Author: The New Economy

Creating customer delight with SAP and Microsoft

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Luminous Power Technologies is a B2B power and lighting manufacturer, producing a wide range of innovative products from its seven manufacturing units in India, and exporting to 36 countries around the world. As the company’s CIO, Chander Khanduja is “building our focus on differentiators for Luminous, rather than just keeping the lighting on” – he explains how RISE with SAP on Microsoft Azure has helped Luminous Power Technologies create a digital platform to “innovate, integrate, and extend our capabilities, not only on cloud, but on hybrid platforms.”

Cahnder Khanduja: Luminous Power Technologies has a wide range of innovative products in power backup, home electrical, and solar spaces. Our vision is to create customer delight through innovation and passion.

We have a 4C digital strategy in place, which is Connected People, Connected Products, Connected Processes, and Connected Plants.

Microsoft and SAP are core digital technology partners for us. They really are pillars for our digital strategy. A lot of solutions have been developed and deployed using these two technologies.

RISE with SAP on Microsoft Azure brings both long term technology partners together under the same SLA, operations, technology, support, and foundation on which Luminous can really help in creating digital value adds.

As a CIO I am working on building our focus on differentiators for Luminous, rather than just keeping the lighting on.

RISE with SAP on Microsoft Azure has really given us a lot of peace of mind, because now we have a single contract to manage both SAP S/4HANA and hyperscaler like Azure, and it has helped us in easing our technology complexities and obviously better management. And it has given us those uptimes which were really required by the business.

Now with this digital core available to us, our time to market for our schemes or reaching our customers has improved tremendously. We are really able to create a differentiation with our competitors.

On top of it we are getting SAP BTP platform integrated with Azure, to develop a lot of innovative solutions.

We are probably one of the few companies in the world making bots based on BTP which are integrated with Microsoft Teams. We are really proud of that achievement.

Salesbot has really changed the way we were working. What we have done is now, real-time, during any call or meeting, the salesperson can directly get within Microsoft Teams any information which is required for his day-to-day working. This has created a lot of operational efficiency, because now the data is coming in real time, using a BTP platform, right from SAP. We can integrate multiple systems on BTP integration platform. And all of them can be managed right from your Microsoft Teams chat window.

So that is a beauty whereby we are able to create a solution for our customers, our employees, our sales teams, and now we are planning to integrate our business ops dashboards also on Microsoft Teams using this framework.

RISE with SAP on Microsoft Azure platform has really helped us in creating a digital platform where we can innovate, integrate, and extend our capabilities: not only on cloud but on hybrid platforms.

So we are really delighted. Now we have a platform where we can have best of both worlds. I think that is where RISE with SAP on Microsoft Azure has really helped us in taking our digital journey forward.

Powering Carhartt with SAP and Microsoft

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Carhartt is a 132-year-old premium workwear company, with a mission to build rugged products that serve and protect hardworking people. Over the last five years it’s been on a digital transformation journey – completely replacing its application, infrastructure, and security landscapes. The business now runs off SAP S/4HANA, based on Microsoft Azure – and it’s driving a paradigm shift for Carhartt’s people. John Hill, CIO and SVP Business Planning; and Tim Masey, VP IT Infrastructure and Security, discuss the benefits of Carhartt’s transformation.

John Hill: Carhartt is a 132 year old premium workwear company. Our mission is to build rugged products to serve and protect hardworking people. Our digital transformation here at Carhartt started approximately five years ago.

Over a five year period, we’ll essentially replace everything inside of Carhartt – the application footprint, the infrastructure footprint, our security. And even how we go about analysing data and driving insights from that data.

The decision to move to SAP S/4HANA on Azure was based on the premise that we wanted to get back to standard. We felt that SAP had worked with its customers and built a set of business processes that we should be able to leverage and help us better react. We’ve reduced customisations by over 93 percent as part of the migration to S/4HANA.

Tim Masey: Moving to SAP on Azure has allowed us to move out of the hardware business. We’re not having to manage power requirements, data centre requirements, memory capacity, or storage capacity. It’s there for us when we need it. That provides us with flexibility, agility, and availability that we just could not match internally.

John Hill: We deployed onto our retail business unit earlier this year, and they’ve been able to drive significant improvement of their own agility and insight. Number one, the ability to see in real time what’s going on from an inventory standpoint, and then the ability to move that inventory and be able to understand their performance against that with a very simple user interface.

You know, the ability for our consumer to be able to consume the product how they want is critical to our future success. SAP S/4HANA sitting on top of Azure, provides that vehicle for us to achieve that.

We’ve got the point of sale, the ecommerce, and the ERP managing that order flow, making sure that ultimately the product gets to the consumer.

Tim Masey: One of the features that SAP on Azure provides is security by design. We were able to build our security model and framework and lay that out ahead of time with the Microsoft architectural team. Before even standing up our first system, we had our security model in place. And then after that we started building out our SAP systems. That helped us to improve our security posture.

We have over 2,000 employees and contractors today working from home, and relying on Teams for things like Instant Messaging, voice calling, collaboration: you know, with meetings and document presentations.

