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SAP.iO In Article, New York, Supply Chain Management, Sustainability

Turn Waste Into Value With Analytics

Trusting your data, telling stories about your success and knowing that every act, no matter how small, can help win the fight against waste was some of the advice shared by Queen of Raw and Topolytics, two gamechangers in waste management at the recent SAP Sustainability Summit panel discussion about orchestrating ecosystem innovation for impact.

“Zero waste can only be achieved with the help of data,” said Michael Groves, Founder and CEO of Topolytics, a data analytics business for waste managers. “Data shows public and private players exactly what is happening to their waste and will help them build better intervention options and create closed loops for recovery.”

Groves was one of the people on the boat hosting the Ocean Plastics Leadership Summit (OPLS) in 2019, a research expedition to better understand the scope of plastic pollution and to develop cross-industry solutions and partnerships to solve this global challenge over the next decade.

Seeing is believing

Whenever the ship approached clumps of sargassum seaweed, the participants would stop their meetings and jump into zodiac boats with their snorkeling gear. But they didn’t see any fish. And at first, they didn’t see much plastic either. That’s because it’s often not visible. Plastic in the ocean breaks down into small particles that are caught in seaweed and ingested by marine creatures.

“What you don’t see is the real problem,” says Groves, winner of the Circular Economy 2030 challenge sponsored by SAP and Google that year. A geographer who was appalled by the amount of plastic he encountered in South East Asia long before people began talking about the crisis, Groves believes waste is still not getting the attention it desperately needs.

While we may not actually see the damage, the data is irrefutable. An alarming 60 percent of waste produced in cities around the world gets dumped or leaked into the environment, and an equally alarming 61 percent of people globally don’t have access to proper waste management infrastructures. It’s a thorny problem because the waste value chain is very complex and opaque, with many private and public sector players and a significant informal sector around the world. To make matters worse, there is a huge mix of materials, each requiring different methods of recovery and recycling.

Realizing that money follows data, Groves developed a solution that uses analytics and machine learning to follow trash as it travels. Clear data and insights are fundamental to spurring investments in new infrastructure and innovation in the sector. With useful data available about what waste is where and in what quantity and quality, companies can then procure this waste much more effectively and bring the materials back into their production processes through platforms like SAP Ariba software.

Debunking myths

“Many companies think they know what’s going on with their waste, but they are usually surprised by the truth,” he says. “There is huge potential to unlock economic and social value that is currently just draining away!”

One person helping fashion retailers stop the drain is Stephanie Benedetto, co-Founder of Queen of Raw, a marketplace to buy and sell unused textiles, from organic cotton to some of the highest quality luxury deadstock fabrics that would otherwise be burned or buried.

Benedetto was inspired by her childhood experiences growing up in an immigrant family in the Garment District of New York. Her grandfather would collect unused clothes from the neighborhood and repurpose them into beautiful, fashionable items for local sale. It was a profitable, sustainable business that inspired her when she later became a corporate attorney on Wall Street, specializing in technology and sustainability. When the crash came in 2008, she decided to start her own company.

When Benedetto first started talking to brands and retailers about sustainability years ago, it was seen as nice to have. People responsible for sustainability were new in the position, and they did not have big budgets. Her first big challenge was debunking the myth that sustainability has to cost a lot of money.

She realized that retailers became paralyzed when faced with objectives such as becoming 100 percent sustainable by 2030. “You wouldn’t know where to start on day one if you heard that. It’s too much, too fast,” she says. “We go to the retailers and help them pinpoint the valuable waste in their supply chain. We look at their unused inventory and their deadstock. We help them sell it on the marketplace, and we provide tools to minimize waste going forward.”

Once the retailers are making money on their unused inventory, she explains, they can start putting their savings into doing other good work such as paying their workers better wages and using innovative technology and sustainable materials without increasing overall capex expenditure.

New SetSail Analysis Shows Micro-Incentives Combined With Actionable Data Are Key to Successful B2B Sales Cycle

–SetSail, the Revenue Execution platform for sales, releases new data on the anatomy of a successful B2B sales deal, derived from its analysis of deals at six large enterprises, including one of the Fortune 10, over the past two months. SetSail found sales reps are most effective when given data on the next best action in tandem with a micro-incentive (points that lead to prizes and rewards) to act. On average, if a sales rep takes action on five or more success indicators the deal win rate increases by 62%.

