Category: Technology

How we can expedite customers’ move to emerging tech like AR & VR

Many real-world scenarios have shown us the need to keep up with technology. The COVID-19 pandemic, for example, has proved to be an unanticipated catalyst in accelerating customers’ move to the new and emerging technologies and tools. As millions of consumers go into lockdown, they are forced to work from home that impacts their day to day habits of digital connectivity. 

Though COVID-19 has created a major drag on the world economy, it is playing an active role in accelerating the development and commercialization of several emerging technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR). This is especially true for innovations that automate processes, reduce human-to-human contact, and increase productivity during social distancing. This article examines how new technologies such as AR/VR can influence various industries.

Wholehearted Support for Virtual Health Care

In a survey conducted by Perkins Coie LLP, a vast majority of the respondents found healthcare and medical devices as one of the top potential growth areas for AR and VR technologies.

Telemedicine had previously not received enough support from healthcare providers, financers, and patients. But now, the need for virtual healthcare advice is accelerating the adoption of telemedicine. Various countries have authorized their healthcare professionals to expand telehealth consultations to make it easier for patients to speak with their healthcare providers.

This pandemic is also spurring the interest in asynchronous healthcare, a form of telemedicine that eliminates the need for face-to-face appointments in managing and monitoring chronic health conditions. New technologies in AR/VR allows a healthcare provider to remotely assess and diagnose a patient in an ambulance two miles away. 

Related Reading: Is Mixed Reality the Future of the Healthcare Industry?

Promising future for the Real Estate Industry

Though the present scenario has stirred unrest in certain industries, the real estate sector need not come to a standstill at this time. The use of AR/VR technologies can facilitate communication and collaboration within the industry. As a useful tool for design communication, AR/VR has the ability to ensure virtual co-location of the teams making it possible to transfer messages and work cultures.

The new tech line (AR and VR) allows all project stakeholders to take a ‘walk’ inside the project before it is built. Such an understanding of project data can reduce errors, facilitate faster and better decision-making, and achieve greater business and profitability. In this period when physical mock-ups and on-site prototyping are no longer viable, VR-enabled online libraries can add accuracy to design projects without additional cost.

Related Reading: Augmented Reality & Virtual Reality: Transforming The Real Estate Industry

Use Chatbots Instead of Human Punching Bags

The COVID-19 pandemic has induced changes in customer behavior and business models, which might persist well after the crisis abates. Meanwhile, chatbots can be used to reduce the surge in customer frustration. Various websites are using chatbots to answer general FAQs asked by the customers providing them a better customer experience. 

AI-powered chatbots can communicate with humans in real-time. Such personalized chatbots can be developed for your websites, social media profiles, and SMS services to generate automated responses using pre-defined keywords and categories. COVID-19 has complicated the role of the customer service representative. They have to lead the delicate dance of balancing policy and empathy with frustrated customers. 

Read our case study: Using Chatbots to Create an Enhanced and Engaging Learning Experience

Chatbots provide proactive customer service and help protect the emotional well-being of the agents. Onboarding and training new customer service representatives are not viable options when the work volume increases. Chatbots allow you to scale-up teams and multiply output within seconds. Additionally, now chatbots can be used effectively to sell products directly to users via WhatsApp (WhatsApp for Business). 

Powerful Cutting-Edge Technology: Face-Recognition 

In the span of a few weeks, COVID-19 has reshaped how the world works. This new paradigm has opened the door to the deployment of latest technologies such as facial recognition. During this period of social distancing, business and government agencies are increasingly turning to facial recognition technology. Also, face recognition payments are growing in popularity. 

Read our case study: The Future of Communication and Security Using Augmented Reality

Grand View Research, Inc. forecasts that by 2027, the worldwide facial recognition market will increase at a CAGR of 14.5 percent to reach 9.93 billion dollars.

Face recognition is already getting a lot of momentum since it avoids touching surfaces and potential infection. Another benefit to face recognition is that it can enable thermal scanning to check body temperatures, minimizing the risk of the sick infecting other workers.  

The Race To Keep Pace

Today the globalized economy is in fierce competition. Technology helps increase efficiency across industries especially during this pandemic. That is why AR/VR is emerging as a critical solution. From accelerating user collaboration to streamlining processes, the use cases of AR/VR technologies in business will only get stronger. And as IT infrastructure increases in complexity, these new technologies will deliver multiple benefits to businesses as a whole. 

Fingent helps accelerate your move to new and emerging technologies such as Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and Mixed Reality. Get in touch with us to find out how we help our clients deliver a compelling reality experience using these technologies. 

Transforming Healthcare with Predictive Analytics powered by SAP HANA

Predictive analysis has been helping businesses like Uber, Amazon, and Netflix to best serve their customers. They use it to predict what shows viewers would like to watch or what items they’d like to buy. It’s altogether a different story when it comes to healthcare. 

The stakes are higher when you recommend care based on predictive analysis. That’s why many healthcare organizations prefer prescriptive analytics over predictive analytics even now. However, the rewards are potentially much greater if organizations buy into this risk balance and ensure that predictive analytics is incorporated in an appropriate way to deal with the complex operations of a healthcare organization.  

The Healthcare Data Challenge

Healthcare data doubles every three years and the $7 trillion industry is unable to keep up with the staggering rate at which information is produced. The ever-increasing medical data generated/ collected in real-time from numerous medical records, clinical trials, research, personal fitness bands, wearables, implanted devices, sensors, and health apps will be equivalent to 300 million books. That means the average person is likely to generate more than 1 million gigabytes of health-related data in their lifetime (source: IBM Research). 

Related Reading: 5 Ways Big Data is Changing the Healthcare Industry

So, we require smart tools to use these massive data efficiently and derive clinically actionable results from them. While treating patients, we need to gain insights faster to provide specifically tailored treatments that are based on biological, genetic, and physical information. 