I think one of the biggest ways in which supply chain is using Teams and SAP technology is through the development efforts. They’ve heavily relied upon this during our business transformation project.

John Hill: The paradigm that I see happening, not only within the SAP landscape, but also with Microsoft Teams, is people are getting used to ‘how do I find what’s going on right now, and see it as it’s occurring’, as opposed to, ‘I get my report every morning, I’ll see what happened yesterday’.

The combination of SAP and Microsoft technology is helping to provide that change for our business.

Embedding social impact into the heart of business

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As society faces extraordinary challenges on an unprecedented scale, businesses on the forefront of solutions are putting purpose and social impact at their core. One way companies can do this is by working with social enterprises – businesses that direct at least 50 percent of their profits to a societal, environmental, or humanitarian goal. Adaire Fox-Martin is the Executive Board Member for Customer Success at SAP: she explains how SAP UK has started using ‘social procurement’ for some of its business necessities – and how SAP is making it easier for other companies to follow suit.

The New Economy: Adaire, why do corporates need to think seriously about integrating social impact into their core business?

Adaire Fox-Martin: I think we need to think about it seriously, Charlotte, because we actually don’t have a choice. If you think today about the stakeholders of a company, your customers are demanding this kind of approach. Your employees demand that you live the purpose of your company. And there are many major equity investors that are looking not just at the traditional KPIs of a business, but the type of societal impact that that organisation has.

The New Economy: One way to prioritise social impact is by partnering with social enterprises – what are social enterprises, and how big an impact can social procurement have?

Adaire Fox-Martin: A social enterprise will associate itself with an outcome that either has a phenomenal societal, environmental, or humanitarian impact. And at least 50 percent of their profits – in some cases it’s all of their profits – are directed towards that core mission outcome.

Now what’s social procurement? Regardless of what you do, all of us require indirect goods and services to actually operate our business. The paper for the printer, the coffee in the machines, the pens and pencils in the stationery cupboard. Very many social enterprises provide a range of goods or services that fall into this category.

Social procurement is the opportunity to redirect some of your spend – money that you’re spending anyway – to social enterprises. You can buy a ream of paper; or you can buy a ream of paper from a social enterprise whose profits go to educating young girls in Africa.

And it’s so interesting when you consider the impact that this can potentially have. Most corporates today have corporate social responsibility programmes. But for every one dollar that we spend on our CSR programmes, we spend $400 on the indirect goods and services it takes to run our business.

Last year we began a pilot programme in SAP UK. And within a very short period of time, we had redirected 2.5 percent of our spend on indirect goods and services to social enterprises, having a very significant impact on a wide variety of different societal and environmental issues. And we are inviting as many corporates as deem this a worthy cause to join us. Because we today run the largest business to business network. And we are onboarding social enterprises onto that network.

So if companies want to participate in social procurement, they have the opportunity, using this network, to locate social enterprises that are capable of providing the goods and services that they need. And they can do so knowing that their spend is having such a significant impact.

Managing the ‘green line’ to address climate action

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As the world responds to the challenges of theCOVID-19 pandemic, UN Secretary-General António Guterres has said that the planet’s unfolding environmental crisis is an even deeper emergency. Daniel Schmid is Chief Sustainability Officer for SAP; he explains why radical change is required, and outlines SAP’s solution to help businesses understand and reduce their own environmental impacts.

The New Economy: Daniel, why does SAP believe we need tangible action now to make this our decade of delivery for climate?

Daniel Schmid: Indeed; tangible action is urgently needed, so time is of the essence. And it’s no either/or question; we need to address both: the health crisis and the climate crisis.

And COVID-19 will reduce global emissions in 2020 by almost eight percent. But more is needed for the 1.5 celsius scenario to which SAP also committed. And we have now the unique window of opportunity to build back better. So public policies need to drive sustainable recovery; and businesses, we need to engage too in reshaping a more inclusive, resilient, and circular economy.

The New Economy: Why is it important that businesses address the climate concerns and expectations of diverse stakeholders to accelerate meaningful change on this issue?

Daniel Schmid: You need to understand, and you need to consider the stakeholder expectations. It is so critical for the future success of your company.

Consumers, we love more and more to choose brands taking environmental and social responsibility seriously. Employees love to work for a company that is a thought leader and a front-runner when it comes to sustainability. Governments: the upcoming national and international regulations are likely to require more and more environmental impact information. Finally the investors: environment, social and governance criteria are more and more embedded in the analysis of the mainstream investors.

The New Economy: SAP announced its Climate 21 programme at Sapphire Now in June; how is SAP enabling your customers to act on climate?

Daniel Schmid: Through the Climate 21 programme, SAP supports and enables organisations globally to assemble, assess, and act on their carbon emissions footprint along the entire value chain.

Assembling the CO2 emissions data on all levels of the enterprise means to create the initial transparency you need in order to understand the sources of your CO2 footprints. And the first product we have in place is called SAP Product Carbon Footprint Analytics, doing exactly that. It tracks the carbon emissions on a product level – including production, raw materials, the energy used, and transport.

