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In Press, Article, Supply Chain Management

Accenture/SAP to accelerate sustainable transformation

Decades long, Accenture and SAP have been collaborating for many years to help companies to embed sustainability across their entire business operations to unlock new value in their supply chains.

Breaking down Accenture and SAP’s latest partnership

By combining SAP’s technology with Accenture’s Sustainability Services and broad industry knowledge, the two are expanding their current partnership to create new solutions that empower companies to accelerate full decarbonisation in the supply chain, and capture their share of economic growth that a circular economy could bring. 

The new solution

Co-innovating and co-developing, SAP and Accenture plans to create a new solution for responsible production, manufacturing and design. Its capabilities will help companies to embed sustainability metrics across their value chain and supply chains. 

How does it work?

The solution harnesses integrated data from multiple operations, allowing companies to better design and produce products with less waste, better recyclability, and more recycled content. 

By providing this solution, SAP and Accenture hope to help to reduce the growing cost of compliance which has been driven by new regulations. 

“Our work together will enable SAP’s customers, which include 92% of the Forbes Global 2000, to use their core systems to help drive their sustainability agenda, optimize their ESG performance and achieve their goals. This expanded collaboration builds on our long history with SAP — including our joint partnership with the United Nations Global Compact and 3M — and our shared commitment to drive adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals,” said Julie Sweet, chief executive officer at Accenture.

SAP’s Climate 21 initiative

In addition to partnering with SAP on this new solution, Accenture supports SAP’s Climate 21 initiative. Climate 21 allows companies to use analytics to measure and minimise their CO2 emissions as well as lower their carbon footprint across a products lifecycle. 

In doing so, sustainability metrics harnessed across the end-to-end supply chain allows for an integrated view of environmental savings and cost impacts, as well as the ability to more easily optimise operations.

“To successfully tackle the greatest threat to our world today, we need to collaborate at every level of business and society. Building on our long-standing and trusted partnership, SAP and Accenture are joining forces to help our customers realize long-term growth in a sustainable way. We’re creating visibility into the environmental impact across the entire value chain, providing enterprises with the insights they need to take the right action and accelerate their transition to the circular economy,” said Christian Klein, chief executive officer at SAP.

SAP.iO a global accelerator

Furthering their efforts to accelerate sustainable transformation, SAP and Accenture began a global sustainability focused accelerator program at SAP.iO. 

As part of the SAP.iO, the ‘Sustainability Future’ program – the latest cohort to date – aims to help B2B startups in their early stages drive digital transformation and innovation in four target areas: carbon tracking and trading, resource efficiency, climate risk tracking and mitigation, and circular economy.  

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In Article

“Safe but very uncomfortable” — a deep dive into SAP’s intrapreneurship programme

Intrapreneurship programmes often get criticised for being unstructured and ineffective.

Innovation consultant Alberto Onetti recently wrote that the majority of intrapreneurship programmes he has seen fail to produce meaningful results [and suggests ways of doing them better].

Worse yet, in a piece about the “dark side” of intrapreneurship, Tim Heard, founder of the Circle of Entrepreneurs, told the stories of entrepreneurs left in limbo, with little support structure.

So when I got the chance to have an inside look at SAP’s entrepreneurship programme recently, speaking with Vishal Shah, one of the entrepreneurs who has come through the programme and with Alexandra Begue, head of growth at the programme, I was curious to see how this one measures up.

The programme was revamped in 2015 and since then has assessed something in the region of 3000 ideas and produced 3 businesses, one of which has gone on to become its own business unit.

How the intrapreneurship programme fits in with the rest of SAP

Like many large organisations, SAP has a large number of innovation initiatives, for both “internal” startups that had been incubated within SAP and “external” startups that might want to work with SAP .

On the external side, SAP.iO Foundries is a network of equity-free accelerators for startups and SAP.iO Rising Stars is a program that helps promising startups scale up their partnerships with SAP.

On the internal side, the SAP intrapreneurship programme is a company-wide, internal scouting programme and SAP Venture Studio is a venture building unit in which takes the most promising of those scouted projects and turns them into commercial businesses.