 SAP HANA Helps Unlock Massive Health Data

SAP HANA is the platform that integrates disparate and fragmented biological, clinical, and lifestyle datasets, helping users to analyze them and gain insights from them. SAP HANA enables users to conduct predictive analysis to examine and identify patterns across healthy as well as patient populations. 

Predictive analytics powered by SAP HANA combines the depth and speed of in-memory analytics with the potential of native predictive algorithms to process huge amounts of healthcare data on a real-time basis. In industries such as healthcare, most of the data is unstructured. Whether you use Enterprise systems, data warehouses, data marts, spreadsheets or Hadoop environments, Predictive Analytics solutions from SAP HANA combines both structured and unstructured datasets from any source. 

Leveraging SAP predictive analysis for visualization, R’s extensive library of statistical and data mining techniques, and SAP HANA predictive analytic library, data scientists get everything they need to predict the future in real-time. For instance, you’ll be able to predict the “patient footfall” in a hospital in a given period of time. Once you have the expected number of patients walking in, you can easily make arrangements to meet their needs like adjusting the bed capacity, maintaining stocks of critical protective devices, medicines, and so on. These proactive decisions can be extremely helpful in the current COVID-19 crisis situation.

Related Reading: Data Mining and Predictive Analytics: Know The Difference

Implementing SAP HANA Solutions in Healthcare

Does this sound too futuristic and hard to deploy? 

Well, you’ll be pleased to know that using SAP HANA for Predictive Analytics is also easy. You just have to use a drag and drop visual interface for data selection, preparation, and processing. You can create models by using native predictive algorithms as well as algorithms from R. So it’s not only for the experts. With SAP BusinessObjects and business intelligence integration, you can unlock predictive insights. Moreover, the stunning and advanced visualizations help to reveal valuable, hidden insights. The Mitsui Knowledge Industry has successfully used SAP Predictive Analytics to provide a one-stop-shop for genomic data analysis of cancer patients and support personalized therapeutics. 

Today, global healthcare industry experts are moving away from the one-size-fits-all approach. Personalized and preventive medicine is taking the center stage so that the right patient gets the right treatment at the right time. This, in turn, paves the way towards improved clinical outcomes and cost savings. Genomic research is gaining importance as it not only helps predict the signs of diseases even before they occur but also helps learn their physiologies. This can enable healthcare providers to determine the treatment plan on an individual basis thus greatly improving the efficiency and standard of healthcare. 

However, the challenge is to store the growing data. Only the genetic sequencing data would amount to approximately 5PB for 6 billion humans on the planet! Analyzing and interpreting this data is another challenge. Using SAP HANA researchers can analyze this data almost instantaneously. What once took 48 hours to analyze now takes only a few minutes with SAP HANA. This ultimately means a faster and precise diagnosis, better care, and fewer visits to the hospital.  

With SAP HANA, medical researchers and clinicians can integrate genomic data with clinical data to find associations with genetic markers and certain types of diseases. Once a doctor accesses this data in real-time, he can provide personalized treatment that is specific to certain genetic markers of the patient. 

Uncover hidden trends, take proactive actions, conduct new research on pharmaceuticals, and plan for future needs with Predictive Analytics from SAP. Fingent’s SAP experts help you take advantage of your SAP investments. Talk to us to know more.      

Understanding the Significance of SAP Support and AMS

Any SAP user can vouch for the fact that the SAP plays a significant role in their company.  Since business operations depend upon the reliability of the SAP system, any flaw can develop into a major problem hampering business operations. The effectiveness of your SAP support functions will determine how quickly your organization can restore operations. Choosing the right SAP Support model is, therefore, critical. So let’s dive right in and understand SAP support functions.

Related Reading: What is Business Process Expertise in SAP and Why You Need it

Types of SAP Support Functions

SAP support functions can be divided into 4 types: 

• Business Process Support
• SAP Functional support
• SAP ABAP and Interfaces Support
• SAP Basis or Technology Support

1. Business Process Support: 

The role of this team is to assist in various business processes and streamline them. Since the best role is played by the internal staff who are well versed in the workings of the company, you’ll see external consultants in this capacity.

2. SAP Functional Support: 

This team assists you with how to use the SAP software in the most effective way. Every now and then situations may arise where you require help. Your business may also demand frequent reconfigurations to handle new scenarios. The functional support team handles all these requests. This team needs to have an in-depth knowledge of the SAP system and a working knowledge of business processes. 

3. SAP ABAP and Interfaces Support:

This support team is also called as the technical team. While implementing SAP, the team that configures the system gathers business requirements and tries to meet them. Ideally, the ERP system should cater to all business needs. Of course, the business processes are re-engineered to meet best practices, but in the end, the role of SAP is to support business processes; not the other way around. While doing so, you realize that there are gaps and the ERP is unable to handle everything that your company does. This is where the ABAP and Interfaces Support team comes in. They go under the hood and modify or extend the software to meet the needs that could not be realized before. Similarly, if you want your SAP system to communicate with another ERP system or software, you’ll need help from the technical support team to write programs that enable the smooth flow of data between the two.       

4. SAP Basis or Technology Support: 

This team maintains the health of the infrastructure. They make sure that the SAP software is up and running on various environments such as production, testing, development, and training. Additionally, for each environment, you may have multiple machines. Thus the SAP software is running on multiple machines that host the database, operating system, hardware, and network. Depending on the size of your company, you may require a larger team to manage more number of machines. Of course, if you’re going on the cloud then you won’t need all this. The PaaS provider is responsible for maintaining the software as well as the infrastructure.  

