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First Water Finance helps mid-market companies modernize their FP&A processes by streamlining data integration across their business systems as a managed service or through one-time improvement projects. Through Microsoft Fabric’s OneLake, they establish a central source of truth that improves data quality and accelerates time-to-insight for their clients’ analytics needs.

However, significant skillset gaps and data infrastructure exist in current accounting and finance teams, particularly in technology/system experience, workflow automation, artificial intelligence (AI) use, and FP&A skills. As First Water Finance CEO Ben Lehrer explains, “Finance teams need to become more technical to spend less time being technical. This paradox is particularly challenging for emerging and mid-market businesses facing resource constraints.” Finance teams also bear the burden of managing system and data fragmentation as a ‘way of life’ in fast-paced organizations pursuing growth, acquisitions, and/or technology advancements. First Water helps these companies by building out the technology infrastructure needed to connect and manage their financial data.

As a partner to many high-growth and investor-backed companies, First Water consistently observes acute data fragmentation challenges and process gaps that must be solved to enable proactive, high-impact dialogue and meet stakeholder demands for information. Clients use various accounting and ERP platforms, including NetSuite, Intacct, Dynamics, QuickBooks, and a number of other operational systems. This fragmentation creates a web of data sources that need to be centralized and prepped for end-user needs.

First Water’s clients often rely on manual processes to keep their financial data in sync across systems, creating bottlenecks, increasing redundant updates across systems, and reducing time available for analysis. With multiple systems to maintain and increasing demands for faster insights, teams struggle to keep pace while preparing for growing data infrastructure and analytics needs.

The solution: Unified data integration with CData Sync and Microsoft Fabric

First Water implemented CData Sync for clients as their primary data integration platform, creating a standardized FP&A data layer through structured replication into Microsoft Fabric through Sync’s OneLake connector. This solution transformed their approach to data management and integration across multiple systems.

The implementation enabled automated data pipelines from various enterprise resource planning (ERP) or accounting systems (NetSuite, Intacct, Dynamics, QuickBooks, etc.) into Microsoft Fabric. This structured replication approach also included pre-modeled data from customer relationship management (CRM) platforms like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Pipedrive, establishing a centralized data management system with medallion architecture – progressively improving the structure and quality of data as it flows through each layer of the architecture (from Bronze to Silver to Gold layer tables). This architecture provided streamlined schema management and data transformation capabilities ensuring seamless integration with Microsoft’s Power Platform.

The solution’s flexibility proved particularly valuable for organizations anticipating future system changes. As Lehrer notes, “CData Sync checked all the boxes, even launching its dedicated OneLake connector as we started assessing partners. CData offers the connector set, underlying source data availability, structured replication engine, and flexibility we sought in seeking a cost-effective ‘pure play’ solution that delivers maximum return on investment (ROI) for our partner companies.”

“The combination of CData Sync and OneLake offers organizations an effective and achievable way to centralize, organize, and automate the data underpinning critical FP&A processes. As finance teams take more responsibility in managing the bridge from data capture to end-user consumption and continuously improving time-to-value, these tools and capabilities are powerful enablers to increase finance’s impact across organizations.”

—Ben Lehrer, CEO, First Water Finance

The result: Accelerated time-to-value and enhanced financial visibility

The implementation of CData Sync has delivered transformative results across various client scenarios. For one healthcare customer, CData Sync and OneLake eliminated redundant manual updates across systems, reducing update effort by as much as 88 percent and ensuring one-click, consistent data access for all team members. By removing manual extraction requirements, centralizing access points, and delivering data ready for individual process needs, the finance team automated recurring processes, eliminated process pain associated with multiple refreshes, delivered outputs earlier, and freed up team members to invest more time in critical thinking, bringing more value to performance review and planning dialogues.

Customers also experienced a dramatic shift from monthly to daily reporting capabilities. This enhancement enabled near real-time sales visibility through Power BI dashboards, fundamentally changing how the organization manages ongoing sales performance dialogues and helping sales leaders pivot activities proactively.

CData Sync automated data flows for another one of First Water’s clients (a public affairs firm) from their accounting system into OneLake, enabling daily sales reporting through Power BI instead of monthly manual updates. This real-time visibility helped teams make faster, more informed decisions about business performance. The solution’s expanded data capabilities allowed the organization to analyze ledger progression patterns, identifying opportunities for accounting process improvements and enabling more accurate flash reporting prior to completion of month-end close.