These internally-built ventures most often become part of one of SAP’s existing business units. SAP Supplier Financing, for example, was a successful venture built by Vishal Shah, founder and general manager, in the venture studio. It was eventually merged with SAP’s Ariba Network, the ecommerce network.

How the intrapreneurship programme works

There is a call-out for ideas every spring between April and May, which will typically result in around 500 ideas submitted to the innovation team. Submitting an idea involves recording a short video, explaining the project and answering 6 key questions around whether the project can achieve mass scale, whether it can be efficiently tested and if SAP can leverage any particular advantage in pursuing the idea.

The innovation team will cull the initial 500 ideas down to 100 which will go through to a fast-track validation phase that takes around 3 months. The fast track teams receive mentoring and help in developing their idea.

Some 25 of the most promising of the ideas will go through to an 3-week accelerator programme, where they get an even more intense crash course in entrepreneurship and venture-building.

At the end of the accelerator programme, the teams pitch to an investment committee and around a handful go on to join the SAP.iO venture studio.

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In Foundries, Tel Aviv, Consumer Industries

These SAP.iO startups deliver personalized and holistic experiences for consumers on SAP Store

Shifting consumer values are driving new innovations to market at a speed like never before. Consumer Products companies must be able to serve consumers by orchestrating an ecosystem that delivers personalized experiences in the service of achieving an outcome, all at the most favorable cost.

To help drive their own innovation efforts, consumer products companies are increasingly looking to startups and new technologies to fuel future growth. By collaborating with startups to address the industry’s most pressing challenges with innovative solutions through SAP.iO, SAP is dedicated to empowering its customers to continue to thrive as prominent industry leaders. The seven startups that participated in SAP.iO Foundry Tel Aviv’s consumer products cohort last year are now all available on SAP Store in the latest set of solutions for SAP customers.

“We chose these seven companies to join SAP’s partner ecosystem as a result of due diligence and close collaboration with the industry and product teams at SAP. These startup offerings that are available on SAP Store provide critical solutions to the biggest challenges in the consumer products industry, helping SAP customers best utilize their existing data in order to improve the consumer experience,” said Inbar Yacoby, Program Manager, SAP.iO Foundry Tel Aviv.

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In Foundries, Blog, Tel Aviv, Portfolio News, Consumer Industries

SAP.iO Startups Deliver Personalized and Holistic Experiences for Consumers on SAP Store

Shifting consumer values are driving new innovations to market at a speed like never before. Consumer products companies must be able to serve consumers by orchestrating an ecosystem that delivers personalized experiences in the service of achieving an outcome, all at the most favorable cost.

To help drive their own innovation efforts, consumer products companies are increasingly looking to startups and new technologies to fuel future growth. By collaborating with startups to address the industry’s most pressing challenges with innovative solutions through SAP.iO, SAP is dedicated to empowering its customers to continue to thrive as prominent industry leaders. The seven startups that participated in SAP.iO Foundry Tel Aviv’s consumer products cohort last year are now all available on SAP Store in the latest set of solutions for SAP customers.“

We chose these seven companies to join SAP’s partner ecosystem as a result of due diligence and close collaboration with the industry and product teams at SAP. These startup offerings that are available on SAP Store provide critical solutions to the biggest challenges in the consumer products industry, helping SAP customers best utilize their existing data in order to improve the consumer experience,” said Inbar Yacoby, Program Manager, SAP.iO Foundry Tel Aviv.

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In Berlin, Munich, Consumer Industries, Press

Sustainable Business Is Better Business for All

Sustainability is the business challenge of our lifetimes.

Customers are increasingly educated and demand products and services that minimize negative environmental impact. Investors are integrating climate risk in their portfolio strategies. Government regulation is on the rise around the world, affecting carbon emissions, waste management, product design, and producer responsibility. Employees are increasingly vocal about their employer’s environmental policies and actions, making it challenging for businesses to recruit top talent without a genuine environmental vision and track record.

