Category: Business

6 Hot Technologies that Handhold Businesses Amid COVID-19 Impact

The COVID-19 pandemic has had wide-ranging ramifications for several businesses. Forrester predicts that the retail sector will endure a 2.1 trillion-dollar loss in 2020 due to COVID-19. It also said that it will take four years for retailers to experience the growth seen before the pandemic. As COVID-19 continues breathing threats down the neck of businessmen, hot technologies are emerging as a relief to counteract them and lead businesses towards their goals. We will discuss a few of these specific technologies such as cloud, eCommerce, eLearning, automation, virtual collaboration, and contactless services that can help you minimize the effects of COVID-19 on your business. 

Read More: Fingent’s Response to COVID-19 Business Implications

1. Cloud Adoption During COVID-19

With physical interaction no longer being an acceptable form of communication, organizations and institutions have had to swiftly shift to digital solutions to retain productivity. The domino effect of COVID-19 was seen in various sectors, accelerating the adoption of facilities for seamless remote work. Cloud computing has emerged as an essential technology for critical application and scalability of infrastructure in this regard. 

Companies from various sectors are now starting to realize the benefits and value of cloud computing as far-reaching beyond the scenario created by the pandemic. As a result, businesses will have to scale up their digital transformation efforts and invest in cloud resources without delay. If anyone had reservations about investing in cloud computing before this, COVID-19 has proved that its necessity is indisputable. 

Read More: 5 Trends That Will Transform Cloud Computing in 2020

2. E-Commerce

CCInsights reported that as of 21 April 2020, US and Canadian e-commerce orders have seen a 129% increase.

With restrictions on the number of people that can be gathered in one place, gone are the glory days of shopping malls and brick and mortar stores. COVID-19 has changed shopping behaviors overnight, necessitating brands to adapt and be flexible to meet changing needs. 

For example, the Buy Online Pick up In Store (BOPIS) capability has become vital to maintaining sales volume with the restrictions in mind. A good example of this is the mobile phone industry. When foot traffic is curbed, then Mobile Point of Sale programs can be set up to take orders and payment at the same time for business continuity. Membership or Loyalty cards can be now digitalized through mobile applications. 

Read More: How a Smart Product Ordering System Helps Retailers and Wholesalers

3. Virtual Collaboration

Many developed nations are now stipulating that employees of non-essential businesses work remotely for an indefinite time, making video conferencing vital.  Schools, colleges, and universities are also leveraging video conferencing platforms through live or recorded lectures. 

This has brought many virtual collaboration solutions to the forefront that facilitate video conferencing, instant messaging, task and calendar management, work collaboration, file sharing, attendance tracking, and so on. A few examples include Zoom, DingTalk, WeChat Work, Zoho Remotely, and so on. 

At Fingent top software development company, we use InfinCE, a powerful cloud-based enterprise collaboration software that offers support for remote work. 

Read Our Case Study: How Fingent enabled a smarter digital workplace solution for Sony Mobile

4. E-Learning 

During this time of crisis, the entire education ecosystem is coming together to ensure that students do not suffer. Educational applications, platforms, and resources offer functionalities across multiple categories such as:

• Resources to provide psycho-social support
• Digital learning management systems
• Digital systems designed for use on basic mobile phones
• Massive open online course platforms 
• Self-directed learning content
• Mobile reading applications
• Tools for teachers to create digital learning content

Read More: E-Learning Taking A New Front: How Can LMS Technology Help

5. Automation

Automation has been helping businesses mitigate disruption by enabling them to stay connected across teams and systems while maintaining customer support in times of uncertainties such as this pandemic. 

Robotic Process Automation improves the efficiency and reliability of work outcomes and automates the time-consuming, repetitive tasks that weigh down intelligent workers. The benefits are:

• Digital workers do not need to have the weekend off. They can work 24 hours a day, 24/7 to respond to spikes in business activity. 
• They do not have travel restrictions nor are they at the risk of COVID-19 infection or affected by physical office closure. 

During the pandemic, companies that have already invested in automation technologies are doing exponentially better than those who did not. It is obvious, that automation can pave the way for a better future.

Read More: How Automation Ensures Businesses Stay Afloat During COVID-19 Crisis

6. Contactless Services

The coronavirus pandemic has driven a preference for self-service purchasing, boosting contactless services. Consider a few examples available now and upcoming in the future: 

• Dining experience: Technology can take care of everything: reserving a table at the restaurant, pre-ordering your food, digital valet services, contactless seating, contactless payment, and online feedback.
• Contactless payment: It lets shoppers integrate their payment information to their loyalty account through an app and then use a QR code for payment through self-checkouts. 
• Contactless delivery: This ensures end-to-end hygiene because a customer places an order, makes the payment online, and gets the food delivered without ever coming in contact with the delivery agent. 

Read More: Contactless Services: The New Normal in Retail

Grab a Slice of Hot Technology

While the end of the pandemic remains elusive, capturing even a slice of these hot technologies could make a huge difference to businesses. They can even help smaller businesses gain a stronger foothold during this pandemic and into the future. Get in touch with us and help us guide you through this pandemic by implementing the right technology solutions for your business. 

The Need for Digitalization

Digital technologies have penetrated into every aspect of our lives, transforming the way we seek and receive information. For instance, today, we search for products and services on search engines rather than in yellow page directories and other offline media. We communicate our experiences with other people through chats, email, blogs, or social media posts. In other words, the media we use, the content we consume and share, the customers we engage with – all benefit from digitalization and digitized data.

Read More: A Road Map To Digital Transformation in 2020

Why is digitalization inevitable for businesses and how can organizations benefit from it?

Before we discuss the advantages of digitalization, we need to understand the difference between digitization and digitalization. According to Gartner’s IT Glossary, “digitalization is the use of digital technologies to change a business model and provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities, whereas “digitization is the process of changing from analog to digital form.”

