenance report, I can see which ones are late, so the business outcome here in this example is make sure the oil head keeps running so we're trying to build things.

A

What we call persona led, which is what business outcome do we want? So that's kind of interesting um that we have there and then the next thing is: can they use sap procurement for everything that people buy and in some ways, there's a danger here and our competitors do this to go off on a slightly on the get so excited about catalogues and yeah. Catalogs are cute, they debo well and they're like amazon, so people understand them. Well, that's fine and we have a good catalogue. Guided by is pretty decent.

A

However, most important things in the company, most big things most expensive things aren't bore on a catalog. I mean just think about your own personal life, right, which of these items are bought in a shop with a traditional retail transaction.

A

Your university education, no, your utilities, no, your vacation, no life insurance, no stocks and shares no a house, no a car. No, none of these things are actually bought in a shop, so in most companies same is true. Most the big important stuff is not bought with catalog. So we want to make sure that when we say all spend, we don't just focus on cute little demo, stuff, hey, buy an apple pencil, that's kind of great yes, I know that's a nice demo, but that's not the way we buy 400 tons of steel.

A

That's not the way we buy a hotel contract so making sure we catch all spend broadly. This means direct materials, indirect materials and services, just like those three little pictures there.

A

um So my exam that I used here is from bhp bhp, billiton, big mining company, and this is some deep sink he's based in australia as well and he's his little tag line. His buying paper clips is kind of different from buying explosives. Yeah! That's that's true. um I don't know how you buy explosives.

A

I never bought explosives, but if you're a mining engineer you buy explosives and how you buy them ain't the same way you buy paperclips so make sure that we track all spent next month's kind of interesting, because this doesn't really rate so much about product more about how sap we're delivering services to our customers- and this is about making sure that we work with them on achieving value in the way that they want to. So I call this value-based adoption so sometimes as a software provider, it's tempting to want to do stuff. That's easy!

A

B

Hey, it's live.

A

Go live and go home, we're done and actually in cloud it's really about adoption and making sure that the the path they're on is aligned to the value the customer expected to get from the system, and so in procurement. There are decisions to be made about which categories you should roll out in which order which classes of users should roll out which order which countries perhaps uh which were called buying channels.

A

Perhaps um so the idea is: don't just do the easy stuff I've been on projects in the past, where hey we've got the I.t service deity um spares parts uh catalog done ever gonna buy an apple pencil, yeah, okay! Well, that's not really gonna provide the value we hope to get. When we've got marketing out of control and we've got you know. Stock warehouse is full of spare parts. We don't know why.

A

So this is a allows us to work with customers and partners on the right uh project plans to give uh to deliver the value so value-based adoption next one's kind of interesting, the idea of community. So, as you know the previous slide here, this net business network, we talk about sap.

A

It has uh about four million companies on it, yeah four million, and it has a few trillion dollars of spend on it. In fact, I once calculated that if you look at the total spend across the business network of sap, it's bigger than the gdp of france, so it's a significant, um I said: hey should be next time. They have one of those g20 summits. We should get invited because we're bigger than several of the companies in the countries in the g20, so we should be able to get good information from that.

A

Okay, so there's lots of information about who to buy from what people are buying which what the trends are and so on. So we have the ability to use that in a community fashion, so benchmarks, for instance, so benchmarks of what's what's the best time to to buy something. What's the good number of suppliers to have in this type of an rfp?

A

uh What's the average approval time for this type of contract so on? So we can give companies benchmarks around that. We have to be a bit careful here, because we have to respect confidential confidentiality and uh commercial privacy. So there's a balance here: uh we don't want to be somebody that just trades our customers data away for short-term gain. um So we want to make sure that we respect uh customers, data, we're a cloud provider and they expect that of sap.

A

um One thing uh that we see here is the ability to use uh qualtrics uh to uh ask people about things. That's an interesting way that we can use to get community more, so more uh experience management.