Based on Accenture research*, enterprises with high ratings for environmental and social governance (ESG) performance attained operating margins nearly four-times higher than those with low ESG ratings and generated annual total returns to shareholders that were double their peers. According Accenture and United Nations (UN) Global Compact research, 54% of CEOs agree sustainability is critical to the future success of their organizations, and 71% of investors believe the pandemic will accentuate global policies to tackle risks related to climate change.

From Periphery to Core

Enterprises must show accountability through ESG performance and manage end-to-end operations responsibly. By reimagining its business model, any company can operate in an intelligent way, minimize negative environmental impact, and unleash a new dimension of enterprise resource planning (ERP). Decision-makers can use this intelligence to design better products, create engaging experiences, and equip employees to do their best work by eliminating busywork. They can create an efficient, ethical, and adaptable supply chain, reaching beyond organizations and first-tier suppliers to proactively manage performance and risks with trading partners around the world.

Just like any other core business function, sustainability performance must also be managed in real time and integrated into wider business decision making. True, integrated reporting will go hand-in-hand with ESG management, and information transparency will provide a solid foundation to optimize financial results and sustainability performance together.

Most companies have a long way to go before they move beyond the basics of simply reporting ESG performance to actively steering their business operations toward ambitious sustainability goals. While the UN Global Compact’s SDG Ambition program has challenged companies to enhance their commitment to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), only 25% have set goals aligned to societal or environmental needs. Although CEOs acknowledge the universal call-to-action to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all, less than 50% have implemented sustainability into their operations.

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In Blog, Global, Venture Studio

Venture Voices: A year of and with GreenToken by SAP

Sometimes news unfold on April Fools Day that isn’t a joke, but real and exciting: The founders behind Green Token by SAP share their venture’s founding anniversary with other greats in the tech industry. Here are some of their highlights from their first year.

Founded on April 1, 1976, Apple most certainly wasn’t a joke. Nor was Google’s announcement in 2004, introducing the beta version of Gmail, its new — and free! — web-based email service. And of course, though hard to believe today, SAP was once also considered a start-up. When five entrepreneurs started the company on April 1 in 1972, Hasso Plattner didn’t even own a personal computer.

Today, almost all of the world’s 100 most valuable brands use SAP software and the company has grown to more than 100,000 employees. Even with its storied history and reputation in the tech industry, SAP has not strayed far from its start-up roots. Among its 100,000 employees, some continue to build products and teams from scratch through the SAP.iO Venture Studio, an organization dedicated to fostering employee-driven innovation. Since 2016, SAP has been investing in small, entrepreneurial teams to find and test new areas with products that attack some of the biggest problems in enterprise. On April 1, 2019, Green Token by SAP, a venture building a solution focusing on supply chain transparency for more ethical business, also joined the ranks of SAP’s employee-led ventures. Hear what James Veale and Nitin Jain have to say, looking back on their first 12 months and ahead as venture founders:

Exactly one year ago you started GreenToken by SAP after 18 months of evolving the idea. What happened since?

Nitin & James: “Like one-year-old humans we have learnt an incredible amount in the last 12 months and now proudly stand on our own two feet. Our memorable successes since April 1, 2019 have to be :

  • Building a fantastic team of eleven passionate individuals who go above and beyond in their daily tasks to make GreenToken a success.
  • Great meetings with our motivated advisory board members who have given us excellent guidance and share our drive and enthusiasm for this project.
  • Our launch customers who helped us prove GreenToken at scale at the end of last year and continue to challenge us to make the product frictionless and fit for purpose.”

Biggest misconception on founding and building a venture you had so far?

Nitin & James: “One of the biggest myths we faced was ‘you all have to be based in one location for this to work.’ We have team members in APJ, Europe and North America and we and made it work! What’s more, GreenToken works with global supply chains and our globally distributed team is actually able to talk to any customer or prospect in the world in their local business hours.”

Plans for your second year as venture founders?

Nitin & James: “Our second year is shaping up to be as exciting as our first! This year we plan to release the production-ready version of GreenToken and run it at scale, we intend to expand into new industries across many different raw material supply chains, and we aim at adding new features that will give our customers meaningful insights into their raw material supply chains showing them the good actors, the risk and the blind spots. We want to enable them to make meaningful procurement decisions and help drive sustainable and circular economies. And we already hit the ground running in year 2: Watch this space and our personal LinkedIn accounts for our new initiatives in a circular economy industry.”

