When most indus­tries refer to sup­port­ing their field work­ers with tech­nol­o­gy, it’s about pro­vid­ing mobile-dri­ven ways to sub­mit orders, run tests, order parts, or com­plete cus­tomer ser­vice tasks. For Taron­ga Con­ser­va­tion Soci­ety Aus­tralia, its field work­ers are feed­ing and car­ing for its res­i­dent ani­mals. This pre­sent­ed a very unique chal­lenge for the IT team charged with design­ing and build­ing a staff expe­ri­ence app. Because when you’re in an enclo­sure with a giraffe, you need to be able to com­plete your sup­ply order quick­ly with one hand on a mobile device. 

Fly­ing into the SAP S/4HANA Cloud

This was an ambi­tious dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion that involved a move from SAP ECC 6.0 on-premise where the team relied on spread­sheets to do ana­lyt­ics, all the way to SAP S/4HANA Cloud. The employ­ee mobile app would con­nect with the new cloud-based ERP sys­tem, as well as with a new SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors imple­men­ta­tion to help employ­ees com­plete HR-based tasks. And all of this work would take a dig­i­tal-first and mobile-first approach as it aimed to help employ­ees com­plete self-serve busi­ness process­es more effi­cient­ly than they could before. 

Man­ag­er of IT Oper­a­tions Cas­san­dra Long explained to ASUG how the orga­ni­za­tion relies on tech­nol­o­gy to achieve its mis­sion, as well as how she and her team accom­plished the first phas­es of their dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion. The goal was to rein­vent fric­tion­less busi­ness process­es so employ­ees could stay focused on the real rea­sons why they’re there — to care for the res­i­dent ani­mals and edu­cate guests about how they can per­son­al­ly take part in con­ser­va­tion efforts. 

Ann Marie: Tell us a bit about Taron­ga Con­ser­va­tion Soci­ety Aus­tralia. What’s your his­to­ry and how have you evolved today?

Cas­san­dra: Taron­ga Con­ser­va­tion Soci­ety Aus­tralia is a not-for-prof­it orga­ni­za­tion that pri­mar­i­ly con­ducts research and con­ser­va­tion work through edu­ca­tion. We offer kinder­garten to master’s‑level edu­ca­tion, and we also deliv­er trans­for­ma­tion­al guest expe­ri­ences at our zoos in Syd­ney and Dub­bo. In 2008, we wel­comed more than 1.9 mil­lion guests. We want their expe­ri­ences with us to change their atti­tudes and behav­iors toward pos­i­tive out­comes for wildlife. We’re more than a hun­dred years old. In that time, we’ve moved from being a zoo to a con­ser­va­tion soci­ety. We now aim to be a leader in con­ser­va­tion with a glob­al impact that influ­ences human deci­sions, sup­ply chains, and gov­ern­ment policy. 

Ann Marie: How do you rely on tech­nol­o­gy to sup­port your mission?

Cas­san­dra: About two years ago, Taron­ga adopt­ed a dig­i­tal-first approach for all our busi­ness-fac­ing appli­ca­tions and the way we do busi­ness from an oper­a­tional per­spec­tive. That approach is all about look­ing to tech­nol­o­gy to help us achieve cost sav­ings for our infra­struc­ture, to be able to rapid­ly respond to changes, and to con­tribute to sus­tain­abil­i­ty goals like our on-site car­bon foot­print. When it comes to our con­ser­va­tion and edu­ca­tion­al mis­sion, we use tech­nol­o­gy to cre­ate real transformation. 

Ann Marie: How do the guests at your zoos engage with your dig­i­tal-first approach? 

Cas­san­dra: One of our great suc­cess sto­ries is our Tiger Trek super­mar­ket. For this expe­ri­ence, our guests enter through an air­plane sim­u­lat­ing a flight to Suma­tra. Then they come out into a Suma­tran vil­lage to see the tigers. The mes­sag­ing on the exhib­it is around sus­tain­able palm oil and what actions to take to stop defor­esta­tion. When the guests exit the exhib­it, they come into the Tiger Trek super­mar­ket. The tech­nol­o­gy there lets the guests — and ulti­mate­ly the deci­sion-mak­ers of the fam­i­ly — look up their favorite prod­ucts that they buy and see how that prod­uct rates in terms of sus­tain­able palm oil con­tent in the sup­ply chain. 