Digitalization is already influencing the way we do business

Digitalization already has had an impact on our business – from the way we acquire and retain customers to the way we present our business and manage our reputation. While in the past, brick-and-mortar stores were sufficient to establish your business, now consumers want to know what services or products you offer before deciding to make the purchase. 

Today, businesses have to be in close proximity with their customers to find out about their opinions and improve customer experiences. When you know more about your customers, you have more data at hand. Digitalization helps apply this data to make better business decisions. 

With digital technologies, you have more tools that make work easier. This can lead to increased productivity and reduced costs. Digital tools such as dashboards and collaboration tools such as messengers and video chats help align your employees with business goals and improve internal communication. 

What does digitalization mean to you?

Digitalization does not just mean implementing various technologies into daily business. You need to also rethink your business and operating models to implement the technology. Technology is just the tip of the iceberg. Together with it, you need to understand your digital maturity as an organization. Technology does enable digital engagement, but you need to assess the big picture of what digitalization means to your business – whether you are a public organization, a small private company or a global player. To gain control over customer relationships, you need to develop end-to-end strategies to reach customers. 

Top 3 opportunities for digitalization

1. Converting excel sheets to dashboards

In any organization, we find an opportunity gap between the growth of the company on a revenue basis and the growth of the support staff. This part of the company needs to focus on improving automation and scalability to better support the rest of the company. 

Read More: How Automation Ensures Businesses Stay Afloat During COVID-19 Crisis

Most of us still enter information in excel spreadsheets. For example, if we track our projects (work in progress), contracts, savings, etc. in separate spreadsheets, we’re only entering the same data many times. Converting to dashboards can help you quickly view and analyze your entire data in one place. 

Along with consolidated views, dashboards provide opportunities for business intelligence by allowing users to display only what’s required through the use of filters. Once you start adding insights and recommended actions along with the summary, the dashboard becomes more useful by closing any communication gaps between various departments in your company. In short, you save time, provide clear communication, and drive business goals. 

2. Document Management systems

The advent of digitalization has opened up new avenues of data, making its’ management complex. The traditional file and paper methods have become archaic as well as cumbersome. Document management systems have proved themselves indispensable for businesses of all sizes. 

With digitalization dominating the trend in business, enterprises are looking for new ways to streamline documentation by using various automation techniques. The rise of cloud-based document management systems has simplified the creation and sharing of digital documents for enterprises. 

Read More: Top 6 Reasons Why You Should Move to a Cloud-Hosted ERP

Managing huge volumes of data has also become relatively easy. Today you have document management systems that vary in scope from simple systems that cater to small enterprises to more sophisticated ones that cater to large global enterprises. Document management systems reduce physical storage, enable quick access of documents, promote security, make maintenance and customization easy, and reduce monotonous tasks.

3. OCR Technology

Another technology that helps with the digitalization of businesses is OCR. The ability of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to automatically extract data from an image file or scanned document has helped businesses to streamline their operations. It reduces the time required in manual data entry and extraction. A robust and accurate OCR can extract data from multiple document formats. Thus, it saves time in data collection, reduces human effort, and aligns business processes with customer needs. AI-powered OCR eliminates manual entry, thereby reducing errors and improving productivity. Businesses that are equipped with AI-powered OCR technology can stay afloat in the digital wave that has swept across the world.

Digitalization can drive recovery from COVID-19

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to take a toll on people’s lives, it has also stimulated change in the social, personal, economic, and corporate forefronts. The focus has now shifted from growth, business development, and digitalization to just riding out the storm, that is, ensuring business continuity. However, organizations should not lose sight of the long-term effects of the crisis. Companies would have to rethink their business models according to changing customer demands. This crisis has forced organizations to invest in their digitalization strategies to establish sustainability. 

Read More: Business Process Re-engineering: Facing Crisis with Confidence

Companies need to direct their digitalization strategies towards increasing resilience and optimization. Rather than just focusing on increasing productivity, a sustainable and comprehensive digitalization strategy should focus on maintaining productivity during future challenges. Write to us to know more. 

What is Exploratory Data Analysis?

Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) is a statistical approach used to analyze data and produce descriptive and graphical summaries. Analysts may or may not use a statistical model, but EDA primarily foresees what the data can reveal to us beyond formal modeling. 

With EDA you can analyze your data as it is, without the need to make any assumptions. EDA further validates and expands the practice of using graphical methods to explore data. EDA gains insights from statistical theories that give easily decipherable insights. Exploratory data analysis techniques can also be used to derive clues from data sets that are unsuitable for formal statistical analysis.   

Exploratory Data Analysis displays data in such a way that puts your pattern recognizing capabilities to full use. The patterns are evident to an examination that is careful, direct, and most importantly assumption-free. Thus, you can understand relationships among variables, identify problems such as data entry errors, detect the basic data structure, test assumptions, and gain new insights.  

Purpose of Exploratory Data Analysis

The prime purpose of EDA is to study a dataset without making any assumptions. This helps the data analyst to authenticate any assumptions made in devising the problem or operating a particular algorithm. Researchers and analysts can, therefore, recommend new schemes that were not previously considered. 

In other words, you apply inductive reasoning to obtain results. These results may be in opposition to the theories that directed the initial data collection process. Thus, EDA becomes the driver of transformation. This approach allows you to oppose planned analyses and probe assumptions. The ensuing formal analysis can continue with better credibility. EDA techniques have the potential to uncover further information that may open new areas for research.        

Role of EDA in Data Science

We need to understand the role of EDA in the whole process of data science. Once you have all the data, it has to be processed and cleaned before performing EDA. However, after EDA, we may have to repeat the processing and cleaning of data. The cleaned data and results obtained from this iteration are further used for reporting. Thus, using EDA, data scientists can rest assured that the future results would be logical, rightly explained, and relevant to the expected business circumstances. 