Feel free to personally connect with Nitin and James on LinkedIn and never miss a beat on their upcoming projects & results.

About Green Token by SAP

GreenToken by SAP is a supply chain solution that offers companies new levels of transparency through reliable, blockchain-based information. Gain visibility into where raw materials came from and produce products with knowledge about where and how the materials were produced, even in complex, non-batch supply chains. More on www.green-token.io

About SAP.iO Venture Studio

SAP.iO Venture Studio drives a new era of organic growth at SAP. It invests in new ventures founded by small, entrepreneurial teams inside of SAP who are focused on building the future of enterprise business processes. SAP.iO Venture Studio provides design, development, and sales support to help these ventures launch. Founding teams join the SAP.iO Venture Studio primarily through the SAP.iO Intrapreneurship and Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) programs.

In Foundries, Article, Berlin, Consumer Industries

With Stylumia, Real-Time Data Intelligence Powers Competitive Retail Advantage

Consumer fashion may be among the most unpredictable markets on the planet, but one startup in India has created a demand sensing platform based on artificial intelligence (AI) that combines the brilliance of data scientists with seasoned industry experts to ferret out trends with uncanny accuracy. The idea is to close the gap between supply and demand.

“We help companies create demand-driven fashion forecasts from consumer data across a holistic value chain,” Ganesh Subramanian, founder and CEO at Stylumia, said. “Our demand sensing engine collects and analyzes publicly available global data to rank product trends, providing fashion designers, retail buyers, and merchandisers with a much deeper understanding of real-time consumer demand signals.”

More Profitable and Sustainable Business

Forecasting fickle consumer appetites for unseen products has long stymied the most experienced minds in the fashion world. Stylumia can reveal breaking trends, allowing people to make design and merchandising decisions perfectly in sync. This can reduce under- and overbuying.

According to Subramanian, the typical Stylumia customer has improved the prediction accuracy of style and color levels by up to 30% and increased sales and revenue between 25% to 50%, compared to the performance of products not designed and merchandized using the platform. Customers have also reduced excess inventory and carbon footprint levels by an aggregated average of up to 40%.

“When products are selling well, companies have less stock and are able to lower their carbon footprint because they’re using fewer resources while generating the same amount of revenue,” he said. “Since our founding, we have reduced the number of garments that our customers have produced by over 60 million while their sales and profits have grown.”

Consumer Intelligence Research on Steroids

From its headquarters in India to hubs in Australia, the U.S., and the UK, Stylumia’s teams work with fashion, sports, and lifestyle brands that represent companies of all sizes worldwide.

Instead of brainstorming solely by intuition, designers and buyers log in to their personalized portal to storyboard ideas using Stylumia’s AI-fueled algorithm or their own images for design inspiration. As they select colors, materials, patterns, and other product features, Stylumia instantly surfaces trending demands against the designer’s ideas. They can view similar products, see where selling levels are highest, and save and share their ideas with colleagues.

For retail merchandisers, the tool improves forecast accuracy for better assortment planning down to the local level. They can see which sizes, colors, and styles are most popular by geography. Subramanian added that the platform is not just for large consumer brands.

“We’re democratizing intelligence for small and midsize companies that can use these insights for their growth too, bringing the right products to the right geographies at the right time,” he said.

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In Supply Chain Management, Foundries, New York, Press Release

Cogniac Announces Visual Operations Intelligence Platform for Cloud-based Solutions from SAP

 Cogniac Corporation (“Cogniac”) today announced that its Visual Operations Intelligence platform is now available on SAP® Store. Cogniac’s AI, machine vision platform complements the industry cloud portfolio from SAP for automotive and industrial machinery and components industries and integrates with SAP Digital Manufacturing Cloud, delivering an AI-based approach to customers looking to extract value from their visual data.