A

They finally spend better that follows on from social responsibility. So the observation that we make here is actually procurement is the way to actually change things to change things in the world. So many companies have uh social responsibility, programs and they're, quite small, quite frankly, compared to even say, indirect procurement, and our analysis of one of our groups says that actually it's a hundred times uh bigger. So what companies are already spending on indirect procurement 100 times bigger than what they're spending on their social programs?

A

So, wouldn't it be better to work on that that large amount of money that's spent indirectly and find better ways to spend it by using social enterprises by getting involved in things such as sap plastics cloud, which is trying to find suppliers that are able to reuse plastics lots of initiatives here, but the idea is: can we help companies redirect their indirect spend onto social enterprises? We do a very small thing here.

A

Already in my company sap uk, we changed the provider of our stacks in the office uh to use a local fruit company that works with local farmers. uh To have fruit provided a record, so we don't use big the big multinational food providers for that. Okay, it's a very small example, um but it's certainly employees like to get involved in things like that. Okay, so that's been better. How can we help companies do that?

A

Okay? So just uh what are we actually doing so some work streams that we have so? First of all, um I think it's really important that we identify that sap is now very much about the ecosystem. So you see this already, but a series of apis, but also programs to support people who want to write things, hackathons different sap, io initiatives and so on. So again my experience for reba was we used to be quite closed, uh but now we're on the cloud platform.

A

Of course lots of exciting things can happen and so we're working with a lot of partners on ecosystem solutions. uh We've covered user experience already, um but the idea of micro services is the key enabling factor here so uh our guided buying user interface, which hopefully you've all seen it's all built on microservices. So the ability to have other things in there is possible. Likewise our arriba network portal for suppliers. So that's this thing here so where suppliers sign on and get access to a screen. What screen do they see?

A

Well that screen's made of micro services? That's kind of interesting right, which means that you, as a provider, can put something on a supplier screen and another of their customers, because they have customers uh could put something else on their supply portal. So when they sign onto the business network, they see a bit from you and another bit from somebody else all on one screen. Okay, so this idea of assembling a multi-enterprise experience for suppliers is kind of interesting, that's all done with with cloud platform and micro services.

A

uh We've covered this really, but this really is the key to everything. um The sap business network and bringing everything together again read the post from christian klein came out just yesterday on this, and I always say that this is why I like this diagram, because the network's it's the bun on top of the burger right. So there's your burger there's the bun on the top of the burger right. It's there, it's the outward connection and I think companies too long.

A

I've been looking inwardly and it's time to see that most of the value that you're going to get is is beyond it's beyond your own four walls, it's out in the world with your customers and suppliers and other types of partners. uh And lastly, this is a experience management. uh So this is. This is qualtrics, of course, um and we uh put it on data um experience. Management means that we are using qualtrics to ask suppliers um so, mr supplier, how could how could we be better customer for you?

A

How can we be a customer of choice for you? uh How is your image situation how's your access to funds? Do you need to pay some invoices early because you've shortened money? Let me know right so there's a lot of asking of suppliers about how how how we are as a customer and it's great for people, because because people some to some extent, uh still always think that they have all of the uh power in the relationship and that's not true, especially in an economy where there's a lot of uh supply chain disruption.

A

uh So you think imagine you are uh pfizer right, you're, not short of people to sell your vaccine. To. That is not the problem, so you want to be a customer of choice that is for sure to get hold of something that's very hard to get, has limited supply, that's becoming more and more common with minerals or skilled workers. I want to be a customer of choice so that you make your limited supplies available to me and not my competitor.

A

So how can I be a better customer uh is part of experience, management, kind of a backers way of thinking, but actually it's super important. So that's why we're wrapping uh qualtrics into this as well all right mukesh. I think I am done with my drawings, so um maybe you want to uh open up for some questions for people and see how we do on that.

B

um Thanks james for sharing this perspective with us, so anyone has any questions for for james. You can actually unmute yourself and and ask a question.

B

So I have a question uh james just to take things off from uh from that perspective, so you spoke about the personality experience right, so one of the things this this is something which is important and how far are we in realizing this vision in terms of the products and functionality currently in the product itself,.

