SAP Community - Telecommunications

Create a road map to your future at SAPPHIRE NOW 2019

2019-04-10T20:50:31+02:00

I work with the SAP Road Maps team, where our focus is to support our customer’s journey toward the Intelligent Enterprise with guidance on how SAP’s product portfolio will evolve, and the recommended solutions needed to implement their IT adoption plans.

We will be at SAPPHIRE NOW, to provide in-person expertise on how you can evolve your business.

WHAT TO EXPECT AT SAPPHIRE NOW 2019

The SAPPHIRE NOW theme this year is: Building an Intelligent Enterprise in the Experience Economy. The conference experience is built to bring the Intelligent Enterprise to life and provide companies with outcomes and action plans on how to respond to their opportunities and challenges.

The conference experience includes a new showfloor:

5 neighborhoods: Focused on the five main pillars of the Intelligent Suite. Each neighborhood is activated by a customer showcase, and

3 pavilions: Industries, Services & Support, and Platform & Intelligent Technologies. Each pavilion will provide intelligent enterprise guidance and action plans, so people can walk away with a greater understanding of the end-to-end scenarios that make the most sense for them, and the next steps they can take for impact across every part of the business

You will find our Road Map experts at the Services and Support Pavilion. In addition, the team will also be hosting numerous information and demo sessions during the course of the conference.

Call for Action:

Register for an in-person one-on-one session with an SAP Expert and build a complimentary, custom road map for your business. The team will offer two types of sessions:

Concept session: Create a sample transformation road map and explore business value, timelines, and integration in a 30-minute concept session

Deep-dive session: Build your own road map, select the best point in time to start your digital transformation, and create a rock-solid business case in a 60-minute deep-dive session.

Visit us to learn more about the tool, and how it can support your business’ transformation to an Intelligent Enterprise in today’s economy.

NOW, A LITTLE HISTORY …

SAP has provided customers with company insights through product, solution, and industry road maps for a long time now, however the SAP Transformation Navigator (essentially, a road-mapping tool) is still relatively new. The tool was launched at SAPPHIRE NOW 2017 to improve and prioritize the customer experience: customers were asking for prescriptive guidance about how to transform their existing landscapes towards an SAP S/4HANA-centric world. Since it went live, approximately 23,000 users have created more than 53,000 road maps to support their digital transformation planning.

SAPPHIRE NOW 2018: Intelligent Enterprise

One of the key messages shared at last year's conference was SAP’s vision of the Intelligent Enterprise, which was the focus of SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner’s keynote. He talked about a future where self-optimizing and context-sensitive processes would allow people to shift their focus to the essentials of their business.

Plattner reviewed SAP’s history from an era where ‘founders did everything’, to the development of R/3, then HANA in-memory database, to today’s Cloud Platform which focuses on providing customers more intelligent IT systems.

What is the Intelligent Enterprise in simple terms? It’s a company that has connected its back office with its front office, so that employees can use data to determine what their customers want and exactly how to provide them with what they want.

Planning the path to the Intelligent Enterprise

So, where do you start? Well, this is where we loop back to SAP’s road-mapping tool, the SAP Transformation Navigator. It’s free and easy to use, it helps customers assess their current IT landscape, and, perhaps most importantly, it helps bridge the gap between the customer and their digital future of becoming more connected. The tool brings together SAP ‘s strategy and expertise about the intelligent enterprise, and the customer’s business and IT goals, and produces a custom road map and supporting documents to guide customers toward their future landscape.

At SAPPHIRE NOW 2018, the SAP Transformation Navigator introduced a number of enhancements and usability improvements. The impression we made on our customers, along with the ability to proactively implement value-adding enhancements made us the 2^nd most visited booth of the entire conference, with over 1,200 visitors. At the SAP Transformation Navigator booth, within Digital Business Services, our experts hosted over 300 one-on-one and deep-dive sessions to help customers open business opportunities and create custom road maps.

SINCE THEN …

The product’s tool team has been continually releasing many significant features and functions to further enhance and simplify the tool, the latest of which are detailed below:

Customer Usage Data: “Which solutions run my business?”

The SAP Transformation Navigator prompts users to make certain decisions about their product usage, where they must define which capabilities they actually use within SAP’s products (including SAP ERP, SCM, SNC, SRM, NetWeaver).

The Customer Usage Data feature helps customers identify and pre-select which capabilities they are using by analyzing data from the SAP EarlyWatch Alert (EWA) service and mapping it back to the solution capabilities. It eliminates the need to analyze numerous capabilities for each complex product and manually select which capabilities might be used by various lines of businesses within the company. This feature automatically completes which capabilities our customers use today, essentially in ‘one-click’.

Addition of Value Maps

Value Maps represent each industry’s most relevant solutions, outlining main business needs and showing the recommended SAP solutions required for a best-run Intelligent Enterprise. Across various channels and tools, Value Maps are used as a starting point for customer conversations and interactive exploration of SAP solutions.

Value Maps can now be accessed in the tool, in the 'Add Capability' tab. The 'Value Map View' showcases a subset grouping of the most relevant and recommended solutions within SAP’s solution portfolio, and their capabilities. Value Maps provide clear guidance on implementation with one solution capability per business need, making capability selection simpler than before.

Easy learning: Quick Tips Videos

Late last year, we launched the Quick Tips Video Series, which includes short videos and demos to guide customers through the various features and functions of the tool.

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Join us at SAPPHIRE NOW next month, let us help you become a best run intelligent enterprise.

How the Experience Economy Blurs Industry Boundaries with Data and Technology

2019-07-03T01:19:57+02:00

Why do people buy cars? To get around. There may be other reasons, but in the end, what people want is mobility.

Car ownership, however, comes with associated trappings. You’ll need a license and insurance. You may also need financing. And don’t forget, if you want to protect your investment, you’re on the hook for maintenance and repairs.

Or so it is with an ownership-based business model where a manufacturer makes a product (the car) and you (the customer) take it away. The rest is up to you.

Give them mobility

Today, however, there’s another model – one that is driven by data and technology. Call it the outcome-based model. If what customers want is mobility, then give them mobility as a service.

This is the model followed by Care by Volvo, a mobility subscription service. In the era of the “experience economy,” Volvo recognizes that at least a certain segment of its customers care less about the product and more about the overall experience of mobility. These customers don’t want to sweat the details and responsibilities of owning a car. Instead, they pay a steady monthly price in exchange for a car – upgradable every 12 months – that also includes insurance and road-side assistance.

Blurring lines

Care by Volvo is only one example of one company in one industry moving to outcome-based models. The fact is, organizations everywhere seek to deliver better customer experiences by crossing traditional industry lines. In the case of Care by Volvo, one line crossed is the line between auto manufacturing and insurance. Now Volvo is generating value by partnering with insurance companies to make life easier for its customers. The insight here is that customers want experiences rather than products. Companies that deliver these experiences are winning the experience economy.

What does it take for a company to cross industry lines? Increasingly, it takes modern technology, flexible data management, and highly agile processes. By orchestrating these, companies are running on new business models that connect an ecosystem of partners together in an end-to-end value chain that makes life easier for customers.

Adjacent capabilities are ripe for the picking – but companies should take a broad view on what may or may not be adjacent. For Care by Volvo, offering insurance seems obvious enough, but what about other possibilities? A few years back, Volvo announced its plans for a driverless car – one that envisioned a partnership with Netflix (so that you can watch videos while the car drives itself) and Ericsson (so that you’ll have a reliable signal for streaming). The flexibility to quickly collaborate with new partners helps accelerate innovation.

Enabling disruption

Stories of companies like Airbnb, Uber, and Netflix disrupting industries with transformative business models are by now a decade old. In their place are countless stories of established companies catching on and learning how to drive market change on their own terms (as evidenced by Volvo).

What it takes to move forward is, first and foremost, an understanding of how customer expectations have changed. If the experience now takes precedence over the product, then companies have clear remit to make life easier for their customers.

Yet, while the primacy of the customer experience underpins how companies should pursue transformation, the practical considerations on how to make it all happen remains. This is where data, technology, and processes come into play.

SAP and the customer experience

At SAP we understand the need for data visibility, intelligent technologies, and agile processes. In fact, we’ve built them all into our next-generation ERP offering, SAP S/4HANA.

Data visibility: With a simplified data model that streamlines data access and management, SAP S/4HANA enables you to seize new opportunities faster. Now you have the agility required to string together new or existing business processes and plug into larger value chains. Subscription-based services, predictive maintenance, integrated financing – whatever the business model, SAP S/4HANA supports a single source of truth that gives you the visibility to understand your customers and serve them better.

Intelligent technologies: Internet of Things (IoT) technology can be used to capture important usage data from cars, industrial machines, coffee makers, and much more. Machine learning can then be used to compare this data against historical data in real time to identify patterns that yield insight about customer behavior. Blockchain technology can be used for virtually irrefutable transaction transparency while 3D printing can help speed manufacturing and move production closer to the end customer. SAP S/4HANA is designed to work flexibly with all of these technologies and more.

Agile processes: SAP S/4HANA supports standardized processes in 25 industries. Plugging into these processes can help you break through industry boundaries and collaborate with diverse partners to deliver the value customers seek. More recently, SAP has added customer experience data to the mix with the acquisition of Qualtrics. Today, SAP can combine now combine immensely rich stores of operational data with real-time metrics on the customer experience to help you serve your customers better.

And some help from SAP Transformation Navigator

If you’re implementing SAP S/4HANA, of even if you’re running it, SAP Transformation Navigator is a good place to start for blurring industry boundaries. This tool starts with your as-is environment and allows you to map out your transformation as you see fit.

Let’s say you’re a pharmacy, traditionally seen as a subset of retail. Now let’s say, you want to move toward markets in the insurance and healthcare industries. For whatever business you want to go after, you can use SAP Transformation Navigator to explore healthcare and insurance capabilities, and then import them to your retail road map.

Industry templates, meanwhile, provide a good opportunity to dive into exactly the kinds of processes your cross-industry competitors already run. SAP Transformation Navigator also supports higher-level value maps that instantly resonate with industry audiences with a “showcase view” that highlights the most relevant and recommended capabilities. For this reason, they help engage stakeholders, facilitate buy-in, and drive transformation forward.

With SAP S/4HANA, and SAP Transformation Navigator to help guide the way, SAP customers everywhere are moving forward with digital transformation projects designed to seize new markets and blur industry boundaries. For more info on how your company can do the same, visit us at www.sap.com/roadmaps.

Optimise your current SAP and build your case for SAP S/4HANA

2019-10-11T17:22:30+02:00

UKISUG Connect is the largest annual gathering of SAP professionals, experts, partners and users in the UK & Ireland. Spread over three days, UKISUG Connect is the ‘go-to’ annual conference for all SAP users and includes multiple opportunities to learn from SAP experts, network with like-minded peers and collaborate together to help influence SAP.

We have over 120 sessions for you to chose from in this year's agenda, including a two-part session delivered by SAP on Business Scenario Recommendations.

During this session, we will explore two tools, which are complementary to optimise your current system (SAP ERP or SAP S/4HANA), discuss with your business executives and prepare your digital transformation.

The SAP Innovation and Optimisation Pathfinder report helps you get most value out of your current SAP system and SAP maintenance entitlement. It provides you with tailor-made recommendations on areas of relevant SAP innovations, business process improvements and IT optimisation potentials. Two versions of the report are available: SAP ERP or SAP S/4HANA. More information on www.sap.com/pathfinder

To best prepare your transition from SAP ERP to SAP S/4HANA, and secure business buy-in, start with the next generation of the SAP Business Scenario Recommendations. Find out how SAP S/4HANA supports your business goals. Receive specific process performance insights and tailored recommendations for SAP S/4HANA by line of business. More information on www.s4hana.com

These interactive reports are based on data from your current SAP system. They are available free of charge for all customers on SAP maintenance.