“Today marks an important moment in Cogniac’s growth,” said Vahan Tchakerian, chief partnership officer at Cogniac. “Through our valuable experience in the SAP.iO Foundries program and our partnership with SAP, businesses that use SAP solutions will now have access to Cogniac technology. By offering our platform on SAP Store, we are able to scale more efficiently and deliver exceptional performance in the manufacturing and industrial sectors.”

Cogniac’s Visual Operations Intelligence platform uses no-code AI, enabling companies to maximize the value of their visual data. By integrating with SAP Digital Manufacturing Cloud, capabilities of the Cogniac platform are now accessible within the solution’s architecture, providing advanced AI machine vision technology across a variety of industries.

For customers in the automotive, rail, manufacturing, government, logistics, packaging and kitting, and safety and security industries, Cogniac’s AI machine vision platform drives significant process improvements. Through better defect detection, safer operations and increased efficiencies, Cogniac supports many customers looking to achieve Industry 4.0 standards, reduce costs, and optimize their processes.

Building on the Intelligent Enterprise strategy, SAP is expanding its vertical solutions with an ecosystem of industry cloud applications. These solutions complement the existing SAP portfolio to extend the value of joint customer investments.

“The Visual Operations Intelligence platform developed by Cogniac complements our portfolio and enables an AI-based approach to customers looking to extract value from their visual data,” commented Stefan Krauss, SVP General Manager Discrete Industries and Energy and Natural Resources at SAP. “This is a prime example of how co-innovation between our organizations can deliver value for customers. We look forward to continued collaboration with Cogniac to create innovative cloud solutions and applications for customers who want to drive cost-effective and sustainable growth in their industry.”

SAP recently brought together SAP Store and SAP App Center into one single marketplace at store.sap.com. It delivers a simplified and connected digital customer experience for finding, trying, buying, and renewing more than 1,800 solutions from SAP and its partners. There, customers can find the SAP solutions and SAP-validated partner apps they need to grow their business. And for each purchase made via SAP Store, SAP will plant a tree.

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In Foundries, Press, Tel Aviv, CRM & Customer Experience

SAP.iO Foundry Tel Aviv announced 7 startups to joint its next program with Publicis Sapient

SAP.iO Foundry Tel Aviv launched yesterday its startup accelerator program focused on consumer engagement, together with the digital business transformation company Publicis Sapient. Seven startups have been selected to join the program, all are focused on developing advanced marketing and commerce solutions to help brands improve their consumer engagement.

“Recent year events and new market challenges in the Consumer Industries, emphasized the importance of expanding our partner portfolio in the e-commerce and marketing domains, and led us to launch a dedicated program with that focus.” says Lior Weizman, Director of SAP.iO Foundry Tel Aviv. “After screening startups from more than 30 countries, 7 startups originating from Israel, US, Poland and UK were selected. The selected startups present advanced capabilities in their fields and have a strong track record of success, will enable SAP’s clients to engage in new ways with their customers.”

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In Foundries, Tel Aviv, CRM & Customer Experience

SAP.iO Foundry Tel Aviv Joins Publicis Sapient to Accelerate Consumer Engagement Startups

 SAP has teamed up with digital business transformation company Publicis Sapient to launch a consumer engagement–focused startup accelerator program at SAP.iO Foundry Tel Aviv. Seven startups have been selected for the program focusing on advanced marketing and commerce solutions to help brands improve their consumer engagement.

“In the consumer industries’ ever-changing environment, it’s critical to connect our industry cloud customers with innovative startups to deliver modular and easy-to-use solutions,” SAP Industries & Customer Advisory President Peter Maier said. “Thanks to SAP.iO, we have been able to successfully support our customers’ transformation journeys by providing the widest range of solutions available to support their unique industry requirements.”

SAP and Publicis Sapient will work closely with the selected startups to drive their joint customer-innovation initiatives, which include new solutions for personalized marketing content and offers, product discovery and trial, social engagement, consumer segmentation, and direct-to-consumer business models. The startups will also explore integrations with the omnichannel customer engagement platform from Emarsys, now an SAP company.