Then we give the guest the oppor­tu­ni­ty to email the big super­mar­kets to tell them, ​“Hey, keep stock­ing this prod­uct,” or ​“Maybe you could stock a dif­fer­ent brand that has more sus­tain­able palm oil con­tent?” Our guests have sent more than 100,000 emails to the super­mar­kets where they shop. And those super­mar­kets are engag­ing with us. So, we’re actu­al­ly influ­enc­ing the sup­ply chain through dri­ving con­sumer deci­sions. That’s one bright suc­cess sto­ry of how we’re using technology.

Ann Marie: What oth­er tech-dri­ven expe­ri­ences do you offer guests? 

Cas­san­dra: We’ve got a new Savan­nah exhib­it open­ing soon, fea­tur­ing giraffes, zebras, and lions. And we have engaged with a group of peo­ple in Kenya that we’re work­ing with to pre­vent poach­ing by pro­vid­ing anoth­er income stream. We’re call­ing it ​“Beads for Wildlife.” We have a vir­tu­al real­i­ty (VR) set­up where peo­ple can buy the beads from the crafts­peo­ple in Kenya and can send a mes­sage of encour­age­ment to them. The guests can put VR lions or giraffes over their faces, take a pho­to, and send a post­card to the crafts­peo­ple. Tech­nol­o­gy like this can real­ly ramp up our edu­ca­tion­al expe­ri­ences and make them mem­o­rable for our guests. 

Ann Marie: What types of intel­li­gent tech­nolo­gies are you using or plan­ning to use? 

Cas­san­dra: From a con­ser­va­tion per­spec­tive, machine learn­ing offers a great oppor­tu­ni­ty for us to mon­i­tor ani­mal behav­ior and breed­ing activ­i­ties, par­tic­u­lar­ly for ani­mals liv­ing in large envi­ron­ments. For exam­ple, we have a site at Dub­bo called the sanc­tu­ary that’s 110 hectares of preda­tor-proofed space that’s designed to house mam­mals, endan­gered species, and species that are already extinct in the wild. Machine learn­ing helps us map the move­ments of these ani­mals to make sure that our man­age­ment deci­sions like the intro­duc­tion of new cohorts of ani­mals are sup­port­ed based on the data we are col­lect­ing and analyzing. 

Ann Marie: It sounds like tech­nol­o­gy is very inter­wo­ven with your mis­sion. How does SAP tech­nol­o­gy sup­port your core oper­a­tions such as finance, pro­cure­ment, pay­roll, and HR?

Cas­san­dra: SAP plat­forms are absolute­ly a mis­sion-enabler for us. Just recent­ly, we moved to SAP S/4HANA Cloud for our finan­cials. That helps us work from any­where, gain oper­a­tional effi­cien­cies, and dig­i­tize our process­es — espe­cial­ly the tricky ones around pur­chas­ing, for exam­ple. We use SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud pure­ly for our finan­cials at this stage. But we real­ly want to open that tool up to be able to track our con­ser­va­tion efforts. Taron­ga spends between $14 and $15 mil­lion on con­ser­va­tion work. Our SAP plat­forms and SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud will allow us to cal­cu­late our spend and deter­mine our con­ser­va­tion ROI, for instance. Our goal is to help the con­ser­va­tion team spend more time in the field and not push­ing around paper or spreadsheets. 

Ann Marie: What oth­er SAP solu­tions do you use? 

Cas­san­dra: We are in phase one of our SAP Suc­cess Factors launch. We’re hop­ing to go live with SAP ECC pay­roll by Novem­ber 2020, which is a very auda­cious goal. That will give us effi­cien­cies around the way we man­age our HR onboard­ing and off­board­ing. Once again, we are look­ing at trans­form­ing every­thing that we’ve been doing that, up until now, has been paper-based. 

Ann Marie: How do these solu­tions help your staff? 

Cas­san­dra: Being able to real­ly tight­en our oper­a­tions and make them real­ly effi­cient means that we can direct our funds into our con­ser­va­tion and edu­ca­tion work. The biggest exam­ple for us in how we’ve used SAP prod­ucts was in 2019 when we launched what we call Stax, our staff expe­ri­ence appli­ca­tion. This is an SAP Cloud Platform and SAPUI5 project that we part­nered with Bourne Dig­i­tal to build. 