With the SAP Innovation and Optimisation Pathfinder, allows you to find out:

Where are areas of business process improvement? And how are you positioned compared to your peers?

What are the most relevant innovations? Out of the vast offering including SAP Fiori apps, Business Suite enhancements, SAP S/4HANA scenarios or Cloud extensions.

What are the most relevant innovations in SAP S/4HANA 1809? If you are operating an older SAP S/4HANA release

Where are potential areas for IT optimisation?

What are the next steps?

The Next-Generation SAP Business Scenario Recommendations for SAP S/4HANA allows you to find out:

Why move to SAP S/4HANA? And how does SAP S/4HANA support your business goals?

How to secure business buy-in? With specific business performance insights and most valuable business scenarios for SAP S/4HANA

What are the benefits? So you know where to start your journey and get tailored recommendations by line of business

Every SAP Business Scenario Recommendation report is industry-focused and tailored for each SAP customer, based on your company’s SAP ERP system input. Both reports are tailor-made and free for every SAP maintenance customers.

Who is Rene Cedat?

René Cedat is in charge of Customer Value Experience in UK and Ireland for SAP, helping companies identify and quantify business and IT improvement opportunities and preparing for the move to SAP S/4HANA, by addressing topics such as business performance improvements, IT TCO reduction, and innovation agility.

View the full agenda here

3 Ways Unified Communications Can Improve Your Customer Service

2020-02-25T11:34:09+01:00

Contacting customer services often feels like a real chore. It’s something that we - in our roles as consumers – tend to avoid doing whenever possible. As a business owner, that’s not how you want your customers to feel about your company. You need to find a different way to approach customer service.

What if the service you offered could win customers over from your rivals? More than that, what if it could lead your customers to recommend you to friends and relatives? The fact is that customer service truly is that important to consumers.

(https://www.zendesk.com/blog/why-customer-service-is-so-important-to-online-shoppers/)

How, then, can you make your customer service a differentiator? How can you deliver a customer experience that sets you apart? The answer could be via unified communications. Put all communications under one unified umbrella, and you can offer customers a better end-to-end service.

There are many ways in which unified communications can boost customer service. We’re going to deal with three of the most significant below. First, though, let’s talk about precisely what the phrase ‘unified communications’ means.

What Does Unified Communications Mean?

Unified communications (UC) is one of those phrases that’s simpler than it first appears. UC is a new way to approach modern business communications. With a UC platform, a firm can bring together – or unify – all their different channels. You can blend all the ways you use to speak to customers, clients, and team members.

With UC, you don't juggle email accounts, phone lines, IM services, and other channels. Instead, everything gets brought together. A UC solution helps businesses manage all their channels more effectively. It also allows for enhanced integration of those channels. That means a broader scope for collaboration both within and beyond the organization.

The overriding purpose of UC is to enhance human-to-human contact. A unified platform makes it easier for a company to communicate effectively. Unified communications, as a result, can have a profound impact on customer service.

Three Ways Unified Communications Can Help Your Customer Service

Effective communication is vital to customer service. Whoever your customers are, being able to interact with them efficiently is essential. UC platforms open a host of new avenues for your customer service provision. The following are three ways that UC can help you to deliver better customer service.

Provide Better Information, More Quickly

When a customer contacts you, they’re looking for a swift reaction. They want their questions answered or issues solved as quickly as possible. Unified communications better places you to provide precisely that kind of service. With a UC platform, you can offer better information, in far less time.

(http://customerthink.com/how-to-improve-your-customer-service-response-times/)

With a UC system, an agent can swiftly find an answer to any customer query. That might be by accessing order information. It could be by contacting an expert within or outside the organization. Either way, you can do it all in the same system, thanks to UC. No longer do customers have to suffer long hold times or wait for you to call them back.

That kind of efficient cross-organizational communication, too, helps you to provide better information. Your agents can share in-depth details via email or other channels while talking on the phone. They could even hand off a customer to a specialist with ease.

Be Available to All Customers at All Times

If you run an international firm or operate 24/7, you need to communicate via many channels. Customers abroad may not be able to reach you on the phone. Someone buying online in the early hours of the morning may need an answer before your office opens. UC solutions help you to communicate better with these customers.

The unified platform draws together communications from all channels. That makes it swift and straightforward to respond to out of hours queries. You might even be able to handle them with chatbots. It also means you can transfer specific questions to locations in different time zones if you have them.

What’s more, UC lets you deliver consistent service across channels and devices. Your staff will have quick access to all prior contact with a customer. Take, for example, if someone exchanges emails with your firm and then later calls you up. Your agent who answers the call can bring up the past email thread with ease via a UC platform.

Enhance Interactions & Strengthen Relationships

UC platforms give you a broader range of ways in which to communicate with customers. You don’t have to only rely on phone conversations or email threads. You can introduce enhanced interactions to take your customer service to a new level.

Collaboration tools like screen-sharing or video conferencing are vital in this regard. They allow your staff to walk customers through solutions to their problems. Your agents can genuinely show them what they need to do to get products or services back on track. All those options are that their fingertips within the same system.

(https://www.shopify.com/blog/customer-retention-strategies)

The impact of such personal and effective service is profound. It creates far stronger customer relationships. Your customers will view you as an organization that cares. They’ll know that you give as much attention to aftercare as you do to sales. That will make them far more likely to become loyal, repeat customers.

Customer Service Benefits from a Unified Approach to Communication

Superior customer service is about always doing your best for your customers. You need to deliver the same positive experience every time they reach out to you. That means offering accurate information quickly. It also means being able to do so wherever the customer is, and however they contact you.

Unified communication is a solution that lets any firm achieve that level of service. By integrating communication channels, you can always interact efficiently. You have the info and the tools at your fingertips to provide the service your customers deserve and demand.

C19FREEACCESS – SAP Qualified Digital Transformation Assessment Report

2020-04-21T21:21:25+02:00

Note to SAP Community members: SAP recognizes the importance of the integrity of the SAP Community. In an effort to continue to support the community and at the same time adapt to this time of uncertainty, we are creating a temporary space for partners who have free solutions that can help you continue to move forward. Our intention is to give you direct access to their solutions as they may provide you with practical help to tackle COVID-19 disruptions.

The spread of COVID-19 has affected almost all spheres of human life – physical, emotional, and economic. Businesses are grappling with this unforeseen situation and trying to mitigate several challenges. As this global crisis signals business and cash flow difficulties for the next few months, we joined hands with KTern to do what little we can for the SAP fraternity we know and love.

In the spirit of goodwill, we will be delivering a KTern product-automated SAP Qualified DTAR (Digital Transformation Assessment Report) to help businesses with their SAP productivity now and beyond COVID-19. The report is cost-free with no strings attached as we stand together during this crisis to ensure your productivity at first and happiness at best.

Within 2 business days of Auto-Assessment (remotely), KTern will auto-generate the SAP Certified DTAR to help organizations map their “as-is” SAP system, identify areas to optimize, and present a roadmap for the effective realization of the possible optimizations.

What does the SAP Qualified DTAR contain?

Custom Process Auto-Assessment

ECC optimization, SAP S/4HANA impact and archiving analysis of custom processes

Custom to standard process adaptation scenarios in SAP S/4HANA

Landscape Auto-Assessment

Interface & add-on analysis and its SAP S/4HANA testing impact

User license optimization recommendations

Data footprint analysis of the SAP ECC landscape

Business Process Auto-Assessment

Materiality analysis and process mining for complexity & risk estimation

Fit-gap analysis and insights

Training scenarios and stakeholder recommendations

Test case recommendations

Deviations and optimization insights of existing business processes

Roadmap and Effort Auto-Estimation

Determination of right product choice & migration approach

Project forecast with roadmap and effort

Simulation results of KTern's S4HANAPEDIA.AI engine which comprises intelligence from 127 successful SAP S/4HANA projects

Who are eligible to receive the SAP Qualified DTAR?

ECC customers who want a roadmap for their transition to SAP S/4HANA with cost, time, and effort estimations

SAP S/4HANA customers who want to identify optimizations in their SAP landscape

SAP ECC customers who want to identify optimizations in their existing SAP ERP system and evaluate the feasibility

ECC customers who have completed the SAP Readiness Check and would like a further analysis of their SAP ECC system to understand the impact of SAP S/4HANA better and plan accordingly

Enterprises that want to auto-generate test cases to optimize their testing processes

SAP ECC customers with excessive customizations who want to clean up their custom code before thinking about any SAP transformation

Companies that want to prepare an RFP for their SAP projects

If you would like to learn more, view a sample report, and generate your SAP Qualified DTAR (Digital Transformation Assessment Report), you can get in touch with me or contact KTern at https://ktern.com/company/contact.

Stay home. Stay safe. Stay productive. Like every other crisis, we will ride this tide, adapt, and come out stronger.

What to Know When Choosing an Internet Service Provider

2020-05-18T07:30:13+02:00

It’s clear that our lives revolve around internet access, regardless of the usage is for professional or personal purposes, the fact is that the internet is an important tool we have come to depend on. We all want a fast and reliable internet connection that is dependable enough to help us get through the day. We all want an internet connection that never goes down and is accessible on a 24/7 basis.

The internet allows us to connect globally, uniting everyone and allowing us to make the impossible possible. Therefore, before you decide to select a service provider it’s always wise to do research, but the thing about research is no one wants to do it and everyone wants to benefit from it. So I have taken the liberty and highlighted some of the areas that you want to focus on before you have the installation technician come over.

DATA LIMITS AND METERED CONNECTIONS

The first thing that you want to look out for are data caps, I mean they are just lame and annoying. If you happen to be a Windows 10 user then you should know that there is no option to turn off automatic updates, which means your personal computer will continue to update itself. You can try and tell Microsoft that you have a metered connection and to only download and install the most vital updates. The most annoying fact is how the internet will cut off once you have used up your monthly allocation of data.

Payment and re-connectivity are simple enough, but not everyone has the funds to do so at all times. Having high-speed internet access on a portable mobile hotspot more than makes up for the higher-priced subscription charges, especially in the event that there is no other option available. Be prepared to monitor your usage, which means that you will have to be thrifty on how you get your data. Sitting down at your local Starbucks with a pair of headphones is a nice way to do so, thanks in part to their hotspot, which is offered free of charge. Regardless of the service provider, always ensure that there is no data cap.

SPEED

The next aspect that you should be on the lookout for is the speed of your internet connection. You want to have a fast enough connection that results in an enjoyable experience when compared to the frustration of having a slow internet connection. Whenever any service provider quotes a speed, be aware of the wording. Speeds are always advertised according to the words Up To, therefore, pay close attention since you won't always be able to achieve the advertised download speed. You should also take a look at your actual requirements, a stable 4 Mbps internet connection is good enough for streaming and playing video games. Remember, you should always have the ability to increase your download speed according to your requirements. If you require a simple internet connection then 1-2 Mbps will be recommended for light browsing and accessing emails. Now if you happen to have multiple users in your home, then 25-50 Mbps per second may be required.

IS THE PRICE RIGHT?

The next thing that you want to make sure of is the price that you’re being charged for the service is actually, in fact, the right price. Most service providers will offer you a promotional rate for 1-2 years where afterwards the cost will increase to possibly double the price. It may make sense to bundle the services together even if you aren’t currently in the market for cable or telephone services. At times, you may be able to secure a longer promotion for the same price as an Internet-only package by bundling the telephone service together. LocalCableDeals and other such providers that offer you a one-stop shop to compare and choose an ISP make it worthwhile for you to bundle the home telephone services alongside your internet services without any contractual binds.

Always be sure to inquire what the regular charges for the internet services will be after your promotion expires. Make sure to take into consideration that adding additional services makes you eligible for another promotion, which is just more value for your money.

SAP Road Map Explorer: The New Way of Viewing Road Maps

2020-06-15T22:12:41+02:00

The new generation of road maps is here at SAP!

