Meet George Jetson – Your New Chief Procurement Officer

Transcript of a discussion on how rapid advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning are poised to reshape procurement.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: SAP Ariba.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect.

Gardner

Our next technology innovation thought leadership discussion explores how rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are poised to reshape procurement -- like a fast-forwarding to a once-fanciful vision of the future.

Whereas George Jetson of the 1960s cartoon portrayed a world of household robots, flying cars, and push-button corporate jobs -- the 2017 procurement landscape has its own impressive retinue of decision bots, automated processes, and data-driven insights.

We won’t need to wait long for this vision of futuristic business to arrive. As we enter 2017, applied intelligence derived from entirely new data analysis benefits has redefined productivity and provided business leaders with unprecedented tools for managing procurement, supply chains, and continuity risks.

To learn more about the future of predictive -- and even proactive procurement technologies -- please join me in welcoming back Chris Haydon, Chief Strategy Officer at SAP Ariba. Good to have you with us, Chris.

Chris Haydon: Great to be here again.

Gardner: It seems like only yesterday that we were content to gain a common view of the customer or develop an end-to-end bead on a single business process. These were our goals in refining business in general, but today we've leapfrogged to a future where we're using words like “predictive” and “proactive” to define what business function should do and be about. Chris, what's altered our reality to account for this rapid advancement from visibility into predictive -- and on to proactive?

Haydon: There are a couple of things. The acceleration of the smarts, the intelligence, or the artificial intelligence, whatever the terminology that you identify with, has really exploded. It’s a lot more real, and you see these use-cases on television all the time. The business world is just looking to go in and adopt that.

And then there’s this notion of the Lego block of being able to string multiple processes together via an API is really exciting -- that coupled with the ability to have insight. The last piece, the ability to make sense of big data, either from a visualization perspective or from a machine-learning perspective, has accelerated things.

These trends are starting to come together in the business-to-business (B2B) world, and today, we're seeing them manifest themselves in procurement.

Gardner: What is it about procurement as a function that’s especially ripe for taking advantage of these technologies?

Transaction intense

Haydon: Procurement is obviously very transaction-intense. Historically, what transaction intensity means is people, processing, exceptions. When we talk about these trends now, the ability to componentize services, the ability to look at big data or machine learning, and the input on top of this contextualizes intelligence. It's cognitive and predictive by its very nature, a bigger data set, and [improves] historically inefficient human-based processes. That’s why procurement is starting to be at the forefront.

Haydon

Gardner: Procurement itself has changed from the days of when we were highly vertically integrated as corporations. We had long lead times on product cycles and fulfillment. Nowadays, it’s all about agility and compressing the time across the board. So, procurement has elevated its position. Anything more to add?

Haydon: Everyone needs to be closer to the customer, and you need live business. So, procurement is live now. This change in dynamic -- speed and responsiveness -- is closer to your point. It’s also these other dimensions of the consumer experience that now has to be the business-to-business experience. All that means same-day shipping, real-time visibility, and changing dynamically. That's what we have to deliver.

Gardner: If we go back to our George Jetson reference, what is it about this coming year, 2017? Do you think it's an important inception point when it comes to factoring things like the rising role of procurement, the rising role of analytics, and the fact that the Internet of Things (IoT) is going to bring more relevant data to bear? Why now?

Haydon: There are a couple of things. The procurement function is becoming more mature. Procurement leaders have extracted those first and second levels of savings from sourcing and the like. And they have control of their processes.

With cloud-based technologies and more of control of their processes, they're looking now to how they're going to serve their internal customers by being value-generators and risk-reducers.

How do you forward the business, how do you de-risk, how do you get supply continuity, how do you protect your brand? You do that by having better insight, real-time insight into your supply base, and that’s what’s driving this investment.

Gardner: We've been talking about Ariba being a 20-year-old company. Congratulations on your anniversary of 20 years.

Haydon: Thank you.

AI and bots

Gardner: You're also, of course, part of SAP. Not only have you been focused on procurement for 20 years, but you've got a large global player with lots of other technologies and platform of benefits to avail yourselves of. So, that brings me to the point of AI and bots.