Related Reading: How To Choose Best IT Infrastructure For SAP HANA

How SAP Support Works

All four support teams interact with each other based on requirements. Most SAP users have a team called SAP CCOE or Customer Centre of Expertise wherein the IT and (Line of Business) LOB collaborate with each other. The IT department takes care of the infrastructure and supports the technical part (SAP ABAP and interfaces), whereas the SAP configuration and business procedures are owned by the LOB. 

The SAP CCOE aims to promote transparency, efficiency, and innovation to drive continuous improvement. The CCOE program starts with the Primary Customer COE and allows customers to gradually mature into certified Advanced Customer COE(s).  Advanced Customer COE(s) help by providing a clear definition of the IT service portfolio and cost models. Apart from service provision, they leverage their knowledge of business processes, objectives, and technical feasibility to implement innovative ideas using leading technologies. Advanced Customer COE(s) thus provide competitive business advantages by including both IT and business in decision-making processes.     

Related Reading: Create Intelligent Organizations with SAP Model Company

SAP AMS (Application Management Services)

All said and done, internal SAP support teams have to face many challenges like :

• Providing and maintaining competencies for all business areas covered by the system
• Strategic talent management to meet the dynamic demands of ERP support 
• Ensuring that all problems will be solved within the allotted time frame 
• Ensuring efficient work-load planning
• Maintaining cost-effectiveness
• Maintaining effective contingency plans 

While SAP keeps adding new and valuable features and functionalities to their software at regular intervals, even in the current gloomy market, SMBs are forced to upgrade in order to maintain vendor support. All these challenges have led many organizations to look for third party support or SAP AMS providers for support. 

You can considerably reduce the support and maintenance costs of your SAP software by opting for Shared Team Delivery Model offered by Fingent. With shared services, you have a larger pool of resources to support multiple customers. Collaborating with various team members in a shared team enables the team members to learn about industry best practices thus enhancing skillsets. Customers can enjoy the benefits of improved scalability and flexibility. 

With support from an AMS provider, you get continuity of support in accordance with the SLA. However, you have to take care to avoid setting simple SLAs for support. You need to focus on getting more value from the SAP AMS provider. 

Related Reading: SAP Preconfigured Solutions Boost Efficiency Among Industries

Choosing an AMS provider that fits seamlessly as an extension to your existing staff can help your organization to deliver desired business outcomes. Of course, every company may have unique processes that call for unique SAP support. With Fingent, you get solutions that are tailored to your needs. Our service delivery structure is designed to manage costs and improve service levels. Thus you are freed from vendor lock-in, empowering you to focus on improving agility and innovation. Contact us to learn more.    

How SAP Solutions Help with Business Continuity Challenges

Every organization needs a business continuity plan to carry out its critical business as usual, especially when the area where it operates is affected by a crisis like COVID-19. That’s where enterprise resource and business planning suites like SAP comes to your rescue. SAP solutions are designed to help you meet your business continuity goals and ensure that your establishment survives and recovers from a disaster efficiently.

“SAP Help Portal describes business continuity as the efforts to ensure that critical business functions will be continuously available for clients, customers, suppliers, and other entities.”

Business continuity planning, however, is not free of challenges. Varying business requirements can shoot up your investment costs. Consider scenarios such as the installation and maintenance of hardware, software, and data center infrastructure. A simple and cost-effective way to address these requirements will be to use efficient cloud computing solutions instead of massive physical servers. This is where SAP solutions can come handy. SAP Cloud Platform, SAP S/4HANA, SAP Cloud Analytics, SAP Leonardo, SAP Cloud Platform Internet of Things, etc. are only a few of the key services offered by SAP. 

How SAP Solutions Help with Business Continuity Challenges

SAP is an efficient technological framework that can be easily incorporated into your existing business structure to maximize the productivity of your business functions. This helps boost the overall growth of your establishment. 

SAP offers impressive ways to manage your clients, customers, and business interactions. With the right SAP solutions, you can fast-track and automate your routine processes and dedicate your skilled workforce to attend the core functions. Minimal workforce retention and lower equipment maintenance costs are two of the key benefits of deploying SAP into your business. 

Related Reading: What is Business Process Expertise in SAP and Why You Need it

You will gain a high degree of flexibility by integrating SAP in your business structure. This way, you can adjust to the existing as well as imminent changes in the industry smoothly. That helps your establishment to adapt and evolve as per the varying market trends. By storing massive amounts of data on the cloud, you can also significantly reduce the operational and management costs of your business.

Business continuity plans can be very complicated to employ and execute. Traditional ways of managing the recovery infrastructure and testing the solutions can be very challenging and time-consuming. With reliable SAP solutions, all that can be managed flawlessly. 

Below are some examples of how SAP solutions can help to solve different business continuity challenges.

Identifying Alternative Sources of Supply

Maintaining the supply chain is one of the most critical aspects to ensure efficient business continuity. Using SAP Ariba allows you to create smart connections with your suppliers so that you can communicate and collaborate with them adequately. The spend management solutions of SAP Ariba also ensure that your business is responsive and responsible, no matter what the crisis is.

SAP Ariba solutions help simplify the procurement and supply chain processes. It enables you to find new sources of supply for better management of your resources in the event of a disaster. At the same time, you can find profitable customers too, and scale your client relationships for superior sales cycles and cash control.

Financial Modeling and Managing Cash Flow

Financial modeling is key to make certain that your business continuity plans are authoritative and adequate. With the help of SAP S/4HANA Finance solution, you can easily manage your financial planning and accounting jobs. The ERP system also allows you to use real-time operational data and end-to-end planning for avoiding redundancy and time lags.