“Reps must be aware of the path to success and motivated to execute on multiple recommendations, focusing on the small wins that lead to big deals,” said Haggai Levi, SetSail CEO. “Micro-incentives accomplish this – they lay out success indicators and prompt reps to take action, making the difference between a deal closing and an indefinite sales cycle.”

As part of its analysis, SetSail broke down the three most important elements of a B2B deal: Buyer Persona (who the rep is contacting), Buyer Engagement (contact type and frequency) and Deal Progression Keywords (keywords discussed throughout the deal cycle) and the impact that micro-incentives play within them.

ScanTrust on a steady growth path

The outbreak of the global pandemic accelerated the need for contactless solutions to facilitate customer interactions and for QR codes as a connected products gateway. Scantrust, with its proprietary barcode scanning technology, has benefited from this trend resulting in over 100 percent revenue growth since the pandemic began.

Scantrust is a connected products platform for companies that sell physical products in an increasingly connected world. Through its patented processes for using QR codes, the company offers brands solutions to help maintain brand integrity, increase traceability in the supply chain, and create a direct channel for communication with end customers. Since the company’s founding in 2014, it has consistently developed and advanced a brand protection solution that is poised to be a game-changer in fighting counterfeits.

“We offer several options for brand protection and security using QR codes that intrinsic copy protection while also being scalable to integrate into existing product packaging processes. Using QR codes as an IoT gateway, we enable brand owners to mitigate risk in their supply chains and drive growth through direct end-customer engagement”, explains Scantrust’s CEO and co-founder Nathan J. Anderson.

More than 40 active enterprise customers worldwide are currently using Scantrust’s QR solution, and this number will significantly change in the next few months, as revealed by Nathan. The majority of the customers are multinational global brands with operations in Asia, Europe, the US, and South America and Africa.

Scantrust has also had healthy revenues figures since its launch, consistently realizing 100 percent year-over-year revenue growth, and the first quarter of 2021 saw this trend continue with record quarterly results. Scantrust takes pride in retaining customers and has a good record of client retention. “Interestingly, we did not see a single client churn since the start of the pandemic. On the contrary, in the current environment, where supply chain disruptions have become the norm and counterfeit products have increased across the globe, we have seen our existing customers increase use on our platform and expand the application to more products to reach their customers in challenging times”, says Anderson.

How Staple is Helping to Power the First Mile of Data Processing

We talked to Ben Stein, CEO at Staple about converting documents into structured data and here is what he said about it.

First of all, how are you and your family doing in these COVID-19 times?

Ben Stein: We are all doing well, thank you! Like most of the world, all team members have been involuntarily separated from friends and family. Our team is decentralized across Singapore, Vietnam, India and Sri Lanka. Our relationships have shifted online, and that is something we have grown accustomed to. Thankfully our team, our families and our friends are all doing well.

Tell us about you, your career, how you founded Staple.

Ben Stein: I previously worked with KPMG in Australia, Europe and North America for almost a decade, then in various corporate positions in London and Singapore. After working with clients in banking, energy, manufacturing and real estate, I noticed persistent inefficiencies in both enterprises and SMEs around data management. I left my CFO position at the time to explore how deep technology (“deep tech”) might present potential solutions to these inefficiencies. I joined EF (joinef.com), where I met my co-founder, Josh, a Ph.D. computer scientist. Together we met with more than 150 companies to understand their most pressing pain points, and we built Staple to address them.

Staple’s solution can read, interpret, extract and reconcile data from semi-structured and unstructured documents, regardless of layout or language. Currently, we support more than 90 languages, and we are helping customers process data-heavy workflows in Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese and Indonesian.

How does Staple innovate?

Ben Stein: There is a lot of hype around big data, RPA, AI and analytics and their potential to rapidly accelerate the digitalization of business. What many don’t appreciate is that these technologies can’t function without a core ingredient: clean, structured data. RPA and bots are fantastic innovations, but they can only work with structured data. There is so much reliance on data, yet enterprises struggle to access, unlock and use it at scale because the data is not available in a standardized, accessible format. Without structured data, RPA bots cannot function, analytics tell an incomplete story, and information for decision making is either not timely, inaccurate, or not useful.

Many businesses are unable to reap the benefits of automation technologies as they cannot cross the divide between structured system needs and the unstructured or semi-structured realities of business. It’s the classic adage of “garbage in, garbage out”: unless meaningful, accurate, standardized data is ingested from the outset, RPA and automation implementations will fail. It’s important that digitalization agendas have proper regard for the “first mile of data processing.”