The second part is assessing the CO2 emissions inputs. So with that SAP aims to enable customers to visualise their emissions inventory, to analyse the trends, conduct benchmarking, and finally to identify focused investments with the greatest opportunity to transition to a more responsible emission management, to bring down the emissions.

And that leads me finally to the third part of our overall programme roadmap: acting in order to reduce the emission inputs. So SAP aims to provide integration tools that help to operationalise the climate plans.

Enabling the transformation to circular business

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As the world continues to deal with the challenges of the pandemic, leaders are calling for a continued commitment to sustainability: both to increase the resilience of our economies, and to fight the effects of environmental degradation, including climate change. Maggie Buggie is Chief Business Officer for SAP Services; she argues that society must move from an economic paradigm targeting endless upwards growth, to a circular model based on maintaining balance with the environment.

 The New Economy: Maggie, can you share your perspective on where we are today? 

Maggie Buggie: Absolutely. With the convergence of crises in health, the economy, our society, and the environment, the future of humanity is increasingly being assessed through our individual and collective economic, social, and environmental contribution.

We must now move from traditional economic paradigms based on endless upwards growth, to circular models, based on balance, where value lies in everyone benefiting.

The circular economy has the potential to unlock $4.5trn in economic growth, by promoting water and nutrient security, reducing carbon emissions by 45 percent, and reducing waste by 90 percent.

COVID-19 is giving us a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reset: to build back better, and to kickstart a new economic era. We can now build with resilience and balance at the centre. All of which ultimately helps address this century’s biggest threat to health: climate change.

The New Economy: What’s SAP’s approach to becoming a circular business?

Maggie Buggie: SAP is focused on five areas that together are key to the transformation to circular business. They are: responsible design, responsible sourcing in marketplace, responsible production, responsible consumption, and resource recovery and reuse.

The holistic approach to circular business can minimise costs, increase customer satisfaction, mitigate risk, grow profits, and enable resilience.

Our approach helps companies become smarter, more responsible businesses. It helps balance and maximises earth’s finite resources by bringing us closer to making the circular economy a reality.

The New Economy: In a larger sense, what’s needed at a global level to deliver a circular economy?

Maggie Buggie: The pandemic has revealed that none of us can prosper alone. We now need more than ever a collective, political, social and corporate view, and focused action around our shared future. We need to take a systems approach, in both strategy, mindset, and most importantly in action.

Powering the circular economy will be by definition a global, inclusive project, that we all need to subscribe to together. It will have to go hand-in-hand with our action for climate, and creating a more inclusive society.

To create a blueprint for a better future, we need collaboration, trust, innovation, unity, and leading with action. We can do this, but only together.

Advancing diversity, inclusion and equality: Evolving a moment into a movement

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Judith Williams is the Global Head of People Sustainability and Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer for SAP. She’s been working on diversity and inclusion in the technology industry for the last 10 years, and she says that although there is now greater transparency about what the industry is doing, there’s still a lot of progress to be made. As Black Lives Matter protests continue in the face of ongoing police violence, she discusses her hopes to continue the momentum of the movement and achieve real social change.

The New Economy: Judith, thank you for your insights in this report – I wonder if you could give us your own personal view of how you think the technology industry is performing in terms of diversity and inclusion.

Judith Williams: I’ve been working on this topic for a number of years in the tech industry, and I would say that we are working on it in the way that we’ve been working on it for the past 10 years. So, that means that we have a lot of work to do, and we have a pretty big opportunity.

And I would say if we think back 10 years ago, the first stage that we saw was that tech companies were not really transparent about how they were doing, and what they were doing, with regard to diversity and inclusion. But now we see greater transparency about what our actual numbers are; transparency about the types of initiatives that we are trying to engage in, both internally and externally; and third, we see a greater willingness to engage in the larger social and political debate, outside of our organisations. So I would say that we have a huge opportunity; we can do more, we can make more progress. But we haven’t done as much as we could have done in the past: I see that changing.

The New Economy: Why is an inclusive culture so important to a company’s ability to innovate?

Judith Williams: What makes a company successful is that we have a lot of different people working well together to solve really complex problems. And what that means is we need to create a culture where everybody feels the psychological safety to bring their best selves to work. We also need to have an organisation that has people who have different experiences, different backgrounds, come from different geographies, different ethnicities: because they bring all those ideas to bear. And it’s that creative conflict that comes when people disagree in an inclusive manner, that actually lets us solve those thorny problems and innovate.

The New Economy: As you say in the article, it’s not just about what businesses are doing internally, but about working to achieve real change for people on the ground; what are your hopes for SAP’s partnership with Global Citizen?

Judith Williams: I have a lot of great hopes for the partnership! I mean, we are dedicating our resources to education, social justice initiatives and increasing opportunity internally. And that’s something that we’re not alone in doing.

We can ally with organisations, non-profits, other corporations, that are driving for the same outcomes to say: this isn’t just about us trying to move the needle alone, this is a movement that we’re all participating in.