SAP S/4HANA Finance solution also supports accounts payable and receivable, so that you can keep an eye on the cash flow as well as create ad hoc simulations to see new business models or organizational changes. The treasury and financial risk management solutions of the ERP system allow you to integrate cash flow analysis and business planning, including the liquidity planning lifecycle. This is highly beneficial for effective accounts management.

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

Employee Training and Certifications

Staff involvement is another vital element of a successful business continuity plan. However, holding a meeting to train and educate your staff members on the essentials of the business continuity and disaster management plans may not be possible always. This is where SAP SuccessFactors Learning Management System (LMS) emerges as a productive alternative. The online learning solution can simplify the process and adequately instruct your employees about the business continuity plan.

SAP SuccessFactors LMS can make sure that everyone is on the same page through proper training and emphasis on critical business functions. You can create easy-to-understand content for your employees and incorporate personalized and innovative elements to help them get a clear idea of the business continuity plan. You can also manage certifications and documents easily using the LMS software.

Download Our Case Study: Check out how Fingent automated integration between SAP SuccessFactors and SAP S/4HANA.

With a robust business continuity plan laid out using the right SAP solutions, you can have all the critical business data secured and accessible. This helps you recover from the disaster quickly and manage important business functions without affecting your customers or business reputation.

Fingent helps enterprises to frame robust business continuity plans leveraging SAP, S/4, and intelligent enterprise platforms. Our team includes members who are part of SAP’s core engineering team, who can provide consulting, advisory, implementation, integration, support, and monitoring services to ensure business continuity. Get in touch with us to learn more about our services. 

The Key Benefits of Adopting LMS in eLearning

Learning and training by means of various digital resources (eLearning) have been in vogue for some time. When learning is imparted through internet-based platforms like Learning Management System or LMS Technology and made available to users through electronic devices like computers, tablets, or smartphones, it offers learners the convenience to access resources any time they need. That makes eLearning even more beneficial in times of a global pandemic like COVID-19 to ensure uninterrupted learning.

Digital learning (eLearning) offers numerous benefits to both organizations as well as learners. 

• For employers, it offers a time-effective and affordable mode of training employees.
• For employees, it helps in quick learning and improved productivity.
• eLearning systems can also benefit educational establishments that are looking for robust solutions for remote learning activities.

Related Reading: How Corporate Learning Management Systems Help Engage Your Employees

How Digital Learning is Becoming a Trend in the Education Industry

eLearning systems like LMS offer a reliable solution for the diverse requirements of the education industry. It can be helpful for all kinds of learning, be it in a business environment or for an educational institution. Below are some of the key advantages of eLearning that boost its importance in the education industry.

Cost-Effective

The most obvious benefit of eLearning is that it helps to save time and money. As users can learn anytime, from anywhere, and using any device, they do not have to take time out of their current schedules for learning and training. There is no need for printing materials in online education either, which adds to the cost benefits for the company.

Facilitates Better Communication

Some businesses use eLearning to educate their clients and partners as well. This helps in better customer engagement and retention, which ultimately leads to increased revenue. Moreover, as online education fosters the idea of interactive content, it motivates the learners to keep going easily. Interactive digital content also makes it easy to remember the information and apply that at work.

Offers More Convenience

Online learning is also more consistent and reliable when compared to face-to-face training sessions. Although every instructor will have a tried-and-tested method of instruction, there are still chances of errors and mistakes in the traditional approach. These can be easily eliminated with eLearning because it offers standardized training modules for everyone. The courses can also be customized easily to meet the specific needs of the company.

How LMS Boosts Productivity and Efficiency in Online Education 

LMS provides you the right tools to accomplish your eLearning goals. You can easily create and manage a training program using the learning software, which can be beneficial in saving a lot of time when compared to running a training session in the meeting rooms. The LMS software also allows you to organize the eLearning schedules as per the needs of the learners. This makes LMS a cost-efficient solution for businesses. 

Here are a few benefits of implementing LMS:

1. Better Resource Management

By adopting online education, your company does not have to bear the costs of travel and accommodation for employees or instructors. As online classrooms allow you to provide training to a large number of users in a go, there is no need to host multiple sessions either. As you can easily avoid those expenses, it gives you more resources to equip the LMS software with extra features and tools for enhanced functionality.

2. Scalable Education Modules

You can train and educate employees in different geographical locations with an LMS platform. The online courses can be used repeatedly as well, without having to allocate any extra funds for that. This means you can enroll new users easily and have them follow the same schedules for quick learning. The LMS software will also allow you to scale the learning modules so that you can include new lessons in that as needed.

3. Enhanced Collaboration and Administration

The learning management software will give you complete control of administration as well. This makes it easy to collaborate and communicate with trainers and users. You can create as many groups and courses in the software as required and assign different roles to learners, instructors, and supervisors easily. In addition, LMS also makes content management very simple. You can update the learning courses with intuitive and interactive content whenever applicable.

4. Managing and Sharing Information

As all the data is organized properly and stored in a structured manner, accessing the information about the courses, registrations, and user files is also very efficient with LMS. You can even customize the learning platform as per your preferences, such as adding corporate image and brand logos. Some LMS software applications also support multiple languages, which can be an added advantage for training and educating staff members overseas.

How to Choose the Right LMS Software

In order to make the most of the Learning Management System, you need to choose one that suits your needs in the best way. There is no one-size-fits-all solution here, which is why you should assess your organization’s requirements properly before choosing one. 

Related Reading: 5 Tips for Choosing a Responsive Learning Management System

An LMS application can be cloud-based, open-source, commercial-grade, or installation-based. So, you need to check out all the features and functionalities in each of the options carefully to make an informed decision. Your goal should be to find an LMS software application that will allow you to create courses easily, manage users and content effectively, and report on the learning process accurately.