The overall business impact has been substantial across all implementations:

• Significantly reduced implementation time for new FP&A processes
• Enhanced data control and future flexibility through owned data repositories, with access to much more granular data as compared to the native reporting modules offered by accounting and ERP tools
• Improved scalability of central sources of truth
• Enabled new value-added analyses through structured dataset replication
• Increased finance team resilience to future system changes
• Created a foundation for future AI testing and integration

Looking forward

First Water continues to expand its use of CData Sync and Microsoft Fabric, helping more clients advance their data maturity and FP&A capabilities. The solution’s scalability and connection-based pricing model provide predictability and cost-effectiveness as client data volumes and tech stacks grow and evolve.

Experience the power of CData Sync

Transform your organization’s FP&A operations with CData Sync. Whether managing complex system environments, supporting rapid growth, or preparing for future system changes, CData Sync provides the reliability and flexibility you need. Contact us today to learn more about how CData can accelerate your Microsoft Fabric implementation.

The post First Water Finance Accelerates FP&A Data Transformation with CData Sync and Microsoft Fabric appeared first on ERP Today.

The challenge: modernizing global data operations

Despite their expansive operations, the company’s data infrastructure was managed by just three team members, all responsible for replicating critical financial and supply chain data from multiple SAP instances into SQL Server. The company faced several key challenges:

• High data volumes, requiring incremental processing: As the pharma business’s operations scaled, they were faced with high data volumes, which had to be processed incrementally. However, their existing SSIS-based data extraction pipelines were too labor-intensive and did not natively support the CDC capabilities the team needed to scale.
• Limited connectivity options across ecosystems: The team struggled with connecting a mix of legacy SAP ECC systems and modern tools like Salesforce, SAP S/4 HANA, and Power BI Cloud. The company’s decision-makers rely on Power BI as their main source of business intelligence (BI), which presents a cross-ecosystem integration challenge with SAP.
• Complex hybrid cloud and on-premises environment: In addition to integration needs across multiple ecosystems, the company faced challenges integrating across a mix of cloud and on-premises environments and needed a solution that could handle both easily.

“We had challenges accessing data from SAP ECC with an old version in some countries. I had to build pipelines to collect data from our on-premises ERP, cloud CRM, and other disparate operational systems into a central data warehouse for reporting,” notes the Business Intelligence manager at the company.

His team was using SSIS to support ingestion into their data warehouse. However, this was a manual process that required selecting columns from each table, programming data flows, and implementing the logic for incremental updates from scratch. This process took the small team up to a week for more complex data transfers.

The solution: unified data integration with Cdata Sync

The company implemented CData Sync to create a seamless data pipeline between their various systems. The solution enabled them to replicate SAP ERP, S/4 HANA, Oracle EPM, and Salesforce data into SQL Server in an automated fashion, without the need to manually design incremental replication and schema change detection logic.

They can also connect cloud services (like Power BI Cloud, SAC, and Salesforce) with on-premises systems like SAP ECC while processing 1.5 billion rows of data monthly. The team also maintains compliance with European data privacy and data residency laws through an on-premises deployment model that connects to cloud systems.

Overall, this solution has allowed a three-person BI team to support the organization’s 3,500 global data consumers.

The result: Accelerated growth and efficiency

The implementation of CData Sync has transformed  data operations. Sync allows this data to make it into decision-makers’ hands up to seven times faster, which improves the company’s agility and allows it to respond quickly to market and supply chain developments.

The solution also supports seamless integration across ecosystems like SAP, Salesforce, and Microsoft, allowing users to visualize data using their preferred tools and environments.

Looking forward

The company continues to expand its use of CData Sync, with plans to integrate additional data sources while maintaining its critical financial reporting infrastructure. The solution’s scalability and connection-based pricing model provide predictability and cost-effectiveness as data volumes grow. It will also look to replace more and more of its SSIS pipelines with automations supported by CData Sync.

Experience the power of CData Sync

Transform your organization’s data operations with CData Sync. Whether managing complex hybrid environments, dealing with legacy systems, or scaling for growth, CData Sync provides the reliability and flexibility you need. Contact us today to learn more about how CData can support your data integration needs.