Similar to how paper maps were reshaped by navigation systems and digital maps, classic PDF road maps are being transformed by the SAP Road Map Explorer. This interactive tool helps customers and partners navigate the complexities of planning a digital future.

Create your own road map

In just a few clicks, the interactive tool showcases recent and future innovations (or product features). Users can create and tailor their own road map, filtering innovations from SAP products, industries, business processes, and even focus topics such as Big Data and Internet of Things! Use filters to help narrow (or expand) the road map search.

Make informed decisions

Customers can also have a more holistic view of each innovation, making it easier to come to informed decisions. Planned Innovations have an overview and benefits section, while delivered innovations have additional information such as specific features and a technical view section. Stakeholders from business management to IT teams can all be part of the conversation.

Collaborate with colleagues

The collaboration continues with the tool’s “Save and Share” features, making it easy to share a specific innovation or a whole road map with other colleagues! The “My Road Maps” section allows users to view and share their saved road maps and innovations once they log back in. Additionally, users can download road maps to their desktop to view it offline.

Explore roadmaps.sap.com today to view road maps across SAP's main products (i.e. SAP S/4HANA, SAP S/4HANA Cloud), industries, and business processes!

To learn how to use SAP Road Map Explorer in 5 steps, visit this blog post.

Transcript Blog- The Global Impact of COVID-19 on the Telecommunications Industry

2020-06-16T05:19:48+02:00

Telecommunications is so essential in a time when we cannot connect in person. On this episode of Industry Insights by SAP, Josephine Monberg interviews Michaella Munyuzangabo, Global Solution Manager of Telecommunications at SAP. Michaella discusses the short- and long-term impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on the telecommunications industry and how technology can help aid in the recovery from this crisis.

For more episodes on Industries, please subscribe to “Industry Insights by SAP” Podcast Series.

Josie: (00:03)
Welcome to the industry insights by SAP podcast series. My name is Josephine Monberg, and I am your host. You are now listening to the COVID-19 special edition of our show. Welcome come to our podcast. Hey everyone. And welcome to our podcast. We're looking at how different industries are being impacted by COVID 19. And even though we've moved further ahead, still tons of stuff happening that are dramatically changing different industries. And today we're going to take a closer look at the telco industry. So telecommunications not to use abbreviations all the time and to do this. I am so fortunate that I am joined by Michaella. Now I'm going to say your last name, Munyuzangabo. That I, that I say, right? Yeah, exactly. I right. I tried to practice in advance, but you never know. So Michaella, you were an expert in the telco industry. So tell me a little bit more about yourself and you know, what you do so our audience can get to know you

Michaella: (01:16)
Yes. Michaella Munyuzangabo like you said so well, and I am actually based in Montreal in Canada. And I'm part of a team that we call the telecommunication industry business unit as a global solution manager. So what that means is that I work while my team and I work on understanding the needs of the market, like what is happening in telecommunications in general, discussing with our customers, understanding their needs and then sort of positioning, um, solutions to help them. So on one side, explaining and leading the go to market strategies of all we have that can help them. And then on the other side, looking at what more could we develop and then bring in that internally so that we can always evolve as our customers' needs evolve as well.

Josie: (02:14)
Hmm. I've always, whenever I do these interviews, I always get, so I love my job, so I'm definitely not complaining, but I think that's so cool how you kind of like sit between the two worlds and bring them all together and then you ensure that we stay so customer centric. So I really do think that's so important and just, I know you're in Montreal, but your name, where are you originally from?

Michaella: (02:39)
Okay, well, so I'm originally from Rwanda, uh, but I'm a bit of a, like a third culture kid, you know, I grew up in seven countries.

Josie: (02:48)
I seem so boring now, I grew up one little country.

Michaella: (02:53)
so I have many homes, but I'm Rwandan Canadian for now.

Josie: (03:00)
Oh, okay. Very, very cool. Yeah, I'm just Danish. So that's me. Not at all. Yeah. No. Um, okay. So let's talk a little bit about telco telecommunications. What's going on? How's the industry being impacted by COVID-19.

Michaella: (03:18)
So it's actually been an interesting time for telecommunications. There has kind of been this resurgence and appreciation for them, you know, because usually they're these big companies, I kind of operate in the background and we don't really think about them as a consumer, you know, but now it's like, that's how we work. That's how we communicate. That's how, if you have kids, you teach them they're learning online. Right. So they've kind of really become one of these essential services that we are depending on like food and utilities to sort of keep the world going around. And so for telecommunications themselves, then they've had to sort of think about what services are they providing to their customers. And also do we increase the amount of data that people have access to, whether it's on their phones or in their homes, um, how do we help different businesses that are currently impacted and are not technically working right now? And so while at the same time still maintaining their networks right. And ensuring that there are no breaks and that there are no problems because we do depend on them so much.

Josie: (04:29)
Hmm. So what have they actually done? Have they done any frame, anything differently now because of COVID-19?

Michaella: (04:36)
Yeah. So different companies obviously react differently, but some have been out pre data, you know, so given off with their, some of their customers, some have sort of like push back, um, bill payments and allowed their customers who are like strained to sort of delay their payments. Um, and others are sort of coming up with like new offering and rethinking the different plans that they offer in order to really account for this huge surge in data consumption that we're now seeing in the market.

Josie: (05:08)
Hmm. And how about 5G that's something that we talk a lot about in general also be more covert, but I'm sure that's something that gained a little bit more momentum now that like you said, we're stuck at home and we can't really go out and do the things I've used to fill up our days with. So what's the role, what's the role of 5G?

Michaella: (05:29)
It's such an interesting topic because a lot of people are still trying to understand it, right? Like all of these telecommunications companies are investing in it and have started investing in it. And so for them, I think it's been a moment of, um, of reflection. You know, some of them have, uh, increased their investment in 5g, as they see really the need to really have access to not only more data, but like faster data, be able to do more with it, be able to provide these services to, to these, uh, B2Bs and while others have sort of decided to kind of hold and see, there's also been like interesting conspiracy theories. About how 5G is one of the reason that COVID-19 is happening, which of course for the record, it is not. Yeah.

Josie: (06:21)
Which is insane. Tell us a little bit more about that conspiracy theory.

Michaella: (06:25)
Yeah. So yeah, so it sort of started on the internet and kind of grew because social media these days, right. And people are out here attacking teleworkers. It's actually really sad attacking tele workers and like destroying towers in Europe and in Asia because it causes five G and it doesn't. And so now it's like, we have to not only keep investing, if you're a telco in 5G, but then do this whole education to really tell people like this is a good investment, it's going to allow you to do more. It's going to help you. It's going to help healthcare companies. It's going to help manufacturers retailers. It's going to really even improve your entertainment because you're going to be able to download a movie in three seconds, you know, rather than it being such like a negative thing. And so that reeducation of, um, telling people like this is not true, but then also just for them, like on the telcos, just keep investing in it.

Michaella: (07:26)
And then the most important part is sort of thinking of like, what are the different use cases that we can actually do with 5G? Because unlike, let's say the 4Gs or the other bandwidth before here for five G to work, telcos will need to collaborate with other people. So collaborate with partners or that these are like implementation partners, but also collaborate with our customers. So whether it's like a city for smart cities or like a utility company or a healthcare network, so create use cases where they partner with other people, which is something that they haven't really had to do a lot of in the past.

Josie: (08:05)
So COVID-19 is really a time of collaboration. I see that across other industries as well, and also when it comes to supply chain and so on. So what are you telling your customers right now? Are you saying, are you telling them something different than what you did before COVID? Is it just because it's an industry that really hasn't been from what I'm hearing from you impacted dramatically in a negative way, at least is this is a different conversation or is it, is it pretty much the same?

Michaella: (08:37)
No. I mean the bigger team theme, the larger theme around digital transformation is the same. But I think now there's a bit more of a sense of urgency because sometimes we're having this conversation and insight, they felt that they had a little bit more time, but now as they feel sort of the strain right. On their systems to keep going now, it's like, okay, well, as we start thinking about how we recover, then what do we really start focusing on? So for example, telcos also have retail stores, right? Like when you go on to get your full plan, um, both have had to close. And so if those are closed, then did they have the capabilities let's say to have commerce online? Like how were their commerce, how were their online stores set up? You know, were they as strong as they are physical stores?

Michaella: (09:31)
Where did they, did they really, were, they really set up for that whole Omni channel experience? And so we've seen like a momentum in that as well, especially because for telcos, like their billing system is a bit different than a regular retail store. Because if I'm going to buy a plan, it's going to be associated to a phone it's going, I'm going to have to choose like how much data I have, which will impact my pricing. And so they are commerce experience is a little bit different than from a regular retail store. So we've seen some change in that direction. And then as we were talking about the investment in five G, we've seen of course an impact on the supply chains, like how do they work with our different suppliers, but also how do they really sort of look at their profitability? Because it's like where it's spending a lot of money investing in all of these assets. And now we're also sort of helping our customers and giving them a lot of data and sort of changing how our plans are structured. So how do you really balance that cash flow? The conversation on a grander level is the same, but I guess to talk in some settings has, has, has had to change, right? We have to adapt.

Josie: (10:43)
Yeah. So speed is a factor. Now it's accelerating digital transformation, which is really the case for all industries, but in this case, it's because they need to keep up with the demand. And then of course also the collaboration piece of it, which is, is important as well. What about, you mentioned 5g and you mentioned a couple of other things, but what should businesses, teleco companies do right now? What is like, they should focus on their digital transformation. Are there more kind of concrete areas that they should also be focusing on in terms of how they go through an even more rapid digital transformation?

Michaella: (11:23)
Yeah. So for right now, the way we've structured sort of structured it right now is like in the short term where they've sort of been doing, um, sort of, we call it meeting the needs of a dispersed workforce. So now we're all working from home. So how do we ensure that there is some form of continuity and this is not only from their customer side like us, but also from their own employees. Right? Because now their own employees are working from home. So how do they make sure that they understand the experiences of that employees and that their employees are set up for success so that they can continue on delivering these services to their, to their customers. Right. So that's really been the first place to start to start from. And then what else, what we've seen as well is when you start thinking about planning, right?

Michaella: (12:11)
Whether we're planning for like these five G, like this network, expansions or planning for the reopening of the stores, but it's like, how do you readjust the plan that you had at the beginning of the year? Because the one that you had in January, are different ones and how can we help you do that? And then last but not least is, as we think about the new services that are going to be created. So if telcos are helping their business customers with, with new services that like I was mentioning earlier, how can we collaborate with other companies? How can we bring in partners so that we can create new use cases that will help us in that going forward? And I think the challenge always right, is that in a moment of crisis, you really focused on just the, now you're focused on keeping this running as usual. Whereas here, yes, we have to keep business running as usual though we also have to take the notes and think about, okay, what do we need to do next so that we will be in a stronger position going forward.

Josie: (13:24)
Yeah. And it's, it's a, it's a great point because when you look at COVID-19 and you look at it from the start, which was where, okay, COVID hit, everything changes pretty, I wouldn't say overnight, but it was pretty dramatic. Right. And then companies have to figure out how do we respond? And that was really kind of the first phase. And that is also of course, trying to run business as usual. But then there is the recovery phase was for example, I'm in Denmark right now. And Denmark starting to open up again. So literally the government said, well, tomorrow all malls can open. So if you're not prepared for that phase, well, then you're kind of lacking behind and that's just for physical stores, but it's also having an impact of course, in the entire business model and then comes to the last phase, which is the reimagine of the business model, right?

Josie: (14:15)
Like, so we are in the recovery, but how has this actually reimagined our business model in the more longterm? Because like you said, digital transformation, speed, agility are factors that are just so much more important than they were before. So if we talk about reimagine, which is also kind of looking into the future, because I don't maybe apart from China, I don't think that there's many companies that are in that phase quite yet. So what are you seeing in terms, or maybe also South Korean, other countries in Asia, but what are you seeing in terms of, if you look into the future for telco, what's, what's going to happen? How do you think they're going to reimagine their business? It's such an easy question, right?