We recommend our clients to adopt customized Learning Management System with single-time development cost and zero license fee as the best way to get started. It retains your savings in your pocket.

Customized Learning Management System (LMS) Development

Fingent helps schools, universities, colleges, educational institutions, NGOs, and training centers to develop customized LMS platforms that come with aptitude-based smart learning tools. This makes sure that you can have a more interactive learning atmosphere. Customized LMS allows you to cultivate more transparency and communication between the instructor and the learner, which works to improve performance significantly.

Get in touch with us to find out how Fingent’s LMS software can help augment your learning process.

Today’s organizations require flexible ERP solutions for capturing new growth opportunities and embracing new business processes and models that allow them to reap the benefits of digital transformation. Faster adoption of intelligent technologies has become the new norm as organizations have increasingly started to look at their business from an integrated “end-to-end” perspective. 

The end-to-end implementation helps ensure efficiency in terms of cost, performance, compliance, and insights through which process owners can improve the quality of service and speed up the execution time. Companies can become more agile, make faster acquisitions, meet high-level business objectives, and streamline processes by implementing the end-to-end process. It enables businesses to visualize duplicate efforts and eliminate them quickly. 

Related Reading: Unlock the Potential of Intelligent Enterprise with SAP Leonardo

This article discusses how SAP S/4HANA can transform your end-to-end business process for enhanced efficiency.

What is an end-to-end business process?

An end-to-end business process is a process that is capable of addressing all your business requirements and processes in one centralized hub. It is a complete process cycle including all its various phases like project kick-off meeting, gap analysis, blueprint, realization, finalization, go-live, and after support.

In simple terms, the end-to-end business process starts with a customer’s request and ends with the successful fulfillment of that request. For businesses such as trading or manufacturing, end-to-end software has tools that can manage eCommerce, process orders, control stock, and manage warehouse and accounts. 

It provides businesses with all the necessary components while managing the installation, integration, and maintenance of the process. The end-to-end process ensures that a business enterprise gets everything they need to function effectively. It can help minimize software costs as well as operational costs. 

How S/4HANA transforms the end-to-end business process?

Since its launch in February 2017, SAP S/4HANA has been used extensively to provide “next-generation intelligent ERP”, enabling businesses to achieve digital transformation. With its three pillars, digital assistant, machine learning, and predictive analytics, S/4 is all set to transform the end-to-end business process.

Here are some ways how S/4 can transform end-to-end business processes:

1. Automation with intelligence

The ever-changing business infrastructure requires integrated, mission-critical, end-to-end processes. The intelligent ERP in the S/4 cloud caters to that very need. By further automating the process, it allows businesses to become more intelligent and agile. S/4 end-to-end processes are designed to work without interruption, thus improving agility. Since the cloud uses real-time embedded analytics, the processes function intelligently and automatically with nominal user input. 

2. A game-changer 

As the next-generation business suite, S/4 is designed to redefine how enterprise software creates value across industries with real-time insight. It also personalizes the user experience regardless of the device in use and eliminates batch processing by running end-to-end business processes at unprecedented speeds. The icing on the cake is that it can connect to IoT, Big Data, business, and social networks in real-time to create endless possibilities.

3. S/4 enables digitization

SAP S/4HANA is a business suite designed to help enterprises run uncomplicated end-to-end processes in today’s digital and networked world. Since S/4 can be deployed in the cloud or on-premise, it can drive instant value across lines of business with ultimate simplicity. It provides a guided configuration with the goals and value-realization plans for digitization activities that are part of the end-to-end implementation. 

Related Reading: Create Intelligent Organizations with SAP Model Company

4. One system 

With S/4 in place, employees do not have to spend time learning multiple systems. This ensures that the end-to-end process can be up and running as soon as possible. It minimizes disruption and results in a faster return. 

5. Competitive edge 

The source-to-pay solution is a decisive end-to-end process, which can improve the performance of an organization. This strategy covers the entire process starting from spend management through to accounts payable. By integrating SAP S/4HANA into source-to-pay, businesses can make better-informed decisions that translate into positive business impact and greater efficiency and productivity. Thus, streamlined source-to-pay processes give a competitive edge to businesses by helping them make intelligent procurement decisions. 

Transform your business with S/4 for enhanced efficiency

Managing the end-to-end process can be challenging, but SAP S/4HANA can help businesses to stay ahead of the game by helping their customers to gain the most value through such interconnected processes. 

By implementing S/4, businesses can experience greater automation to drive accuracy, efficiency, and better streamlined end-to-end processes. It can not only reduce time spent and risk of human errors but can also enhance data security. SAP S/4HANA can integrate strategy, process, procedures and policies, people, and technology into one cohesive effort ensuring that the organization is process-driven. 

As discussed earlier, SAP S/4HANA is key to integrating end-to-end solutions into your business. To find tips on how you can seamlessly transition to SAP S/4HANA, click here. 

If you are ready to get your business on to this revolutionary business suite, get in touch with us. 

Why Implement Virtual Reality in your Real Estate Business

Virtual Reality is rapidly becoming a part of every modern business, and the real estate industry is not excluded from the list. In fact, VR technology opens up many innovative opportunities for real estate businesses to market their listings in a better way.

Generally, a real estate deal involves checking the listings, price negotiations, and an in-person visit to the property. This workflow is very robust and has always brought forth good results. However, it is very time-consuming for both the client and the realtor. Sometimes, visiting the property can be inconvenient for the homebuyers as well. This is where Virtual Reality tools can be a game-changer.

Related Reading: Augmented Reality & Virtual Reality: Transforming The Real Estate Industry

Virtual Tours

VR technology allows realtors to showcase the property to their clients as if they were there in the flesh. The client just has to put on a VR headset and experience an immersive three-dimensional tour of the property. Potential homebuyers can virtually visit multiple properties this way, even without having to leave their home once. This allows them to make an informed decision when buying or renting the property.