Publicis Sapient, the digital transformation hub of global communication leader Publicis Groupe and an SAP customer, helped identify suitable business-to-business startups from all over the world to participate in the 12-week program. Publicis Sapient also will serve as a potential beta site for pilots and go-to-market channel for the startups.

“This strategic initiative with SAP.iO helps foster innovation in the consumer products industry, bringing fresh thinking from creative startups to support our clients in accelerating their digital transformation,” said Kristen Groh, Publicis Sapient Consumer Products Industry lead.

During the equity-free program, the startups will receive curated mentorship and access to SAP technology and application programming interfaces (APIs). Their work includes creating new partnerships and value propositions that help solve key e-commerce and marketing challenges facing consumer brands.

The following startups were selected to participate in the consumer engagement SAP.iO program:

  • Algopix provides an intelligence platform for consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies, brands, e-commerce marketplaces and data companies to increase their omnichannel sales and market share and improve their e-commerce market trend visibility.
  • eStoreMedia provides an e-commerce automation suite that helps brands accelerate their online sales by combining digital shelf analytics, e-commerce research, e-content management and syndication to e-retailers.
  • Explorium offers an automated external data platform that automatically connects and matches internal data with thousands of relevant external data signals to accelerate value from advanced analytics and machine learning models.
  • Jebbit enables anyone to quickly build interactive experiences that capture first-party declared data without any line of code.
  • Mention Me is a referral marketing and customer retention platform that integrates into brands’ websites to incentivize, track and reward referrals throughout the customer experience.
  • SundaySky helps customer-centric brands deliver video-powered experiences at critical moments along customer journeys that engage, educate and inspire consumers.
  • Vue Storefront is a mobile-first e-commerce front-end platform that operates as an open source project and allows customers to build fast e-commerce websites and apps without changing the back-end platform.

In Blog, Global, Venture Studio

Venture Voices: Isn’t it time that we see a Chief Receivables Officer?

Receivables teams might need to look across the hall to their procurement and payables counterparts for a transformation roadmap.

By Andrew Blum, Head of GTM and Customer Engagements, Paid Pronto by SAP

The path is laid out

The procurement and payables space has been transformed by a digital revolution over the last few decades. This has in turn enabled significant automation. I’m lucky to have witnessed it firsthand as a practitioner, consultant, and technology advisor. Procurement and accounts payable organizations have evolved from focusing on tactical, cost-control measures to adding meaningful value towards the organization’s bottom line. Local or regional organization structures have been replaced by centralized global procurement organizations.

Technology has been at the center of this revolution and the results are clear. Compliance and cost-control is managed by the technology which allows procurement professionals to focus on higher-value, strategic initiatives.

This great transformation has increased the importance and visibility of the roles within the organization. Often an afterthought, a Procurement Manager used to be the middle person executing on the tactical parts of purchasing. Now that the tactical tasks are automated, and focus is on adding strategic value to the bottom line, we’ve seen a surge in companies adopting the title of Chief Procurement Officer — a reflection of the value that they bring to the enterprise.

Is Accounts Receivables really that much different than Procurement and Accounts Payable?

When I joined Paid Pronto by SAP and took a deeper look into the accounts receivable space, I realized that it’s very similar to where procurement was 20 years ago and ripe for evolution. In fact the only major differences between accounts receivable and its procurement and accounts payable counterparts are that we’re talking customers instead of suppliers and managing invoices instead of purchase orders.

If the global pandemic has taught us anything in the business world, it’s that a strong cash flow helps prepare enterprises for anything. Outside of increasing sales or improving margins, there are two levers that finance organizations have to improve cash flow: (1) increase payment terms or (2) decrease receivables.

All too often, I see organizations only focus on the first lever. I’ve seen firsthand where a company made a blanket increase to their standard payment terms, from Net-45 to Net-120. And while larger suppliers can (uncomfortably) accept that, this is potentially fatal to smaller businesses that don’t have deep capital pockets.

So, we need to start focusing on the second lever, and optimize receivables. This presents a massive opportunity for Receivables Managers to provide strategic value to the enterprise. They are now at the same inflection point that procurement and accounts payable managers were at 20 years ago.