The post Global Pharma Biz Streamlines Global Data Operations appeared first on ERP Today.

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As artificial intelligence continues to evolve on an almost daily basis, the AI milestones of yesteryear seem to become a little more ancient, even quaint in retrospect. Remember when IBM computer Deep Blue beat human champion Gary Kasparov at chess in 1996? Or when Alpha Go, created by Google’s DeepMind, beat Go champion Lee Sedol twenty years later?

Barrett Thompson, General Manager of Commercial Excellence at cloud-native pricing company Zilliant, certainly does, bringing up the historic events in an appropriately “deep” podcast this summer. Talking to Lou Simon, VP of Uptima Elevate at AI-powered transformation consultancy Uptima, the conversation between the two asks if AI will “eat” the software world, and where pricing fits into the current GenAI narrative.

For Thompson, there is a clear distinction between the “shock of the new” as represented by DeepMind and Deep Blue’s successes, to the more “subtle” nature of AI today.

As he puts it, AI can find what humans have overlooked, whether it be game moves not considered by a player, or suitable products not yet put past certain customers.

“[With AI] the bigger value add on a day in, day out basis is not that the machine is necessarily superior to what the best human on the planet is doing, but if it could even measure up to what an average or reasonably good person is doing – and just do it at a scale that we’ve never seen before,” he explains.

Thompson imagines studying thousands of customers in a database and figuring out which products ought to be sold to them. As he puts it, “If I had infinite time as a human, I could probably go build some Excel charts and pull it up and see the magic myself.”

But we don’t have the time – and that’s where AI comes in. Lou Simon adds to the discourse by examining what AI can offer the front end of a revenue life cycle.

“It’s mainly driven by product and pricing: we pick products, we price them out, we do a quote, we have a contract. We have these basic fundamental pieces, and being able to use Generative AI to maybe suggest ‘if you package this individual product – it could be something as small as a bolt – with this particular item, you gain more revenue on the backend, and more customer satisfaction on the backend.’”

The VP says predictive models can be used here with data coming from the service side, feeding into the vendor’s data, as collected on its ERP systems. None of this should have the shock of the new; indeed, Zilliant itself already embeds GenAI in its CPQ workflow and analytic capabilities. AI-driven pricing guidance of this sort comes from a deep – there’s that word again – integration between price optimization and CPQ solutions, helping deliver the right product at the right price to customers – whilst flagging any pricing in need of approval workflows.

When using one software to manage the entire pricing lifecycle and connecting multiple lines of business under a unified end-to-end process, it’s easier for AI to be used throughout the lifecycle to augment and automate critical pricing processes. It may not lead to global headlines, but with the subtle yet powerful nature of AI today, users can become augmented to take quicker action, output meaningful reports and set up alerts to power proactive price management.

And that could help businesses win the challenging game of business in today’s age, too.

The post What Pricing Can Learn From AI Game Champions appeared first on ERP Today.

These dual-role promotions are an extension of the Wellesley ethos of growth via real-world learning and execution.

As the new Global Chief Events Officer, Annette brings decades of experience in supporting and fostering the growth of global communities.  By leveraging her expertise in marketing, product innovation, communications and management, Annette’s new role will fuel greater community connection and learning opportunities across all events in the Wellesley family of brands that includes SAPinsider, Mastering SAP and ERP Today.  She continues to directly lead and support the SAP community in APAC in her CEO – APAC role at Mastering SAP.

As the new CEO of ERP Today, Mark Fried’s extensive experience in leadership and global growth, as well as his financial expertise is the perfect fit to lead the globalization of ERP Today’s product offerings, while working closely with Wellesley Executive Management to fully integrate the brand into the broader Wellesley ecosystem.

“The promotion of Annette and Mark is the next step in Wellesley’s commitment to globalize and drive community engagement for our members and partners.  Each of their respective backgrounds brings a host of experiences that perfectly align with Wellesley’s mission of leading the global discussion in the enterprise technology industry.” said Jamie Bedard, Chief Executive Officer of Wellesley Information Services. “Under Annette and Mark’s leadership, our events and ERP Today offerings will continue to innovate. Connecting and engaging the largest community of enterprise technology end-users and partners is the heart of the Wellesley offering, enhanced again with these promotions.”

