To stay com­pet­i­tive and rel­e­vant in today’s mar­ket­place, a busi­ness must con­sid­er its cus­tomers’ end-to-end jour­ney. That’s every­thing from the point of inter­est to the point of trans­ac­tion and beyond. Although there is plen­ty tech­nol­o­gy that will help you track, mea­sure, and pre­dict these expe­ri­ences, we still need human empa­thy to dri­ve innovation.

Eric Stine, chief inno­va­tion offi­cer at SAP North Amer­i­ca, is respon­si­ble for deliv­er­ing a seam­less, inte­grat­ed expe­ri­ence across the cen­ters of excel­lence focused on indus­try and domain exper­tise, solu­tion engi­neer­ing, and advi­so­ry ser­vices ded­i­cat­ed to enter­prise data, cyber­se­cu­ri­ty, and busi­ness val­ue realization.

Sim­ply put, he and his team aim to deliv­er a seam­less cus­tomer expe­ri­ence for SAP cus­tomers built on trust, empa­thy, exper­tise, and busi­ness val­ue. He sat down with ASUG News to dis­cuss how his team accom­plish­es this and what it means for the future of business.

ASUG News: Tell us about your role at SAP and what you’ve been focus­ing on for the last year.

Eric: I’m respon­si­ble for dri­ving the go-to-mar­ket strat­e­gy for North Amer­i­ca. My team sits between the aware­ness and demand gen­er­a­tion done by mar­ket­ing and the sales exe­cu­tion of our mar­ket units. 

We pro­vide advi­so­ry ser­vices in all 28 indus­tries where SAP goes to mar­ket. We facil­i­tate the oppor­tu­ni­ty for for­mer indus­try exec­u­tives to sit across from our cur­rent cus­tomers as peers. 

My team offers engi­neer­ing resources that work with our cus­tomers to under­stand the strat­e­gy they are try­ing to dri­ve as a cor­po­ra­tion. We help them under­stand how their dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion aligns to that strat­e­gy and what out­comes will advance that strat­e­gy. That’s a nec­es­sary first step to get­ting to the last major piece of what my orga­ni­za­tion deliv­ers, which is solu­tion engineering.

We pro­vide prod­uct and tech­nol­o­gy experts, enter­prise archi­tects, and busi­ness experts in a vari­ety of spaces from finance to sup­ply chains, to human resources, sales, and ana­lyt­ics. We look at the con­text of the cus­tomer strat­e­gy, the out­comes that they are look­ing to pro­duce, and the capa­bil­i­ties and expe­ri­ences that will deliv­er those out­comes. And then, we help them design a solu­tion to deliv­er those capa­bil­i­ties and experiences.

We have a tru­ly orches­trat­ed mar­ket process that starts with the con­text of the customer’s indus­try, quan­ti­fies the out­comes that they’re look­ing for, views them through the lens of expe­ri­ence and capa­bil­i­ties, and then puts a solu­tion behind it. 

We want to make sure that we have a solu­tion for three buy­ing per­sonas — the func­tion­al own­er, the CIO who will be held account­able to the deliv­ery, and the CFO who’s look­ing to man­age both the cost and more impor­tant­ly the busi­ness val­ue that comes out of the investment.

ASUG News: Your team focus­es on the con­nec­tions of trust and empa­thy that SAP builds with cus­tomers. What do you see as the most crit­i­cal ways to earn this?

Eric: It starts with lis­ten­ing to the chal­lenges that our cus­tomers are fac­ing. As a result, we rec­og­nize pat­terns that help our cus­tomers under­stand why their peers are mov­ing from lin­ear sup­ply chains to agile sup­ply net­works or how automa­tion is trans­form­ing finance. 

So, it must start with lis­ten­ing and look­ing for those pat­terns so that we can under­stand what’s going on in the mar­ket. I believe we are the front line that helps prod­uct devel­op­ment under­stand what our cus­tomers are look­ing for. And of course, the last part is to act on that under­stand­ing by putting togeth­er a solu­tion that address­es the busi­ness value.

ASUG News: What is your team’s role, if any, in SAP’s new cus­tomer-first ini­tia­tive?

Eric: Mar­ty Mru­gal, SAP’s glob­al head of Cus­tomer First, and I have a very close part­ner­ship. We both believe that a world where we call things pre-sales and post-sales no longer exists. With more than 70% of our rev­enue now recur­ring and the impor­tance of the cloud busi­ness, I believe that we must earn our cus­tomers’ trust every sin­gle day. Switch­ing costs are low­er, brand loy­al­ty in every indus­try has changed, and the rigid lines that sep­a­rate indus­tries have changed, too. Many of our cus­tomers are them­selves in the tech­nol­o­gy busi­ness and under­stand what it means exceed ser­vice lev­el expec­ta­tions and to inno­vate for their customers.

And so, I see my team’s respon­si­bil­i­ty with the cus­tomer-first ini­tia­tive as edu­ca­tion. We need to edu­cate our col­leagues about why the cus­tomer is trans­form­ing, and what the expect­ed out­comes are, so we can help them real­ize the val­ue that they’re try­ing to cre­ate for their cus­tomer. Marty’s team is about adop­tion and val­ue real­iza­tion. So, if we’re talk­ing about iden­ti­fy­ing the val­ue of under­tak­ing an SAP trans­for­ma­tion, Marty’s team is about mak­ing sure you receive that val­ue through best prac­tices, busi­ness val­ue real­iza­tion, and employ­ee and cus­tomer adoption.