We dedicate a lot of effort to building software that employees actually enjoy using, as opposed to software that employees are forced to use. We don’t think there should be a distinction between software for SMEs or software for the enterprise; it should all just be software to be more productive. We also have a sharp focus on developing solutions that anybody – from the most junior employee to a highly technical CTO – can use. We’re working on tools that allow non-technical users to develop new AI models without touching a line of code. This introduces a level of flexibility that was previously out of reach for many users.

project44 Acquires ClearMetal Inc.

project44 announced that it will acquire San Francisco-based ClearMetal, a market leader in international supply chain visibility and predictive analytics for enterprises. ClearMetal’s patented artificial intelligence (AI) enables organizations to optimize their supply chains and provides customers with easy access to trusted, live information about their orders and shipments. project44’s acquisition of ClearMetal is the latest growth milestone preceded by building on tremendous 135% YoY growth, crossing the $50M ARR mark, and being named a Leader in the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant. This acquisition places project44 on the cutting edge of logistics AI, enabling customers to improve agility, and resiliency across their global and multi-modal supply chains.

Breinify announces $11M seed to bring data science to the marketing team

Breinify is a startup working to apply data science to personalization, and do it in a way that makes it accessible to nontechnical marketing employees to build more meaningful customer experiences. The company announced a funding round totaling $11 million.

The investment was led by Gutbrain Ventures and PBJ Capital with participation from Streamlined Ventures, CXO Fund, Amino Capital, Startup Capital Ventures and Sterling Road.

Breinify co-founder and CEO Diane Keng says that she and co-founder and CTO Philipp Meisen started the company to bring predictive personalization based on data science to marketers with the goal of helping them improve a customer’s experience by personalizing messages tailored to individual tastes.

SAP.iO In Blog, Global, Venture Studio

Venture Voices: Tips for successful start-up marketing

Start-up marketing, Storytelling and Co.: The Director of Product Marketing at Brilliant Hire by SAP shares some key lessons that that she has learned through the years.

By Katya Pokrovskaya, Director of Product Marketing at Brilliant Hire by SAP

Having recently made a career move, I joined Brilliant Hire by SAP as Director of Product Marketing just over a month ago. Brilliant Hire is an employee-led venture in the SAP.iO Venture Studio, SAP’s in-house incubator designed to build new growth businesses for the company. Having worked for a few early-stage software start-ups in the past, it feels great to be back in the innovation space. I wanted to share two tips that I believe are key in developing strong messaging and positioning for a SaaS start-up: building your story around your audience and communicating value over functionality.

So, why does my start-up need marketing?

As a marketer, a question that I often get asked from non-marketer colleagues and friends is “Why do we even need marketing in the first place? We’re building a great product. It should sell itself”. It’s an interesting question as there’s no doubt that a great product is the foundation for the success of a business. Organizations such as Product-Led Institute have built fantastic frameworks and entire training programs on building fast-growing SaaS businesses with a product-led approach. However, as important as product is, so is getting the word out about it in a way that will resonate with your market. Marketers exist to craft a clear, compelling story and bring it to the right people at the right time – to ultimately communicate the value of your product and drive growth.

Tip: Make your customer the hero of your (marketing) story

Who is your target audience? If you’re trying to appeal to everybody, then you’re probably not appealing to anybody. I would argue that the number one rule of marketing is this: know your audience. It starts with taking a step back from what you’re building or selling to listen and empathize with your target user and customer. Try to learn as much about them as possible to understand their unique needs and think about where you can help. Make time for qualitative research such as interviews and focus groups to build detailed buyer/user/customer persona profiles. If your product addresses a few different audiences, repeat the audience profile exercise for each one to understand all the key personas that you are positioning your product to. Ask yourself: Who are you building your product for? What problems does it solve for them? What value can it bring to their lives?

The expert knowledge you gain from empathizing with your audience should be the foundation for your marketing storytelling. Think of your marketing message as a story and your customer as the hero of the story. I recently came across an interesting framework for crafting a marketing story in a great book that I’m reading: Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen by Donald Miller. As in any story plotline, the hero (your customer) will need to overcome a challenge or obstacle. Eventually, they meet a guide (your product/service/solution) who will offer them a plan and provide a call to action to help them solve the problem. How does your product help customers overcome a challenge and make them successful?

