SAP Innovation Forum Nordics 2018

Blog: Capgemini CTO Blog

What is SAP Innovation Forum Nordics?

SAP Innovation Forum Nordics is a mini-SAPPHIRE event, directed towards the Nordics market. It is a two-day forum where SAP, SAP users, SAP partners, and solution experts meet and experience the hot topics within the SAP world of innovation. It is a business-centric event and includes workshops, presentations, discussions, and showcases of SAP Leonardo applied in practice. The event was held on September 19-20th at Lokomotivværkstedet in Copenhagen, providing just the perfect ambiance: Combining a classic old industrial hall with modernized and digital elements.

At the Keynote

Expectations

Capgemini was one of the sponsors at the event and we decided to participate with twelve representatives from the SAP Practice and Account Management from Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway. We spread the word and expected to meet our customers, existing and potential, as well as partners and competitors and showcase the work that we are doing with SAP Leonardo as well as see what others are working on, what the trends and needs are and what the current buzz is. We wanted to show our strong capabilities and use cases within SAP innovation and prepared two demos to bring along, both described below.

Hindsight

More than 500 unique visitors came to the event over the course of two days, a good mix of customers, partners, and SAP. Day one started with workshops and running live sprints, after lunch the keynotes and other presentations followed. We got to experience inspirational talks from SAP and from customers (such as Danfoss, Danish Crown, Nokia, and Equinor) and learn about their journeys into S/4HANA, the digital enterprise and working with innovation. Day two continued with getting deeper insights into the same topics.

The conference ended with presentations of the results from the Run Live Sprints (with Falck Ambulance, Royal Greenland, Planetlocal and TrygFonden), all of which were very impressive and a great proof for the fact that an SAP-related engagement does not necessarily need to take months or years but can be done within a few days, using an efficient mix of competences, design thinking and engaging the end users – it’s more than good enough for a proof of concept, which later on can be scaled up into a larger initiative.

During both days, the exhibition floor was open, offering not only old-fashioned slides and brochures but also very interactive experiences from SAP, as well as innovative demos from some of the partners. IoT seems to be a common denominator for the demos brought to the event, some within retail, some within the supply chain.

The ColdChain truck

Google Visual Inspection

Capgemini brought to the table two SAP Leonardo demos:

ColdChain, helping companies producing and transporting i.e. Dairy and Meet to control the temperature-sensitive transport in real-time by tracking sensor data (such as temperature and location) from the trucks on the road, managing the underlying purchase orders and deliveries. The setup is using Digital Twins, SAP IoT Services, SAP Cloud Platform, Fiori and S/4HANA.

Google Visual Inspection helps manufacturing companies to control the quality of their products both in production and at end of the line. Here we used machine learning for visual classification in order to identify correct products and products with errors falling into different classes. The setup is using Google’s Auto ML/Vision API, SAP Cloud Platform, SAP IoT Services, Fiori and S/4HANA.

Both the demos caught significant interest amongst the visitors and were very well perceived.

Fun with innovation

Google Visual Inspection demo in action

My personal view

Were my expectations fulfilled? I must say: YES! We got some very good discussions going, with existing and prospect customers, SAP and even some very constructive dialogue with the competition. We went home with some very good leads and have further grown our network within the digital enterprise space.

Connected Funfair from SAP

SAP has without doubt been a leader in the core ERP for a long time. Now, my view on SAP as an aspiring leader also within innovation and as the hub in the digital enterprise of the future was certainly confirmed. At the same time, I can see that the work we are doing at Capgemini, our capabilities and our strategy is correlating extremely well with the journey of SAP and our customers.

I strongly believe that we are looking at a very exciting future here and the already started journey towards S/4HANA, C/4HANA, and the digital enterprise together with our customers – and I am happy to be part of it!