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Post COVID recommendations by SAP

Source: Promo

Thursday, 25.06.2020.

08:23

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Illustration (Photo: Saklakova/shutterstock.com)

The fight against the coronavirus has entered its second phase, with more and more companies starting production and returns its employees to work from the offices. SAP experts have summarized their 5 + 1 recommendations for a period of easing the restrictions and recovering. Although these suggestions are primarily stand for medium and large enterprises, the methodology may also be relevant for smaller businesses.

1. Health at Work

The first and foremost question is how to put epidemiological measures and formal guidelines into practice by the management of a company turning to recovery phase. The biggest challenge during this period is to strike a literally healthy balance between precautionary measures and business considerations. This requires, first, a full risk analysis covering corporate spaces, interactions, and workflows. If the company does not yet have a solution that supports health, safety and environmental protection (HSE) processes, the design and rigorous implementation of measures can be a serious task for those responsible. Such tasks may include the establishment of internal rules (eg temperature measurement at entry, distance, reporting of suspicious cases) and communication channels, as well as the implementation of actions to inform and encourage their use. In addition to mitigating health risks, such systems can ensure that any signs of infection or breaches of the rules are brought to the attention of the relevant decision-maker as soon as possible.

The SAP Environment, Health and Safety (SAP EHS) solution provides professional support in designing and regulating precisely these processes: it allows risk assessments to be carried out, guides you through the development of protocols, and, thanks to its integration with the enterprise resource planning system, can replace the already established and separate systems like incident management, employee health monitoring and other subsystems. Seeing the challenges that the coronavirus has posed to HSE professionals, SAP is trying to help their work with discounted licensing and deployment schemes.

Of course, SAP EHS is by not only relevant in the current epidemic: in general, it is a system for identifying, assessing and mitigating risks to workers' safety, health and the environment, which also helps to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements and provides reporting functions and extraordinary insight into HSE processes to both management and the authorities.

2. Continuity of supply chains

It is important for companies to recognize that just as they may have experienced major disruptions around their own operations, the same could have happened for all their partners and suppliers. Due to the sudden increase or decrease in demand, there may have been, or may continue to be disturbances in the arrival and quality of raw materials, components and semi-finished products, or in terms of the human resources used. It’s worth to take advantage of the periodic free access to SAP's Ariba Discovery platform, which connects customers and suppliers, where you can freely bid for any purchase of goods or services, and suppliers can post their related offers free of charge.

In the pandemic environment, in the supply chain, those companies facing the biggest challenges that have become masters at maximizing efficiency in recent years. Companies that have flagged inventory minimization, the introduction of just-in-time systems, and even outsourcing their core businesses now need to rethink their business continuity considerations.

For this matter, SAP IBP (Integrated Business Planning) planning solution can be useful, as it helps to identify supply chain disruptions as soon as possible and to respond to such situations. The essence of the solution is that it connects all external and internal parties involved in the supply chain but operating in silos: customers, sales, marketing, finance area, inventory designers, production designers, purchasers, suppliers. The solution helps them to work together on developing supply planning processes. In addition, SAP now announced a 90-day discount period for SAP IBP from May.

The SAP IBP solution can also be an essential help and a useful digital platform for governmental organizations in a pandemic situation. Thanks to the predictive algorithms of the solution, the demand for masks, protective equipments or other health accessories and instruments can be easily predicted. Furthermore, inventory information and data from suppliers will quickly reveal whether these needs are being met at the national, county, or health care institution level, or whether we may need to look to new suppliers. In the latter case, a few clicks can be used to start a procurement process in Ariba for the missing devices.

3. Workforce support

A relaunched corporate life by far doesn’t mean that everyone would resume from where they left off: changing rules and work environment, extra tasks and problems to be solved test the endurance of employees. In such circumstances, special attention must be paid to inform and motivate employees, provide the inputs and tools needed to perform their tasks, and to reorganize their work. As part of the SAP Here To Help campaign, a 'Remote Work Pulse' questionnaire running on the SAP Qualtrics platform was published in April to continuously monitor employee satisfaction, collect any comments and identify issues to be addressed. Now in the second phase, SAP helps companies gradually re-establish their work schedules with the 'Return to Work' Pulse. SAP has made different collaborative interfaces for SMEs free of charge: Ruum for project planning and management tasks, and SAP Litmos Remote Readiness & Productivity Academy, with ready-to-watch video-based courses to help establish best practices for remote work, and develop leadership during times of change and challenge.

