SAP Insider: Integrated SAP Solution Set - Product and Demand Networks.

SAP Insider is an annual conference where organizations using SAP solutions can get together and share their practical experiences, get in-depth view of SAP’s products and learn about SAP’s future software strategy. Since the focus is around sharing SAP product knowledge and implementation experience, attendees can get into weeds to understand SAP’s current product line and future strategy.

This year the annual SAP Insider conference was held in Las Vegas at the Mirage, with over 1500 people who attended the manufacturing keynote. The conference had 195 sessions and 31 case studies by 165 experts in the area of logistics, SCM, PLM, manufacturing and procurement. The keynote from Hans Thalbauer (Senior Vice President of Solution Management for Extended Supply Chain) was named - Connecting your company strategy with your customer and product strategy.  Hans’ keynote focused on the current industry trends and SAP’s strategy to address them. He talked about how in current business environment corporate strategy has to be tied to company’s customers and the products that they manufacture. Customer centricity has led to creation of newer channels that assist in understanding customer demands at the most granular level. Hans touched upon personalization of products that has come about due to 3D printing – with it the ability to configure products to the needs of customers and  direct impact on supply chain. 

Hans also touched upon the SAP software strategy  to address the IoT (internet of things) domain. SAP software helps its customers gain real time insight into the information networks, making the data that comes from sensors and machines to flow in PLM, manufacturing entire supply chain etc. This helps companies to take actions such as repairs of existing broken down equipment and also to avoid future issues using predictive analytics functions within SAP.

SAP described its Demand and Product Networks concept to address current industry business, software and engineering trends. SAP’s strategy covers every activity that falls in the manufacturing world including supply chain, product development, compliance and beyond.

Overall SAP in each of the sessions, reiterated its concept of connected and complete solution set for the enterprise with its Product and Demand Network along with with IoT approach. Its solution strategy is to have HANA as a core platform and SAP Fiori as responsive front end for all its applications. SAP made it widely aware to the attendees  that cloud is the future and it will serve what its customers want whether the need be on premise or public cloud.