It seems to me that right at the time when procurement needs help, when procurement is more important than ever, that we're also in a position technically to start doing some innovative things that get us into those words "predictive" and more "intelligent."

Set the stage for how these things come together.

Haydon: You allude to being part of SAP, and that's really a great strength and advantage for a domain-focused procurement expertise company.

The machine-learning capabilities that are part of a native SAP HANA platform, which we naturally adopt and get access to, put us on the forefront of not having to invest in that part of the platform, but to focus on how we take that platform and put it into the context of procurement.

There are a couple of pretty obvious areas. There's no doubt that when you’ve got the largest B2B network, billions in spend, and hundreds and millions of transactions on invoicing, you apply some machine learning on that. We can start doing a lot smarter matching an exception management on that, pretty straightforward. That's at one end of the chain.

It's not about upstream and downstream, it's about end-to-end process, and re-imagining and reinventing that.

On the other end of the chain, we have bots. Some people get a little bit wired about the word “bot,” “robotics,” or whatever, maybe it's a digital assistant or it's a smart app. But, it's this notion of helping with decisions, helping with real-time decisions, whether it's identifying a new source of supply because there's a problem, and the problem is identified because you’ve got a live network. It's saying that you have a risk or you have a continuity problem, and not just that it's happening, but here's an alternative, here are other sources of a qualified supply.

Gardner: So, it strikes me that 2017 is such a pivotal year in business. This is the year where we're going to start to really define what machines do well, and what people do well, and not to confuse them. What is it about an end-to-end process in procurement that the machine can do better that we can then elevate the value in the decision-making process of the people?

Haydon: Machines can do better in just identifying patterns -- clusters, if you want to use a more technical word. They transform category management and enables procurement to be at the front of their internal customer set by looking not just at their traditional total cost of ownership (TCO), but total value and use. That's a part of that real dynamic change.

What we call end-to-end, or even what SAP Ariba defined in a very loose way when we talked about upstream, it was about outsourcing and contracting, and downstream was about procurement, purchasing, and invoicing. That's gone, Dana. It's not about upstream and downstream, it's about end-to-end process, and re-imagining and reinventing that.

The role of people

Gardner: When we give more power to a procurement professional by having highly elevated and intelligent tools, their role within the organization advances and the amount of improvement they can make financially advances. But I wonder where there's risk if we automate too much and whether companies might be thinking that they still want people in charge of these decisions. Where do we begin experimenting with how much automation to bring, now that we know how capable these machines have been, or is this going to be a period of exploration for the next few years?

Haydon: It will be a period of exploration, just because businesses have different risk tolerances and there are actually different parts of their life cycle. If you're in a hyper growth mode and you're pretty profitable, that's a little bit different than if you're under a very big margin pressure.

For example, maybe if you're in high tech in the Silicon Valley, and some big names that we could all talk about are, you're prepared to be able to go at it, and let it all come.

If you're in a natural-resource environment, every dollar is even more precious than it was a year ago.

That’s also the beauty, though, with technology. If you want to do it for this category, this supplier, this business unit, or this division you can do that a lot easier than ever before and so you go on a journey.

If you're in a hyper growth mode and you're pretty profitable, that's a little bit different than if you're under a very big margin pressure.

Gardner: That’s an important point that people might not appreciate, that there's a tolerance for your appetite for automation, intelligence, using machine learning, and AI. They might even change, given the context of the certain procurement activity you're doing within the same company. Maybe you could help people who are a little bit leery of this, thinking that they're losing control. It sounds to me like they're actually gaining more control.

Haydon: They gain more control, because they can do more and see more. To me, it’s layered. Does the first bot automatically requisition something -- yes or no? So, you put tolerances on it. I'm okay to do it if it is less than $50,000, $5,000, or whatever the limit is, and it's very simple. If the event is less than $5,000 and it’s within one percent of the last time I did it, go and do it. But tell me that you are going to do it or let’s have a cooling-off period.

