SAP recently announced the creation of a digital ecosystem with the SAP Leonardo portfolio exclusively for India. To accelerate the digital economy of India, SAP is collaborating with technology powerhouses to extend a holistic innovation system and initiatives across industries. Kaushik Bagchi, Vice President and Head – Digital Enterprise Platform Group, SAP Indian Subcontinent, shares with EC, why SAP is extremely bullish on the digital opportunities emerging out of India
Some edited excerpts:
What are some of the huge opportunities that SAP sees in India with respect to digital transformation?
Digital transformation is rewriting the rules of every aspect of business and reshaping almost all the industries, as we know it. Industry disruption and transformation presents numerous opportunities, as well as challenges, for technology vendors, service providers, and enterprise customers. Understanding every major aspect of this changing landscape, the impact on Indian businesses and developing a strong and timely market response will be the key to continued success and growth in this market. The most significant growth opportunities that we see for us are in the areas where technology can support new and innovative business models – and, essentially, business value. We have a robust portfolio of products that can enable digital transformation across enterprises and run business-critical processes quickly and securely in the cloud – today and as businesses need to evolve.
Can you give us a brief on some of your firm’s solutions that are in demand from customers for their digital transformation journey?
With industry expertise that touches more than 70% of the world’s business processes, SAP is uniquely positioned to deliver tangible progress towards our customers’ digital transformation strategy. The success formula behind this is our strong digital core and our easy-to-use system that supports innovations consisting of SAP S/4HANA, our cloud portfolio and SAP Leonardo. Our next-gen ERP system supports operational excellence, automation, and seamless technology integration from our customers’ business core. Additionally, our system of future-ready technologies is accessed through the cloud and augmented by design thinking services for rapid prototyping and adoption. All of these work in tandem to make entire businesses more immediate, intelligent, and seamlessly integrated – no matter the size or industry of our customers.
Recently, SAP and the European Research Center for Information Systems (ERCIS) collaborated on a maturity model that will allow companies to assess, track and develop digital skills that their workforces need to succeed in the digitally-enabled world. Do you have such a model for India?
We are currently exploring how to leverage that model for India. We have, however, taken several steps specifically for India towards fostering digital skill development in the country. One of the prominent initiatives in this direction is Code Unnati, a multi-year, collaborative digital literacy & software skills development initiative along with ITC and Larsen & Toubro Public Charitable Trust. The initiative significantly emphasizes on advanced software skills relevant for Industry 4.0 and employment creation, with an intent to fill the gap of 3.5 million technologically skilled and educated citizens required for India to be known as a digitally literate nation.
Can you name some of your recent customer wins in India with respect to digital transformation?
SAP’s comprehensive solutions are compatible with business processes across all industries. Some of our large customers like KEC International, Mahindra & Mahindra, Infosys Limited, Asian Paints Ltd., Emami Cement, Kurlon Enterprise Ltd, Seforge Ltd are leveraging SAP HANA, SAP Cloud Platform and other key SAP solutions. The solutions have digitally transformed their business and helped them in key processes like making real-time decisions, providing insights and analytics for better customer service and standardizing their systems and processes. Our SAP SuccessFactors solutions are serving many of our newer customers like D’Décor and NEC Technologies in integrated human capital management; especially with matters like regulating recruitment and hiring processes, easy access to human capital information, empowering hiring managers with the necessary data and boosting productivity and performance. For driving down costs by automating procurement, Spark Minda uses SAP Ariba Sourcing.