Tip: Communicate value, not feature/function

In the fast-paced, information-saturated world that we live in, communicating value helps people quickly understand why they should care about your product. When creating marketing messaging for software, it can be easy to resort to listing the features and functions of the amazing SaaS product that you’re building. However, unless you’re targeting a highly technical customer, this approach most likely wouldn’t resonate with your audience. Instead, think about how you can help your customer: specific use cases for your product, the problems solved for the end-users and ultimately, the value that it brings. Even better, could you quantify the value to show things like time saved or ROI?

Stewart Butterfield, the co-founder of Slack, once sent a memo to his team that said: “Just as much as our job is to build something genuinely useful, something which really does make people’s working lives simpler, more pleasant and more productive, our job is also to understand what people think they want and then translate the value of Slack into their terms”.

The category of company-wide messaging software wasn’t new when Slack entered the market in 2013. However, Slack was unparalleled in translating their platform’s capabilities into a clear value proposition. By positioning themselves as a replacement for email and the place “where work happens”, Slack clearly communicates how its product makes users’ working lives simpler, more pleasant and more productive. The strong messaging and positioning, coupled with a fantastic product, powered Slack’s impressive hypergrowth.

At the end of the day, customer-centric marketing that communicates clear value will make it quick and easy for your audience to understand why they should choose your product over all of the other options out there.

Check out the SAP.iO Venture Studio website to learn more about how we drive organic innovation for SAP.

About Brilliant Hire by SAP

Brilliant Hire intelligently matches candidates with a personalized shortlist of a company’s jobs based on what really matters to them. It allows the candidates to search based on their skills, interests and passions — instead of keywords.

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.

SAP.iO In Portfolio News, Supply Chain Management

Pangaia introduces ‘digital passports’ in apparel

Apparel brand Pangaia has today partnered with traceability solutions provider Eon and will leverage its CircularID Protocol to introduce ‘digital passports’ in its garments.

With product-specific QR codes linked to a cloud-based platform, Pangaia customers will be able to scan items and access a digital archive of lifecycle data including carbon emissions output and water usage.

Natasha Franck, founder and CEO of Eon, said: “Through product digitisation, Pangaia is redefining the relationship between brands, products and customers – pioneering an entirely new model for sustainable commerce and taking a mission-critical step towards realising a fully circular business model.”

SAP.iO In Portfolio News, Supply Chain Management

LiveEO Enters Strategic Partnership with Planet, Setting Preconditions for Rapid Expansion

Earth observation company LiveEO has today announced its partnership with Planet, the leading provider of global, daily satellite imagery and insights. The strategic move empowers LiveEO to massively scale its infrastructure monitoring operations around the globe, avoiding friction in the procurement of satellite imagery.

During the past 12 months, LiveEO has been able to quadruple its customer base by establishing more client relationships outside of Europe, especially in the United States and Australia. In order to accommodate its growing customer base, LiveEO doubled the size of its engineering team and significantly strengthened its infrastructure, with the new partnership being a central component of this effort.

Different from the traditional reseller model prevalent in the satellite data industry, as a part of the Powered by Planet program, LiveEO is able to purchase satellite imagery up front, with no predefined areas of interest (AOIs). Allowing the data usage to be freely and seamlessly adjusted to current customer needs.

“From day one we developed our tech stack with a clear focus on scalability”, says Daniel Seidel, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of LiveEO. Since every newly onboarded customer entails vast amounts of data to be acquired and processed, and with quick turnaround times being one of LiveEO value propositions, velocity is key. “To build scalable applications, we need great APIs to purchase data on a recurring basis without human interaction. In this regard, we consider Planet a role model for other satellite operators in the industry, which at times still handle the ordering process via email.” concludes Seidel.

SetSail Leverages AI To Empower Sales & Increase Team Productivity

SetSail, an AI-powered sales tracking, motivation and empowerment platform, leverages AI to identify buying signals and provide recommendations for sales teams, and help them follow the best path of action to closing deals faster and building good selling habits.

Back-Of-The-Box Details

SetSail is designed to help sales teams automate their sales data and buying signals in their CRMs to improve sales team behavior, helping salespeople at every level of an organization improve their productivity and performance while closing deals. SetSail’s signal-based coaching app also uses these signals to help managers coach their reps to close deals and generate revenue more efficiently.