The opportunity case is there. Improving days sales outstanding by one day provides a $2.7M cash flow benefit for every $1B in sales. Simply put, the receivables team can easily make a material impact on the bottom line. A cash flow benefit of this magnitude is sure to make any C-suite notice, especially in capital intensive industries.

The key to unlocking this value is automation of tactical activities so receivables professionals can use their expertise to focus on the complex problems. A receivables agent typically spends most of their day putting out fires and executing routine tasks, unable to tackle their work in a strategic manner. Whether it’s asks from a customer to update a contact or upload to a portal, internal payment status queries, or just trying to get others to respond, there is a huge opportunity for automation.

It’s uncanny how similar this opportunity is to what procurement and accounts payable teams faced a just a few decades ago. They’ve successfully tackled this problem and have been rewarded with a seat in the C-Suite. So, I ask the question: Isn’t it time that we see a Chief Receivables Officer?

Paid Pronto by SAP is your transformation partner

We at Paid Pronto want to be your partner as you embark on this transformation. Our solution automates standardized receivables tasks, so that your receivables team can focus on the complex, high-value-added activities. Early pilots have shown significant improvement in day sales outstanding, total cash collected, and number of open invoices.

Paid Pronto by SAP is currently looking to expand our pilot program. If you are interested in letting us obsess over your success as part of the program, reach out to paidpronto@sap.com.

Find more also on www.paidpronto.io

About SAP.iO Venture Studio

SAP.iO Venture Studio drives a new era of organic growth at SAP. It invests in new ventures founded by small, entrepreneurial teams inside of SAP who are focused on building the future of enterprise business processes. SAP.iO Venture Studio provides design, development, and sales support to help these ventures launch. Founding teams join the SAP.iO Venture Studio primarily through the SAP.iO Intrapreneurship and Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) programs.

In Paris, Press Release, Energy & Natural Resources, Foundries

SAP.iO Foundry Paris Accelerates Agribusiness Startups in New Program

SAP launched an agribusiness-focused virtual startup accelerator program at SAP.iO Foundry Paris. The eight international startups have been selected by a jury of SAP experts, partners, customers and investment funds to join the program.

As France is one of the largest agricultural powers in the world, SAP.iO Foundry Paris was a natural location for the first accelerator program from SAP.iO entirely dedicated to this industry. The selected startups specialize in procurement, supply chain, production monitoring platforms and decision support tools.

“Digital technology and collaboration are key enablers to feed the rapidly growing world population in a sustainable way,” said Anja Strothkaemper, SAP vice president of Agribusiness and Commodity Management. “Working together with startups, we can combine our innovation power and serve the evolving needs of our agribusiness customers.”

The program addresses three key industry challenges:

  • Integrating data, artificial intelligence, analytics and decision-making into agribusiness
  • Combining compliance and traceability throughout production and processing
  • Ensuring agriculture is more responsible and environmentally sensitive

Over the next 10 weeks, the startups will have access to curated mentorship from SAP executives, exposure to SAP technology and application programming interfaces (APIs), and opportunities to collaborate with SAP customers around the world.

The following startups are participating in the SAP.iO Foundry Paris program:

  • Agrora enables processors and traders of agricultural commodities to save time on procurement and distribution processes.
  • Clarifruit offers an automated quality control platform for fast, objective and consistent fresh fruit and vegetable quality control.
  • Connecting Food uses blockchain technology and smart modules to provide transparency, traceability and digital auditing of food products.
  • GrainChain Inc. combines blockchain and Internet of Things–driven technologies to verify and auto-execute smart contracts, creating fully automated and digitalized workflows at every stage.
  • HeavyConnect develops easy-to-use mobile software that digitalizes paper-based compliance workflows in farming and processing.
  • Milk Moovement connects all players in the dairy supply chain, improving visibility and generating valuable insights across the raw milk supply chain.
  • ProcSea digitalizes seafood trading by connecting all partners on one digital platform for optimized and secured purchasing and sales processes.
  • Sencrop designs and sells connected weather forecast solutions farmers use to measure humidity, temperature, wind speed and rainfall.

To learn more about how SAP.iO is helping innovators start up and scale with SAP, please visit https://sap.io/.