ASUG News: Through our State of the Com­mu­ni­ty study, we’ve dis­cov­ered that inno­va­tion can be a pain point for a lot of cus­tomers. Many cus­tomers strug­gle to find enough time to inno­vate when they are spend­ing so much effort to main­tain lega­cy sys­tems. What is SAP active­ly doing to help this seg­ment of customers?

Eric: I would say two things. First, let’s rede­fine inno­va­tion. And sec­ond, lis­ten more than you talk.

Peo­ple come to events like SAP­PHIRE NOW and ASUG Annu­al Con­fer­ence. They see all the oppor­tu­ni­ties and poten­tial for the future, but the pace at which most orga­ni­za­tions can con­sume change is exceed­ed by the vast options that they have to inno­vate. I think that’s the rea­son why orga­ni­za­tions need to start by defin­ing their busi­ness strat­e­gy, out­comes that can advance that strat­e­gy, and then the capa­bil­i­ties that would be the most mean­ing­ful. From there, they can deter­mine where and how to innovate.

Let me explain more what I mean by redefin­ing inno­va­tion. I believe the most inno­v­a­tive inven­tion — process inno­va­tion, not prod­uct — of the 20^th cen­tu­ry was the cre­ation of the assem­bly line. With­out the assem­bly line there wouldn’t be cars for the mid­dle class, which means no roads, no inter­state high­way sys­tems, no sub­urbs, no fast food restau­rants, no music cul­ture, and no dri­ve-in movies. All of a sud­den, Amer­i­can cul­ture would look com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent through that lens.

I always tell our cus­tomers to start with the process. Just a sin­gle process can change the way you do busi­ness. If you’re look­ing for a prod­uct as a rea­son to inno­vate, you might be look­ing in the wrong place. Start inno­vat­ing by chang­ing the way peo­ple behave, because to me, that is the most pow­er­ful way to do it.

Many of our cus­tomers from the late 90s and ear­ly 2000s have heav­i­ly cus­tomized envi­ron­ments where they feel a strong sense of own­er­ship over how they did things. That’s now shift­ing toward a greater will­ing­ness to get to fit-to-stan­dard process­es. Part of the inno­va­tion part­ner­ship is being open to dif­fer­ent ways of doing things that pro­duce the same or bet­ter results.

Now for the sec­ond thing: Lis­ten more than you talk. Lis­ten­ing is a bidi­rec­tion­al activity.Listening is SAP’s respon­si­bil­i­ty as well. Through the course of our rela­tion­ship with Nike, South­ern Cal­i­for­nia Edi­son, and Lock­heed Mar­tin, we have coin­no­vat­ed solu­tions for the agile sup­ply chain, con­sumer indus­tries, projects and pro­grams and util­i­ties, and sev­er­al oth­er areas. There are always oppor­tu­ni­ties to inno­vate if we lis­ten to each oth­er and we both express our will­ing­ness to learn. For SAP, it’s about iden­ti­fy­ing emerg­ing indus­try trends, and for our cus­tomers, it’s about under­stand­ing how to move the nee­dle and innovate.

Final­ly, the tra­di­tion­al lines between indus­try are blur­ring. Every­body is in the expe­ri­ence busi­ness, every­body is a con­sumer com­pa­ny, and every­body is an employ­er. If we look at those uni­ver­sal truths and start hav­ing the con­ver­sa­tion from that per­spec­tive, we get a much greater will­ing­ness to rede­fine inno­va­tion and to lis­ten to each other. 

ASUG News: In your opin­ion, what inno­va­tions do you think are poised to change the busi­ness world the most in the next one to two years?

Eric: Embed­ded intel­li­gence will com­plete­ly change the work­force. Facial recog­ni­tion soft­ware will elim­i­nate 1.8 mil­lion jobs, nat­ur­al lan­guage pro­cess­ing will elim­i­nate 3 mil­lion call cen­ter jobs, self-check­out will elim­i­nate 3.4 mil­lion cashier jobs, autonomous dri­ving will elim­i­nate 3.5 com­mer­cial dri­ving jobs. But we are cre­at­ing 58 mil­lion jobs over the next five and a half years in cat­e­gories that don’t even exist today. Work­force devel­op­ment is the cli­mate change prob­lem of the work­force, and it’s some­thing that every­body is focused on solv­ing because embed­ding intel­li­gence into the busi­ness will com­plete­ly change how we hire, who we hire, and what they do. It also will change eco­nom­ic struc­tures because the val­ue of dif­fer­ent jobs will change as well. I’ve got three-year-old twins, so I think about this dai­ly for very per­son­al reasons. 

ASUG News: You have the back­ground of a Renais­sance man. You have a law degree, you’ve stud­ied polit­i­cal sci­ence, his­to­ry, com­mu­ni­ca­tions, and even the­ater. How does your var­ied back­ground help you in your cur­rent role? 

Eric: The thing that gives me per­spec­tive is that my par­ents were teach­ers. They taught me the val­ue of hard work and that hard work makes a dif­fer­ence. They taught me the val­ue of empa­thy because to them it meant two things: the impor­tance of for­give­ness and the abil­i­ty to see the world through some­body else’s eyes.

If I can cred­it my per­son­al suc­cess to any­thing, it would be to empa­thy and that’s why it’s a core val­ue for my team.

Join us at one of our region­al ASUG Exec­u­tive Exchange events in 2019 to net­work with oth­er exec­u­tives look­ing to get more val­ue from their SAP systems.