If you don't tell me or if you don’t stop me, I'm going to do it, and that’s the little bit of this predictive as well. So you still control the gate, you just don’t have to be involved in all the sub-processes and all that stuff to get to the gate. That’s interesting.

Gardner: What’s interesting to me as well, Chris, is because the data is such a core element of how successful this is, it means that companies in a procurement intelligence drive will want more data, so they can make better decisions. Suppliers who want to be competitive in that environment will naturally be incentivized to provide more data, more quickly, with more openness. Tell us some of the implications for intelligence brought to procurement on the supplier? What we should expect suppliers to do differently as a result?

Notion of content

Haydon: There's no doubt that, at a couple of levels, suppliers will need to let the buyers know even more about themselves than they have ever known before.

That goes to the notion of content. It’s like there is unique content to be discovered, which is whom am I, what do I do well and demonstrate that I do well. That’s being discovered. Then, there is the notion of being able to transact. What do I need to be able to do to transact with you efficiently whether that's a payment, a bank account, or just the way in which I can consume this?

Then, there is also this last notion of the content. What content do I need to be able to provide to my customer, aka the end user, for them to be able to initiate the business with them?

These three dimensions of being discovered, how to be dynamically transacted with, and then actually providing the content of what you do even as a material of service to the end user via the channel. You have to have all of these dimensions right.

If you don't have the context of the business process between a buyer and a seller and what they are trying to affect through the network, how does it add value?

That’s why we fundamentally believe that a network-based approach, when it's end to end, meaning a supplier can do it once to all of the customers across the [Ariba] Discovery channel, across the transactional channel, across the content channel is really value adding. In a digital economy, that's the only way to do it.

Gardner: So this idea of the business network, which is a virtual repository for all of this information isn't just quantity, but it's really about the quality of the relationship. We hear about different business networks vying for attention. It seems to me that understanding that quality aspect is something you shouldn't lose track of.

Haydon: It’s the quality. It’s also the context of the business process. If you don't have the context of the business process between a buyer and a seller and what they are trying to affect through the network, how does it add value? The leading-practice networks, and we're a leading-practice network, are thinking about Discovery. We're thinking about content; we're thinking about transactions.

Gardner: Again, going back to the George Jetson view of the future, for organizations that want to see the return on their energy and devotion to these concepts around AI, bots, and intelligence. What sort of low-hanging fruit do we look for, for assuring them that they are on the right path? I'm going to answer my own question, but I want you to illustrate it a bit better, and that’s risk and compliance and being able to adjust to unforeseen circumstances seems to me an immediate payoff for doing this.

Severance of pleadings

Haydon: The United Kingdom is enacting a law before the end of the year for severance of pleadings. It’s the law, and you have to comply. The real question is how you comply.

You eye your brand, you eye your supply chain, and having the supply-chain profile information at hand right now is top of mind. If you're a Chief Procurement Officer (CPO) and you walk into the CEO’s office, the CEO could ask, "Can you tell me that I don’t have any forced labor, I don’t have any denied parties, and I'm Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) compliant? Can you tell me that now?"

You might be able to do it for your top 50 suppliers or top 100 suppliers, and that’s great, but unfortunately, a small, $2,000 supplier who uses some forced labor in any part of the world is potentially a problem in this extended supply chain. We've seen brands boycotted very quickly. These things roll.

So yes, I think that’s just right at the forefront. Then, it's applying intelligence to that to give that risk threshold and to think about where those challenges are. It's being smart and saying, "Here is a high risk category. Look at this category first and all the suppliers in the category. We're not saying that the suppliers are bad, but you better have a double or triple look at that, because you're at high risk just because of the nature of the category."

Think larger than yourself in trying to solve that problem differently. Those cloud deployment models really help you.

Gardner: Technically, what should organizations be thinking about in terms of what they have in place in order for their systems and processes to take advantage of these business network intelligence values? If I'm intrigued by this concept, if I see the benefits in reducing risk and additional efficiency, what might I be thinking about in terms of my own architecture, my own technologies in order to be in the best position to take advantage of this?