Wellesley is the producer of 12 must-attend events globally across its three brands:  SAPinsider, MasteringSAP and ERP Today.  Renowned for their community networking, engagement and education, the events attract nearly 7,000 participants annually.

Acquired by Wellesley in 2023, ERP Today is known as the independent voice of the enterprise technology sector and is trusted by the world’s most influential CEOs and tech brands to deliver creative content that encourages its audience to think differently about the complex challenges of twenty-first century IT.

In a late 2021 acquisition, Wellesley added Mastering SAP to the portfolio that forms the largest and fastest-growing SAP membership group worldwide. Mastering SAP is a thriving community that has been providing brilliant content and unrivalled networking to SAP end-users in the ANZ and APAC region for over 27 years.

About Wellesley Information Services

Wellesley is the fastest growing global operator of B2B enterprise technology communities, driving global conversation, education, and action that brings buyers & sellers together with a membership model that benefits the entire marketplace.  With over 1.2M registered professionals from 50K+ companies and over 300 of the world’s most innovative technology companies, Wellesley fosters community networking, educational opportunities, and vigorous member involvement by leveraging digital content, research, publications, and live events.

Wellesley Information Services Media Contact:

Abbegayle Morrow

Chief Marketing Officer

Abbegayle.Morrow@wispubs.com

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The aftermarket and spare parts sector, as part of the automotive and industrial manufacturing value chain, has always served an important role in organizations, taking care of everything that needs to be done after the sale of a product or equipment to maintain it, improve it or upgrade it.

As vehicles and various equipment wear out, organizations reach out to the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) aftermarket, which includes a wide range of companies involved in manufacturing, procurement, distribution, retailing and installation of replacement parts to facilitate the services users may need.

Demonstrating how important this sector is, a recent survey by McKinsey and Company has shown that the service business (maintenance and repair of vehicles) generates about 45 percent of total aftermarket revenues, while retail and wholesale of vehicle parts make up the remaining revenues.

Known for being all-encompassing, aftermarket service is so important for OEMs as “it has a significant impact on customer experience, it drives brand loyalty, as well as retention,” explains Nirmal Assudani, enterprise applications and industrial market partner at IBM. “So customers are a lot more loyal if they experience a really good aftermarket service.”

The importance placed on aftermarket service can be seen as OEMs benefit when they can improve their estimated time of arrival, promise a high-confidence ETA of parts to their customers and give greater control in the hands of consumers when it comes to planning their equipment’s availability.

But as many industries are currently experiencing market and workforce constraints, exacerbated by harsh economic conditions and the pandemic, the OEM aftermarket is on a mission to improve user experience, better serve its customers and retain them.

To help achieve this, IBM and Oracle have teamed up for an aftermarket supply chain solution that combats many of the challenges facing this evolving industry in the face of changing customer habits, new regulations and complex supply chains. The solution joins supply chain planning and supply chain execution, financial planning, human capital management and even customer experience – all into a single platform designed to help companies transform their business.

The solution is built on IBM’s Cognitive Enterprise Business Platform for Oracle Cloud and powered with IBM’s intelligent workflows. It comprises a pre-defined, industry-specific design, based on leading practices, and it brings together a target operating model for clients as it benchmarks key performance indicators (KPIs).

One of the big challenges existing within legacy systems used for managing the aftermarket and spare parts sector is that lately “they’ve been a constraint on the business, rather than enabling the business to support new business models,” John Barcus, group vice president of manufacturing industries and emerging technologies at Oracle explains – as dated systems have prevented organizations from transitioning their business to meet customer needs.

With customers being even further challenged in a labour-shortage environment where they can’t source enough skilled employees, Barcus suggests this makes matters worse for the aftermarket landscape and reduces organizations’ expertise, making them more determined to pursue a way to get value quicker.

Showcasing how the solution can help, as one example, Barcus emphasizes that it can make a difference in identifying exactly what part a company needs replacing. “All of us have gone through that struggle, we’re trying to figure out what the part is that we’re trying to replace, what’s the service that’s required, and to be able to do this in a seamless process that makes it easier for our customers, to be able to engage with them as quickly as possible, this is a huge opportunity area,” he says.