EDA helps to clean the feature variables that are to be used for machine learning. Once data scientists get familiarized with the data sets, they may have to go back to feature engineering since the early features may be unable to serve the objective anymore. After completion of the EDA, data scientists obtain a feature set that is required for machine learning. Each dataset is generally explored using multiple techniques. 

Read More: Top 10 Must-Know Machine Learning Algorithms in 2020

Methods of Exploratory Data Analysis

Exploratory data analysis is carried out using methods like:

• Univariate Visualization – This is a simple type of analysis where the data analyzed consists of a single variable. Univariate analysis is mainly used to report the data and trace patterns.
• Bivariate visualization – This type of analysis is used to determine the relationships between two variables and the significance of these relationships.
• Multivariate visualization – When the data sets are more complex, multivariate analysis is used to trace relationships between different fields. It reduces Type I errors. It is, however, unsuitable for small data sets. 
• Dimensionality Reduction – This analysis helps to deduce which parameters contribute to the maximum variation in results and enables fast processing by reducing the volume of data. 

Using these methods, a data scientist can grasp the problem at hand and select appropriate models to corroborate the generated data. After studying the distribution of the data, you can check if there’s and missing data and find ways to cope with it. 

Then comes the outliers. What are your outliers and how are they affecting your model? 

It’s always better to take small steps at a time. So you need to check if you can remove some features and still get the same results. More often than not, companies just venturing into the world of data science and machine learning find that they have a lot of data. But they have no clue how to use that data to generate business value. EDA techniques empower you to ask the right questions. Only specific and defined questions can lead you to the right answers. 

Exploratory Data Analysis: Example with Python

Read More: Why you should migrate to Python 3

 Suppose you have to find the sales trend for an online retailer. 

Your data set consists of features like customer ID, invoice number, stock code, description, quantity, unit price, country, and so on. Before starting, you can do your data preprocessing, that is, checking the outliers, missing values, etc. 

At this point, you can add new features. Suppose you want the total amount. You multiply quantity and unit price to get this feature. Depending on the business requirement, you can choose which features to add. Moving on, by grouping the countries and quantity or total amount together, you can find out which countries have maximum and minimum sales. Using Matplotlib, seaborn, or pandas data frame you can visually display this data. Next, by grouping the year and total amount, you can find out the sales trend for the given number of years. You can also do the same for each month and find you out which time of the year has shown a spike or drop in sales. Using this same method, you can identify further problems and find out ways to fix them. 

Read More: How to Use Data Analytics to Improve Enterprise Sales Numbers

The key to exploratory data analysis is to first understand the LOB and get a good hang of the data to get the desired answers. Get in touch with us to know more about EDA. 

COVID-19 Gives A Fillip To Innovative Digital Retail Tech & E-Commerce

Containment measures implemented as a result of COVID-19 have created a “hide and seek” situation for the retailers and their customers. Although many believe that this is forcing retail tech to evolve, it is in fact doing much more. It is causing a ‘retail revolution’ and significantly changing the retail tech across categories. This article will discuss how COVID-19 will advance innovation in Retail technology. 

Five Essential Retail Technologies

One way in which the COVID-19 pandemic has forced the retail industry to adapt to the “New Normal” is by finding viable ways to ensure business continuity. Home quarantines and mandated store closures around the world have expedited the shift to online shopping, forcing many organizations to adopt e-commerce as their primary shopping channel. 

Here are five essential approaches to retail tech across categories in response to the current crisis:

1. Work from home capabilities

With over 210 countries affected by the coronavirus as of May 2020, several countries have encouraged or even enforced work from home (WFH) as the only viable option for business continuity. This requires a shift in work dynamics necessitating companies to become more flexible and open up communication lines across departments and customers. Retail organizations will have to adopt technology enablers and digitize their processes and workflow to bolster WFH capabilities.

2. Integrated inventory management 

Paranoia about supply shortage has customers adding multiple items to their cart at various stores, but this does not always lead to a purchase. This has led to uncertain stock demand, which causes fluctuations in the stock condition, making it extremely challenging to regulate and maintain inventory during this crisis. 

Retailers thus need to focus all their efforts on preparing for a flexible, streamlined, and digitally backed omnichannel retail strategy with an enterprise-wide centralized inventory management system if they want to stay profitable. With an integrated omnichannel approach, you can deliver a unified experience to your customers across channels by tracking, refreshing, and refilling inventory quickly. 

Read More: How a Smart Product Ordering System Helps Retailers and Wholesalers

3. Go digital!

Though the shift to digital in retail has always been in the cards, the pandemic is fast-tracking this move, allowing retailers no room for delays in adopting a digital-first approach. 

According to a survey held by YouGov in March 2020, 83% of internet users in Hong Kong and 85% of those in China said they avoided crowded public places. If the outbreak of COVID-19 worsens, 58% of US internet users said that they would avoid shopping centers and malls. If retailers do not prepare for these new purchasing behaviors, they will fall behind other competitors in the market. 

Read More: Ways to Leverage Smart IT Solutions for your Retail Business

4. Smart delivery

Delivery is quickly becoming the only option for most retailers. However, there are risks associated with it. While a shopper may be anxious about accepting a parcel in person, a driver or delivery person is also at the significant risk of coming in contact with an infected person, and he in turn might infect other customers. This situation makes it imperative to scale up a contactless delivery program. 

Retailers can use apps that allow them to track the driver’s location in real-time and ensure that they are learning the routes and delivering packages to the right locations. It is extremely important to get started on this immediately to stay competitive. Leverage the educational capabilities of an app to help onboard new delivery drivers quickly. 

Retailers need to invest in:

• Finding reliable logistics partners
• Automating logistics and supply chains for real-time updates 
• Finding innovative ways to meet the customers’ expectations

5. Adopt “self-server” technology

PYMNTS.com reports that the projected value of the mPOS terminals market by 2024 is $55 billion.