Michaella: (15:01)
Yeah. That's a big question. So, I mean, tacos have always sort of been like two folds, right? So obviously on the customer side, like the direct customer continue delivering an excellent customer service, right. I think that consumers today have high standards. We're just so used to getting like deliveries in one day or in two days. And we want our experience to be the same, whether it's in a physical store or like online, or if I call for a call center. So as we think, as we go forward in the future, telcos really have to sort of rethink their customer experience and to make sure that it's aligned to that and that whether I am in store or I am online, they know who I am, they know my profile, they know how I've spent, um, in the past and can give me recommendations that sort of align with what I want as a customer.

Michaella: (16:03)
So that's on the customer side and then there's a huge opportunity on the business side. So when we think about manufacturers, um, like putting the connectivity at the edge so that they can really deliver these services where they can, for example, do like some fleet management and it helped their business customers with services that they wouldn't be able to afford on their own. You know, there's a huge opportunity in retail by if you think of the retail of the future, providing a connected retail experience where the customer can sort of just go and like check out if we want, you know, without having exactly, um, the huge opportunities in smart cities, right? Like we've started seeing it already, like with smart lighting, we started seeing it with smart trash management, all of that depends on connectivities. And so really the telco of the future is going to be really central to sort of like our life as customers, but in a more larger scale than they have been in the past. And it is very, it is an exciting time for them. And it is an exciting time to be in this business.

Josie: (17:17)
Yeah. I was going to say, I think you are in a good, in an exciting industry. If you look ahead and you see, because right, you're right. It's, there's so many things that depend on telco and like smart cities, which is a huge thing. Or like you said, light lightning. I talked to a customer and SAP customer. They're doing insane things with lightning where they can use it to figure out kind of, um, the temperature in the room or different things that I was like, I never imagined. So it's really, really fascinating. Yeah. Have you heard about something similar to that or?

Michaella: (17:53)
Yeah, so we've had like, some customers sort of do like, um, temperature tracing, so like, like using like track trace, you know, so for example, you would be able to know when let's say a vaccine leaves a facility and goes to be delivered to the center where they're supposed to be delivered, you'll be able to monitor, but the temperature is like all along so that, you know, if there has been like a risk of infection or the risk of like the product being affected because the temperature drops too much or not, you know, and this can also be done for food. Let's say if you have frozen foods and you want them to remain on certain temperature, um, so that they can remain viable and we can consume them safely. Um, we've seen actually also, I don't know if you've heard about it. Uh, and this is relates to the COVID-19, but the Deutsche Telekom and SAP and the German government partnership where the're developing together a COVID-19 tracing app.

Michaella: (18:56)
And this is because telcos, have all of our information, right. They are able to kind of trace where we've been and anonymize that data. And so what the application is going to do is that it's going to help people sort of know where they were at certain times, so that if let's say tomorrow, God forbid, but I was to have like COVID-19 yes, but I'll be able to say like, Oh, I have it. And then the people who were around me at the time or who I've been in contact with over the last few days would be able to receive a notification that says, like, you were close to someone, you were in contact with someone who has COVID-19. So please, um, like self isolate or go see your doctor, or, you know, like whatever, um, instructions that government or that public health sector gives to their citizens. You know? And so these are solutions that are very real, you know, like they're needed, they're very relevant right now. And it sort of brings up, um, once again, like, yeah, hey're important.

Josie: (20:09)
Yeah. And it's like you said, it's critical this time and I'm assuming obviously all of this is very GDPR compliant because there might be people listening saying, Oh, do I want my data to share it that way?

Michaella: (20:21)
Yeah, no, no, no, no. It's anonymize data. Like it's anonymized data. So they will be able to just like, there's no way to say like, hi Michaella, you were in contact with someone with this person. No, it's more like your ID, your anonymized ID was around who had COVID. So maybe take these following precautions. And as the world opens up again, and as we go back to work for some people in their office spaces, or at some people have never stopped working, it sort of gives an added sort of security level just to, just to ensure that this is monitored. And there are ways that we can sort of manage the pandemic because it's not going to be over soon.

Josie: (21:04)
Yeah. And if there's a time to want to share your data, I think this is absolutely the best purpose that I've ever heard of. So that is so it's amazing to see in this time that we live in, even though it's so unprecedented companies are stepping up and they are taking responsibility and they're thinking outside of their traditional business models in terms of, well, how can we restructure what we're doing to better help? And I think that's one of the really beautiful things about what's going on right now is that we're seeing that individuals as well as humans are truly stepping up to the challenge. So, and I see that is also the case for telco. So thank you so much, Michaella for coming on the show. It was so fun talking to you. And I am. I just think it's such a cool industry that you've focused on. So thank you for coming on the show. Please subscribe to our channel industry insights by SAP at open SAP, Apple, Spotify, or podcast, to learn more about what SAP is doing to help you cope in COVID-19. You can go to sap.com about global health safety and find free access to select SAP software tools to support your business in much more. Stay safe, everyone.

Use the SAP Road Map Explorer in 5 steps!

2020-06-16T22:29:22+02:00

The SAP Road Map Explorer was recently released to help SAP customers customize road maps according to their needs. In 5 simple steps, customers can navigate the tool in an easy and intuitive way.

To first access the tool, log-in with your S-user credentials or you can create an account for free on roadmaps.sap.com. Then, simply follow the steps below to start exploring:

Step #1: Search for your topic

There are 3 ways you can view a road map: 1) Browse on the top according to a product, industry, or business processes, 2) Use the search bar to type the topic of your choice, or 3) Click on the “Most viewed Road Maps” at the bottom.

Tip: As you type on the search bar, suggestions will appear, and you can choose which one best fit your search. Currently, “free-text” functionality or typing freely on the search bar is not available so please choose one of the suggestions to yield the best results.

Landing Page

Step #2: Customize with filters

On top of the Kanban board, there are 5 categories you can choose from: Products, Processes, Industries, Focus Topics, and Suite Qualities. Numbers on the right side of filters indicate show many innovations will appear if you choose that filter. Filters will only appear if there are innovations available to show so you’ll never experience 0 results. The Time Horizon on the right allows you to manually select quarters from past and future years.

Tip: Choosing 2+ filters within the same category (i.e. choosing 2 products) follows the “OR” formula. Innovations with Product A or Product B will appear on the Kanban board. Choosing 2+ filters from different categories (i.e. choosing 1 product and 1 industry) follows the “AND” formula. This means the Explorer will show innovations that contain Product A and Industry B.

Filters on the Kanban board

Time Horizon Filter

Step #3: Explore innovations on the Kanban board

The Kanban board is the page that showcases all the innovations (or product features) in quarters. Use the left/right scrolls to browse through the road map. Each quarter column has arrows on the top right – click on each one to change your view preferences of the innovations (collapse or expand the innovation cards).

Click on each innovation card or box to view more details such as the innovation description and benefits. Planned innovations will have additional information such as features and the technical view.

Tip: Use the “star” button to favorite certain innovations that stand out to you! This makes it easier to spot innovations on the Kanban board.

Kanban Board

Innovation Details

Step #4: Share with your colleagues

The top right of each innovation card has a share button, giving you a link to copy and paste. Once you save your road map and/or innovations, “My Road Maps” on the top right of your page will also have a sharing link.

Sharing Feature

Step #5: Save & Download

The top right corner of the Kanban board has a “Save” button which allows you to save the full road map you created with the selected filters. Easily access them later under “My Road Maps”. If you want to save certain innovations, click on the “+” button beside the innovation name to add it to your “Innovation List”, which you can also access under “My Road Maps”.

Lastly, a download button is available beside the “Download” button, which will automatically produce an Excel file with all innovations pertaining to the road map you created.

Save & Download Feature

Innovation Set Feature

You can start exploring now at roadmaps.sap.com. For more information on how to use the tool and any updates, view and follow the SAP Road Maps team's Wiki Page.

The Future Will Belong to Cities That Put Their Citizenry at the Center

2020-11-19T16:46:54+01:00

While it's clear that there is no shortage of smart-city initiatives taking place around the globe, the outcomes up to this point have been mixed. Even though a considerable amount of time, energy and money have been invested, only a limited number of sustainable, repeatable solutions that have emerged as a result.

Despite this, the effort to meaningfully improve the way people interact with their cities - carry on. It's a situation that Boston found itself in during 2017, when officials began to see the possibilities for modern technology to create new and improved services for residents. At that time, Boston began to look for innovative new ways to help commuters struggling with parking and transportation. They also were trying to address the concerns of their citizens who were worried about unchecked development, affordable rent, sustainability and safety. Boston took a proactive approach to progress. They used a platform to collect input (especially data) from their citizens that they can then use to co-design new ways to live, work and operate. They prioritized delivering as much value as possible in terms of greater responsiveness, more unique and personalized experiences, inclusiveness and of course, community connection.

The cities that do this will thrive in a future that is far closer than many realize. The ones that don’t will not only miss out on incredible gains from urban transformation, but they'll also wind up losing their citizens' trust.

Harnessing the Power of the People to a City's Advantage

According to one recent survey that gathered input from more than 6,000 people living in Australia, France, Germany, Singapore, the UK and the US, people overwhelmingly want the areas they live in to focus on the digital delivery of public services, greater personalization and easier, more secure ways to share and access data moving forward. 42% of respondents, for example, said that they would be more than happy to use the Internet of Things to share their personal data in exchange for things like service improvements. A staggering 45% of people said that they were willing to participate in focus groups or spend time on committees to improve the services they already use.

Despite this, many cities are not actively exploring a way to involve their citizens in the types of smart-city initiatives that they are currently executing. A team of researchers from the journal Business & Information Systems Engineering said in 2018 that one of the major reasons why smart cities fail to meet their core objectives comes down to not appropriately involving citizens or considering the impact of their initiatives on those citizens.

A major mistake that far too many of these cities make involves seeing their citizens for exactly what they AREN'T. Rather than looking at them as users, testers or consumers, they need to be the producers and sources of creativity and innovation that they truly are.

But while designing projects that aim to better understand citizens' needs and engage them is certainly a start, it is also just one small part of a much larger story. Equally important is a city's ability to provide platforms that enable their citizens to participate in the creation of their bold new urban experience. Citizens, businesses, university researchers and others need to be able to work together to co-innovate and solve urban problems in smarter and more sophisticated ways. There must be a shared, collaborative framework between all key stakeholders that allows them to drive desired outcomes across the board.

Many commercial platforms are already doing this. In the world of fitness, for just one example, developers regularly release apps that bring users together by way of crowd sourced routes, leader boards, competitions and more. By adapting these kinds of ideas for the urban environment, cities can become what they were always meant to be: innovation hubs.

But none of that will be possible if cities aren't ready to listen to begin with.

According to a 2018 projection offered by the United Nations, 68% of the world's population will live in cities by as soon as 2050. During that time, challenges to economic development, social inclusion, mobility, housing and even quality of life will continue to grow if left unchecked. Cities must get smarter in order to adequately address them, and citizens must be at the heart of those efforts.

Cities who take a more proactive approach to advancing this future where constituents can provide input to co-design new ways to live, work, and do business will enjoy a period of significant economic growth and prosperity. Those that don't will fail to grow - ultimately leading to an exodus of citizens and a slow, inevitable decline in their wake.

If you want to dive more into this topic read our research . We combine data-driven research with knowledge from your peers, experts and leading thinkers from around the world. No marketing fluff. No “insider” technical jargon. Just compelling insights about improving citizens lives in cities.

