As part of an Evolution Partnership initiative launched in June 2020, SAP and IBM have once again collaborated on new intelligent industry offerings to help customers emerge even stronger post-COVID and further accelerate digital transformation across various industries.
SAP and IBM’s latest collaboration reinforces their 48-year-old alliance with new co-developed solutions to empower clients with the latest cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), automation, and analytics. The following integrated solutions will enable end-to-end business transformation processes to help companies advance the modernisation of their systems and workflows:
- Intelligent Industry Cloud Solutions for Industrial Manufacturing
- Cognitive Care for SAP Utilities
- Continuous Intelligent Planning
- IBM Accelerated Move Center
The latest industry-specific offerings will utilise emerging technologies to support intelligent workflows and transform data into business value, helping customers across various sectors expand their digital transformation capabilities.
Additionally, IBM has also announced that it will continue to work closely with SAP in enhancing solutions to complement its collaboration on cloud and RISE with SAP. Strengthening its commitment to driving digital transformation across various industries, IBM was one of the several partners that has expressed support for RISE with SAP.
In January, Matt Schwartz, SAP Global Practice Leader at IBM, shared about IBM’s involvement in SAP’s holistic Business Transformation as a Service milestone offering. He stated:
“RISE with SAP provides new flexibility to help our mutual customers chart their best course to the Intelligent Enterprise aligned to their organizations’ needs. Leveraging SAP Business Technology Platform and packaging solutions around IBM’s AI-powered industry intelligent workflows and Accelerated Migration Factory offerings give customers more options to accelerate their digital transformation journeys.”
New Offerings from SAP and IBM to Drive Digital Transformation
To help address changing global market requirements and expectations in the industry, IBM has joined forces with top industrial manufacturing companies to create Intelligent Industry Cloud Solutions for Industrial Manufacturing. The new capabilities integrated with SAP’s Intelligent Suite and Industry Cloud Solutions utilise AI and analytics to help industrial manufacturers in modernising their workflows, improving productivity and customer satisfaction, and increasing win rates.
Meanwhile, the Cognitive Care for SAP Utilities solution — which integrates with SAP S/4HANA, SAP Customer Experience, and leverages Qualtrics — aims to help the utilities sector adopt a more efficient approach to their customer service as the pandemic continues to drive high volumes of customer calls to contact centres. By maximising conversational AI, automation, and machine learning capabilities, the solution transforms the customer service experience into an intelligent workflow and empowers customer service agents with the ability to answer questions quickly.
Additionally, SAP and IBM have jointly developed Continuous Intelligent Planning — a new supply chain solution aimed at helping organisations better deal with disruptions especially with COVID-19’s unforeseen impacts on the supply chain. To help better predict demand for customers’ goods or services, this solution expands the functionalities of SAP Integrated Business Planning (SAP IBP) for better forecasting and demand sensing in the short-term planning perspective.
Lastly, IBM Accelerated Move Center has been established to accelerate digital transformation and give customers more predictability on their journey to SAP S/4HANA. Already seeing progress with clients in European and Indian markets, the offering is expected to continue addressing the brownfield migration requirement by many mid-market businesses and divisions of larger companies.
IBM also plans to release offerings in the retail and defense sectors to provide customers with greater flexibility for hybrid cloud solutions. Schwartz said in a statement:
“We’re also combining efforts in sustainability with the SAP Climate 21 initiative.”