Retailers need to focus their resources on implementing better hygiene measures and shelf replenishment than asking the staff to keep their scanners clean. Technological development is now allowing the shopper to scan and pack their items as they shop. This self-serve capability in the form of an app can be downloaded on to the personal devices of the customers. It allows them to shop for essential items and put them into their own bags and pay for them at a special counter before they leave. This results in less interaction with other customers or staff and less waiting time for payment. 

Read more: How Important is Technology in Retail: 4 Focus Areas

Advance Innovation in Retail Tech

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the retail sector, altered consumer behavior, and brought in lasting changes to the retail landscape. But success depends on your response to the COVID-19 situation. On the bright side, it has forced many retailers to adopt innovation in retail tech. 

According to PYMNTS.com, “one hundred fifty million US consumers are expected to use in-store mobile payments by 2021.” Retailers will adopt contactless technologies such as QR codes, mobile payments, and tap and go, and this revolution is happening as we speak. The time to strike is now. Give us a call and let’s discuss how to get you started. 

Why Business Process Re-engineering is a Must-Have for Organizations

COVID-19 has knocked down businesses around the world. On the one hand, it had employees scrambling for cover as soon as the lockdown was announced, while on the other hand the ensuing panic substantially increased consumer demand. This has necessitated a huge shift in the way organizations manage their business. At this critical time, Business Process Re-Engineering (BPR) can assist organizations in maximizing customer value while minimizing the consumption of resources. Let us now discuss how BPR can help your organization handle a crisis like COVID-19.

What is Business Process Re-Engineering?

Business Jargons defines Business Process Re-engineering as the “analysis and redesign of core business processes to achieve substantial improvements in terms of performance, productivity, and quality.”

The crisis of COVID-19 is completely changing the business world and BPR can create drastic improvements and help organizations to free themselves from conventional approaches. BPR focuses on improving organizational operations enterprise-wide. 

Related Reading: How Automation Ensures Businesses Stay Afloat During COVID-19 Crisis

Seven Amazing Benefits of Pre-Planned BPR

BPR is an important method that allows enterprises to revamp existing business processes to improve productivity, quality, and cycle time, especially during a crisis.

1. Outstanding customer satisfaction

 “The customers’ perception is your reality.” – Kate Zabriskie, President, Business Training Works, Inc.

Panic driven buying has changed the customers’ needs. During this time, matching your organization’s services with customer expectations allows your business to build lifetime loyalties with your customers. BPR enables your enterprise to achieve this by re-designing your business process.

BPR strategically plans relevant activities to design, manufacture, and market a product that provides customer value. It analyzes value-creating activities and compares it with your organization’s competitors to find better ways to satisfy your customers.

2. HR management and health monitoring

All enterprises are concerned about the health, safety, and wellbeing of their employees. Post COVID-19, proactive management of employee health will include collecting important information and using it for health management. BPR can help the organization undertake major changes in the attendance recording system including mandatory temperature checks at workplaces. Large organizations will benefit from enhanced HRMS software to include such data, minimizing the risk of disease spread and work suspension.

Related Reading: SAP Payroll Compliance: Extending Support During COVID-19

3. Enhanced security features for remote working

Apart from the IT industry, COVID-19 has introduced the concept of remote working for several other organizations. BPR ensures that this phenomenon receives a review of security policies, network management, acceptable use of software, and connectivity. Without infringing on its privacy policy, an organization will be able to monitor employee productivity.

4. Keep-up with the radical change in supply management

As global trade is under restrictions due to health, geopolitical and economic concerns, supply management will have to undergo a phenomenal change. This would include quality management, supplier collaboration, warehouse and logistics management, spare parts management, and shipment tracking. BPR will help your enterprise find scalable and adaptable solutions as your business experiences rapid changes in demand and complexity.

5. Skilled service operations

COVID-19 has created a reduced dependence on human travel and physical presence bringing in a massive change in service management. Organizations will have to increasingly rely on IoT and AI for remote monitoring operations, fault detection, and auto-correction. With BPR optimization, enterprises will be able to re-design highly complicated and skilled service operations resulting in much higher productivity and less reliance on service experts.

6. Digital signatures

Thus far, digital signatures and validations have been adopted for compliance or security checks. But now, constraints on the handling of printed documents and remote working have necessitated increased use of digital signatures. Optimization of BPR will help bring in process and software alignment across the organization ensuring security while overcoming the hurdles involved.

7. Lower commercial space requirement

The transition to remote working will drastically reduce the need for commercial space. If your organization wants to bring about this change, there would be substantial value generation for your stakeholders. This could result in reduced rental expenses and increased free spaces. BPR optimization in seat utilization could bring higher productivity. The rostering and office locations of the employees could be done in a way that maximizes space utilization. 

Related Reading: Optimize Workforce Management with SAP SuccessFactors and Qualtrics

Use BPR Optimization to Handle Any Future Crisis 

No one knows what the future will bring. But we can learn from the COVID-19 crisis and act smarter and strengthen the global supply chain by benefiting from Business Process Re-engineering. BPR optimization can revamp your organization to leverage the power of AI and other emerging technologies equipping you to maintain business continuity amid uncertainty and disruption. 

BPR will help you reassess your sourcing strategy and rebuild your supplier network. Your organization will be able to find the balance between the level of risk you can accommodate and the amount of operational flexibility you want to achieve. 

Working from home would require a huge emotional and cultural shift. Hence, this is the time for enterprises to revisit your strategies. There is a huge value in optimizing BPR to make the shift now so that you and your employees can look towards the future with a smile on your face. With all these benefits in store, why wait to get started on BPR? Give us a call and let’s discuss how we can get this working for you. 