A

uh Okay, so that's a fair comment, so so the one that's probably most advanced here is the idea of a maintenance engineer uh out in the field.

A

Okay, so so maintenance, so working a lot of this mukesh breaks down to individual industries, uh so we're working with our industry cloud groups on identifying what are the key um uh stakeholders and what they do so we're working principal accenture uh on some things around that for the maintenance of oil and gas, uh but also uh we have some historically some acquisitions around field ticketing that I think come in there as well.

A

So it's a bit more like that, so obviously the traditional you know, personas that we've had would have been people like um you know the the cpo.

A

uh Shared services.

A

So that so shared services uh are people who do a lot of things to to. um um You know help help documents move to the system. You could say: well, they shouldn't be. It should be doing this if the system worked properly or but you know what people still have shared services. So we have a a something called procurement operations desk which is being rolled out for shared services, people. So that's another example. Then we have a calorie management dashboard as well.

A

So that's probably another one, so shared services person in here and then calorie management is probably the one.

A

Okay, so um those are the kind of percentages we've worked out.

B

Okay, thanks uh thanks james anyone else, questions for james. uh It need not be just about sap procurement, but also about procurement in general as well so james. I think one of the things that you shared, which I thought was very powerful, was the fact that typical indirect spend that organizations do is 100 times more than the overall csr spend, and the kind of impact that they can have on societies is much significant than what they have with their csr. So do you already see this happening?

B

Where, where does sap sit? What do you see from a global point of view? The adoption of this.

A

So that's a good question mccash, so uh different, uh interesting different countries have different priorities here so, for instance, in australia uh they do a lot of work around indigenous population. um So they want to make sure that these mining companies, but also you know, everyone really has goals that they issue a certain number of contracts to certain um uh indigenous suppliers.

A

So we have one company that makes flowers, for instance, and so hey companies buy flowers for all sorts of reasons, and now they are an indigenous provider and they're flagged that way, and we use a third party to help people find them. So that's that's one. um We see a similar approach um in other areas, so in south africa, for instance, where they are looking to um reach out to historically uh black enterprise companies and how they can help them.

A

So one bank that we had uh wanted to make sure that suppliers could bid, even though someone was so small, they didn't even own a computer crikey. Well so get this they're a bank right, so they set the system up so that you could go to any bank just like a regular bank and respond to an rfp there. It's like okay, because you haven't got a computer, so come to our bank, we'll set you up and you can respond the rfp, but they they reached out in that way.

A

So there are a lot of different initiatives that companies do and so we're trying to provide a framework. um So it's not so much that we will do this all centrally. We want to give people the tools and critically the partners to allow them to do those kinds of things.

B

Nice um thanks james um anyone.

A

That was ned bank, so.

B

B

Yeah sorry, someone was asking a question. uh I interrupted it now.

A

You can use the chat or put your hand up or come off mute.

B

Any questions, let me go back to gallery view so that I can see if there is someone who's asking any questions.

B

So so far there are, there don't seem to be any questions, so let's just give another 30 seconds for people to uh think uh if they have any questions. Okay. Otherwise, we would like to conclude here: okay,.

A

How I sign your work today is the eighth okay.

B

Okay, so looks like there are no questions james. There are only two instances where I believe there are no questions. One is when, when people have unders understood everything that you've said and second is.

A

B

Talk about that.

B

Yeah so so I think uh I would like to thank you for for your time and sharing your insights and perspectives with us. I'm sure this is valuable uh for everyone who attended the call and all those people who will actually view the recordings at a later point in time. So, okay.

A

On behalf of indus.

B

Yeah right, thank you so much on behalf of windows. I'd like to take this time to. Thank you. I also see prakash prakash. Are you on call? uh Can you unmute yourself, and maybe you know quickly say a couple of words, he's one of our board members and is a cio at epl, uh limited.

B

Cash: okay: I think uh he dropped out. Okay, yeah, okay,.

A

Thank you so much goodbye good good to see everybody and uh thanks for watching and thank.

B

You so much yeah take care bye.

B