We’re saying that this is essential, this is important. And that we all have a role to play. And so when we can come together with an organisation like Global Citizen and elevate our platform, and reach an even bigger audience, we can take this movement and continue the momentum, so we can make real social change.

Intelligent enterprises: Putting purpose and sustainability at the core of business

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It’s summer 2020, and companies all over the world are facing unprecedented challenges: from the COVID-19 pandemic and the movement for social justice, to climate change and the economy. Thomas Saueressig, Member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, SAP Product Engineering, looks at the pressures disrupting all our lives and calls on businesses to embrace sustainability and purpose, and explains how SAP has been enabling intelligent enterprises to help the world run better and improve peoples’ lives.

The New Economy: Thomas, companies all over the world are facing unprecedented challenges this year; can you share your perspective on what feels like a very important inflection point?

Thomas Saueressig: Yeah; I mean, this pandemic absolutely has forced the world to look into the mirror. And COVID-19 has put tremendous pressure on the economy and society, in actually disrupting every aspect of our lives and our work.

Hidden issues of social injustice and racial inequality have been unmasked, especially in the US and spreading globally.

While COVID-19 has accelerated digitalisation, it also has quickened the growing skills gaps with regard to digital skills. And that again leads to more inequalities around the world.

While the world is focused on COVID-19, the biggest challenge of our times remains climate change. And contributing to climate change is the enormous resource-consumption and waste created in our supply chains. These problems aren’t independent, but actually are rather interdependent. They are trans-national, so no single entity, government, or business, can solve them alone. It requires networks of businesses, consumers, government, local and international agencies, working together to solve these problems. So it requires all of us.

The New Economy: Given the interconnectedness of these issues, what do you see as a key foundation for the solutions?

Thomas Saueressig: I think the clear answer here is actually purpose, and that’s more important now than ever. Businesses are being asked to step up and take responsibility. To demonstrate clearly how they contribute to helping the world run better, and show how they can improve peoples’ lives through sustainable, fair practices.

Resilience and profitability still matter. But a third, new dimension, as to how this is achieved, has been added. And this is sustainability and purpose.

The best-run companies of the future will embrace these principles to solve these issues. By using intelligence as the key differentiator. And the ambition is to become an intelligent enterprise.

The New Economy: So, what is SAP doing to enable these intelligent enterprises that run with purpose at their core?

Thomas Saueressig: Yeah, this is actually two-fold: because on the one side, SAP serves as an exemplar, as a role model itself; but also we want to be an enabler for our customers to achieve their goals.

For nearly 50 years, SAP’s purpose has been to help the world run better and improve peoples’ lives. Which means we act based on ethical principles. We innovate and deliver based on ethical principles. But also we support our customers to act, and innovate, and deliver and produce based on ethical principles.

That means for sure that we participate in initiatives like the Equal Justice Initiative. We also for sure actively work on carbon neutrality. With our product portfolio and our customer base, we have the ambition to really also enable our customers to achieve their goals with regard to purpose and sustainability.

And here, in the light of COVID-19, we started to open up our portfolio of products to our customers for free, to ensure for instance that their workers can go safely back to work.

We also started a development initiative called Climate 21, where we basically have a holistic view about the end-to-end value chain, and how to optimise this in order to reduce the carbon emissions.

And the first product actually we released just at Sapphire was SAP Product Carbon Footprint Analytics. With that you can analyse and measure the product carbon footprint; and with that be able to optimise and manage this actively. And there’s way more to come.

Every industry is disrupted with digitalisation. But also COVID-19 for sure is accelerating this. Which means we, together with our partners, provide all the required technology they need to have the next best practices in place.

I truly believe that actually SAP is a company which really lives up to the purpose to help the world run better and improve peoples’ lives. And this is something where we are really taking the pride to move in that direction.

City of Malaga offers ‘the benefits of a modern city, but not the headaches’

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Malaga – Spain’s sixth-largest city – has been transforming itself into an innovative smart city. Home to one of the region’s most important technology parks, the opportunities for innovation and – of course – beautiful Mediterranean climate, have attracted people from over 150 different countries to make Malaga their home. Marc Sanderson, Director of International Economic Development for the City of Malaga, explains his office’s mission, the support it offers to businesses seeking a new home in Europe, and the benefits of living and working in Malaga.

The New Economy: Marc, what’s the core mission – the ambition – at the heart of the work you’re doing for the city?

Marc Sanderson: Well, as an employee for the city of Malaga, we certainly want to provide a better quality of life and jobs for the citizens of Malaga. And the best way we can do that is provide a dynamic and diverse economy. So right now we’re trying to help local companies expand their trade and services around the world, as well as bring international businesses to Malaga. We feel there’s a lot of benefits that the city offers to international companies when they relocate in Malaga, and they obviously create jobs, spend money, and create value for the city.

From the city we offer soft landing services, so we help companies do initial analysis of Malaga and the market, and find out prices for employment, as well as for office space, so they can get a general idea of what it’s going to cost. Try and make it as easy as possible for them to take away the headaches of what it may be to open up a location in the city, as well as provide visas if they’re bringing employees outside of the European Union.