SAP Commerce Cloud: The Path to Delivering an Omnichannel Experience

The accessibility of the internet and various commerce solutions have broken boundaries to open up a global market. As a result, many businesses are looking for e-commerce solutions that are flexible, scalable, and provide highly targeted customer experiences across multiple touchpoints. Enter- SAP Commerce Cloud (formerly known as SAP Hybris Commerce).

What is SAP Commerce Cloud

SAP Commerce Cloud connects the dots in a comprehensive commerce portfolio integrating all digital and physical activities of the customer, creating a smoother and more personalized shopping experience. SAP Commerce Cloud is one of the five key components of the SAP C/4 HANA suite. SAP Commerce Cloud, together with SAP Marketing Cloud, SAP Sales Cloud, SAP Service Cloud, and SAP Customer Data Cloud form the entire CRM environment. 

SAP Hybris Commerce was renamed to SAP Commerce Cloud since SAP shifted their technology from proprietary infrastructure to the cloud. SAP Commerce Cloud uses an open-source Kubernetes technology and runs on the Microsoft Azure Hyperscale platform.

Features of SAP Commerce Cloud

• Omni-channel Storefront – gives your customers a consistent view of your contents or end-products across all their devices – PC, smartphones, or tablets. Today, customers interact with a brand both online and offline before considering to purchase an item. 
• Personalization –  You can improve the average order value and augment gains by providing tailored content, based on the shopper’s behavior and buying history. SAP Commerce Cloud allows you to segment customers and provides relevant product recommendations based on preferences. 
• Order Management – Managing global market channels lead to complexities, data fragmentation, and high costs, making order management a challenge for companies. SAP Commerce Cloud solutions can support any B2B, B2C, or B2B2C go-to-market strategy through a single commerce platform and simplify the process. You can have a single view of inventory, shipping, and returns throughout the organization thus streamlining order management. Customers can have complete flexibility without cluttering stock levels.
• Real-time Customer Support – The Assisted Service mode in Cloud Commerce helps you offer real-time sales support from your business website directly. If the customer gets stuck during an online purchase or needs help at a retail store, the Assisted Service mode immediately connects them to customer support to help them complete their purchase or answer questions. The customer service representatives get a complete view of the profile of the customer complete with their purchase history, preferences, and so on.
• Accelerators – The SAP Commerce Cloud provides industry accelerators that can address the unique requirements of your industry. SAP Commerce Cloud offers cross-industry accelerators for B2C and B2B sectors, accelerators that are specific to the Chinese market, and several specific accelerators for Telco and media, financial services, travel, and citizen engagement. 

Related Reading: SAP Preconfigured Solutions Boost Efficiency Among Industries

Integrations offered by SAP Commerce Cloud

In order to ensure the best customer experience, your commerce solution needs to be integrated with the other solutions in your ecosystem. While this can be complex and time-consuming, the prebuilt integrations offered by SAP Commerce Cloud help simplify and unlock efficiencies of this process. SAP Cloud Platform Integration service eases integration by using publicly available APIs and by using industry-standard protocols for managing data transfer. 

Related Reading: SAP Focused Industry Templates & Automation Solutions

SAP Commerce Cloud offers pre-built integrations with SAP S/4 HANA, SAP Marketing Cloud, SAP Service Cloud, SAP Customer Data Cloud, and SAP Sales Cloud portfolios, services from third-party providers, and various other solutions. These pre-built integrations permit end-to-end process management with the SAP Cloud Platform. SAP Cloud Platform integrates the master data with business processes to create a single source of truth. It thus prevents the complexities arising due to siloed data. What’s more, the intuitive user interface gives control to your system administrators to manage data with transparency.

Related Reading: SAP S/4HANA: Redefining End-To-End Solution

Benefits of SAP Commerce Cloud

• Rapid onboarding by providing quick access to development, staging, and production environments 
• Many self-service features that give you the power to control the working of your commerce solutions in the cloud.
• With the cloud-native capabilities, you also gain access to the latest releases and upgrade packages, code checks, and quality gates.
• The SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory allows extension and integration of microservices without affecting the core application
• You can augment your market reach and organize data through marketplaces, search, social, and marketing channels.
• The platform is highly scalable and can easily handle your traffic peaks. In other words, it grows with your business. 
• You get automatic weekly full database backups and hourly incremental backups.

The SAP Commerce Cloud is a hyper scalable, flexible, and high-speed omnichannel commerce solution that is delivered through a SaaS model. You can exploit the efficiency and speed of the cloud by using SAP’s shared cloud infrastructure. You end up having nominal IT costs, you don’t have to maintain servers, and to top it all you have the world-class data security that SAP provides. So why not make the move (if not already done)? Fingent top software development company, can help streamline last-mile delivery and improve a number of business processes. Our team of specialists can help you successfully deploy SAP Commerce Cloud and become a truly global digital business. Contact us today.

Can Robotic Process Automation Rescue Businesses From An Economic Recession

COVID-19 is panning out to be a historic tragedy both for the human race as well as our economy. While most businesses are stalled due to the economic recession induced by COVID-19, there is a ray of hope. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is rising up as the savior for many businesses by offering recession-proof operations. RPA might be that one alleviating factor that can keep your business and the economy afloat. 

When implemented successfully, RPA can help many sectors experience an undeniable upsurge. How RPA can help businesses get through these unprecedented times? This post takes a look. We will also examine a few automation cases.

Related Reading: Jaw-dropping Facts about Robotic Process Automation

Businesses Can Stay Afloat in These Unprecedented Times

RPA goes beyond allowing businesses to stay afloat. It also helps them respond instantly to drastic changes in demand during such critical situations as COVID-19. It has proven to be an invaluable technology for businesses by ensuring that employees remain productive even if they have to work remotely and from home. 

Here are some benefits of RPA.

Increased flexibility

RPA allows your business to run smoothly despite ever-changing demands while automating manual processes and increasing efficiency. Furthermore, it is helping organizations combat the spread of COVID-19 and is providing customers with timely support as businesses move on to new operating models. For instance, deploying chatbots or automated answering machines in contact centers or help desks can help handle bulk volumes of customer service calls and emails, especially when organizations are forced to function remotely or operate with a limited number of employees. 