Haydon: You have to question how much of that you think you can build yourself. If you think you're asking different questions than most of your competitors, you're probably not. I'm sure there are specific categories and specific areas on tight supplier relationships and co-innovation development, but when it comes to the core risk questions, more often, they're about an industry, a geography, or the intersection of both.

Our recommendation to corporations is never try and build it yourself. You might need to have some degree of privacy, but look to have it as more industry-based. Think larger than yourself in trying to solve that problem differently. Those cloud deployment models really help you.

Gardner: So it really is less of a technical preparatory thought process than process being a digital organization, availing yourself of cloud models, being ready to think about acting intelligently and finding that right demarcation between what the machines do best and what the people do best.

More visible

Haydon: By making things digital they are actually more visible. You have to be able to balance the pure nature of visibility to get at the product; that's the first step. That’s why people are on a digital journey.

Gardner: Machines can’t help you with a paper-based process, right?

Haydon: Not as much. You have to scan it and throw it in. Then, you are then digitizing it.

Gardner: We heard about Guided Buying last year from SAP Ariba. It sounds like we're going to be getting a sort of "Guided Buying-Plus" next year and we should keep an eye on that.

Haydon: We're very excited. We announced that earlier this year. We're trying to solve two problems quickly through Guided Buying.

Our Guided Buying has a beautiful consumer-based look and feel, but with embedded compliance. We hide the complexity. We just show the user what they need to know at the time, and the flow is very powerful.

One is the nature of the ad-hoc user. We're all ad-hoc users in the business today. I need to buy things, but I don’t want to read the policy, I don’t want to open the PDF on some corporate portal on some threshold limit that, quite honestly, I really need to know about once or twice a year.

So our Guided Buying has a beautiful consumer-based look and feel, but with embedded compliance. We hide the complexity. We just show the user what they need to know at the time, and the flow is very powerful.

Gardner: Well, it certainly sounds like an area where intelligence would have a very marked improvement, and we'll look for some interesting news there as well.

I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. You've been listening to a BriefingsDirect thought leadership podcast discussion on how rapid advances in AI and machine learning are poised to reshape procurement.

We've heard how, as we enter 2017, applied intelligence, derived from entirely new data analysis, benefits redefines productivity. Lastly, we've been presented with SAP Ariba’s view on where we can take business intelligence aspects into more types of process and more refinement of the procurement function.

With that, please join me in thanking our guest, Chris Haydon, Chief Strategy Officer at SAP Ariba. Thank you, sir.

Haydon: Thank you.

Gardner: And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining this SAP Ariba-sponsored business innovation thought leadership discussion. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator. Thanks again for listening, and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: SAP Ariba

Transcript of a discussion on how rapid advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning are poised to reshape procurement. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2016. All rights reserved.

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SAP Ariba Chief Strategy Officer on the Digitization of Business and Future of Technology

Transcript of a discussion on how advancements in business applications and the modern infrastructure that supports them portends new and higher degrees of business innovation.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: SAP Ariba.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.

Gardner

Our next technology innovation thought leadership discussion focuses on advancements in business applications and the modern infrastructure that supports them, and what that combination portends for the future.

As we enter 2016, the power of business networks is combining with advanced platforms and mobile synergy to change the very nature of business and commerce. We’ll now explore the innovations that companies can expect -- and how that creates new abilities and instant insights -- and how companies can, in turn, create new business value and better ways to reach and serve their customers.

To learn more about the future of technology and business networks, we’re joined by Chris Haydon, Chief Strategy Officer at SAP Ariba. Welcome, Chris.

Chris Haydon: Thanks, Dana. Great to talk to you again.

Gardner: For me, IT architecture is destiny. Now that we have cloud, big data, and mobile architectures aligned, how does that support where we can go with new business applications and processes -- to get entirely new levels of productivity?

Haydon

Haydon: It's an exciting new age. The new platforms, as you say, and the applications coming together are a kind of creative destructivism. We can start all over again. The value chain is changing because of digitization, and technology needs to respond.

