SAP Leonardo and the Intelligent Enterprise
In today’s world, integration is the way forward. SAP is heavily focusing its R&D investments on Leonardo and S4/HANA and the future looks exciting!
In the evolution, optimization of tasks had been a primary focus. It was “Industrial Automation” to begin with, then came “Business Process Automation”, and then “Digital Transformation”. SAP has articulated “Intelligent Enterprise” as the next block in the evolution chain.
Intelligent Enterprise consists of “Intelligent Suite” – consisting of the Digital Core (S/4HANA), CRM, SAP and the suite of SAP products, “Digital Platform” – consisting of Data Management and Cloud Platform, and finally “Intelligent Technologies” – consisting of Machine Learning, IoT and the likes. Leonardo represents this third component – “Intelligent Technologies”.
Below are the six reasons why Leonardo is the future of Intelligent Enterprises:
Future of Modern Technology
SAP Leonardo is a digital innovation system. It is an umbrella term that enables customers to access various SAP products and components across emerging technologies like Machine Learning, Big Data, Internet of Things and Block Chain. It covers anything that fits into modern technologies; including the predictive capabilities of S/4HANA.
It’s not just a Technology
Leonardo is focused on design thinking. It packages technologies and defines methodologies to address business challenges. Design Thinking is a methodology which focuses around creative ideas and solutions to resolve use cases. The fact is that customers don’t just need a good technology; they need an approach to find out what and how much the technology can do for them.
A Leading Brand
It’s just not SAP involved in their design thinking methodologies. It is a crowded market place with the likes of IBM, Microsoft and leading research universities such as Stanford offering their own innovations. Though is that their products often operate in silo – and this is where SAP comes in the picture. The challenge for SAP is that companies do not often think of SAP as a vendor for IoT, Blockchain and so on – when you think of SAP you mainly think of ERPs. But the strength of SAP’s brand lies across the SAP portfolio. SAP Leonardo has the capability and is designed to be integrated, so if you already have SAP ERP, S/4HANA or other SAP solutions.
Integrated Approach with Emerging Technologies
The best part or I would say a major benefit of SAP Leonardo is that it allows you to integrate multiple SAP products with emerging technologies. Let’s take an example, in the SAP Cloud Platform you can create Fiori apps that use IoT services. Now when integrated into your business processes as an end user you won’t necessarily know there is Machine Learning behind the scenes and you won’t see any different, but you will experience automatic decision-making or recommendations.
Machine Learning Technology at Different Levels
SAP was never limited, italso provides Machine Learning technology models at different levels which you can learn on yourself without too much expertise. These standard models are so well described that it covers around 80% of your needs. It’s possible to train your own models but you’ll need an expertise and the help of data scientist – in other words you need to know what you’re doing. Applications in SAP S/4HANA, such as cash reconciliation and invoicing, already include Machine Learning as part of SAP Leonardo and the number of these Machine Learning scenarios will soon become a part of S/4HANA is also growing more. By the end of 2018, there will be around 40 different use cases covering the main application areas within S/4HANA.
Embracing Internet of Things
Digital transformation is really growing more as services and technologies are been brought together by SAP Leonardo. For example, In supply chain and logistics, IoT processes across SAP S/4HANA, ECC and Hybris permit you to monitor goods as well as assets in-transit and survey the lifecycle of mass-market products, maximizing the value of your fleet and IoT-enabled business assets. IoT enabled processes in SAP solutions enable you to increase the value of products, including raw materials, semi-finished or finished products, combine real-time sensor data with business data from SAP and non-SAP systems and provide better insight into areas such as product inventory and replenishment, product consumption and utilization and consumer interactions.