We have some cor­po­rate staff, but we’ve got so many oth­er employ­ees work­ing in the envi­ron­ment we call ​“in-grounds.” For exam­ple, our keep­ers and our hor­ti­cul­tur­al­ists. These peo­ple are sci­en­tists out in the field. They just want to do a food order or a req­ui­si­tion for a prod­uct. Before we had the app, they had to fill out pieces of paper and then take that paper some­where else to get signed. And then it would go to purchasing. 

We dig­i­tized that whole process. Staff can now raise pur­chase req­ui­si­tions, log leave requests, and more from their mobile. And if they hap­pen to be on their break, then they can do it from a com­put­er. We also includ­ed some emer­gency codes and alerts in the app, along with instruc­tions on what to do if they see those alerts. 

We’re using the app to not only dig­i­tize more forms, but we’re also inte­grat­ing it with SAP S/4HANA Cloud and, even­tu­al­ly, SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors. It has become our dig­i­tal staff portal. 

We’ve received about 3,500 pur­chas­ing req­ui­si­tions since it launched. Now it takes about four or five min­utes, and you will have a req­ui­si­tion sit­ting in your approvals inbox. Before, it was a paper-based process that required phys­i­cal­ly walk­ing pieces of paper to your super­vi­sors who could be on the oth­er side of the zoo. 

Ann Marie: How did you gain some of the insights you need­ed to bet­ter under­stand the staff expe­ri­ence and where it need­ed opti­miz­ing before you built this solution? 

Cas­san­dra: For our part­ner, Bourne Dig­i­tal, their whole way of approach­ing projects like our Stax project is by using Design Think­ing and Agile devel­op­ment. We basi­cal­ly start­ed by iden­ti­fy­ing the one or two biggest things that are a strug­gle for our employ­ees to man­age. And the two that came up were mak­ing pur­chas­es and request­ing leaves through HR.

We have an intranet, but it’s not very dynam­ic. So, we also looked at how we could bring some of this type of infor­ma­tion into our Stax project. 

There were a lot of work­flow work­shops with the stake­hold­ers. We formed a cham­pi­on user group. And we made sure that the design matched the Taron­ga branding. 

Ann Marie: The move from an on-premise SAP ECC sys­tem to SAP S/4HANA Cloud is a big one. What kind of change man­age­ment efforts were required to make this switch? 

Cas­san­dra: We end­ed up with an MVP [min­i­mum viable prod­uct] and we decid­ed just to release it to see what the inter­est would be like. Rather than doing a huge change-man­age­ment piece across the orga­ni­za­tion, we were inter­est­ed to see what the uptake would be and how quick­ly it would evolve through the organization. 

And it real­ly did blow up all of a sud­den. We had this influx of requests from users — could we put this form on? Could we look at this process? The engage­ment was real­ly, real­ly great. Those com­ments end­ed up becom­ing part of the phase two deploy­ment of the Stax app. We added in a num­ber of forms and work­flows based on that ini­tial user feedback. 

We did the actu­al devel­op­ment sprint in about six weeks — it took only six weeks to release an MVP of an app to an orga­ni­za­tion that didn’t have any train­ing and didn’t know how to use it.

Ann Marie: It’s an inter­est­ing exper­i­ment because if you’re build­ing an app that’s intu­itive — if you do your job right — you don’t real­ly need a ton of change management. 

Cas­san­dra: Yeah, that’s right.

Ann Marie: You skipped over the step of broad user test­ing by putting the solu­tion out in the wild to see what would happen. 

Cas­san­dra: Exact­ly. We had a very small group of testers just to make sure that the work­flows were func­tion­ing. But after that, we basi­cal­ly told the staff — here are the tiles you can use, and now off you go. And we know that the uptake is work­ing because we’ve processed just under 4,000 leave requests and we have received 110,000 page views since we launched the app. 

Ann Marie: What fac­tors did you have to con­sid­er, giv­en this was a mobile user expe­ri­ence? What should oth­er SAP cus­tomers pay close atten­tion to when devel­op­ing mobile apps?

Cas­san­dra: The whole thing was designed from a mobile per­spec­tive to start. Hav­ing it on a desk­top was just a bonus, real­ly. We were con­cen­trat­ing on help­ing the peo­ple who don’t have access to a com­put­er to get these tasks done. It was always about the per­son in the field. All the UX design was based on some­one who was out­side with a hat on, using a thumb with one hand, because they have a buck­et in the oth­er. That was the user story.

