deal architect

Business as Unusual

19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is credited with the quote ‘That which does not kill us makes us stronger’. Since then, it has been used by many to inspire resilience and strength during adversity.

In the last few years, that resilience has been repeatedly tested by shock waves from large digital transformations, adapting to climate change, surviving COVID, and now navigating the Ukraine crisis. No industry or country has come through unscathed. Yet, like championship boxers, a breed of executives has learned to bounce back and keep on fighting.

In their dogged persistence, they are helping the world create new energy, new medicine, new mobility, new chemical formulations, new financial instruments, new ecosystems, new customer pathways, new business models.

Thanks to the sponsorship of Thomas Saueressig, Executive  Board member, Product Engineering and Peter Maier, President of Industries and Customer Advisory at SAP, I have been part for the last several weeks of a magical tour of this ‘Business as Unusual’

We have talked to countless executives at SAP, at its customers and its partners. The conversations have covered over 25 industries and 20 countries and involve a changing business vocabulary with concepts like molecular recycling,  green v blue hydrogen, decentralized energy markets, smart insurance, parametric testing in fabs, personalized medicine  and outcome based contracts. The transcripts of the conversations already exceed 2,000 pages.

We are organizing the threads along a series of themes such as Sustainable Energy Transition, Everything as a Service and Future of Capital. You will be hearing lots more about them in the next few weeks.

You already know about S/4HANA and SAP’s cloud products like SuccessFactors. You will get to hear more about products like AIN, BRIM, e-Mobility, Fioneer, GreenToken and many others which are helping with innovation at the edge of enterprises in their labs, their EV fleets, their treasury, their warehouses.  

Importantly you will hear in first-person from many of these ‘boxers’ who keep coming back for more.

Welcome to a New World. 

Analyst Cam: Salesforce Verticals – Health and Life Sciences

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission) as part of my Analyst Cam series.

This time it is Amit Khanna, SVP and GM, Health and Life Sciences at Salesforce.

The health and pharma markets have gone through an extremely challenging last couple of years. How will they emerge from the ups and downs? Amit presents on some of the trends they are seeing:

• 42% of the members say they're frustrated by the experience they get from their health plans/providers
• 77% of the providers say that non-traditional care revenues, such as retail health, care anywhere, are becoming more important
• 93% of the pharma companies are still not using AI effectively because they believe it's too complex or are unsure where to start.
• Almost a third of the $3.5 trillion the US spends on healthcare (nearly 20% of its GDP) is in administrative costs, much of it waste.

He explains where Salesforce plays – around the areas where EMR and ERP vendors play. Salesforce is more focused on longitudinal care outside the hospital, multi-channel engagement and the entire chain to provide personalized care.

He covers a lot of ground around vaccine management, telemedicine and other trends which accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic.

But, over and over it comes back to making the patient the center of the universe. I like his closing “Simple concepts (we are used to in other sectors) don’t seem to apply to healthcare. Providers ask you the same questions over and over…my date of birth doesn't change. Knowing about me is a concept (which seems foreign to) healthcare. If we can solve that, through the lifecycle of the consumer, we will reduce tremendous amount of waste in the system.”

Very crisply done in about 15 minutes.

Analyst Cam: Buday Thought Leadership Partners

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission) as part of my Analyst Cam series.

This time it is Bob Buday of Buday Thought Leadership Partners. For over 3 decades, he has been helping organizations think big at CSC Index, Bloom Group and now at the firm he leads.

We have a really invigorating conversation around “blockbuster” ideas which have influenced so many of us including Michael Hammer’s reengineering, Clayton Christensen’s disruption, CEB’s Challenger Sale concepts and several others.

He shares techniques which work (and do not work) when it comes to developing what he calls “momentous” ideas. Many of the ideas he has helped up shape end up as management books and influential articles in publications like the Harvard Business Review.

Nicely done in under half an hour. It is a nice primer to his new book Competing on Thought Leadership.

Analyst Cam: IFS Verticals - Manufacturing – Part 2

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission) as part of my Analyst Cam series.

This is part 2 of the conversation with Maggie Slovic and Andy Burton, Global Directors for Process and Discrete Manufacturing, respectively for IFS

In Part 1 yesterday, they provided highlights of 6 sub-verticals that falls under their definition of Manufacturing – Automotive, High-tech, Industrials, Food & Beverage, Chemicals and Life Sciences. They talked about the circular economy, servitization trends in product companies, industrial robotics and COVID’s impact on manufacturing.

Today they cover functionality in the IFS Cloud, discuss a few of their customers and some of the supply chain and other threads they picked up at the Hannover Messe, which is always a trailblazer of industrial trends.

Analyst Cam: IFS Verticals – Manufacturing – Part 1

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission) as part of my Analyst Cam series.