The benefits I think are the operating costs overall. The general cost of living in Malaga is fairly cheap; for office space, but also energy, transportation. So you can offer businesses a way to save money.

The New Economy: And being in Malaga, those businesses can then offer their employees just a wonderful quality of life?

Marc Sanderson: Sure – Malaga’s obviously on the southern coast of Spain, so it enjoys the Mediterranean lifestyle. So it’s a very easy city, enjoyable city to live in.

We always say that it has lots of the benefits of a major city, but not all the headaches: traffic and pollution and congestion. And certainly for myself, the work-life balance: you know, being able to allow my kids to enjoy the beach and at the same time being able to work in a city like Malaga. So for little money you can enjoy a great life on the Mediterranean Sea. So that’s an added plus for the employees; but again, the businesses are also benefitting from the lower costs.

The New Economy: What has changed in business that cities have to create this kind of environment to be competitive in today’s landscape?

Marc Sanderson: You know the business models have changed. It used to be large companies would outsource to far-away locations. Nowadays with advances in technology, the ability to work in different locations and from home, employees are demanding more flexible working environments – and certainly more enjoyable environments as well. So in that case Malaga becomes a very attractive alternative for companies. It combines a nice Mediterranean lifestyle and climate, but also technology park and businesses taking place there as well.

Malaga wants to be a smart city, it wants to be an innovative city, it wants to be a sustainable city. So we have projects around electric mobility, water efficiency. We also have an urban laboratory where companies can come in, use the city as their test bed. We’re very fortunate the Spanish digital content Lab is located in Malaga. This project is bringing in lots of new innovative technologies around 3D animation, graphics, as well as video games and design. So it’s exciting times in Malaga.

The New Economy: You personally have been living and working in Malaga for 10 years now; what sort of changes have you seen in the city over that time?

Marc Sanderson: Well, the city has changed dramatically over the last 20 years; but I think over the last 10 years that I’ve been there it’s also changed quite a bit.

When I first arrived there were just over 12 million passengers arriving to the Malaga airport, and last year we eclipsed 19 million passengers, so it’s been quite a growth as far as people arriving to the city.

We’ve opened up the train station as well, so the high speed rail takes us to Madrid in just 2.5 hours, where before it was 4.5 hours. So there’ve been lots of improvements in infrastructure. The metro system has opened and is expanding in the city as well. I’ve personally seen the openings of the Carmen Thyssen Museum, the Centre Pompidou from France, as well as a Russian art museum.

So the cultural offerings in the city have also expanded. As well as lots of pedestrian spaces in the downtown area. It’s really opened up the city, made it more enjoyable. There’s no noise from cars and traffic, and you’re very close to the sea. And so in just a short walk you’re along the port and enjoying the Mediterranean Sea.

The New Economy: And what about in the next 10 years: what are the goals that you have in mind for the city?

Marc Sanderson: Well, we want to continue to evolve as a smart city, as an innovative city. We want to be an option for not only employees and their companies, but also for citizens to live there.

So right now we have different plans – to build an auditorium, for example, in the port area. To continue with the cultural offerings.

We’re working right now again on digital content, so we’re doing lots of filming, editing and design around 3D graphics and animation. So I think the city has evolved, but it still has a long way to go, and it will continue to move in the right direction.

And ultimately I think citizens, individuals, are looking for companies and businesses that agree with their philosophy. And so having an office in Malaga, is a way for a company to demonstrate to their employees that they care about them, they want the work-life balance; and what a great place to live, in Malaga!

The New Economy: Marc, thank you very much.

Marc Sanderson: Thank you.

PhenoMx promises advanced medical imaging, anywhere, anytime

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“The products and services that will have the biggest impact on our health will not come from healthcare, but from outside of healthcare,” says digital health futurist Maneesh Juneja. As consumers we’re enjoying greater convenience – and we’re beginning to expect the same from healthcare providers. He and Mark Punyanitya – co-founder and CEO of medical imaging platform PhenoMx – discuss the future of healthcare, the need to technological health interventions more accessible, and the technology behind PhenoMx’s offering.

The New Economy: “The products and services that will have the biggest impact on our health will not come from healthcare, but from outside of healthcare.” These are the words of my guest: digital health futurist Maneesh Juneja; joining us also is Mark Punyanitya, co-founder and CEO of medical imaging platform PhenoMx.

Maneesh, tell me more about the innovations that you’re seeing – that are coming from outside of healthcare, but still to improve our health.

Maneesh Juneja: So what we’re seeing is the emergence of things like wearables, we’re seeing consumer health apps, which are being developed by entrepreneurs who are not necessarily part of the healthcare system; all designed to help people have a more convenient way of managing their health, possibly early detection of disease, and possibly even about prevention of disease through behaviour change.

Consumers are saying: hey, we’ve seen through retail, travel, banking, it’s possible to have more convenient products and services. So we’re asking that of healthcare now as well. So we’re starting to see this shift where technology is enabling healthcare to move outside of the hospital, into the home.