Ann Marie: How has mov­ing to the cloud helped you achieve your tech­nol­o­gy goals?

Cas­san­dra: Being able to respond rapid­ly is def­i­nite­ly the best ben­e­fit that we’ve had from going to cloud com­put­ing. With SAP S/4HANA Cloud, we’ve been able to trans­form our paper-based process­es quick­ly into dig­i­tal because of the work­flows with­in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, such as for pur­chas­es, pur­chase orders, goods receipts, and invoice receiv­ing. We’ve tak­en very lengthy process­es and put the end user in con­trol where they are more respon­si­ble and account­able for what they do rather than just sign­ing a piece of paper and push­ing it off to some­body else to do the work. It was real­ly about empow­er­ing the staff to do things themselves. 

With SAP S/4HANA Cloud, it’s a very intu­itive prod­uct. Even though we need­ed to do some train­ing, it’s noth­ing like the old SAP ECC. There is no way I could have used that prod­uct with­out prop­er training. 

Ann Marie: It must have been rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent for your team to shift to main­tain­ing a cloud-based ERP ver­sus an on-premise system. 

Cas­san­dra: You spend less mon­ey on train­ing peo­ple and wor­ry­ing that any main­te­nance upgrade is going to break some­thing. It just takes all the effort out from an IT oper­a­tions per­spec­tive. We’re not wor­ry­ing about things going down. We’re not wor­ried that capac­i­ty is being reached. We’re not wor­ried about hav­ing to do main­te­nance. All of those sorts of things have gone away and now we’re con­cen­trat­ing on busi­ness improve­ments and process improve­ments — the things that actu­al­ly cre­ate value. 

The cloud com­put­ing and the pre­dic­tive ana­lyt­ics pieces are crit­i­cal for us to have an under­stand­ing across our busi­ness about what’s going on with our con­ser­va­tion efforts and how we’re spend­ing our mon­ey. Going for­ward, we are going to be look­ing at the plan­ning mod­ule for SAP Ana­lyt­ics Cloud. That will allow us to have pre­dic­tive ana­lyt­ics and fore­cast­ing func­tion­al­i­ty. It gives us that ease of mod­el­ing and plan­ning that will help us be more flex­i­ble. Before, we had just spread­sheets which will only take us so far. We can go so much far­ther with pre­dic­tive analytics. 

Ann Marie: True. When you have the pow­er of your ERP plat­form behind what you are ana­lyz­ing, that’s far beyond what you can do with spreadsheets. 

Cas­san­dra: It’s also about the shar­ing of that infor­ma­tion and mak­ing that infor­ma­tion avail­able at all lev­els, rather than just at the exec­u­tive lev­el. It allows us to be even more col­lab­o­ra­tive and deliv­er the analy­sis across the busi­ness rather than just to one area, which I think is super-impor­tant. We haven’t had that kind of ana­lyt­ics at Taron­ga before. This is total­ly new and excit­ing for us.

Ann Marie: What ben­e­fits or ROI have you seen since launch­ing these solutions?

Cas­san­dra: Oper­a­tional effi­cien­cies is one. Also being able to redi­rect effort to the work that cre­ates real val­ue for us — mov­ing away from just keep­ing the lights on to empow­er­ing our staff to be able to con­cen­trate our efforts else­where, rather than hav­ing to work to keep the servers run­ning or spend­ing mon­ey on on-premise data cen­ters. It alle­vi­ates some of that so that we can do what we do best, which is con­ser­va­tion, look­ing after the ani­mals, and being out there on the grounds, giv­ing our guests the best experience. 

Ann Marie: One bonus ques­tion for you: What’s your favorite ani­mal in res­i­dence at the con­ser­va­tion society?

Cas­san­dra: At the moment? It’s the red pan­da. It’s endan­gered and it lives in the Himalayas. It’s got a real cute face, and I was lucky enough to have a nice birth­day expe­ri­ence with one. They’re real­ly shy and they just have got the best tail. 

Ann Marie: That sounds fun. I would enjoy that, as well. Well, thank you so much for shar­ing such a great sto­ry with us, Cas­san­dra. Keep up the great work for the animals. 

Be sure to reg­is­ter for the ASUG Best Prac­tices: SAP for Indus­tries vir­tu­al expe­ri­ence to under­stand how com­pa­nies are lever­ag­ing SAP S/4HANA across dif­fer­ent industries.