As for the real estate companies, employing VR tools allows them to expand their reach to more clients. As the internet is not confined to any physical boundaries or borders, realtors can offer their listings to global clients as well. This can be of great help to long-distance buyers as well as to those who are looking to migrate to a different country.

Realtors can also offer a 360-degree virtual tour of the property for clients who do not have access to a VR headset. Alternatively, they can create an interactive virtual tour, wherein the user can move from one place to another within the property by clicking on various hotspots. Both of the guided and interactive virtual tours can be easily included along with the property listing on the website.

Virtual Staging

Virtual Reality also allows realtors to add furniture and other essential items in the property so that it looks more appealing and cozy to the clients. Staging has been an integral part of the real estate business for years and is widely used when uploading photos of the property on the website. VR technology can make this more realistic.

Virtual staging is one of the best ways to market a newly built home or apartment. This can be done by creating 3D tours of the property with furniture and fixtures. That makes it very simple for the client to visualize how their future personal space will be. As this connects potential buyers to the property emotionally, it motivates them to make a quick decision.

Real estate businesses can also employ VR technology to boost the sales of under-construction properties using virtual staging. Realtors find it very difficult to market such properties because empty buildings and unfinished structures do not attract buyers at all. This gap can be efficiently filled using architectural 3D visualization and virtual staging tools.

Virtual Commerce

Virtual staging of the property has another benefit too. Apart from creating a premium and lasting impression on the potential buyers, it can also promote virtual commerce. Realtors can easily add a purchase option with any element when staging the property and creating the 3D tour. This allows the clients to customize the space as per their personal preferences.

For instance, real estate businesses can integrate an online store with the staged elements. This will give the clients the options to, say, change the style of the furniture or choose a different light fixture. This not only makes the virtual tour of the property more interactive but also allows customers to imagine how it will be when they move in.

Even if a client does not make any changes to the interior staging during the virtual tour of the property, there are still chances that they may find the items included in the 3D tour interesting and may buy them eventually when they buy or rent the property. This is always an added advantage for the realtor.

Related Reading: Tech Disruptors in the Real Estate Space

The Key Benefits of Employing VR Tools in Real Estate Business

The most striking advantage of incorporating Virtual Reality in real estate business is that it saves time for both the realtor and the client. It is much cost-effective than taking the client to check out multiple properties.

Besides, an immersive 3D virtual tour of all the properties listed on the website will be available round-the-clock to the clients, which means that they can virtually visit any property at any time. This allows realtors to work with more clients, which means more opportunities to sell a property.

Another great thing about VR technology is that it gives clients an instant sense of ownership. As they get the options to customize the space as per their liking during the virtual tour, checking out the different areas of the property quickly establishes a personal connection with the clients.

This can be very helpful in inspiring them to make a purchase or sign a rental agreement. It is also possible to add to the customer experience by including interactive tools in the virtual tour, such as mortgage calculators and neighborhood descriptions.

There is no arguing that Virtual Reality has already made an impact in the real estate industry. Most of the big names have adopted the technology for improving their reach, and soon, every real estate business will incorporate VR technology for better productivity.  

If you would like to work with an expert to build your VR strategy, we can help. Contact us.

Focused Industry Templates and Automation In SAP 

Focused industry templates and automation in SAP can radically cut the time and effort required to transform the systems of various industries. Modern solutions that integrate business functions, data management and financial management can facilitate various industries. Recognizing this massive potential, both big and small industries are adopting industry-specific solutions. This article discusses in detail how industry-specific templates can benefit verticals such as healthcare, retail, logistics, utilities, and media.

Understanding Templates for Industry Specific Verticals

A standardized, industry-specific vertical approach is a fast and cost-effective way to implement an ERP solution. 

Related Reading: Unlock the Potential of Intelligent Enterprise with SAP Leonardo

When Do We Need Templates?

You need templates when your work is repetitive, such as filling in a monthly report. This speeds up mundane tasks and ensures accuracy and uniformity across all the reports. A business that performs the same functions across different locations would benefit from an industry-specific template.

How Does It Work?

Building an industry-specific template would require a typical implementation approach: gather, analyze and document the requirement. This is done in phases such as planning and blueprinting. Then it is tested and confirmed by the business before it is deployed across the organization.

If different parts of the organization work differently, there is no need to create a new template from scratch. SAP industry-specific templates allow you to create a version of the existing template to handle the task.

Related Reading: Create Intelligent Organizations with SAP Model Company

What Are the Benefits of Industry Focused Templates and Automation?

• Allows businesses to achieve quick return on their investments. 
• Minimizes ERP implementation expenses.
• Minimizes or avoids risks such as budget overruns.
• Allow you to control projects more accurately and easily.
• Give you the ability to repeat and refine processes. 
• Enables you to apply the best practices to the next project. 

Five Specific Industries That Facilitate Focused Industry Solutions

Many industries are looking for expert IT partners with a focused approach in providing industry-specific technology solutions. Here are examples of five specific industries:

1. Healthcare 

Throughout a patients’ journey in the healthcare lifecycle, the healthcare industry can leverage focused industry solutions to proactively approach the patient and provide individual, personalized content increasing patient satisfaction and building patient loyalty. With SAP industry templates, healthcare can increase efficiency with insight into costs and outcomes, improve customer experience and improve risk and compliance management. 

SAP solutions increase workforce engagement, agility, and overall results. By means of invoice-to-pay, invoice-to-cash, and other features, the healthcare industry can enable their departments to collaborate efficiently.