As another example, organizations can benefit from the solution in the invoice matching process, with generative AI allowing them to quickly map those use cases with what’s available in the product “and come up with recommendations that save a tremendous amount of time,” Chacko Thomas, Americas Oracle leader at IBM, adds.

In addition to the solution’s capabilities, IBM is helping customers in the aftermarket space understand the gaps they have in their KPIs with its Cognitive Enterprise Business Platform.

Assudani explains that the team helps customers in the initial stage by performing a quick assessment to identify the process maturity levels, their performance levels when it comes to inventory, their current performance levels and how those compare to leading performance globally.

“And this gap between the two helps us quantify the business benefit which our clients can get. This becomes the foundation for creating the business case to launch this transformation journey,” Assudani concludes.

To watch the full live interview with IBM and Oracle on this topic, visit our live channel.

Visit ERP TodayLive!

The post Elevating the automotive and industrial manufacturing value chain with IBM and Oracle appeared first on ERP Today.

• Using ServiceNow’s Integration Hub, which enables users access to the automation engine where they can create workflows inside of ServiceNow using virtualized master data from SAP
• Organizations can jump start OT Service Mapping and OT Vulnerability Response Risk Calculations with full visibility of SAP.
• For any organization looking at how to modernize their operations, accurate, bio-directional real-time data integration from SAP into ServiceNow is transformational, even more so if it does not demand huge IT resources to make it happen.

Data governance, data accuracy and financial efficiency are crucial for enterprises. Bringing seamlessness and common sense to SAP and ServiceNow users is key to freeing-up IT skills, driving transformation and creating real business value.

Despite some positive signs in recent months of slowing interest rates and inflation, the global economy will remain in a volatile state as we head into 2024, at least according to the World Economic Forum. For most organizations faced with the prospect of continued uncertainty, this raises a few questions around investment and competitiveness. There are some common problems around IT skills shortages, as well as managing legacy IT investments, to which digital transformations are seen as an answer. But the fact is, not all transformations are equal.

Few businesses can afford a “rip and replace” approach to legacy IT, for example, especially when it comes to ERP systems. Understanding where and how to transform and have the biggest impact is challenging, especially as so many firms are tied to legacy ERP and may not have the time or budget for major change programs. This is where tools such as ServiceNowcome in, to provide a best-of-breed, platform-based approach to enabling modern workflows using existing data from incumbent ERP systems.

However, accessing data from legacy SAP software directly into a platform such as ServiceNow has never been easy, at least in real-time. It has led to a “swivel chair” approach, with teams of people moving from one screen to another to access, manage and input data sets across the two systems. This has been exacerbated by complexity, with often complicated workarounds due to ERP customizations, all of which demands considerable resources and often third-party consultancy support to find fixes. The result is a half complete solution and a lack of Trusted Data.

This pressure on resources has been widely felt, as a Nash Squared Digital Leadership Report found, claiming that the war for talent, and keeping pay demands reasonable, has been a big challenge for business, with 70% of digital leaders stating that a skills shortage prevents them from keeping up with the pace of change. With human-intensive processes required to enable data integration across systems, it is easy to see why.

Facing up to pain

According to Matt Hail, CTO at enosix, there is “a lot of talk from ServiceNow around SAP integration and using ServiceNow as a workflow engine to automate a lot of the gaps around an ERP system, particularly in procurement and in the supply chain and finance areas”.

Hail emphasizes that ServiceNow is gearing the software “to bring those workflows out of SAP” but he says it is not as simple as that. He references a potential customer that is having to confront considerable bottlenecks due to integration issues, where the actual integration with SAP is through the creation of a workflow item via service requests. This has led to developers having to build custom forms to manage the issue.

“All of that is handled inside of ServiceNow,” explains Hail. “The actual part of the integration that they use right now is that someone has to send a workflow in an email over to somebody on the SAP security team to actually do the integration.”

This has led to many people handling requests but also people using these exception processes to get priority-access SAP data to meet their timelines, leading to frustration and disappointment. Further, not showing the real economic advantages of deploying a best-of-breed solution like ServiceNow.