The New Economy: Mark, this is one of the places where PhenoMX comes in, because you’re revolutionising the technology that you’re using, to make it vastly more accessible.

Mark Punyanitya: Sure. So at PhenoMX we’re looking to take medical imaging, which traditionally has been quite behind-the-scenes, essentially liberate it, have an opportunity to use it anytime, anywhere. Whether that’s in a large city, a small village, or even a rural environment.

We’re currently using non-invasive MRI scanning to detect different changes in the major vital organs and tissues, to inform your likelihood of Alzheimers, fatty liver disease, or cardiovascular disease.

We look at automating and incrementing the efficiency, taking some of the consumer concepts of software as a service, pay-per-use, the ubiquity of technology, with a cheaper, quicker scan. A five minute liver scan, for example. Or a five minute brain scan. We drive down the cost of getting the scan done.

At this current time we’re still utilising the existing MRI infrastructure. But additionally, we’re looking at hardware that can be priced dramatically differently. Something that would make it possible to put an MRI scanner in the back of a truck, and take it to remote villages.

Being able to do imaging anywhere around the world, the automation we’re applying – whether it’s the software side or the hardware side – will enable a remote village to have the same level of scanning that could be done at a major academic university. Thus enabling remote patient monitoring – but from the inside of the body. The major vital organs and tissues, because of imaging.

The New Economy: And Maneesh, it is important that as well as being physically accessible, these innovative healthcare interventions are more financially accessible?

Maneesh Juneja: Correct, so, a lot of these technologies being developed are essentially only available if you are wealthy, or you live in a certain part of the world. And that’s scaring many people who are saying, we already have these huge social inequalities in health, and we don’t want these new technologies to make them even wider.

Today we’ve got 7.7 billion people on the planet, and there are literally billions that don’t have access to affordable, safe, high quality healthcare. And by the end of this century we’re going to have 11 billion people on this planet forecasted. So there’s a huge need for actually, how can we get as many people around the world to be able to access these new technologies?

The New Economy: Mark, is this sort of healthcare accessibility part of PhenoMx’s mission?

Mark Punyanitya: Absolutely. We’re taking highly advanced imaging capabilities, but using the ubiquity of technology to disperse it, dispense it, anywhere, anytime. Making the gap between the health disparities much closer together. Decreasing the prices, the efficiency, the automation. These are all components that we have expertise in, to make a more seamless user experience, and provide a package that can be implemented worldwide.

Maneesh Juneja: This kind of technology that we’ve been hearing about today could have huge implications to bring safe, high quality healthcare to everybody on the planet.

Think about that person in that village somewhere around the world, who’s living 200km from the nearest city with a big medical centre and all the equipment. If they can have access to these new technologies, and we can actually enable them to detect certain diseases, manage their health, just be able to live a healthier life: I mean that’s absolutely a fabulous idea.

Mark Punyanitya: So, we’re looking outside of the US. In the US it’s early adoption, but we see a broader perspective in Europe, the Middle East, Asia. Where there is a larger population number, but a familiarity with health screening and the ability to acquire data, medical records, bloodwork and things like that.

And we’re using imaging in that same manner. Can we acquire data on your body much more rapidly?

Additionally, we’re looking at public health and population health screening. And wanting to implement something that addresses some of the environmental factors, the social determinants of health, and tie them to these hard outcomes. Whether you’re developing asthma or something else; and then we’re enabling linking that to scanning your lung.

And then being unplugged. Having the same type of wireless capacity to attach it to the scanner, so it doesn’t have to be a hard line. Lots of technology to come that will make a big difference.

The New Economy: Maneesh, Mark, thank you very much.

Maneesh Juneja: Thank you.

Mark Punyanitya: Thank you.

Why experience matters

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“Experience is now the organising principle of the global economy.” That’s how SAP CEO Bill McDermott introduced the experience economy at SAPPHIRE NOW 2019 in Orlando. The New Economy spoke to a dozen influencers and thought leaders about what the experience economy and experience management means to them.

Lee Odden: You know, when I hear experience economy, I think about experience being the number one differentiator in business today.

Tamara McCleary: It’s kind of this thing that’s grown out of what we know to be true, and that is: business is done through relationships.

Rodrigo Herrera: People might forget who you are and what you do – but they will never forget how you make them feel.

Ronald Van Loon: Basically, everything that we do is experience! So the experience economy already exists for many years, but we use now more and more technology to support our experience.

Kirk Borne: For me, the experience economy is really about how we can get value out of data and technologies to improve customer experience, employee experience.

Tamara McCleary: Everyone! All those external stakeholders as well as internal stakeholders.

Lee Odden: Experiences with really any individual that the brand is going to interact with, or have a touchpoint with.

Tamara McCleary: That’s what it means to me when we talk about an experience economy.

Lee Odden: Delivering an incredible experience really comes down to data. Having the data about customers, and what those pain points are, what those preferences are.

Keith Townsend: You have to think about reducing friction. I don’t want to or desire to interact with a human for commodity services.