This time it is Maggie Slovic and Andy Burton, Global Directors for Process and Discrete Manufacturing, respectively for IFS

In Part 1 today, they provide highlights of 6 sub-verticals that falls under their definition of Manufacturing – Automotive, High-tech, Industrials, Food & Beverage, Chemicals and Life Sciences. Aerospace and Defense, an area IFS has long been strong at, is treated as a separate vertical.  They talk about the circular economy, servitization trends in product companies, industrial robotics and COVID’s impact on manufacturing.

Tomorrow in Part 2 they will cover functionality in the IFS Cloud, discuss a few of their customers and some of the supply chain and other threads they picked up at the Hannover Messe, which is always a trailblazer of industrial trends.

Nicely done – this one is only about 15 minutes long.

The New Polymath: The SAP version

I don’t like to play favorites across my books, but many readers say they really liked my 2010 book, The New Polymath.

The book bio read

“A Polymath—the Greek word for Renaissance Man—is one who excels in many disciplines. From Leonardo da Vinci to Benjamin Franklin, we have relied on Polymaths to innovate and find creative solutions to the problems of the day. How would these Renaissance men and women manage our current technology bounty? Which disciplines would they choose to focus on? Would they work on the architecture of next-generation green cities, or focus on nanotechnology?

As our challenges have grown exponentially we need to bring together da Vinci, Franklin, and many more. The New Polymath is an enterprise that excels in multiple technologies—infotech, cleantech, healthtech, and other tech—and leverages multiple talent pools to create new medicine, new energy, and new algorithms.”

I had a call with a SAP banking customer this week which took me back to the book:

    “He: Vinnie, a lot of these terms I have discussed will be new to you. So happy to revisit and clarify if we need to.

    Me: Believe me, as part of this project, I've gone from the auto industry and all the changes there (electrification, sharing, autonomy etc.) to healthcare to supply chains…

    He: it's fascinating, is it not? SAP is at the center of it all.”

I could have told him about also learning about a dazzling array of new business models,  carbon capture, cold chains. green hydrogen, molecular recycling, robotics in food service, reverse logistics, pharma track and trace and more. And the underlying tech it takes to support them including augmented reality, blockchain, computational chemistry, digital twins, not to mention hardened, high-reliability computing.

Over the last few weeks, SAP has allowed me to “walk the halls” with its executives, its customers and its partners. It has been demanding - not jet lag, but clock lag from Teams and Zoom sessions at all hours with folks in 20 countries so far - and trying to keep up with so much coverage SAP has across verticals, geographies and business processes. I replay the conversations as podcasts when I drive, I have nearly 2,000 pages of transcripts to mine.

Here we are in 2022 and we are worried about climate change, COVID and Ukraine. If you get away from all the political noise, our businesses are thankfully still focused on new medicine, new energy, and new algorithms.

And the realization that we cannot do it alone. I heard a story about how a high-level auto executive came to visit Christian Klein, CEO of SAP as supply chains were being disrupted and told him “‘We have a couple of challenges in our business which I cannot solve alone and I don't think we can solve it with just one software company.’ That was the genesis of the auto industry network, Catena-X and since then SAP has been thinking about networks for many more industries.

“We cannot do it alone” is showing up in SAP’s rapidly changing ecosystem. Long dominated by SIs, I have talked to strategy firms, Industry 4.0 operational partners, startups in the SAP.iO Foundries accelerators. The ecosystem also has digital agencies, NGOs, outcome-based outsourcers and more.

Not every customer tells me “SAP is at the center of it all”. Many of them talk about S/4 or BRIM or hundreds of other SKUs in the product portfolio. But then you see the forest for the trees - what the broad SAP family is working on. It about so many edge applications – it’s not just about new medicine, new energy, new algorithms, it’s about new everything….

Demanding it has been, but as I felt when I wrote the book in 2010, most of these conversations make me go “wow” – and optimistic about the state of the world.

Analyst Cam: Reveal Value

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission) as part of my Analyst Cam series.

This time it is Martin Rowan, Managing Partner of Reveal USA, based in Chicagoland.

Their website says “Our mission is to use our knowledge of the supply chain as an indispensable link toward commercial success and social good.”

Their client base ranges from global companies like BP to local Chicago-based companies with two common threads - they run SAP and they run some kind of a supply chain. “So, they make, buy, sell, distribute something - whether it's minerals, petroleum, petrochemicals or consumer goods.”

With 160 projects over the last couple of decades. he says he can actually guarantee results for clients - inventory reductions, turns and service level improvements, process efficiencies and product production throughput increase.

I like the client maturity model and the operational use cases he shares. And the sherpa metaphor he uses to describe how they help clients scale mountains.

Nicely done in 20 minutes.