“There are limited APIs into SAP, to be able to perform these automated user access requests,” adds Hail. “We are also seeing this on the procurement side and on the finance side, where people are trying to access SAP data. What they’re doing for a lot of this integration is sometimes file transfer, and sometimes human integration, where an email will be sent to somebody and that somebody has to key data from a request ticket.” This is not a true transformative user experience.

For Hail, this is not an unusual scenario. He says he has also seen prospects wanting to handle requested items coming through ServiceNow in SAP, to create purchase orders and then invoices, for example. This has led to a lot of clunky custom workflows being created, due largely to archaic APIs. It demands expertise in SAP which, as Hail points out, is not easy to find. As important, it’s leading to errors at the cost of margins.

“Being able to find those resources and ServiceNow developers that understand the structures of SAP and how to call and sequence ABAP – there’s not really a base of talent out there that’s going to be able to do that,” he says. “So, you get into these large, private and very expensive projects, trying to create a fix.”

It’s not just the more complicated financial data sharing that is creating pain, though; it’s also something that should be as simple as setting a new employee up on a system. Hail says that onboarding and providing access requests can take an unnecessarily long time and a lot of resources. Given the pressure on skills, let alone costs (profit margins), this is something most businesses can ill afford.

Citizen gain, no pain?

Despite the pain points, businesses consistently make attempts to integrate SAP and ServiceNow to solve time-consuming processes. It’s understandable, in that most SAP customers would require a modern front-end system such as ServiceNow, to manage assets and purchase requests more efficiently. So how do organizations overcome the complexities of SAP integration to enable a transformation in workflows and ensure ServiceNow users have access to real-time SAP data?

Hail talks about the rise of citizen integration, with low-code and no-code software enabling a new generation of employees to implement data integrations in real-time, without the need for costly and lengthy IT projects. Against a backdrop of stretched IT resources and a need for speed and data accuracy (Trusted Data), citizen development has become a more viable solution.

As Varsha Mehta, senior market research specialist at Gartner said recently, organizations are increasingly turning to low-code development technologies to fulfill growing demands for speed application delivery and highly customized automation workflows. To do this, they are “equipping both professional IT developers and non-IT people with diverse low-code tools to enable organizations to reach the level of digital competency and speed of delivery required for the modern agile environment.”

For Hail, this is where enosix comes in, with its low-code SAP Connector, uniting SAP Procurement and Asset Management with ServiceNow, and SAP Plant Maintenance (PM) with ServiceNow OTM. He says that the business has deliberately avoided technical language and focused on business terms to help non-IT people use the software.

“What enosix brings to the table is our certified, native framework on SAP and our library of pre-built integration objects,” says Hail. “These are essentially point and click, enabling citizen integrators to use these low-code tools to automate workflows and access SAP data and virtualize SAP data with ServiceNow. So, they will be able to run those same transactions that they would normally run inside of SAP, through the APIs (that are now simplified and easier to use) and instantly into ServiceNow.”

There is no competitive solution, nor can this be easily replicated without years and millions of dollars of investment.

Enabling real-time transformation

Hail says that enosix has taken a couple of approaches for customers looking to get access to SAP data in ServiceNow. Firstly, there’s an app on the ServiceNow store, a turnkey product that “drops right into the ServiceNow workflow, for procurement and for IT Asset Management.” This means, thanks to virtualization of SAP data, ServiceNow users can instantly access vendor lists, materials, transactions, including purchase orders and so on.

“We provide a full vertical stack, all the objects into SAP, and our Connect API platform that runs on SAP’s BTP cloud that hosts all of the API’s. We provide an app that is point and click install and some minor configuration steps to hook it up to the BTP cloud.”

The second approach is using ServiceNow’s Integration Hub, which enables users access to the automation engine where they can create workflows inside of ServiceNow using virtualized master data from SAP. Hail says this means workflows, such as goods movement, PO creation, invoice release and request for quotation are 100% accurate, based on real-time data from SAP, without the need for writing code.

There are significant advantages here. As well as eliminating manual data entry with no-code integration, direct access to real-time data in SAP ensures trusted data is being used in ServiceNow and that there are now no constant swivel-chair actions between screens. Also, there is no middleware to worry about (in terms of licensing but also management) or custom data tables to maintain. It also means organizations can jump start OT Service Mapping and OT Vulnerability Response Risk Calculations with full visibility of SAP.