Subscription Knowledge Series #7 - Getting Started on the 5G Monetization Journey

2020-12-01T17:49:05+01:00

In this blog post, we want to have a look at 5G, and what capabilities are required to get started on the 5G monetization journey. We will go over the following questions:

⦁ What is 5G and why is it different?

⦁ what will 5G business models look like?

⦁ what are the key capabilities required to get started on the 5G monetization journey

⦁ how can SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management help you on the journey?

So let’s start by taking a look at what is 5G and why is it different?

Following high growth from the first through to the third generation of services, growth has slowed in 4G due to disruption by platform and over the top, or OTT providers who bypass telcos to provide their services directly to consumers. As a result, many telcos have not achieved the return on investment that they had envisaged.

5G offers the opportunity to get back to creating and capturing value by collaborating with partners to provide industry solution via three types of use cases:

1. extreme Mobile Broadband (eMBB)
2. massive Machine Type Communications (mMTC)
3. Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communications (URLLC)

This brings endless possibilities of products and services across industries, for example:

⦁ travel and transportation

⦁ Smart cities

⦁ Supply chain and manufacturing

⦁ Healthcare and wellness

⦁ work and play

To offer these industry solutions, new business models are required. These business models are taking shape already with the current 4G technology.

You may already be familiar with the B2X business model where telcos provide services directly to consumers and businesses, with some partners involved in providing devices, content and apps.

We also have the agent business model where telcos act as a payment providers, for example via mobile wallets or direct carrier billing.

We also have wholesale business models where telcos provide wholesale connectivity to other telcos and to mobile virtual network operators.

All of these business are converging to the B2B2X business model. With 5G, the B2B2X business model is likely to become more prominent with industry solutions where telcos will provide network connectivity in the form of network slices, to industry solution providers, who will in turn provide services to consumers.

Telcos will have the additional opportunity to provide Billing on Behalf of the industry solution providers, to the end consumers, and in doing turn the billing cost centre into a profit centre.

So the next question is what are the capabilities required to enable the B2B2X business model? Lets take a look.

There are four key capabilities required for B2B2X:

⦁ the first is enterprise billing as this is the means to manage revenue from services delivered to industry solution providers. This includes billing for solutions and outcomes, managing master agreements and customer hierarchies. Tiered pricing and discounts and consolidated invoicing across customer hierarchies are essential features.

⦁ the second capability is revenue sharing. Schemes for partner revenue sharing and settlement are essential to support ecosystems of companies joining forces to deliver services.

⦁ the third capability is billing and financial convergence. Coexistence with legacy services and systems is key to ensuring both feasibility and viability. Delivering new capabilities with a short lead time and avoiding large scale overhaul of billing systems can mean the difference between success and failure. You may decide to converge on a single subledger to manage both receivables and payables, along with payments and collections. Or you may go a step further to provide invoicing convergence, and allow the end customer the option to receive a single bill with all charges consolidated.

⦁ the final capability is mediation which is the foundation for the other 3 capabilities. Mediation means processing massive volumes of data from various sources to derive business meaning from the data. Data can come from the core, from the edge or from partner applications and APIs. Also this must all come together in real-time.

The SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management solution enables all the capabilities required to get started on the 5G monetization journey.

It covers the end to end order to cash process, and includes the following modules:

⦁ Subscription Order Management to manage subscriptions and contracts

⦁ SAP Convergent Mediation by DigitalRoute to collect usage

⦁ SAP Convergent Charging to price and charge for usage

⦁ SAP Convergent Invoicing to bill and settle with customers and partners

⦁ SAP Customer Financial Management to handle payments, manage credit and collections, and provide financial customer care.

Benchmarking data from case studies have shown that SAP customers have realized a lot of value by implementing the solution. Here you can see some examples of tangible benefits reported by customers.

SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management boasts a high level of agility and flexibility to enable the complex business models required in future with 5G, and it is already used by some of the worlds largest telcos and OTT providers.

With SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management, you can prepare to address the principal 5G use cases associated with industry solutions. The solution helps you manage enterprise billing, revenue sharing, financial convergence, and data mediation with ease. Even if you have not yet started on your journey, SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management can help you work with your current 4G technology to position yourself for entry into the promising new era of 5G.

For further details, please also see the SAP Thought Leadership Paper The 5G Monetization Journey: Developing New Billing and Revenue Capabilities.

If you want to learn more about SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management, visit us at https://www.sap.com/brim.

This blog is part of a blogs series:

#1 Optimize Your Business and Easily Manage One Million Bills a Month

#2  Start Small, Plan Big: How to Embrace Successfully the World of Subscriptions

#3 Transform your business for Revenue Growth amid Covid19 crisis

#4 Our First Virtual SAP BRIM Conference – Some Highlights

#5 – Are You Streaming Music or still Buying Records?

#6 – Optimize Your Business Now

Removing Friction from the B2B Digital Commerce Experience

2021-01-28T18:38:40+01:00

In the business-to-business (B2B) world, offering a smart and frictionless e-commerce experience is no longer an option. When it comes to meeting buyers’ expectations, the bar has never been higher.

As expectations continue to rise, the importance of digital channels for B2B companies has grown significantly, increasing rapidly during the time of COVID-19. As such, more B2B companies are investing heavily in the customer experience to simplify the customer journey and remove points of friction.

One of the key elements of an optimal customer experience is ease of use. Customers expect an intuitive and straightforward shopping experience and one that’s simple to complete. This means making it easy for customers to find the products and services they are looking for while reducing the number of steps it takes to finalize an order, even if it’s a complex, multifaceted product or service.

Underlying ease of use, there must be a nuanced pricing strategy that is consistent and unique to customers across all channels. For leading B2B companies, this comes to life as a personalized omnichannel buying experience with dynamically generated pricing mirroring deals made between customers and sales representatives.Perfecting the customer experience to deliver more value

On a journey to digitalize its operations, Maryland-based TESSCO Technologies Incorporated (Tessco), a value-added distributor of wireless communications products, embarked upon a greenfield implementation of SAP S/4HANA. Taking the opportunity to overhaul its e-commerce storefront at the same time, the business sought help from the SAP Innovative Business Solutions organization to move to a new solution in the cloud.

As a distributor, Tessco serves a wide variety of customers and supports accounts with unique pricing conditions negotiated through sales its reps. To deliver a true omnichannel experience to customers, Tessco needed an e-commerce solution that allowed it to reflect these individual pricing deals across all customer touch points. To make this work, Tessco sought a solution that offered native integration with Intelligent ERP to draw on consistent product information and generate dynamic pricing.

Meeting these needs, Tessco adopted the SAP Commerce Cloud solution, leveraging SAP Cloud Platform Integration Suite to connect the technology to the Intelligent ERP. Tight integration of SAP S/4HANA and SAP Commerce Cloud allows the organization to unite data. This heightens the purchasing experience for customers with product information for more than 65,000 stock-keeping units embedded in the e-commerce experience.

Whether customers interact with the organization through sales reps or using the Web site – the experience is the same. Customers placing orders through multiple channels can view them all through the site. And pricing is consistent, with new quoting functionality allowing customers to generate quotes on the Web site based on prenegotiated rates.

Together with consistent pricing, Tessco is able to offer an end-to end experience with self-serve value-added customizations. This allows the business to ease customer transactions on variant configuration products from its Web site. So, for coax cable, which is cut to length based on customer needs, or antennas, which are tuned to frequency ranges requested by the customer, purchasing these products to their exact specifications has never been easier.

With SAP solutions in place, Tessco is able to offer fluid omnichannel experiences befitting any leading business-to-business or business-to-consumer organization.

2021 SAP Innovation Awards

Tessco’s digital transformation and obsession with the customer experience are being recognized as part of the 2021 SAP Innovation Awards, which offers a showcase of SAP customers’ innovative thinking and successes. View Tessco’s nomination in this year’s awards to discover how the value-added distributor is able to offer an end-to-end purchasing experience for its complex telecommunications products.

Subscription Knowledge Series #11 - 5G Networks Make Billing System Upgrades a Necessity

2021-06-29T10:37:51+02:00

Creating New Vertical Market Opportunities with Partners

Given the low latency and other capabilities associated with advanced versions of next-generation networks, 5G can help Communication Service Providers (CSPs) become purveyors of digital services. 5G networks can lead to more usage-based discrete interactions, in real time, based on autonomous, fully automated operational transactions residing in digital partner ecosystems.

5G networks offer telcos an opportunity to capture value in transactions by collaborating with partners that in turn play an integral role in the development of the next generation of services. CSPs can do so in a variety of ways as 5G makes use of cases across many industry verticals possible, whether it's travel and transportation, as smart cities, smart homes, supply chain and manufacturing, or healthcare and wellness.

The digital ecosystem that creates the use cases could include software vendors, system integrators, hyperscalers, and network equipment producers if not other partner types to offer services that result in billable events.

CSPs, as part of a B2B2X model, can provide network slices to industry solution providers that can use 5G connectivity to deliver services to their customers. The industry solution providers may not have a billing relationship with consumers, creating for the telecom provider an opportunity to provide billing services on behalf of the partner.

The partners' ecosystem can deliver specific services for reaching better quality, lower latency (or minimum video quality), and bandwidth requirements that advanced 5G networks make possible such as augmented reality, drone video, and network slicing.

5G networks can enable dynamic real-time operations and monetization functionalities that are critical for managing use cases delivered with the help of their networks and partners in a B2B2X model. Unfortunately, the billing systems employed by many CSPs today are designed to address a static service definition and delivery process, with results usually measured in hours or days.

So, a new breed of OSS/BSS solutions needs to be developed so that CSPs have the agility necessary to grow revenue, support service-level guarantees, and help them adapt more readily to changing business conditions.

B2B2X in a 5G context requires four key capabilities.

Enterprise Billing to manage revenue from services delivered to industry solution providers. This includes the ability to bill for business solutions and business outcomes that are industry-tailored, potentially involving hardware, software, support, and services, and have value-based KPIs and metrics associated and involve providing service credits where service-level agreements are not met.

Partner Revenue Share and Settlement. Ecosystems of partners collaborating to deliver services, where platform partners, content providers, app developers, advertisers, or even local authorities in the case of public services, all require revenue to be shared.

Financial Convergence. Coexistence with legacy services and systems is needed to ensure feasibility and viability. Delivering capabilities with a short lead time and avoiding large-scale billing replacement can mean the difference between success and failure. Operators may converge on a single sub-ledger to manage receivables and payables, collections, and payments to give a complete view of customer and partner financials and ensure a single consolidated invoice with all charges. It may even be necessary to cater to multiple convergence strategies concurrently.

Data Mediation is the foundational capability required as making business sense of data in the 5G context means picking needles out of haystacks by processing massive volumes of data from various sources in different formats and with complex dependencies. Data from different network slices, from the edge, transport and central data centers and from partner applications and APIs, can potentially form the parameters for billing and settlement in real time.

Decision makers within the ranks of CSPs do see the need to act. According to IDC's Global Telco Survey conducted last year, 63% of respondents are planning or currently transforming their services portfolios and 58% are focusing on increasing operational agility or speed to market, which is fundamental to OSS/BSS transformation. In other words, operational automation and OSS/BSS transformation are typically believed to be primary elements of a CSP's broader business transformation.

Emerging Monetization Models

New billing systems become necessary to properly monetize the new 5G services they want to provide in a B2B2X model. CSPs need to record and standardize disparate transactions that emanate from the services and transform them into comprehensible and payable invoices for customers to prevent potential problems such as revenue leakage.

Furthermore, CSPs need to be able to add and modify services as well as adjust pricing swiftly to demonstrate value to clients while also being able to scale effectively.

5G services have highly variable service attributes (e.g., bandwidth, latency, and service quality) that mandate a different approach to pricing based on the complexity and value of the interaction. Legacy billing systems employed by CSPs aren't flexible or agile enough for them to properly monetize 5G services. Again, CSPs will need to support a range of use cases, such as smart small and large appliances and home security that emanate perhaps from IoT devices.