2. Retail

Today, it is critical for businesses to treat customers as they want to be treated. This is possible only by customizing their experience and selling to them in a personalized way. SAP solutions are suitable for both small and large enterprises. It can be mapped for all company techniques and scenarios, and business features. Since they are exceedingly customizable, SAP solutions are best utilized for business strategies involving seasonal goods. Aggregates and indexes can be replaced by central tables ensuring that steps are transparent from order-to-delivery.

3. Logistics

Certified SAP focused industry templates and automation simplifies the process to avoid the need for designing a full business process from scratch. This can double the performance speed by accelerating user productivity and reducing frustration. It can also eliminate the use of printed paper, reducing your carbon footprint and costs. Automation in the logistics industry leads to faster decisions and instant actions. 

4. Utilities

Utility firms undergo substantial changes across the world. This increases competition, thereby putting immense pressure on utility companies to provide a high degree of customer satisfaction. SAP solution templates and automation helps them by providing operational efficiency, steering utilities to their desired destination and beyond with minimum expense. It can also reduce implementation effort and time, thus realizing a higher ROI for the industry.

5. Media 

Media industries such as newspapers, television, and internet-based social media applications face the challenge of delivering information at the right time to attract their target audience. Implementation of SAP solutions will ensure that all service processes are handled efficiently. It can help in better planning of which information should be broadcast at what time. SAP-based solutions enable the media industry to make instant changes and take quick action according to an on-going scenario. Such agility can provide better commercial outcomes for the industry.

Related Reading: SAP Preconfigured Solutions Boost Efficiency Among Industries

It’s the Right Move!

Agility, quick ROI, streamlined processes – what are you waiting for? Businesses are moving on to Focused Industry Templates and Automation as we speak. Fingent has helped many of these businesses with a host of SAP services that help to improve operational efficiency. Give us a call and let’s get talking. 

What are preconfigured solutions?

SAP Preconfigured solutions are implementations featuring standard functionality or common patterns. Since they include common enterprise features such as supply chain, finance, and inventory management, preconfigured solutions can be deployed rapidly. In simple terms, SAP preconfigured solutions are simple, ready-to-consume solutions that adapt to your business needs.

SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions allows the development of preconfigured solutions for specific functional areas, complete with pre-built reports, preconfigured content, and predefined best practices. Such suites enable enterprises to deploy software easily, with accelerated implementation times, and predictability in cost and scope.

Each preconfigured solution is a complete, end-to-end implementation. Enterprises may adopt it as such, or use it as a base for developing a full-blown customized solution. Open source solutions allow enterprises to download the source code and customize the solution.

Traditional preconfigured solutions came on-premise. The SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud heralds the cloud version of preconfigured solutions.

Related Reading: What is Business Process Expertise in SAP and Why You Need it

How preconfigured solutions enhance industry operations?

Preconfigured solutions spare enterprises from “rediscovering the wheel.” When solutions exist for standard requirements, it avoids the wastage in development efforts. Preconfigured solutions save time, trial-and-error, and labor. The in-built accelerators allow rapid implementation and configuration. The shortened time to market delivers a competitive advantage to firms.

A preconfigured solution offers a working model with glitches removed. These solutions connect key functional areas, to streamline operations and improve communication flow across departments. It automates routine and repetitive functions and offers well-structured content that improves visibility into key fields.

SAP offers built-in support for industry best practices. Solutions developed using SAP combines the latest technology, industry best practices, and processes in a single package.

Developers using SAP to build preconfigured solutions can adopt a modular and scalable approach. They mix modules to create targeted solutions such as CRM, field management suite, ERP and more. Clients may choose the most relevant reporting tools for their reports using SAP Business Intelligence Adoption rapid-deployment solution. SAP Predictive Analytics Content Adoption rapid-deployment solution helps to implement a predefined predictive analysis use case.

Transforming various industry verticals

Preconfigured solutions deliver efficiency improvements in several industries and verticals. Five of them are mentioned below:

1. Real Estate

Unstandardized information, inefficient processes, and weak communications often affect the real estate industry. Preconfigured solutions enable enterprises to streamline data and workflows. 

Developing preconfigured solutions for key functional areas of the real estate industry allows business owners to access information in real-time, prevent opportunities from slipping through the cracks, and remain in control of the business. Here are a few key functional areas where pre-configured solutions can come to the rescue of real estate enterprises:

• Document management with powerful search and sort functionality.
• Process automation functions to streamline operations.
• Contact maintenance to keep track of customers and upcoming tasks.
• Reporting and analytics to generate and share data and other critical information.

2. Supply Chain and Logistics

Preconfigured solutions make the complex supply chain relationships simple and easy to handle. SAP’s Model Company for supply chain planning offers a ready-to-run, comprehensive solution, complete with relevant business content, accelerators, and enablement services.

The suite co-opts:

• Demand planning to manage demand streams and increase productivity.
• Response and supply planning.
• Supply and allocation planning.
• Deployment planning.
• Sales and Operations planning.

The inbound and outbound integrations with SAP S/4HANA ensures seamless integration with other functional areas, such as sales. Businesses gain improved visibility to the upstream and downstream business value chains and can visualize the entire supply chain network. The preconfigured solution aligns demand and supply plans with financial targets and key performance indicators.

Related Reading: Seamlessly migrate to S/4HANA with these tools and methodologies

3. Healthcare

The healthcare industry is under pressure to innovate while keeping up with regulations. Preconfigured solutions automate regulatory concerns and compliance. Ready-to-run process models and scenarios enforce standardization with tight quality controls. It improves efficiency in research and development. Accelerators support rapid design and implementation.