Eric Kavanagh: But you need to have the right information in place at the right time – and these days the latency is so small! You want that customer service representative to have all the latest information right at their fingertips.

Yves Mulkers: Technology allows you to create individual experiences. Companies can look into that data and really customise your experience to what you would really like to have.

Eric Kavanagh: Right now companies can know John likes blue shirts, Jim likes red shirts; we know certain things about you. We have to be careful about how we use that information!

Kirk Borne: There’s a difference between personalisation and getting personal. And so crossing that line of too personal, you have too much information about me, can really change a positive experience to a negative experience.

Fernanda Nascimento: To understand what the customer wants, we need to first of all listen to the customer. It can be through VOC – voice over customer. It can be through NPS. And also analysing the churn rates.

Keith Townsend: Social media’s a great resource to get realtime information on how customers are interacting with your brand, or having experiences with the product.

Kirk Borne: Technology now enables us to capture data about every touchpoint in the customer journey. Of what they looked at, what did they think about – because maybe they put it in their shopping cart, then they took it out.

Rodrigo Herrera: Netflix for example, just took out the rating criteria. But they still measure how much length of the content you watched.

Michael Li: I think that what we see is that a lot of digital-first companies that are based on the web or mobile – they’re doing a really great job of enabling a great customer experience. And I think that what we see is that a lot of those companies that are digital-first are also data-native. And so they understand how to analyse that data and process that data.

Ronald Van Loon: And some technologies are very innovative, and they really set this bar very high. Which means there’s a lot of pressure on companies to increase their experience: get your data management right, the data acquisition, the data processing, the data insights, the real time actions. Because if you don’t you lose your clients, because they don’t think you’re reaching the level of experience anymore.

Dion Hinchliffe: Businesses have to respond to the experience trend by moving out of their siloed structures they have today. So we built our organisations around marketing, sales, operations, delivery, customer care – and they don’t really talk to each other, and they’re kind of disjointed when they’re facing our customers.

Michael Li: Every department has their own data silo; they don’t want to talk to each other, they don’t want to play nice.

Dion Hinchliffe: Let’s integrate this! Let’s make it more seamless, let’s take the friction out of it. Let’s make it as easy as possible for our customers to do business on the channels and devices in the manner they prefer.

Michael Li: If I’m in procurement, if I connect with marketing data: there’s a whole wealth of things I can do. And not just marketing: but sales, and engineering, and all the other departments. If you combine all that data from across the organisation, we can do a lot more.

Eric Kavanagh: Was this customer just on a website? Did this customer just visit one of our establishments? Were they just on the phone? Get all that information to the customer service rep in real time, and then of course you need a polite, caring, professional person to deliver that.

Tamara McCleary: It’s going to be absolutely critical in this experience economy that we’re focused in on the employee experience as well.

Rodrigo Herrera: Your employee needs to be committed; to have the same mindset, the same values as your brand and your customer has. People want to be part of something bigger; and that’s culture, that’s what you need to have in your company.

Tamara McCleary: That’s how you’ll be able to have the best talent within your organisation, is by delivering those experiences. And you’ll be relevant to your customer by delivering those exceptional experiences.

Lee Odden: When companies create a great employee experience, just like with customers you have loyalty, you have less attrition. You might have increased productivity.

Kirk Borne: So the outcome is obviously: good ROI at every front.

Tamara McCleary: The outcome from a better experience is a trusted relationship, which equals business growth.

Lee Odden: The biggest point of differentiation for a brand – the ability to deliver great experiences makes them dominant in their industry.

Tamara McCleary: Who is giving us the experience that makes us feel seen, heard, acknowledged, and that we build trust with? You will have a business and be relevant five, 10 years from now, if you’re creating those exquisite experiences that are memorable for your stakeholders, internal and external.

How intelligent enterprises transform experiences and operations

Posted on by The New Economy

30,000 people from over a hundred countries gathered in Orlando to be a part of SAPPHIRE NOW 2019, SAP’s annual three day celebration of business and technology. SAP is helping organisations combine operational data and experience data, to help them discover new growth initiatives and lead in their industries. Dave Scullin from Ballance Agri-Nutrients, Tony Costa of Bumble Bee Foods, and Helle Huss from KMD, discuss their businesses’ journeys.

Dave Scullin: We’re finding the demographic of farmers in New Zealand changing. And that demand for a great digital experience increasing over time.

The farming demographic is changing – younger ones are coming through, farms are getting larger and more complex in New Zealand. There’s a lot more corporate farming. And they’re demanding 24/7 access to information, they’re demanding an easy way of doing business with us. They’re demanding what I term a unique blend of customer experience e-commerce type capability and agri-tech capability.

So that’s why we’re investing, and that’s why I’m pleased to be seeing SAP invest in bringing experience and operational data together at scale.

Tony Costa: The great customer experience for us is increased trust in us as a brand, that we provide the highest level food safety, transparency, in sustainable caught seafood.

Transparency does matter to the consumer. They want that relationship with a company like Bumble Bee; they want full traceability of their product, and they want to know exactly what they’re eating.