With such use cases in place, CSPs will need to support a broader range of service plans that better reflect consumption with the help of real-time network functions that allow them to scale usage up or down and provide preferential bandwidth.

The massive connection density of standalone 5G networks, for example, will mandate real-time usage measurement given the many devices in need of support. That's unlike today, as CSPs bill based upon 4G data consumed to send and receive emails and browse the web on a monthly basis, for example.

To ensure 5G-enabled services can be properly monetized, a different approach to infrastructure operations is required. Swisscom, Telia, Telefónica, and Telecom Italia, are just a few examples that have embarked upon legacy technology and service phaseout initiatives with more agile service enablement and 5G-driven digital services in mind.

Three Reasons Why Quote-to-Cash Architecture is Key

Inflexible architectures, high maintenance costs, and new requirements mean that most CSPs will need to upgrade systems if they want to remain competitive in a rapidly evolving, 5G-driven, digital services environment.

Billing systems employed by CSPs simply weren't built to address new requirements like dynamic network configuration, continuous quality of service monitoring, partner ecosystem management, and real-time multidimensional charging.

Yet, CSPs will have to provide customers with the ability to order services, provide dynamic quotes/pricing, and manage the processes with minimal effort. 5G will lead to a strong omni-channel ecosystem and drive lifetime value-oriented customer experiences. Furthermore, 5G networks will make for many touch-points, such as IoT devices and connected cars, that are maintained by customers in addition to traditional channels. Partner management and settlement of relationships will play a critical role in complex partner-enabled 5G business models as well.

Order management will therefore play a bigger role as it will have to enable the ordering of complex 5G services to support real-time delivery of these complex multi-component, on-demand services for business and mass-market consumers.

Unless CSPs rejuvenate their telecom operations and business system stacks, the maximization of 5G-related revenue becomes a more difficult prospect.

How to Succeed and Unlock Value

Telcos are increasingly turning to IT vendors and software companies for help as IT and software design principles are required for help with the operational transformation. As part of a Global Telco Survey last year conducted by IDC, CSP decision makers claimed that the implementation of DevOps/agile processes (68%) and the adoption of processes/practices from the IT or OTT world (63%) were the most important factors to ensure a successful digital transformation.

The time to act is sooner rather than later as CSPs need to update their operations, orchestration, and monetization systems/processes to better manage the demands 5G networks will place on them.

Dedicating the right resources to the development of digital business models is essential. CSPs should start to build agile, multidisciplinary teams that develop software-driven products in discrete areas, across product and system value chains. CSPs can also create digital business models by leveraging IT, software, and cloud vendors as well as digital platform suppliers and technology specialists while simultaneously managing legacy telecom equipment suppliers during the transition period.

To find out how SAP is helping CSPs with their billing challenges

Come and listen to our session of the 1st of July at MWC and meet with SAP Telco experts and executives at SAP@MWC

Read this additional blog to find out how SAP can be a partner in 5G Partner

Beyond the telecom industry, want to discover new trends, challenges, customer stories and order-to-cash key functionalities to adopt for your business model transformation?

This blog, co-written with IDC to be based on their market insights, is part of a blogs series

We do have also a set of webinars

Finally, if you want to learn more about SAP Billing and Revenue Innovation Management, visit us at https://www.sap.com/brim.

Services Industries: Transformation-ready and primed for growth

2021-08-30T10:06:44+02:00

When Deloitte Africa– which provides professional services across 17 countries – sought to replace its disparate and legacy systems, it embarked on a digital transformation journey. Armed with an intelligent solution, it leveraged automation, standardized business processes, digitized user experience and improved overall governance.

No industry is immune from disruption. As technology-driven innovations transform the way services are consumed, competition in the Services Industries is stiff. Organizations and industries that were already on the path of digital transformation weathered the pandemic-induced global unrest better than most others. And now, businesses strive for growth in a new digital environment.

Services Industries comprise of Engineering, Construction and Operations, Higher Education and Research, Media, Professional Services, Sports and Entertainment, Telecommunications and Travel and Transportation industries. Each was impacted differently by the pandemic and yet commonalities exist between them as companies and organizations prioritize digital transformation and migration to the cloud.

Dynamic and Diverse

The Services Industries have always been laser-focused on their customers, by nature. But now, emerging trends present this cluster with a new set of challenges to overcome, as well as new opportunities to capture.

From global logistics and telco-driven communications, to workforce management and digital content, Services companies and organizations must collectively find innovative solutions to better serve customers while providing an extraordinary customer experience.

Disruption and continuity are two sides of the same coin for the Engineering, Construction and Operations industry. By 2050, cities will house two-thirds of the human population and yet, three-quarters of the buildings that will exist in 2050 are still to be conceived. This translates to huge growth, billions of components, thousands of suppliers and high productivity. With a connected supply chain to reduce labor costs and improve margins, construction companies must build technologically advanced buildings which are carbon neutral and sustainable.

As universities closed campuses in the wake of the pandemic, the Higher Education and Research community responded with virtual classrooms and online student engagement innovations. A study showed that around 50% of the higher education students surveyed during the pandemic found online learning to actually improve their technical skills when compared to face-to-face classes. Also, majority of the respondents (70%) were ready to opt for online classes to manage the curriculum during this pandemic. Clearly, digital learning interventions are here to stay.

In the last three months of 2020, global streaming grew 44% when compared to the same period in 2019. Reports show that consumers that maintained three streaming subscriptions before the pandemic, now have five. With consumers seeking an enriched experience, the market opportunity in the Media industry lies with digitization of the customer experience. Growth plans will now hinge on predicting the streaming consumer’s needs, up-selling content and cross-selling corresponding services.

The pandemic arrested mobility and hurt the Travel and Transportation industry immensely. But thanks to Cargo Transportation & Logistics companies, the world keeps moving ahead. Intelligent technologies like Internet of Things (IoT), Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) will heighten customer experience by providing real-time location and status of shipment. Also, digitizing customer experiences, adopting intelligent operations and asset management will be central to future growth strategies.

With basic tasks being automated and firms developing digital knowledge-based products and outcome-based services, Professional Services providers are now working to grow revenues without increasing the workforce, while delivering their services in a hybrid or virtual environment. Clients seek outstanding outcomes and personalization. Firms are providing clients the benefit of not having to invest in an on-premise solution and instead offering ready-to-deploy solutions and SaaS products that provide on-demand access to services such as tax advice or business analytics for example.

By 2024, the global sports analytics market size is expected to hit $5.2 Billion. With advancements in technology, performance data makes the difference between champion athletes and the rest of the field. Going forward, comprehensive solutions for player performance data, player contract analysis, fan engagement and ticketing will become game-changers in the Sports and Entertainment industry and help both players and franchises stay ahead of the game.

The Telecommunications industry is critical to how people and businesses interact. Across the world, 4.3 billion users access the internet via mobile devices. And per reports, the expected value of the cumulative operating profit through 2025 for the telecom industry is a staggering US$1.2 Trillion. With 5G on the horizon, companies that personalize end-to-end customer experiences and diversify their revenue streams will be better placed to compete with disrupters and new market entrants.

Technology Transformation as an Enabler

As the world changes rapidly, large-scale enterprises as well as emerging players are challenged to keep pace with new data-driven business models and digital technologies that create growth opportunities.

Our Industry Cloud powered ‘transformation-as-a-service’ solutions help customers rise by removing complexity and simplifying engagement with timely transformation interventions.

As the next phase of market evolution emerges, it is imperative that Services companies and organizations adapt, display flexibility and adopt technology to stay resilient. Accessing industry next-generation practices via Industry Cloud will become key to foster innovation, secure regulatory compliance and achieve effective collaboration with partners and customers.

Thus, with rapid innovation and Industry Cloud powered transformation, the Services Industries are primed for growth in the post-pandemic world.

For more on solutions for the Services Industries, visit sap.com/industries

How Does a Major Telco Provider Create a Unified, Multinational Customer Experience?

2021-11-02T00:07:40+01:00

As one of the region’s leading telecommunication providers, Liberty Latin America Ltd. keeps millions of people and businesses in Latin America connected.

Operating across Latin America, including Chile, Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, and others, Liberty Latin America has a customer base that is extremely broad and diverse. Not only is there variation in services and product bundles across different regions, there is also a mix of customer economics, scale, and need. For example, in the Cayman Islands, the average customer spend is much higher than Jamaica, just next door.

These types of variations can be readily addressed at brick-and-mortar retail stores, but managing this through digital sales presented a challenge. Liberty Latin America knew it needed a robust e-commerce platform to enhance and unify its digital customer experience. Then the COVID-19 pandemic forced the closure of retail stores – giving a new urgency to the project. As Ed Sherwood-Smith, Senior Director, Digital Platform Delivery at Liberty Latin America, explains, “We were going to build the most perfect digital experience across Latin America in a very measured and controlled way, with a three-year road map. Then the whole world changed – everyone was quarantined – and we had to go digital right away. We knew we were going to need a really strong, flexible e-commerce engine.”

The goal for Liberty Latin America was to build a single e-commerce platform that could support all its markets. “There was no way we could go market by market and customize each time,” says Sherwood-Smith. “It would take way too long and would create additional costs in terms of maintenance and future developments. We needed one platform that could provide a user-friendly and unified customer experience while also giving us the flexibility to meet region-specific requirements.”

Enter SAP Commerce Cloud solutions.

Not only do SAP Commerce Cloud solutions provide advanced business-to-consumer and business-to-business capabilities, but they also can be customized to manage a variety of catalogs, products, and configurations for creating exceptional, hyperpersonalized omnichannel experiences. Plus, the flexibility and scalability of the cloud mean it can be deployed quickly in new markets and integrated with various CRM systems as needed without exorbitant on-premise infrastructure costs.

To get its new e-commerce platform up and running as quickly as possible, Liberty Latin America also took advantage of the telco and utilities accelerator for the SAP Commerce solution. “We started planning in June,” explains Sherwood-Smith, “and were live in four months. By October, we were accepting orders in Jamaica, then in Panama by December. Puerto Rico was in February, and by April, we were live in Costa Rica.”

As Liberty Latin America launched the initial e-commerce stores using the out of the box storefront capabilities , it has also started working with advanced capabilities to start using eCommerce APIs directly to build a true headless Digital experience.

Another challenge for Liberty Latin America was to increase customer value along the customer lifecycle. That means making sure that once a customer has signed on for one service, they keep coming back for more. Again, this was fairly straightforward under the local store model, where sales people could make the direct case for bundles or packages. But engaging this way through digital channels would be difficult.

To address the issue, Liberty Latin America deployed the SAP Emarsys Customer Engagement platform. “Now,” says Sherwood-Smith, “we can craft sales in a way that enables targeted cross-selling and up-selling so that we can help customers experience our services better and increase revenue at the same time.”

Going forward, Liberty Latin America will continue to roll out its new e-commerce platform to current and future markets – from Montserrat, where it has tens of customers, to Panama, where it has many more.

Customer data management is also top of mind – putting SAP Customer Data Cloud solutions next on the list for deployment. “While we’re not dealing with the kind of data privacy regulations you have in Europe,” says Sherwood-Smith, “most of the places where we operate have some type of nascent privacy and data protection program in place. As things get stricter, we need to be ready.”

“The ultimate goal is to drive more traffic through our digital channels. From customer engagement to customer creation and to the actual sale – we want it all going through the same digital platform. SAP Customer Experience solutions are going to help get us there.”

To find out more about how Liberty Latin America is using SAP Customer Experience solutions, check out the replay of CX Live. Then visit us online to find out what SAP Customer Experience solutions can do for your business.

