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Innovation in the Intelligent Enterprise

Capgemini
May 5, 2020

In my last blog, I spoke about Capgemini’s two-pronged strategy of reimagining the monolithic ERP built over the years to a future-proof, highly automated, lean, and standardized core, while innovation of the business and differentiation are developed on the edge. My blog this time is not about how Capgemini renews your organization’s SAP S/4HANA®, core making it lean and agile. Instead I will share some insights into how you can introduce innovation to transform your business. Moving from traditional ECC-based ABAP development to an Intelligent Enterprise introduces new aspects irrespective of your SAP S/4HANA transition.

While innovation needn’t be chaotic, it isn’t a forced sequential process either. At the Capgemini European SAP Center of Excellence, we have identified 24 innovation champions who facilitate ideation of new processes or services through design thinking and through our library of use cases. After over a 100+ different “Intelligent Enterprise” projects delivered last year, we realized each customer journey was different (for multiple reasons), and our goal was to maximize the business case and minimize the risk of transformation.

In this context, we outlined our views and services of the top-three client challenges and how innovation works in an Intelligent Enterprise.

  • Introducing innovation as a modular, fast, and tangible-outcome game
    • If SAP S/4HANA is your ERP core, then can’t the Intelligent Enterprise be summed up in respective cores? Yes, it can. This is how we quickly connect to the business case for SAP and non-SAP Intelligent Suite applications to any “innovation” ask from the client and proactively suggest new ideas. From a value-driven, business-led transformation consulting workshop, we start your innovation roadmap right from the word go.
  • If you miss a foundational data platform, you’re already out
    • Mathematician Clive Humby’s perhaps innocent prophesy “Data is the new oil” can’t be taken lightly. The need to proactively understand and curate disparate data sources across multiple cores is what Capgemini’s Multi Pillar SAP S/4HANA Architecture offers, along with innovating irrespective of your organization being on ECC, SAP S/4HANA, or another ERP.
  • Productivity despite application evolution
    • Between use centricity, connectivity, and use-case enablement this is a key area that I see being broken down into multiple levels of granularity and technical complexity. But the crux of it all is how do we evolve and ensure lights-on in a “real-time,” “secure,” “architecture integration,” “cloud” era once an application is deployed?

Customers wanting standardization and differentiation chose multiple paths. Innovation, first by carving out custom components from their ECC and implement SAP S/4HANA at the end as greenfield, is one possible route. Others decide to go for a brownfield conversion to SAP S/4HANA as first step and start innovation later. And there are still other options out there we have delivered towards!

With end-to-end use cases in servitization, responsive supply chain, intelligent asset management, etc., we have a library of plug-and-play innovation use cases for you.

Intelligent Enterprises go beyond an experimental clever use of technologies for business. That’s why we take it a step further and are building a renewable enterprise!

To build a rapid innovation PoC, see our demos and accelerators live in action, visit us at our Capgemini Applied Innovation Exchange Centers or contact David Lowson, Brad Little, Elisabetta Spontoni or me directly!