The most popular modules of SAP’s preconfigured solutions in healthcare are meant for:

• Research and development
• Production
• Regulation
• Quality and traceability
• Logistics and transport
• Purchases and provisioning
• Marketing and commercial

4. Sales and Marketing

SAP preconfigured solutions infuse efficiency to customer-facing functions and increase customer satisfaction. Its most popular implementations in the sales and marketing domain include:

• Predicting customer demand based on real-time data.
• Tracking sales history.
• Automating sales operations. The solution tracks all processes, from ordering of raw materials till the delivery, and takes care of auditing, notifications, and reporting.

5. Financial Services

The SAP Model Company solution for Financial Services offers a ready-to-run, comprehensive solution to support the core financial processes, including:

• General accounting
• Cash and treasury functions
• Planning and forecasting

These preconfigured solutions come with relevant business content for a specific use-case, accelerator, and enablement service. These solutions enable gap analysis, address resource bottlenecks, and support lean implementations.

Today’s enterprises seek efficiency improvements and cost savings without compromising quality. Fingent uses SAP to build pre-configured solutions that enable enterprises to realize such goals. Implementing these custom-built pre-configured solutions helps you transform your processes across various business areas and improve your customer relationships. 

Contact us to get a free consultation with our SAP Experts. 

What is SAP Leonardo?

Though businesses are flooded with Big Data, IoT, Machine Learning, Blockchain, and other latest technologies that support innovation, many of them are unaware of how to bring these technologies together for enhanced business results. This is where SAP Leonardo comes in. SAP Leonardo brings these technologies together by integrating the key features of innovation to drive business outcomes. It is a “digital innovation system” that allows you to innovate at scale, thus rethinking your business models.

SAP Leonardo uses a rapid innovation process that embraces design thinking by utilizing the power of core technologies like Big Data, Analytics, IoT, Blockchain, Machine Learning. SAP Leonardo is built on the SAP Cloud Platform. It is the first digital enterprise platform that gives you the freedom to choose any infrastructure provider you want: SAP, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform. So, whichever IaaS provider you choose, you do not have to compromise on agility and ownership costs.  

Related Reading: Create Intelligent Organizations with SAP Model Company

SAP Leonardo: The future of intelligent ERP   

SAP Leonardo offers a basket of features intended for transforming organizations into intelligent enterprises. 

1. Rapid innovation process: 

SAP Leonardo’s rapid innovation process is a combination of innovation services and design thinking methodology. It helps companies to move from concept to blueprint by driving the process of picking the best projects that are more likely to succeed while minimizing risks. This process encourages users to think about big ideas or challenges by taking small steps at a time. Design thinking being the core of the process will help you amplify your human-centric activities with the help of technology. This is done by embracing empathy and collaboration in a rapid and iterative environment.  

2. Automated innovation: 

SAP Leonardo empowers companies to innovate based on real-time information. Fiori apps can directly interact with IoT systems located on-site through the SAP Cloud. Thus the IoT system can learn and adapt automatically to the ongoing processes that can impact its performance. However, the company will always hold control and can accept or reject the recommendations made by the system. Thus, SAP Leonardo enables companies to gather and process data most efficiently.

Six core technological domains: 

SAP Leonardo combines 6 core technologies and builds solutions on that foundation. 

Following are the six core technologies:

1. IoT: With SAP Leonardo you can connect people, processes, and things based on real-time data received from IoT services. You end up with enriched IoT data on a unified semantic model. Thus you watch your insights turning into business outcomes.

2. Machine Learning: Though machine learning has been around for some time, these projects always existed in silos. With SAP Leonardo, machine learning is made available to everyone and everywhere by embedding it into enterprise applications. With this integrated intelligence, users can solve common problems and also facilitate the deployment of deep learning models for continuous improvement of business processes.

3. Blockchain: With Leonardo, SAP has moved into the BaaS technology accompanying giants like IBM and Microsoft. These companies have incorporated blockchain as the core of a secure transaction-based business. The SAP BaaS is ready-to-use and allows you to experiment on the distributed ledger technology with minimum risks.

4. Analytics: Analytics is crucial to all business processes and applications. With SAP Leonardo, embedded analytics is combined with machine learning, enabling you to create new processes and applications based on insights. Using Predictive Analytics you can leverage machine learning to take proactive actions and improve transparency across your team. 

5. Big Data: The SAP Data Hub, which is a part of Leonardo, helps to turn your chaotic data into context. It combines business with IT and simplifies data sharing. Thus, you can easily promote complete data transparency in your company.

6. Data Intelligence: SAP Data Intelligence combines the salient features of SAP Data Hub and SAP Leonardo Machine Learning Foundation into a single integrated service in the SAP Cloud Platform. SAP Data Intelligence helps you to monetize your data and leverage open source technologies.

SAP Leonardo comes with a set of industry accelerators: 

In order to maximize ROI, you have to innovate quickly at scale. SAP Leonardo makes rapid innovation possible as it is delivered with a set of industry accelerators. They combine software and services that reduce the time of implementation considerably. In other words, the digital innovation system capabilities of SAP Leonardo are wrapped in a set of industry best practices gained from years of experience. All these accelerators combine industry knowledge, data intelligence, and software needed on an open innovation path.

Related Reading: What is Business Process Expertise in SAP and Why You Need it

SAP Leonardo has powered SAP’s own digital transformation: 

SAP is using Leonardo throughout the SAP portfolio to make its business suite and system of applications powerful. SAP Leonardo powers everything from SAP Ariba to SAP S/4 HANA, making them more intelligent.

In addition to improving reliability and efficiency, today’s ERP solutions have to be the foundation on which future business models are built. Rather than just making profits, businesses should focus on altering customer experiences and gaining new market shares. To become an intelligent enterprise, you need an intelligent ERP and SAP Leonardo is definitely the future!   

Contact us if you have a query on how SAP Leonardo can benefit your business. Our consultants will be able to assist you.