Within this context, taking into account its knowledge of the industry, SAP identified the priorities and respective benefits of the partnership with Microsoft to improve processes, as well as the creation of new business models, cognitive services, streaming data, and other enriching tools for your customers.
Launched in 2015, SAP S / 4HANA today has more than 13,800 customers, a record for December 2019. SAP presents a commitment to SAP S / 4HANA cloud in quarterly format, that is, every three months it has to present innovation to its customers, even though due to the extraordinary times due to the pandemic, there may be some delay in the delivery of the tools.
On the other hand, Lus Shaby from Microsoft, explained how the company invested in the Azure platform to make SAP applications compatible and optimized to run in the cloud, never forgetting its security infrastructure. Customers ask for current infrastructure capacity for their solutions, and how it can evolve in the future with workloads. Luis Shaby guarantees this flexibility and scalability through virtual machines.
He also mentions that, before, companies planned their needs for 3 years, and invested, but often did not use their totality, wasting resources. Through Azure there is total flexibility, whether to increase or reduce the needs of the infrastructure or adjust the costs to the needs of the company, with savings that it claims are evident.
Examples of this are the integration of SAP with Microsoft Teams using Azure bots to quickly clarify customer doubts. The entire implementation is based on optimized templates, which already know how to communicate with the platform. This opens a multi-language channel, preserving the respective communication history. Another example of the integration advantage is in authentication, making it easy for a user to use only one password to access the SAP system, through his Office 365 credential.
Practical examples of scanning using SAP S / 4HANA technology in Azure
After the presentation, two real testimonies of use were introduced: an international example, made by Kennametal, a North American company, dedicated to the production of tools and industrial materials for the transportation, energy and transportation industries, through metal-based products. And Sonae Fashion, the area of ​​the company dedicated to exploring fashion store franchises, such as Zippy, SportZone, Salsa and M.
Regarding Kenmetal, the introduction of SAP and Microsoft helped the company to migrate to the cloud, highlighting the speed and mobility with an impact on the productivity of all employees, by simplifying its operations. As challenges they had about 75 interfaces that needed to be migrated to Azure. The company is closing its fiscal year in June, with full integration during its last year, revealing that there was cost savings in integrating the solution.
He also highlighted the remote work capabilities that the platform offers, especially in the COVID-19 pandemic times that are currently being experienced. It was stated that the company's move to telecommuting was very easy.
J Nuno Miller, from Sonae Fashion, also gave his testimony of how SAP solutions have helped the company, considering that it has 400 franchising stores worldwide, in more than 80 countries, with more than 3,000 employees and 5,000 points of sale . It has eight brands, including Zippy, SportZone, Salsa and M. The company has focused on becoming more fashion, digital and gil, as the main pillars of evolution.
It has been a year and a half since the company decided to redesign its digital architecture, with the objective of providing greater agility to the user and making the data generated through intelligence profitable. 24/7 business support is one of the concerns of its new digital structure and at the lowest possible investment and operation cost. It also wants to be an increasingly global business, even if it considers conditions such as the language and currency of each country.
In its requirements, the company wants a unifying platform, a single data center, to serve multiple companies, as some are stronger in retail, others in the online space. It also needed a virtual datacenter, discarding physical servers, with cloud-first and Software as a Service (SaaS). All of this to ensure control in the future and speed of implementation. The company prefers to adopt root solutions rather than adapting existing solutions to its reality.
Despite facing some unplanned costs, Sonae Fashion saw as advantages the access to new technologies and capabilities, as soon as they became available, and the reduction of new machines for its operations.