In Podcast

Work Matters Podcast

Work Matters is a podcast about improving work related experiences that affect happiness, success and engagement both on the job and at home.

Happiness in life depends primarily on three things: our health, our social relationships, and our experiences or the activities we engage in each day. For most of us, this third factor is largely about work. When it comes to living a fulfilling life, work matters! Work impacts our happiness directly by affecting our enjoyment and sense of fulfillment, and indirectly through its impact on our health and relationships. This podcast examines how different aspects of work affect our lives. Each episode we explore a specific topic related to the experience of work with a focus on understanding why it matters and how to make it better. ​

Mental Health Matters

Caring for our mental health is essential to maintaining happiness, motivation, and drive both at work and at home. Regina Athié tells us how we can implement small changes to our everyday lives to improve our overall mental health.

Managing stress by learning to be resilient

Work is often a major source of stress. Even if we cannot eliminate causes of stress, we can learn to manage them. We talk about how to be resilient with Dr. Andrew Shatte’, Chief Science Officer at meQuilibrium a company dedicated to employee wellbeing.

Using e-mail, instant messaging and texting to build work relationships

The way we use e-mail, texting and other electronic communication tools influences how others perceive us at work. We talk with Joe Freed the founder of Cultivate, a company dedicated to improving the quality of electronic communication.

In Foundries, Blog, Berlin, Business Technology Platform

With Data And Analytics, Consumer Products Companies Seize New ‘Moment Of Opportunity’

Since 2015 and the rise of e-commerce hyper scalers,  we have witnessed a fundamental shift in consumer behavior, one that has dramatically accelerated due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a Bain & Company. Consumers today are increasingly making buying decisions on the values that they hold dear– health and wellness, sustainability, safety, ethically sourced materials – instead of factors like price and convenience.

As businesses look for new ways to reach, engage and serve consumers, the delivery of timely, tailored and relevant experiences have become key. While this shift represents significant transformation challenges for companies, it also represents an enormous opportunity to drive the next wave of growth in consumer industries.

For over 75 years, industries have organized themselves around the concept of the “two moments of truth” – get a consumer into a store to purchase a product, and influence them to use the product. And hopefully, the cycle repeats. In this linear path to purchase with touchpoints that focused on getting consumers to complete transactions in a store, the retailers, consumer products companies and wholesalers in the value chain had well-defined and complementary roles, and all stakeholders favored economies of scale.

This is no longer the case. Today, companies are reaching consumers directly in “moments of opportunity”, requiring them to have a more holistic understanding of consumer desires. This model favors economies of speed – companies that can spot moments of consumer opportunity and organize themselves the fastest to orchestrate the delivery of experiences and products, will win.

To respond effectively to these behavior shifts, consumer products companies need to differentiate themselves as a ‘category of one’, where their business is so unique that there are no direct competitors, and these companies need to make innovative and data-centric decisions.

One example that illustrates this dramatic shift comes from a Google study.  One participant spent 73 days and made 250 touchpoints (several  blogs, merchant websites, local retailers, product reviews on YouTube) before buying a single pair of jeans. Indicative of today’s consumers, this consumer is engaged with and desires to be inspired by brands through viewing multiple options before making a selection.       

This example demonstrates the changes businesses have to make to succeed going forward. We expect that soon, 50% of consumer products industry growth will occur through a direct business model. Consumer-facing companies will need to build compelling consumer experiences based on:

  1. Consistent master and consumer data across all channels to enable a consistent and meaningful experience
  2.  Full visibility of the entire value network, from sourcing and partner networks to all consumer touchpoints, both physical and virtual, and actual consumption
  3. Live access to, and use of, both structured and unstructured data to assess demand drivers and market dynamics in real time
  4. Scaled, quantitative and qualitative analysis of consumer perception, sentiment and feedback to deliver a unified, personalized user experience

Key Technologies & Innovations

So how can companies transform and adapt quickly to meet these new expectations and needs while reaping benefits in productivity, efficiency, personalization, and profitability. With intelligent technologies that can quickly increase consumer-centricity.

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