So the experience economy to us is providing that value-driven experience for our customers and our retailers.

Helle Huss: The employee experience is also very important. So whenever we develop new business solutions, we always take the point of: what is actually the user experience that you want to achieve, in order to increase the use of the solutions or technology that you’re actually implementing? Because if you don’t understand the user needs of whatever system in the enterprise: usage will go down, and you will have the manual processes taking over.

And so, it’s very much at the core when we develop new solutions, to understand the user journey: their needs, and their behaviour, in order to design the best solution.

The New Economy: For these innovators, adapting to the experience economy is the next digital disruption. And it’s going to completely transform their industries.

Tony Costa: The future as we see it is, the whole supply chain relationship is completely changing. The way that we interact with our suppliers, our retailers, and even the consumer – leveraging technology to balance that relationship is critically important as we move forward.

We really think we’re just scratching the surface of the capabilities. We’ve had a great positive feedback and uplift just in culture, to see that we are doing what we say we’re going to do. Lead the industry in transparency, and providing that to our consumers and our retailers. And our true focus is around food safety and food quality.

Dave Scullin: At the moment we sell nutrients, we manufacture nutrients and animal feed, and we sell them to our farmers.

Ultimately I think we’ll move to an outcomes-based business model where we take control of the whole supply chain. Farmers will pay us for those pasture outcomes or those crop outcomes or those animal outcomes. And we’ll be responsible for managing their pasture to the optimum level, based on weather data, historical fertiliser plan and agronomy data. Soil health data. And the whole way we work with our customers will be very digitally-centric.

Helle Huss: The core of our business is really our ability to understand those user needs. If you don’t understand how to build in behaviour from consumers or employees, you won’t be able to sell.

Many top executives are not born as digital consumers; they may be afraid of technology, they don’t have the experience and the background. And if you don’t have that, how can you develop actually a clear strategy, and new business models.

Therefore it’s extremely critical that top executives get on board with this technology. It’s not frightening. And try to understand – maybe not the bits and bytes of the technology, but more: what can the technology can do, in order to help transform their businesses, and not lose out on competition.

How Entel, Chile’s largest mobile telecoms provider, uses experience data

Posted on by The New Economy

Entel is Chile’s largest telephony provider – and also its number one in customer satisfaction for mobile and household markets. The company has been working with SAP-acquisition Qualtrics for seven years, using its tools to measure customer experience in real time. Customer Division Manager Pablo Oyarzun explains how combining experience data with operational data is helping Entel improve customer journeys every single day. This video is in Spanish with English subtitles.

Pablo Oyarzun: Entel is a company that has been present in the Chilean market for more than 50 years. We are a cellular phone company. We also sell fiber and wireless solutions for households, directly in the homes of customers.

We have the largest (35 percent) share of the mobile telephony market in Chile; and we also have a 37-38 percent share of the total income of the telecoms market in Chile.

My name is Pablo Oyarzun. I’m the Manager for the Customer Division at Entel. I supervise the customer experience areas, which measure customer satisfaction and the customer journey.

We are number one in the country in customer satisfaction In the mobile and household markets.

Since the company was founded, the customer has always been at the core of our company. All the company’s business strategy is customer-centric. All the future decisions made by the company are based on customer needs.

We’re pretty moved, motivated and excited at being able to provide our customers with new experiences.

We have started to measure the experience of our customers from a contextual and omnichannel perspective. This has enabled us to understand the different needs of our customers and satisfy them when they contact us through different service channels – right away, and in the best possible way.

Qualtrics is one of our partners – we’ve been working together for more than seven years. We started using tools that enabled us to measure the experience of our customers in the digital world.

We used to have operational indicators and satisfaction rates, but we weren’t able to match them. Now we can do it, correlate them, and automatically identify them when we change the customer journey. We can also measure their satisfaction, we have the operational indicators, and we automatically – almost in real time – realise that we made an appropriate change; or that we have, in fact, to go back and repurpose a new customer journey.

By having real-time information, we’re able to measure and define new customer journeys every day; so we can test different what-if scenarios and then change such journeys. This has enabled us to improve in three key areas.

First, it’s real-time information; second, we’ve been able to detect the customer’s pain points much more easily; and third, we can take the customer sentiments and, based on them, offer a new customer journey.

This has enabled us to change the experiences we offer in our stores, the experience we offer online and in our mobile app; and in addition, we provide customer service executives with information about the reasons we failed, or are providing exceptional performance.

Having real-time information makes this process easy, and with this new agile structure, we can offer a new customer experience every week and automatically get new results. This has enabled Entel to rank first in customer service in Chile.

Recently, SUBTEL, a government organisation, published an index where we were awarded as the best mobile telephony company for customer service.

We’ve also won the BCX Award – for the sixth year in a row – for the best customer service in mobile telephony in Ibero-America; and for the eighth year in a row, we are the best company for customer service in Chile.

All this allows us to offer our customers endless possibilities, and Entel’s technology that can help them in their lives.