Hail says that for many companies, “quantifying the reduction in swivel chair” can determine their return on investment – but he says this really comes down to what sort of mess these companies got themselves into in the first place, with custom tools and workarounds.

“With the two screens, there’s such a disparity and a potential for inaccuracy and that’s just scaring needlessly,” says Hail. “With enosix, the virtualization – it’s basically the same system. It’s completely seamless and real-time integrated.”

There is also a data governance benefit here. With data virtualization, as opposed to traditional import ETL processes, you get the same data, one set of trusted data – and not two different versions of data that have not been synced or contain errors through manual inputs. With data governance and data sovereignty an increasing concern, this ability to ensure data accuracy is key. If data is being replicated across systems it becomes more difficult to control access and ensure accuracy.

Another benefit is managing internal IT resources. The ability to provide low-code tools reduces the reliance on valuable IT skills, freeing-up development teams to focus on other tasks. For any organization looking at how to modernize their operations, accurate, bio-directional real-time data integration from SAP into ServiceNow is transformational, even more so if it does not demand huge IT resources to make it happen.

The data integration issue is clearly a concern for both SAP and ServiceNow. Multiple customizations of SAP over the years have rendered each implementation almost unique. This, of course, makes it difficult for any subsequent upgrade to solve all issues. These customizations have led to complexities, something which SAP, through its Clean Core Strategy, is trying to address as it moves customers towards its cloud-hosted S/4HANA upgrade.

SAP is saying businesses should now do any customizations through custom apps on the SAP BTP cloud. ServiceNow is suggesting that users build any custom workflows through its platform. It fits with ServiceNow’s own raison d’etre to “allow employees to work the way they want to, not how software dictates they have to.”

For enosix this is more than solving a trusted data problem but also a skills and financial problem. As businesses look to transform their data with ServiceNow, the prospect of doing so without embarking on lengthy and expensive IT projects that will fail, is attractive. enosix’s ability to extend out to even the legacy ECC base of SAP users with a tool that works out-of-the-box, and with a typical implementation cycle of just two weeks, looks like a panacea.

In other words, that’s what you call real transformation.

The post A Virtual Win: Why SAP Integration is Vital for ServiceNow appeared first on ERP Today.

Sitting down with Robert Bloor, financial controller at Equiniti Group and Tim Wakeford, Workday VP of financial product strategy, ERP Today examined Workday’s offering beyond HCM. The occasion was a CFO-focused Gartner conference, in which various vendors pitched their stand on all things tech, AI and financial related.

In our chat, Wakeford talks about Workday’s relatively new status as not only an ERP disruptor, but also as an FMS firebrand: “I still have to spend time telling CFOs that, yes, we do financials and that kind of stuff because – frankly – most CFOs did not spend their careers working on Workday.”

The VP sees Workday as the CFO app of choice for service-based organizations such as Equiniti. The mission ties in with the increasing tech-ification of the CFO role, and the automation of “mundane” tasks within the financial space.

“We have planning and analytics in the same platform. Some of it is architecture, some of it is machine learning […] with using machine learning to start to rate expense transactions. We do the same for coding on journal entries, looking for strange balances and values.”

This means a move away from validation and moving to changing the business process, as the AI “thinks and reroutes” with an influence more active than passive.

“We’ve seen AI subtly, in a non-threatening way, really help us move the business forward,” as Bloor said prior to our interview in a talk at the summit, whilst also stressing the importance of ensuring AI has clean and complete data to work from.

Workday on a world-scale

But away from the fancy AI stuff, Bloor rates Workday for how it underpins its global footprint, mentioning payroll and having a “common denominator for everything” in its worldwide operations.

Baked into Workday’s financial management suite are global requirements for financial reporting, whilst also, in Bloor’s words, a protection of “the local environment” through compartmentalization that comes without “contaminating the global structure of the product”.

Equiniti, like any other global business, is also concerned with hiring and retaining top talent in its countries of operations. Here Workday’s most famous features on the HR side come back into play, with Bloor pointing to the Peakon Employee Voice feature’s usefulness for carrying out workforce engagement surveys.

“It shone a light on things we’ve never looked at. The clarity that’s brought with facts and analytics means we’re able to target within the business talent we want to keep and a lack of talent that we don’t really want. We can drill into why folks are happy or unhappy, and what motivates them.”

