A major focus of the 2018 SAP­PHIRE NOW event in Orlan­do has been on SAP expand­ing its ​“dig­i­tal inno­va­tion solu­tions.” But what does that real­ly mean? And how can cus­tomers take advan­tage of these solutions?

Design-Led Inno­va­tion

Though SAP Leonar­do was not as hot a top­ic at SAP­PHIRE NOW this year as when it launched in 2017, it real­ly is a good exam­ple of an SAP dig­i­tal inno­va­tion solu­tion. And as a solu­tion, it con­tin­ues to mature since it was intro­duced last year.

When we talk about design-led engage­ment ser­vices, we are describ­ing what SAP orig­i­nal­ly called SAP Leonardo’s indus­try accel­er­a­tors. These are best-prac­tice tools designed to help devel­op and launch indus­try-spe­cif­ic enter­prise soft­ware deployments. 

The Kit is the New Accelerator

At this year’s SAP­PHIRE NOW, SAP rein­tro­duced its indus­try accel­er­a­tors as indus­try inno­va­tion kits. The pur­pose behind this change appears to be to clear up some con­fu­sion. SAP wants to draw a line between the ini­tial indus­try pro­to­type projects (typ­i­cal­ly co-pro­duced with an ear­ly adopter SAP cus­tomer) and the sub­se­quent mod­el for machine learn­ing, the Inter­net of Things (IoT), or oth­er inno­va­tion that SAP is build­ing for cus­tomers in that industry.

These indus­try inno­va­tion kits are the next evo­lu­tion of what SAP has learned so far from its SAP Leonar­do projects. For exam­ple, SAP used its work with Cost­co Whole­sale to reduce bak­ery waste using machine learn­ing as a pro­to­type. Then it cre­at­ed an indus­try inno­va­tion kit with a built-in machine learn­ing mod­el that oth­er retail­ers can apply and adapt to their needs to solve com­mon indus­try chal­lenges. By fol­low­ing a pre­vi­ous­ly suc­cess­ful imple­men­ta­tion as a mod­el, these kits help cus­tomers cre­ate data and appli­ca­tion sce­nar­ios faster and with greater accuracy.

That’s the fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ence between the accel­er­a­tors and the kits — the accel­er­a­tors were the pro­to­type projects and the indus­try inno­va­tion kits are the tem­plates that have come out of these projects for relat­ed com­pa­nies to use.

Defin­ing the Toolkit

SAP defines the indus­try inno­va­tion kits with­in SAP Leonar­do as, ​“Tools and mate­ri­als for spe­cif­ic indus­tries and busi­ness func­tions that can be tai­lored for each cus­tomer in a fixed-time, fixed-scope enable­ment process. The indus­try inno­va­tion kits are pre-inte­grat­ed capa­bil­i­ties designed to accel­er­ate solv­ing crit­i­cal indus­try problems.”

“If you want a more ground-lev­el def­i­n­i­tion, think about indus­try inno­va­tion kits as insight that we have iden­ti­fied by ana­lyz­ing a typ­i­cal busi­ness prob­lem that is com­mon to sim­i­lar firms across the same ver­ti­cal or com­pa­ny type,” said Jayne Landry, Glob­al VP for Solu­tion Man­age­ment at SAP Leonar­do, speak­ing exclu­sive­ly to ASUG dur­ing SAP­PHIRE NOW.

Where the Inno­va­tion Kits Come From

SAP devel­ops each of its indus­try inno­va­tion kits by engag­ing its cus­tomers in a design think­ing strat­e­gy. ​“Design think­ing as a method­ol­o­gy has been proven to sig­nif­i­cant­ly increase the suc­cess rate of a strat­e­gy or inno­va­tion project,” Landry said. ​“So, we start with that approach to help cus­tomers with the prob­lem that they are solving.”

“As we apply the advan­tages of SAP indus­try inno­va­tion kits to a new cus­tomer sce­nario, we are also able to tweak and tune var­i­ous KPIs and met­rics to suit the par­tic­u­lar use case at hand. If the cus­tomer goes ahead after their proof of con­cept (PoC) stage, then we replace the test data (which is SAP-gen­er­at­ed anonymized data) with their own data,” added Landry.

What Tools Are in the Kits?

Speak­ing to var­i­ous SAP exec­u­tives dur­ing SAP­PHIRE NOW 2018, it became clear that there are many func­tions includ­ed inside each kit. This is per­haps why SAP calls them ​“tools” and why SAP has set­tled on the word ​“kit” to describe these offerings.

SAP Leonar­do indus­try inno­va­tion kit tools include pre­de­fined ele­ments of soft­ware pro­cess­ing log­ic based on learn­ings from oth­er SAP cus­tomers, deliv­ered as:

• Defined com­put­ing chan­nels to make API calls for an appro­pri­ate lev­el of data ana­lyt­ics (in this case on SAP HANA) 
• Tem­plates to cre­ate exten­sions to ser­vices like blockchain at the appro­pri­ate point 
• Con­nec­tions to the Inter­net of Things (IoT) and oth­er plat­form paradigms 
• Soft­ware intel­li­gence designed to help firms mon­e­tize their own data once it’s used in work­ing pro­duc­tion environments. 

New Kits For 2018

As of now, SAP Leonar­do offers 23 indus­try inno­va­tion kits (includ­ing five launched at SAP­PHIRE NOW) that span more than 12 indus­try areas, includ­ing con­sumer prod­ucts, life sci­ences, man­u­fac­tur­ing, auto­mo­tive, util­i­ties, oil and gas, and sports and enter­tain­ment. SAP explains that the indus­try inno­va­tion kits have helped cus­tomers under­stand how SAP Leonar­do is rel­e­vant to their busi­ness by address­ing crit­i­cal indus­try chal­lenges and deliv­er­ing faster inno­va­tion with less risk. 

New kits announced this June 2018 include SAP Leonar­do for Retail. This kit was high­light­ed at this year’s SAP­PHIRE NOW keynote on how Cost­co applied machine learn­ing to help opti­mize pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and reduce waste, sav­ing more than $22 mil­lion in the first year of the project. Oth­er new kits include SAP Leonar­do for Auto­mo­tive (fleet insights option), SAP Leonar­do for Dis­crete Man­u­fac­tur­ing (pay-for-out­come option), SAP Leonar­do for Life Sci­ences (cold chain option), and SAP Leonar­do for Con­sumer Prod­ucts (cold chain option). Addi­tion­al solu­tions address busi­ness process inno­va­tions that are flex­i­ble enough to work across mul­ti­ple indus­tries, includ­ing sup­ply chain and logis­tics, dig­i­tal cus­tomer engage­ment, sales fore­cast­ing, and cog­ni­tive controlling. 

What Can Cus­tomers Inno­vate Next? 

Though not all of us are soft­ware engi­neers, we can ben­e­fit from under­stand­ing how these inno­va­tion kits could work at our own orga­ni­za­tions. Could they help us accel­er­ate those inno­va­tion projects that have been sit­ting on the back burn­er for now? While SAP Leonar­do is mak­ing strides by estab­lish­ing indus­try mod­els that are more acces­si­ble to cus­tomers, will that be what it takes to push their inno­va­tion projects for­ward? We will be curi­ous to see. 

Find out what hap­pened on day one, day two, and day three in our 2018 SAP­PHIRE NOW and ASUG Annu­al Con­fer­ence cov­er­age. Or read a recap of Dr. Hasso’s keynote.

You can also brush up on your under­stand­ing of SAP Leonar­do by watch­ing ASUG­’s web­cast series at your own pace.