Less dependency on the individual employee

Though we can’t deny the need for human intervention in most processes, certain tasks need to be accomplished with precision and speed. Here is where RPA becomes useful as a fast and flexible way to replicate employee-driven processes. RPA enables businesses to automate certain critical processes with greater precision and efficiency. And soon, RPA will free businesses from being dependent on the limitations caused by employees’ absence.

Related Reading: How to accelerate your business growth with Robotic Process Automation

Keep up with production

RPA enables organizations to keep up productivity by providing assistance to an overwhelmed customer using attended automation or front office bots. This frees up employees to attend to other critical aspects of the business. RPA can cater to an increase or decrease in the supply chain demand while allowing you to rely on automated back-office activities.

Industries leveraging RPA

Here are a few examples of industries who have successfully leveraged automation: (examples cited by UiPath)

Healthcare

Health of the workforce:  Updating all relevant data of sick employees in real-time while keeping track of healthy employees could be painstaking. With RPA, bots can be set up to keep track of hospital employees. This minimizes manual errors and ensures employee safety. 

Increasing demand in virus testing: With the increasing demand for virus testing, the wait time for registration also increases. Cleveland Clinic in the United States reduced their patient verification and registration time considerably by deploying an attended robot that collects and prints patient data, thereby reducing hospital backlogs.

Accelerating clinical testing: Filling test reports itself would take about 3 hours per day in the life of a staff nurse. But since Mater Hospital in Dublin automated its process through robots, medical personnel are able to use their precious time taking care of their patients rather than chasing admin tasks. 

Banking and financial services

Surge in trading volume: Global markets have seen a trading surge by about 300% daily. This is tremendously increasing the operational burden. Leveraging automation has ensured business continuity while maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction despite the huge spike of activity in areas such as trade allocations and reconciliations.  

Acknowledging customer complaints:  Acknowledging customer complaints in line with UK regulations has been especially challenging for financial services because of their reduced staff. Automation has allowed the banking and financial services to acknowledge complaints in time in compliance with UK regulatory government requirements.

Retail

Helps HR specialists to remain focused on analysis: COVID-19 has overwhelmed the HR department with a large volume of sick leave requests. Automation of two phases of this process has reduced backlogs in processing leave requests while allowing HR specialists to stay focused on their people.

Supply chains

Optimization of the supply chain: COVID-19 has forced factories to shut down leaving their production line idle. RPA allows companies to optimize their supply chains. This has resulted in accurate delivery estimates, optimized vehicle routes, efficient shipment consolidation as well as accountable sourcing. 

Manufacturing

Reduced manufacturing expenses: Prolonged closures of manufacturing plants have forced manufacturers to cut down their operational costs. RPA automates repetitive and manual tasks thus reducing operational costs.

Related Reading: How Robotic Process Automation Is Revolutionizing Industries?

Weather These Turbulent Times with Robotic Process Automation

Robotic Process Automation will enable businesses to efficiently allocate funds to areas that need greater focus. It can automate qualification ad validation processes, update public health data in real-time, and much more. Educational institutes can also leverage automation to schedule and activate their classes using LMS and eLearning platforms.  

Obviously, COVID-19 has brought about changes in the working style of both the consumers and clients. RPA will cater to their needs and help ensure that businesses can stay afloat during these difficult economic times. 

Download our White Paper: Learn how RPA can bring a difference to your business and how to embrace the disruptive technology to maintain a competitive edge.

How Can You Get Started? 

Start small! Start by automating small tasks that will give you the needed confidence and experience in automation solutions. Research and evaluate how far automation is applicable to your IT environment. Talk to custom software development experts at Fingent and find out how you can build on the benefits of RPA. 

Employee Experience Management with SAP SuccessFactors and Qualtrics

The spread of COVID-19 has advanced the need for a single workforce management system (Human Capital Management system) that assists people in managing their jobs, rewards, development, payments, and many such areas. It’s during such a crisis that we realize the need for our HCM system to be well-connected and tightly integrated with other enterprise systems such as IT, security, and financials. This is where SAP SuccessFactors Human Capital Management solutions join hands with Employee Experience Management solutions from Qualtrics. All these solutions come packed in the SAP SuccessFactors sales bag. 

Related Reading: How Can SAP Help Manage Your Payroll Under The COVID-19 Crisis

How SAP SuccessFactors and Qualtrics transform workforce management

SAP SuccessFactors has transformed from an HCM vendor to an HXM (Human Experience Management) vendor with Qualtrics. Businesses have come to terms with the fact that human experiences matter and the organizations that focus on delivering the best employee experiences realize the most stunning results. While you get your operational data or O-data from HCM systems, Qualtrics brings in the experience data or the X-data that measures an individual’s emotions, notions and goals in specific scenarios. Thus, by analyzing your employee’s perspective both inside and outside work, you build a better relationship with them. 

By combining the X and O data you can connect operational HR data with employee experience data. With these, you are armed with information based on facts as well as perception. Whether it’s for routine work events like performance reviews, role change, or for unexpected events like the outbreak of a pandemic, companies can continuously monitor and act upon the data collected. This, in turn, helps you to predict challenges, correct errors, and deliver meaningful results. Thus SAP SuccessFactors and Qualtrics allow you to win in today’s experience economy.

Three employee experience management solutions from SAP Qualtrics

SAP Qualtrics has introduced three employee experience management solutions that help HR leaders to gather insights by leveraging the data that is collected throughout the employee lifecycle based on feedback.