A good way to make people happy is to remove those mundane tasks which Wakeford mentioned earlier.

“A lot of qualified accountants today don’t want to do what I did,” laughs the VP. “They don’t want to spend hours reconciling banks on spreadsheets; they want to know what’s next and how that’s going to help them.

“We have to deliver an engaging experience – otherwise our customers don’t attract, retain or cultivate that talent.”

The message to CFOs then is clear – financially savvy CTOs won’t take your jobs, but your people will leave their roles if you don’t employ the latest tech. Bet your bottom dollar on it.

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In tune with this, Mike Thompson, senior partner at McKinsey & Company shared during a recent sustainability roundtable hosted by Samsara that post-pandemic, the firm has seen a huge amount of decarbonization demand from logistics clients, especially as the contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions by transportation “ranges anywhere from eight to 12 percent”.

“And a lot of that’s road freight, ocean freight, air freight. If you think about any shipper’s perspective, they can’t get to net zero without tackling transportation, including from scope one to scope three,” Thompson explains.

Similarly, for a large logistics company like DHL with about 600,000 workers operating about 300 aircraft and more than 100,000 road vehicles, it was becoming challenging to manage its fleet as efficiently, considering the variety of vehicles and their entire operational profile.

“Every single of these types of equipment has a different operational profile,” Stephan Schablinski, VP GoGreen North America at DHL Supply Chain, explained in the same roundtable. “And we need to understand which vehicle is deployed best for a given operation. We need data and, ideally, intelligence to help our fleet and asset managers to understand where to deploy which of these equipments best, so that it does the job that it needs to do.”

Despite previous research from IoT disruptor Samsara claiming over half (55 percent) of physical operations leaders surveyed in the UK and Ireland could have a hybrid or electric fleet by 2025, rising from 42 percent in 2023, electric vehicles (EVs) will continue operating within their constraints for the foreseeable future.

Schablinski expressed hopes of the technology and charging infrastructure for EVs to catch up, but in the meantime, he said: “We all wish that an electric vehicle will one day behave exactly like a diesel vehicle – that it will have the same range, it won’t take hours to recharge, it wouldn’t need specific training, that you’d find fueling stations everywhere in the country.

“But this is not yet the case for these vehicles. So that means electric vehicles react very differently to operational changes.”

Current fleet specifics require an analysis of hundreds of thousands of data records to find the current capabilities of an EV. This is where advances in technology enabled by Samsara can help operators collect all this data and apply logic as part of an algorithm to understand and assess whether something can work for a given vehicle or given operation.

As part of Samsara’s journey to connecting the world of physical operations like logistics, construction, energy, utilities, local governments and solid waste management, smarter solutions are offered with priorities focusing on safety. This is crucial considering the huge amount of frontline workforces who are in harm’s way as they do their job.

Also key is efficiency in helping answer some pretty difficult questions. According to Sanjit Biswas, CEO and co-founder of Samsara, some of these questions revolve around: “How do we understand which vehicles can be transitioned to new technologies like electric or hybrid fuels? How can we replan our routes to maybe serve customers a little bit differently in a way that’s more sustainable and ultimately reduces carbon footprint? And how do you integrate it really into those day-to-day operations?” 

Highlighting another big problem around fleet management being solved – the uncertainty whether previous fleet use cases are going to work for electrification – Thompson explains that the advancement of telematics data, whether from Samsara or the broader industry, now allows for a real network optimization.

“By using a digital twin, you can simulate your network going forward and drive real network optimization. Previously it was an unsolvable problem because the optimization was a theoretical one. Now you can actually simulate failure modes, and simulate exact service levels.

“In simulating those things, you can make real operational decisions with a fact-based mind that you weren’t able to have before when you didn’t have all this telematics-enabled fleet across your operations,” McKinsey’s Thompson said.

As the industry advances further and it becomes easier for organizations to manage mixed fleets, Biswas envisions that over the next five years we will see almost every major fleet go through this experimentation process and figure out what is right for them and what is practical, as based on workload and vehicle type. 

“But I would be very surprised if, coming to 2028, most fleets have not deployed some fraction of EVs where it makes sense for them and done that in a data-driven, practical sort of way,” the CEO predicts.

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