Companies that have not yet put their HR processes into the cloud and have not digitized or automated them have found themselves in a much more difficult position in a crisis situation. The fundamental change in the world of work is irreversible, so the development of a digitally controlled and more flexible HR system will be inevitable for innovative companies in the future. SAP SuccessFactors, the SAP HR management platform, offers a new generation solution for all HR tasks and processes: recruitment, employee data storage, employee communication, supply management, development and learning, performance measurement, compensation plans, labor-related analytical tasks and the preparation of reports.

4. Financial replanning

With the gradual recovery of processes, forward-looking planning will increasingly take the place of ad-hoc crisis-handling tasks. Changes in the market environment are forcing almost every company to rethink company performance scenarios. The luckiest can expect the new era with unchanged or even better prospects, however, most companies will face more modest turnover and can expect to reach previous revenue levels over a different period of time. In such circumstances, it is particularly important to conduct such business where the products or services sold provide coverage for fixed costs in any case. Moreover, one of the interesting contradictions of the crisis phenomena is that the prices of many raw materials or semi-finished products are moving upwards compared to the usual prices during the economic boom. This is explained precisely by the fact that the fixed cost is apportioned to fewer products sold, and this necessarily passes on.

Profitability must therefore be recalculated for all companies, restructuring the cost side where appropriate, to remain on a sustainable path despite current market environment. For reaching this, companies should rely on innovative ERP systems that are based on artificial intelligence, machine learning and other intelligent technologies - such as SAP S/4 HANA in large enterprise environments and SAP Business One software in the SME sector. These solutions automate reporting for end-of-period closures, create real-time intelligent workflows for continuous sales planning and dynamic liquidity forecasting, optimize procurement and costs with artificial intelligence capabilities, and accelerate customer-tailored bidding and customization. These solutions also reduce risks by setting up and monitoring business rules and making it easier and traceable to prepare, sign and manage contracts.

SAP S/4 HANA customers can use SAP’s next-generation profitability and performance management application, SAP Profitability and Performance Management (PaPm) software. This allows for real-time analysis and management of a company’s profitability, combining a financial and operations-oriented approach. With the help of the application, the resources and capacity of the operation can be adjusted to the need.

5. Maintaining customers’ loyalty

In times of crisis, loyalty is the greatest value, not only on the supplier, employee, but also on the customer side. SAP has been paying special attention to tracking customer satisfaction for years, and the SAP Qualtrics platform is specifically focused on this. Any qualitative data that is generated during the sales process can be relevant and either confirms or calls into question the quality of the product and service, customer satisfaction, and our expectations for further purchases. During the pandemic period, SAP released a number of turnkey, free Qualtrics surveys to help companies measure and maintain customer loyalty: they can rely on Customer Confidence Pulse or Digital Open Door solutions, among others.

One of the drivers of post-crisis redesign can be for many companies to get the customer as close as possible, with a dual purpose: on the one hand, to reach stronger control over the ideal service and product quality, and on the other hand, to save brokerage surcharges on the product that could be turned into customer discounts.

These processes will enhance the role of marketing, online sales, sales support, and customer service in companies, which is why it is worth investing in e-commerce and marketing automation solutions in the near future – an area where SAP's market-leading solutions can support companies as well.

+1. Automation

Innovation cannot stop in times of crisis - in fact, it can even gain a new boost. Profitability, reinforcement of customer service as well as labor safety considerations can drive companies ’further automation projects. To implement these, the introduction of RPA (Robotic Process Automation) is required. SAP experts predict that increasing number of companies will use the support of artificial intelligence in more and more work areas to replace routine tasks, so that the human workforce can focus on solving real, complex problems and serving customers at a high level. Likewise, in the areas of production, logistics, but even physically demanding service areas, robotization is expected to reduce human resource costs and human error, administrative burdens, lead times, and standardize processes.

Companies:

SAP West Balkans Beograd

Tags:

SAP

coronavirus

Health at Work

Continuity of supply chains

Remote Readiness & Productivity Academy

Financial replanning

SAP Profitability and Performance Management

Customer Confidence Pulse or Digital Open Door

Automation

Robotic Process Automation

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