1. SAP Qualtrics Employee Engagement

This solution focuses on the factors that drive employee engagement and productivity enabling HR leaders to leverage real-time insights to attract, nourish, and retain the best talent. This solution records information through employee feedback which helps managers to use employee experiences to identify key focus areas and take necessary actions. The Qualtrics Employee Engagement solution uses powerful Text iQ analytics to scrutinize open text responses. It helps you to easily make out trends, scan topics, and track employee attitude. Managers can use the configurable and role-based dashboards to track the effects of any upgrades and drive results.

2. SAP Qualtrics Employee Lifecycle 

This solution continuously gathers data from employees across their entire journey with the organization and manages their experiences to gain insights that drive improvements. These real-time insights help spot gaps and close them w.r.t expectations and reality. Expert onboarding and exit content, data related to workflow and automation– all these can be directly embedded in the existing HCM system. Using this solution, organizations can understand the key drivers causing attrition and take appropriate actions to retain the best talent.

3. SAP Qualtrics Employee Benefits Optimizer

As global markets continue to tighten, organizations have to compete to attract and retain the best talent. SAP Qualtrics Employee Benefits Optimizer takes the guesswork out of the process of determining what employees want in terms of benefits offered. You can easily recognize the most suitable benefits and compensation packages that are in tune with the unique culture and budget of your organization by leveraging the choice-based conjoint methodology that is a characteristic of this top-notch solution. You also become aware of the trade-offs that your employees are willing to make through ongoing surveys and analysis. HR managers, thus arrive at the most optimal packages even with changing preferences of employees and shifting market dynamics.  

With SAP transforming HCM into HXM, HR systems are shifting towards micro-experiences. HXM systems let you manage all HR, IT, scheduling, and all work-related activities making it an integrated employee platform. With HR leaders struggling to find effective ways to move forward in the wake of the COVID outbreak, SAP SuccessFactors and Qualtrics enables you to manage your total workforce holistically. 

Related Reading: How SAP Supports Effective Business Continuity Planning

We’ve been supporting managers and leaders to expertly run, use, and maintain various SAP solutions. Get in touch with us to understand how you can leverage SAP SuccessFactors and Qualtrics Employee Engagement to improve your workforce engagement and experience.  

Digital Transformation in 2025: A Strategized Guide

Digital transformation refers to employing digital technologies to manage the business processes, company culture, and customer experience, which will help meet the changing industry requirements. It is applied to create new strategies as well as modify the existing approaches to different business roles, such as sales, marketing, and customer service. The digital transformation strategy directly reflects upon how a business engages with its customers in this digitally-advancing era.

Incorporating a digital transformation strategy in a startup or small business is very simple. They can easily future-proof the business by applying a digitally agile method of operation, which will help them grow productively. For an established business though, it may take some reimagining for integrating the right tools and technologies for the best digital strategy and transformation.

Related Reading: What considerations should be part of a company’s digital transformation strategy?

What are the 4 main areas of digital transformation?

A digital transformation roadmap to success should include four key areas – customer engagement, empowering employees, optimizing operations, and transforming business models. Digital transformation is not just about adopting new technology or investing in digital tools, you need to be prepared for the changes, anticipate them, and drive innovation to remain competitive in the market.

1. Customer Engagement

Cultivating good customer relationships is the backbone of every thriving business. Maintaining a healthy connection with customers can be very easy by using digital tools. From addressing grievances quickly to promoting seasonal sales and offers, digital transformation can help improve the brand image through enhanced customer engagement, which will, in turn, lead to superior business results.

2. Empowering Employees

Building a dynamic company culture with digital technologies can lead to high performance and enhanced productivity. Digital collaboration and networking tools, for instance, can allow employees to work easily with different business departments and teams. This helps accelerate delivery, boost quality and efficiency, and drive greater employee satisfaction.

3. Optimizing Operations

A robust operations digitalization strategy can reform the business from inside out. Adopting digital tools for managing human resources, sales, marketing, manufacturing, finance, or any other business operation can give a comprehensive outlook of the current processes. With proper analytics and insights, businesses can easily manage the operations as well as fix the flaws for a better outcome.

4. Transforming Business Models

Digital business transformation strategy cannot be complete without changing how the business functions work. Leveraging technology to find innovative ways to introduce digital products can perfectly complement traditional offerings. In fact, marketing the brand and promoting the products and services digitally is the key to emerge as a flourishing business today.

Related Reading: 4 Questions to Ask When Your Business Goes Digital

How do you develop a digital transformation strategy?

Rapid digital development and evolution can be seen in every industry in the present day. If you want to keep up, you will need to have the right plan to make the best of the digital landscape. A digital transformation strategy framework allows you to understand your current state, identify your goals, and adopt the best measures to achieve those objectives.

Here is a three-step process to create your digital transformation strategy roadmap:

1. Analyze your requirements and align your business objectives

Developing a robust digital transformation strategy roadmap requires you to analyze the market properly. At the same time, you should also focus on your goals and evaluate how it will affect your current business model. Determine your vision for implementing digital transformation and think about how it will improve customer experience and company culture.

2. Plan your budget

You should also secure funding for your digital transformation. It is an ongoing process and usually involves technology-intensive investments. Therefore, you should have an idea of how much resources you can allocate for the initiative. However, the budget should be calculated keeping in mind all the business areas that would benefit from digital transformation. This way, you can structure the best IT transformation strategy by identifying priorities and establishing the scope of the process.

3. Evaluate the present to plan the future

It is also important to recognize your current business state. Simply trying to migrate to digital infrastructure will not work. You need to understand the current organizational structure, culture, business processes, operations, and employee skill sets. This will help you to categorize the pain points or opportunities that should be addressed at the earliest. It will also let you track the achievements in your digital transformation strategy roadmap promptly.

What are some of the best digital transformation examples?

Digital transformation has practical benefits for every business unit or department. Here are a few examples:

In marketing, it can help to find more customers for less capital investment. Digital marketing approaches can generate more leads and connect with potential customers, which results in greater brand awareness.