The signal-based platform offers three different solutions, including:

SetSail Collect, which integrates all sales data from disconnected sources into a single view in a CRM or any other platform, and allows salespeople to pull relevant information for specific buyer interactions;
SetSail Discover, a solution that analyzes customer interactions with salespeople and provides 370+ prescriptive buying signals to help them uncover what is driving the buyer’s deal and decide what actions to take; and
SetSail Accelerate, a custom program that uses real-time micro-incentives to increase sales team motivation, rewarding reps for the right actions throughout the customer relationship.

Who It’s For

SetSail is designed for everyone involved in the sales cycle, including CROs, sales managers, sales reps and more, at organizations of all sizes.

Coca-Cola chooses Shippeo to provide real-time visibility for its road transport

The real-time visibility of Coca-Cola HBC’s transportation network provided by Shippeo will allow the company to further improve both internal and external logistics efficiency, by improving collaboration with its carriers.

The deployment of the technology aims to improve service levels, while at the same time reduce transportation costs, due to a reduction in waiting times, improved flexibility, and resources planning.

Valentin Radu, Logistics Technology & Automation Manager at Coca-Cola HBC said: “The scale and complexity of our operation creates a large administrative effort to coordinate with carriers, which makes handling exceptions time consuming. By implementing Shippeo’s real-time transportation visibility platform, we aim to streamline our logistics operations while further improving on-time deliveries to our customers.”

Data prep platform Explorium raises $75M

Explorium, a startup developing an automated data and feature discovery platform, today closed a $75 million funding round led by Insight Partners with participation from existing investors. The capital, which brings the company’s total raised to $127 million to date, will be used to expand Explorium’s platform after a year in which it doubled its customer base and more than quadrupled revenue, according to CEO Maor Shlomo.

In machine learning, a feature is a property or characteristic of the phenomenon being observed. Features are usually numeric, but structural features such as strings and graphs can be used in pattern recognition. Feature engineering — the process of using domain knowledge to extract features from raw data via data-mining techniques — is often arduous. According to a Forbes survey, data scientists spend 80% of their time on data preparation, and 76% view it as the least enjoyable part of their work. It’s also expensive. Trifecta pegs the collective data prep cost for organizations at $450 billion.

SAP Startup Spotlight: Staple

Ben Stein is CEO and cofounder of Staple, a Singapore-headquartered AI company specializing in data capture, processing, and reconciliation in more than 90 languages. He is a chartered accountant with past experience at KPMG, Octopus Investments, and Entrepreneur First. Ben Stein has degrees in law and commerce and is a full stack developer. In this interview, he explains what his company has to offer and what’s next for Staple.

How Parcel Perform is reimagining the logistics experience for businesses and end-users

The logistics market in Southeast Asia is expected to reach $55.7 billion by 2025, at a CAGR of 5.5 percent. Some of the key catalysts in this market include the rapid growth of e-commerce, enhanced trade across the region, and accelerated infrastructure development. This does not come without challenges, however. Last-mile deliveries can be difficult due to complexities in geographical terrain, poor roadways, and transport systems like railways.

Technological innovations in logistics and freight management are meant to address these opportunities. In this TechNode Global Q&A with Dr. Arne Jeroschewski, the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Parcel Perform, we learn how innovations in logistics are improving the user experience and ultimately enhancing value for both businesses and consumers.

A winner at the ORIGIN Innovation Awards — Startup Awards in Logistics and LMF, Parcel Perform is a carrier-independent delivery experience platform for e-commerce merchants and their end-customers covering 700+ logistics carriers worldwide. Established in 2016, the company has offices in Singapore (HQ), Vietnam, and Germany with a global team of 70+ experts in e-commerce and logistics management.

Before founding Parcel Perform, Dr. Jeroschewski was Vice President for Business Development at DHL eCommerce Asia Pacific, where he led the development of e-commerce logistics products tailored for online marketplaces and merchants as well as market entries for DHL eCommerce throughout Asia. Before that, he was Vice President at Singapore Post’s SP eCommerce, where he was responsible for the B2C e-commerce businesses including vPost and Omigo. In 2012, Arne was the founding CEO of ZALORA, South East Asia’s leading fashion e-commerce player across 8 markets.

Arne was a long-time management consultant at McKinsey & Company where he worked on technology projects in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Arne is a trained economist with a PhD in regulatory economics.