Intelligent Enterprise with SAP Cloud For Your Enterprise
The ex-CEO of SAP, Bill McDermott, in his keynote speech at the 2018 SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG Annual Conference, revealed SAP's vision for the future - intelligent enterprise, with the purpose to fuel economies, lift societies, and sustain our environment with a new holistic offering.
An Intelligent Enterprise, according to SAP, is one that consistently integrates advanced technology and best practices within the agile framework to enhance business processes.
In terms of ground-level implementation:
Instil a cloud-first approach for end-to-end storage and processing needs.
Implement AI and Machine Learning into business processes to create autonomous processes.
Use the power of the cloud and modern tech to derive deep business insights, to better understand customer experience and operations.
These are the core ideas for building an intelligent enterprise - migrating the value chain to the cloud, creating fully autonomous processes, and implementing data-backed process improvements.
An intelligent enterprise is cloud-centric, automation-centric, and customer-centric.
What does it mean to be fully autonomous?
In the context of an enterprise, levels of enterprise process automation can be split into 5 stages. As each stage progresses, human involvement reduces, and AI involvement increases:
Levels of Enterprise System Automation (Source)
Level 0 - Manual enterprise: All processes are run manually, and data is stored on physical mediums
Level 1 - Transactional enterprise: While processes are run manually, technology is used for data storage, data sharing, and process management.
Level 2 - Digital enterprise: Manual tasks are backed by AI-powered real-time analytics and recommendations.
Level 3 - Intelligent enterprise: Robotic Process Automation takes over tasks and uses AI to improve. While processes are automated, they run in silos based on function and require human monitoring.
Level 4 - Autonomous enterprise: Fully automated processes that interact with each other and make data-based decisions, so human intervention is not needed.
We have the technology available today for businesses to be fully intelligent enterprises and achieve Level 3 of automation. Intelligent technologies in SAP S/4HANA and SAP Leonardo technologies are designed to help businesses transform into truly intelligent enterprises.