The Road to TM Forum Compliance - SAP Commerce Cloud, telco and utilities accelerator

2022-01-20T17:43:22+01:00

What is it to be a TM Forum compliant solution in the Telco industry? As Telco providers reach unpredictable acceleration paces, software solutions need to follow the rhythm of innovations and provide a standardized and solid architecture. SAP Commerce Cloud, telco and utilities accelerator s leading this journey and our first TM Forum certification is just the beginning.

SAP is not new to Digital Commerce and has had a dedicated Telco commerce solution for many years; but in May 2018, the SAP Commerce Cloud, telco and utilities accelerator started down its own digital eCommerce transformation path to becoming a TM Forum compliant solution.

For the SAP Telco team obtaining a TM Forum certification is more than collecting badges to showcase to the public; for us, every certification is the reflection of the effort put into a solution that we know will provide the best foundations for our customers to build amazing experiences based on them.

Benefits for Our Customers

TM Forum provides a proven standard that helps reduce implementation costs.

Helps service providers go-to-market faster.

Enables interoperability, open digital architecture, and seamless end-to-end management of complex digital services.

Seamless integration with other TM Forum compliant systems resulting in reducing the cost and complexity of operations.

Guaranteed Outcomes

Reduce costs by adopting standards for use in applications and interfaces.

Save time, cost, and money by adopting a widely proven solution.

Industry-accepted, rich, and extensible information model.

Not only does the SAP Commerce Cloud, telco and utilities accelerator have a TM Forum SID compliant data model for innovations, but the solution also comes with a full set of TM Forum APIs supporting the entire customer journey. TM Forum APIs are proven, comprehensive and efficient; and enable rapid, repeatable, and flexible integration among operations and management systems. They are also used in the respective Spartacus storefronts enabling headless commerce.

Spartacus Architecture from SAP Commerce cloud, telco and utilities accelerator L1 deck, created by Deborah Cholmeley-Jones, Solution Owner

SAP is investing in TM Forum conformance certification and takes pride in having a TM Forum compliant solution for Telco Digital Commerce. Being on the TM Forum certification leaderboard is a statement that we are relevant in the market. Conformance certification ensures that the implementation of our SAP Commerce Cloud, telco and utilities accelerator APIs are consistent with the TM Forum’s globally recognized standards and best practices.

Comply with TM Forum Standards

SID standards for the data model

Business processes for operations

TM Forum APIs for integrations

The first TM Forum certification marks an exciting beginning, and more TM Forum certifications are on the way. We have two certifications and the planned goal is to achieve 13 within one year. Each of these certifications will contribute to our mission of bringing the best standards available to our customers. Next TM Forum API undergoing certification is “Product Catalog Management”.

SAP Commerce Cloud, telco and utilities accelerator list of TM Forum APIs planned for certification:

TMF620 Product Catalog Management

TMF622 Product Ordering Management

TMF669 Party Role Management

TMF632 Party Management

TMF637 Product Inventory Management (certified)

TMF651 Agreement Management (certified)

TMF663 Shopping Cart

TMF666 Account Management

TMF670 Payment Methods

TMF673 Geographic Address Management

TMF677 Usage Consumption Management

TMF678 Customer Bill Management

TMF680 Recommendation

The advantages of SAP Commerce Cloud, telco and utilities accelerator, like TM Forum Certifications, are available to Telco leaders who want to provide end-consumers with seamless experiences. The benefits for our customers and business outcomes bring the opportunities to become relevant and stay ahead in the industry.

SAP TM Forum Conformance Certification

TM Forum Conformance Certifications Awarded

TM Forum Conformance Certification Leader Board

TM Forum SAP Member Profile Webpage

For more information about the SAP Commerce Cloud, telco and utilities accelerator:

SAP software download center (SWDC)

Latest release note: 2111 Release

General SAP Help Documentation

Technical API Documentation: TM Forum and OCC APIs & Swagger

SAP Solution for Telecommunications Reaches Silver Tier in the TM Forum Open API Conformance Certification Program

2022-03-11T17:43:11+01:00

SAP Solution for Telecommunications Reaches Silver Tier in the TM Forum Open API Conformance Certification Program

During my years working in the Telecommunications industry, I learned that Telco Service Providers who choose to implement software that follows globally established standards and industry best practices not only makes everything work smoothly and efficiently but provides the foundation to create innovative offerings and maximize their revenue.

At SAP my goal as a Solution Owner is to build the best software that Telecommunications companies can rely on to implement and elevate their customer's journeys at every level. For this reason, we decided to make our solution, the SAP Commerce Cloud telco and utilities accelerator, pursue the best standards for the industry, which meant aligning and implementing the TM Forum SID data model and TM Forum APIs in our architecture.

Obtaining TM Forum Conformance Certification is a fantastic reward for the SAP Telecommunications team, and one to be proud of. Being recognized with a Silver Tier badge motivates us to keep up the work to build the finest Telecommunications omnichannel solution in the market.

This achievement proves that our SAPs omnichannel commerce solution for CSPs successfully implemented TM Forum Open APIs and are consistent with TM Forum’s globally recognized standards and best practices. Our certified list thus far:

TMF637 - Product Inventory Management

TMF651 - Agreement Management

TMF620 - Product Catalog Management

TMF622 - Product Ordering Management

TMF663 - Shopping Cart Management

We are excited to continue on our journey to be recognized as an omnichannel commerce solution leader within the Telecommunications industry.

About TM Forum

TM Forum is a known and trusted non-profit third party that provides independent and unbiased verification and certification to telecommunications systems suppliers and providers. The TM Forum Conformance serves to certify services and processes that align with the defined industry standards.

Learning Journey – Telecommunications Industry

2022-03-28T13:08:32+02:00

If you are looking for more knowledge in context of SAP Telecommunications Industry please have a look at the Telecommunications Learning Journey.

SAP Learning Journeys are structured visual guides, designed to help you understand and navigate the path to become competent with an SAP solution.

You will find inside:

Overview information on the industry and relevant SAP solutions

Curated assets and links about Industry Cloud Solutions relevant for Telecommunications Industry

Trainings on transition to SAP S/4HANA and Intelligent Enterprise

Reference to other relevant SAP Learning Journeys

Together with SAP Telecommunications experts we design and continuously add the most current and informative assets to the Learning Journey.

Stay tuned and subscribe to the blog. I will post updates as soon there are new assets and other important changes.

Some of the materials are freely accessible and some are available within SAP Learning Hub subscription.

To learn more about SAP Learning Hub please see the videos:

SAP Learning Hub Overview Video (2min, 12.2020)

An Introduction to the SAP Learning Hub (50min, 08.2017) or SAP Learning Hub Demo (25min, 03.2020)

If you have any questions, comments, or wishes please use the comment function below.

Have fun learning and stay curious!

Greg

Achieving Goals: SAP Solution for Telecommunications Reaches Gold Tier in TM Forum Open API Conformance Certification Program

2023-03-14T16:22:34+01:00

It was one year ago when our SAP for Telecommunications solution SAP Commerce Cloud telco and utilities accelerator reached the Silver Tier status. Today, we are Gold Tier certified.

We have continued our commitment to the TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture (ODA) Manifesto. SAP has worked over the past year to obtain certification for 10 APIs that enable communication service providers (CSPs) to standardize and lower the cost of integrating SAP into their IT and business support system (BSS) ecosystem.

SAP is recognized as a leader within the telecommunications industry. Companies who achieve TM Forum conformance certification for their solutions can formally demonstrate evidence that the implementation of the TM Forum APIs are consistent with the TM Forum’s globally recognized standards and industry best practices.

It is a milestone, a true testament of all our hard work and efforts to drive digital business transformation, innovation and agility for SAP customers. This achievement proves that SAPs omnichannel commerce solution for CSPs successfully implemented the following TM Forum Open APIs:

TMF637 Product Inventory Management

TMF651 Agreement Management

TMF620 Product Catalog Management

TMF622 Product Ordering Management

TMF663 Shopping Cart

TMF669 Party Role Management

TMF632 Party Management

TMF677 Usage Consumption Management

TMF679 Product Offering Qualification

TMF673 Geographic Address Management

Service Providers need solutions to automate an increasingly complex and dynamic portfolio of products and services; and reduce time to market. The awarded conformance certification demonstrates that the SAP Commerce Cloud telco and utilities accelerator eases the orchestration of personalized experiences for Telecom administrators and their customers.

Being TM Forum compliant ensures that SAP will fully support CSPs’ business integration with their existing systems (i.e., billing, OSS, BSS) and improve operational productivity, reduce costs, reduce risks, and increase ARPU. Adopting a common language with customers and partners will result in market differentiation that will continue to unleash new business opportunities.

So, what’s up next? Platinum.

About TM Forum

TM Forum is a known and trusted non-profit third party that provides independent and unbiased verification and certification to telecommunications systems suppliers and providers. TM Forum is a global association of over 850-member customers that collectively serve 5 billion customers across 180 countries. Members include communications and digital service providers, telephone companies, cable operators, network operators, cloud providers, digital infrastructure providers, software suppliers, equipment suppliers, systems integrators and management consultancies. The TM Forum Conformance serves to certify services and processes that align with the defined industry standards.

About SAP Commerce Cloud telco and utilities accelerator

The SAP Commerce Cloud telco and utilities accelerator is an SAP Commerce Cloud add-on that focuses on providing top industry-specific omnichannel experiences for Service Providers and their end-consumers. From online, to in-store, to mobile and beyond – thus enabling the delivery of exceptional subscriber onboarding and life cycle experiences.

CSPs that want to exceed their customers’ expectations will find in SAP Commerce Cloud telco and utilities accelerator a solution that will address all relevant criteria to elevate their customer’s purchasing journey and the on-demand management of their accounts.

Navigating the Generative AI Era: Blockchain is key for resilient cross-company communication

2023-11-17T18:16:11+01:00

Problem: Generative AI will exponentially raise the amount of digital business assets a company will have to handle through automation

Solution: To find the signal in the noise, on which digital assets really matter, Blockchain Technology can bring weight on what is important information and what is not by physical backed real world scarcity.

In the emerging digital age, technologies like Generative AI are unlocking unprecedented possibilities. But while this power can also amplify challenges such as misinformation, fraud, and counterfeiting for businesses, blockchain technology can already provide the critical countermeasure against abuse when used together with Generative AI.
This promising counterbalance ensures authenticity, protects against digital misconduct, and solidifies the future of a transparent and trustworthy online ecosystem. So, while harnessing the transformative potential of generative AI, we can be sure that the advancements of AI along with Blockchain technology will ensure us a productive return from the enterprise perspective. The key is efficient spam handling with “Blockchain Weighting” of digital assets.

Let’s go through the current Generative AI (GenAI) hype and try to understand what impact a mainstream use of AI Large Language Models (LLM) has on enterprises when it comes to the question “What if GenAI is used AGAINST enterprises?”.
What harm can GenAI content do to enterprises?
And how can enterprises be protected from a flood of generated potentially harmful content?
Being confronted with an increasing amount of AI-generated material, from deepfakes and phishy communication to mass-produced fake invoices, individual “Fraud Crafting” is now an automated task from an attacker’s perspective.

First, we’ll look at what’s currently happening in the tech industry, and then we’ll look at how blockchain technology can come to the rescue when AI is used as a weapon against businesses in the wrong hands.

The AI Hype

“AI” and in particular “GenAI” are certainly the buzzwords in the business world in 2023. There is no tech conference, business strategy or solution that does not consider GenAI today. There are ChatGPT, Bard, Midjourney, Copilot and many more.

All companies, clearly including SAP, are putting considerable resources into establishing this new technology in their companies and accelerating growth. The momentum is enormous right now. Everywhere, experiments are beginning about where GenAI will help and where it wontBesides, generative AI images have already secretly won major photography and art competitions. ChatGPT, for example, brought a new dimension to texting.
Inspired by all these impressive generative advances, companies are looking for the best ways to transform business models through generative AI.