In sales, digital transformation can allow automation with analytics tracking and data-driven insights. By using the stats, businesses can promote the products/services that a consumer is likely to buy. Besides, the data and analytics can also help understand the effectiveness of current sales techniques and strategies.

As for customer support, digital transformation allows consumers to contact businesses quickly for any grievances related to the product/service. Customer support personnel can share information promptly across digital modes and find the best solution for the customer. When the company addresses their problems in time, it strengthens their relationship with the customer, which in turn leads to better customer retention.

Related Reading: Digital Transformation in Manufacturing

Implementing digital tools also facilitates improved collaboration between different teams within the organization. This is a must for streamlined business growth in today’s highly competitive industry. That is why you should employ a reliable digital transformation strategy for your business. It will definitely help you discover new opportunities and make the most of powerful sales channels to increase business revenue. 

Fingent top software development company empowers businesses to build a strong foundation for smooth and cost-effective digital transformation that helps them discover new opportunities and revenue streams. Get in touch with our experts to learn more. 

SAP Payroll Compliance: Extending Support During COVID-19

The global spread of COVID-19 has put businesses into disarray. The long period of lockdown enforced by many governments has changed a lot of things. We’re all practicing new ways to work (remote work), use software, and pursue learning. We’ve also come across many compliance changes since governments across the world are trying to help their people through the HR and Payroll Systems. Due to this, many SuccessFactors partners have released add-ons, extensions, and functionalities to help users. Free-of-charge COVID-19 extensions for SAP SuccessFactors are available where customers can directly download the instructions from the website and set up the extension in their system as a self-service application. 

Related Reading: How SAP Supports Effective Business Continuity Planning

Getting the most out of SAP SuccessFactors Solutions

It’s the right time for customers to think outside the box in terms of getting the most out of SuccessFactors Solutions. The flexibility of SuccessFactors allows you to use it in new and different ways. SAP customers can also use SAP Jam to put out announcements, publish status updates, messages from leadership, and other questions about how to use the solutions that they have, to the best capacity. 

Since most people are working remotely for the first time, staying connected is more critical than ever. Companies can also leverage SuccessFactors Onboarding for a relaunch and get the business going since many organizations have opted for temporary lay-offs. So to relaunch and get these resources back on-board, this tool can be used effectively.  

Valuable information at your fingertips

Lots of countries are putting out programs for helping workers manage lay-offs, helping companies with cash flow, and giving them financial breaks so that they can retain their workers longer. These approaches are specific and differ from country to country. SAP has created a blog to bring all those updates together in one place. Employers can leverage the schemes that several governments across the globe have announced to prevent mass lay-offs. However, these rules and schemes are subject to constant review and it’s important for employers to review and plan before implementation. Every country HR and payroll need to collaborate to ensure that the changes are correctly put into effect. 

Related Reading:5 Tips to verify the business process expertise of your IT outsourcing partner

Legal changes announced by a few countries w.r.t payroll

Following are some legal changes announced by a few countries w.r.t payroll:

The United States: 

The state and federal wage laws mandate employers to pay minimum wages to their employees and time and half the regular hourly rate exceeding forty hours in a workweek to non-exempt employees. The FFCRA (Families First Coronavirus Response Act) demands employers with a staff less than 500 to provide a paid sick leave of 10 days along with FMLA leave for reasons related to COVID-19. 

Employers can obtain tax credits for Social Security and Medicare for statutory benefits. This Act allows employers to retain the amount of payroll taxes equalling the amount qualified for sick and child care leave rather than deposit it with the IRS. If employers find that the payroll taxes are insufficient to cover the cost of statutory benefits that have been paid, they can file an accelerated payment request with the IRS. The IRS would process these requests within two weeks.

The United Kingdom: 

The UK government has come up with the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme wherein they have pledged to reimburse 80% of wages for furloughed employees up to 2500 pounds per month. All employers in the UK are entitled to this scheme. The main objective is to help those employers retain their staff who cannot afford to pay salaries. They can then get those employees back on board once they start rebuilding their businesses. 

Australia:

The Australian government has implemented a broad range of measures to provide relief to employers through its “JobKeeper Payment Scheme”, where wage subsidies will be granted to employers affected by COVID-19. This will allow employers to pay their employees and such payments will be exempted from payroll taxes. 

The Pay-Roll Tax Relief (COVID-19 Response) Act 2020 that took effect from 1 March 2020 outlines the payroll tax waiver and the exemption for payments made under the JobKeeper Payment scheme. The payroll tax relief approaches in the country differ from state to state and employers need to carefully follow the corresponding province’s website to learn more. 

Canada: 

The Canadian government has announced a 10% wage subsidy for qualified small businesses. To avail of this benefit immediately, businesses should reduce their remittances of income tax that has been withheld from their employees’ remuneration. 

The Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy Act that was announced on April 11, 2020, states that the employers who have lost 30% of their revenue due to COVID-19 are eligible for a subsidy amount equalling 75% of employees’ remuneration paid up to CAD$847 per employee per week for a 12-week period.

Brazil: 

Brazil’s government has announced provisional measures such as a temporary suspension of employment in business sectors that are adversely affected by the pandemic. The authorities have considered permitting employers to reduce the working hours and salaries of their workforce by 50%. Additionally, the employees are to be allowed to take collective vacations with prior notice of 48 hours and individual vacations for 15 days. The employers have to make teleworking arrangements and include flexibility in banked hours. 

Employers should note that such schemes have a wage ceiling, so high earners may encounter greater losses of income. Since the main aim of these measures is to save jobs, employers who utilize these schemes are prohibited from continuing business with a reduced workforce simultaneously.   

The present global crisis has highlighted the essential function of payroll. If payroll fails, everything comes to a standstill. SAP Payroll can help you maintain resilience and ensure smooth operations. Connect with us to find out how your business can leverage payroll compliance with SAP.