GenAI Digital Asset Generation

GenAI has changed the way and speed at which digital assets can be produced – a paradigm shift.

GenAI digital asset generation

From a corporate perspective, the digital assets produced by AI must be filtered by those digital assets effectively affecting how businesses are being built and deployed. Concretely, that means that art-related assets for example are not of direct interest when putting the businesses glasses on.
But what are of direct interest, are workflows, invoices, contracts, code, or business communication of every possible way.

An AI Digital Asset Anarchy

Since GenAI Large Language Models (LLM) are a tool to achieve goals, it is only a matter of time before criminal energies will use LLMs for their own purposes. And these are certainly against the natural interests of companies. Specifically, for their own enrichment.

Illustratively, for example, fake invoices can cause millions of dollars in damage. This is not an “IF” but a common criminal practice. One criminal stole over $122 million from Facebook and Google by sending fake invoices. But this was manual work for the counterfeiter. Imagine an AI assistant is given a personal record of invoices from a company and is tasked with creating fake invoices that are supposed to be real vendor invoices for that company. While in the past it was easy to filter such generated approaches based on their poor quality, that’s exactly what will change with GenAI.

Consequently, in the near future, organizations will be confronted as well as mass bombarded with targeted and individualized fraud such as phishing, forgery, and social engineering over personal data sets. The quality and scale of these attacks will reach unimagined proportions due to generative AI automation.
A thousand perfectly LLM-customized fake invoices built on an existing leaked company data set a day? What sounds like a nightmare for any accountant will soon become reality.
A filtering problem will arise – how can companies distinguish between real digital assets such as legitimate invoices and perfectly crafted invoices with information about your habits, customers and suppliers embedded in the attacker’s LLM database?
How can employees watch for suspicious signs of communication when the quality of fraud attempts is increasing every day, while at the same time being fully automated and thus no longer limited by human input?

Social engineering attacks will be automated in chats and email conversations, and their quality will be so high that debunking them will be very time-consuming for enterprise-side recipients. A battle against windmills. Even with AI support to defend against these attacks, a high level of manual detection and verification will always be required. This is because artificial manipulations become more and more sophisticated, a constant race for concealing and detection.

Once the targeted company’s business data and communication channels are accessible to an attacker, the manual work restriction is removed from the attacker’s perspective.
Therefore, the number of attacks will multiply soon as criminals deploy GenAI technologies, and this technology evolves as well.

This AI evolution has just begun.
Businesses will face an inflationary volume problem of digital assets – what is real and in need of our attention, what is just robbing us of resources in terms of time and review?
Without an answer to these questions, even a temporary return to traditional mail is one of the few currently available ways out.

The Blockchain Concept

“Blockchain” is for sure the most prominent buzzword when talking Bitcoin. The blockchain data structure is important but remains just a single puzzle piece. Ironically, blockchain alone, which is a simple hashed linked list data structure, is not enough to reach effects like the often-quoted immutability.

At the core of Bitcoin’s resilience are four key pillars: decentralization, blockchain, cryptography, and proof-of-work. Together they construct the emergent property of “data immutability”.
Decentralization removes one vulnerable single point of failure from a technical architectural perspective by spreading duplicated components around the world.
Blockchain chains data together and establishes a data relationship over time.
Cryptography entangles secret and public information to provide a form of “possession” in cyberspace.
Proof of work binds information to physical effort and thereby to the physical world, forging a past with unfalsifiable costliness.
As a result, this scarce information acquires several desirable physical properties without inheriting their drawbacks. Be aware that the Bitcoin blockchain can only enforce what’s inside its own network and therefore is powerless on what is happening outside the network.

Bringing order back into the generative AI fake chaos by Blockchain

To restore a positive signal-to-noise ratio in cyberspace awash with digital assets, blockchain technology is coming into play to clear the field of vision for businesses. A strong blockchain, with its non-monetary use cases, can help combat the masses of inflationary, harmful, AI-generated digital assets. Time. Facts. Energy.

Let’s get through each of them:

The three non-monetary use-cases of a strong blockchain

There is time against generative AI flood

Anchoring digital assets in a “timechain” solves the problem of “WHEN”. The result is a “minimum time stamp” with legal provability.
When did something happen? There is a mathematical way to prove that, for example, this fake invoice is not from January last year as stated but is fake and from yesterday.

A kidnapper shows an actual newspaper with its hostage to proof that a hostage is still alive

We’ll use a simple analogy to illustrate: imagine a hostage situation and the task of the blackmailer is to prove that the scourge is still alive today. Showing a calendar with the scourge or a digital timestamp on a smartphone would not be credible and would not convince anyone that the evidence is from today, since these stamps can be created at will. In contrast, the front page of a newspaper is unpredictable and therefore must be current. Such evidence is credible. Everyone knows this intuitively.

The same concept applies to a blockchain block. It is not possible to predict the upcoming blocks and their content. A hijacker could also show a picture of the hostage holding a Bitcoin block picture to prove a minimum date, since it was impossible to predict just like the front page of today’s newspaper last week.

For data integrity, the question is WHEN was the digital asset issued?
WHEN has the digital asset been revoked?
Anchoring a data fingerprint, also called a hash value, in a blockchain provides a “minimum timestamp” for a digital asset and thus increases data integrity. Similar to the front page of a newspaper.

A perfectly AI-generated video message from a CEO to his investors that is presented as leaked footage from last year, but is in fact fake and doctored, can do great damage to a company’s reputation and integrity, depending on what messages are conveyed there.
For AI-generated assets such as a video statement from a CEO or even a simple invoice, blockchain technology provides a way to distinguish between new digital assets from last week and an asset that definitely existed two years ago. This could be an important contract or even a simple document scan.
A digital asset can be mathematically proven to be "at least" as old as a block.
Legal disputes can be settled with court-proof evidence of AI-generated digital assets claiming to be older than they are. Fake video messages from key corporate stakeholders can be debunked easily with the help of a strong blockchain.

There are facts against generative AI flood

There is immutable neutral data, thanks to blockchain technology. The “what” anchored on a strong blockchain with hash trees helps companies maintain control over their cross-enterprise data when other players besides themselves are involved. The data itself must be stored on a strong blockchain. AI generated data which pretends to be genuine can be filtered. The “fingerprint” in the form of a hash is already quite sufficient; the file itself does not need to be disclosed.

When companies use a “neutral database” provided by a strong blockchain, they gain non-repudiation of their digital assets and the assets of their participating business partners. Original digital assets cannot be subsequently declared to be counterfeit AI-generated content.
Version conflicts or revocation states are clear and no longer a subject of debate and dispute;especially from a legal point of view.
Maliciously generated AI assets that target cross-company shared digital assets no longer have a chance of being manipulated. The document, contract, or video message can be unambiguously verified to be in its original state with the swipe of a finger.

Even if the private keys corresponding to the identity in cyberspace are compromised, misuse would be quickly detected because all transactions involve a minimum level of visibility to the owners of the organization’s cryptographic keys. Hidden offline signatures are not possible when built on a strong public blockchain.
Third-party proofs as governments for sustainability taxonomies are implanted in a strong form with minimal effort.

There is energy against generative AI flood

In cyberspace, one law seems to have been suspended: the law of physical costs. Emails and PDF certificates can seemingly be created at will and at almost zero cost. While there are indeed hardware and electricity costs associated with the creation and distribution of digital data, when we look at our email inbox, we intuitively know that the physical overhead in the real world is enormous when we operate in cyberspace. Any owner of a simple Internet device can send thousands of e-mails a day, disguising them as important corporate messages.

13 minutes after the start of the Pentagon’s Whitehat hacking event in the form of the Bug Bounty program, the first report of a security breach arrived.
If the test had required physically penetrating the Pentagon’s sensitive areas, these tests would undoubtedly have gone off without a hitch.
In cyberspace, physical blockchains can revive real-world efforts to penetrate sensitive areas such as corporate networks.
The internet error code ERROR 402 - PAYMENT REQUIRED is all but forgotten and no longer used – until now. The coming flood of AI-generated content will change that.

In the physical world, we can be sure that we will not receive 1,000 perfectly faked letters per day. The reason is the implied physical cost, so the attacker will run out of money very soon.
So, if our physical mailbox gets spammed less than our email inbox, and the reason is simply that the actual cost of printing documents, buying a stamp, and mailing them deters the attackers, then we can copy those principles in cyberspace to meet the digital needs of our customers in an AI-saturated environment. This is already possible because we have energy-related assets that we can connect to enterprise digital assets. And malicious AI-generated content would have to do the same.

If we assume that the noise of AI-generated malicious content, like thousands of real responsive invoices per day, is disrupting and massively damaging the business operations of enterprises and causing them enormous potential harm, there is a reason to bring back the signal in the noise with a strong blockchain.

An interesting new concept in this area is the “Proof of Energy”. The basic idea is to give digital assets, such as sending an email or creating a contract, a certain “weight” in the form of energy.
Bitcoin provides exactly that through Proof-of-Work:
Attaching something of value to digital assets for inter-company communication, such as a few satoshis, which are the smallest unit of bitcoin (1 bitcoin = 100,000,000 sats), would signal, like a timestamp, that inter-company communication has actual costs and is worth listening to. These satoshis themselves represent a certain amount of energy as they are obtained through Proof-of-Work. But in Cyberspace.

“I have something to say to you, and here’s my proof of why this is worth doing for me.” As simple as a physical letter. To me, it’s worth X amount of effort to talk to you. But it gets even better than in the physical counterpart, because the enclosed satoshis, which by their nature are created with real physical activities like a proof of work, can be used as a deposit or pledge. So, companies can also return the attached currency when they confirm value-based communication. Harmful communications are denied this.
In this way, companies can recover signal in a generative, AI-infested business environment where it is nearly impossible to distinguish between real and fake.

Reduction of spam: It would become more expensive for spammers to send bulk emails which are weighted as important, as they would have to pay for each energized email. This could help to reduce the amount of spam noise.

Prioritizing digital assets: Emails with a higher amount of satoshis attached could be considered more important and would be more likely to be read. Comparable to a rea-world letter.

Appreciation of the recipient's time: A small amount of satoshis could serve as a thank you for the recipient's time & attention.

The same concept could be applied to every other type of corporate cross-company communications, such as contracts, invoices or documents. Attaching energy could help ensure the authenticity of these digital assets and protect them from tampering by AI LLMs.

Of course, there are also challenges and potential drawbacks with this energy approach. For one, it would require some technical complexity, both on the part of the sender and the recipient. Not all companies or employees are familiar with these concepts like energy on digital assets.

Conclusion

SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) is the best foundation to offer a standardized service as a solution for customers to “energize” their digital assets to be shared with other stakeholders, companies or third parties.

Proof-of-Energy offers an interesting approach to address the challenges posed by AI-generated material and the general inundation of digital information.

So, giving digital assets a physical weighting to stand out against AI-generated noise. A digital asset sharing service could automatically attach cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin to the company’s digital assets to be shared with the weight it deserves – “it’s worth listening to what I have to say. And I prove it with the use of real-world resources”.
There is a huge cost to an attacker required from using generative AI and LLMs in a harmful way against businesses if those are protected with real-world resources.
As we’ll see, it is possible to protect corporate communications, even if the misuse of generative AI is used by criminals to harm company businesses. A dystopian prospect for sure, but one to think about and have solutions for.

ICN Blockchain Walldorf

Contact at blockchain@sap.com

Learn more:

SAP Blockchain Business Connector: Innovation in Business Models and Cross-Company Collaborations
NFT – Digital Asset Representation on a blockchain
NFTs: Join SAP in Reinventing Business Models and Deepening Customer Relationships
Demystifying NFTs – a technical view
NFT Smart Contract Development – Road to OpenSea (Part 1)

Blockchain: The New Technology for Trust | SAP

NFT (Non-Fungible-Tokens) | Digital Technology and Innovation Management | SAP Community