So what you hear are buzzwords like adaptivity, configurability, or whatever, but these are table stakes now for business applications and business networks. This digitization of value chains forces us to think about how we bring the notion of multiple constituents within the organization, in terms of the adoption, and then couple that with the agility they need to do to deal with this constant and increasing rate of change.

Gardner: People are talking more about “digital business.” It means looking at not just new technologies, but how you do business, of taking advantage of the ability to have insight into your business, sharing that insight across ecosystems with partners. Where do you see the real advantage in action now for a business-to-business (B2B) environment?

Outcome-based conversations

Haydon: We hear about the technology and it’s important, but what we really hear about is the outcomes. We have very outcome-based conversations with customers. So how does the platform with the business network give you these differential outcomes?

What's pretty evident is that you have to be closer to your end user. And it's also about the cloud paradigm adoption. You're only as good as your last transaction, your last logon, your last order, or your last report -- or whatever business process you're running in.

It's this merger of adoption and outcome, and how you string these two things together to be able to deliver the customer benefit.

From a technology perspective, it's no longer acceptable just to think about the four walls or your firewall; it's really about that extended value chain. So this is where we're seeing this merger of this business network concept, this commerce network concept in the context of these business applications.

We're really starting to emerge from B2B, and it's grown out of the business-to-consumer (B2C) world. With the Facebooks, the LinkedIns, or the Ubers, now you're seeing leading practice companies needing to embrace these larger value chains or commerce chains to give them the outcome and also to help drive differential adoption.

From a technology perspective, it's no longer acceptable just to think about the four walls or your firewall; it's really about that extended value chain.

Gardner: For organizations that are really attracted to this and recognize that they have to compete with upstarts, if they get this right, it could be very disruptive.

When we think about having all of your data accessible, when we think about processes being automated, at some point you're able to gather more data and analysis and process refinement that you can then reapply to your business, creating perhaps algorithms and abilities to add intelligence in ways that you couldn’t never do manually.

How do we get companies to understand that feedback loop and get it instituted more rigorously into their organization?

Haydon: One thing we see is that with the technology we have today, we can hide that complexity from the users and embed it in the way that end users need to work. Let’s talk a little bit about an SAP Ariba example here. If you're going to create a new sourcing event, do you really want to have to think about the business you do with your current suppliers? Absolutely, but wouldn't it be great when that’s all managed by extra information presented right in front of you?

On top of that, wouldn’t it be also great to know that these three new suppliers in this category, in this geography that you haven't thought about before, and wouldn't it also be great that they could be automatically invited at no extra friction to your process? So you get more supplier diversity. You're able to also let suppliers become more involved in the process, earlier in the process.

We're redistributing this value chain in terms of linking the insight and the community to the point of where work is being done -- and that’s part of that transformation that we're seeing, and that’s how we see it in the Ariba context. But we’re also seeing that in the larger business-network and business application context across SAP.

Knowing your needs

Gardner: So to borrow the B2C example, if Uber is our poster child example, instead of my standing outside of a hotel and having visibility of all of the cars that are driving around that neighborhood, I could be a business and get visibility into all of the suppliers that are available to me. And those suppliers will know what my needs are before they even get to the curb, so to speak.

What's the next step? When we gain that visibility, when we have supply chain and buyer and seller synergy, what comes next? Is there some way to bring that value extended to the end-user at some time?

Haydon: The next step is network resource planning. This is the awareness about your supply base, but also what other stakeholders in that process might mean, and this is what it could be for the end user. It's not just about the supplier, but also about the logistics provider. It’s about how you might have working capital and finance.

The next step is network resource planning. This is the awareness about your supply base, but also what other stakeholders in that process might mean.

What if you could dynamically match or even have a conversation about differential service levels from a buyer or supplier? I'm okay to take it tomorrow if I can get it at 8 a.m., but it's $2 cheaper, or I am happy to take it today because of some other dependencies.

This is a type of dynamic “what if,” because we have the technology platform capability, in time real-time memory analytics, but also in the context of the business process. This is this a next generation capability that we'll be able to get to. Because the network is external to the application, because together we can understand the players in the network in the context of the business process, that's where that real next evolution is going to come.

Gardner: It sounds as if we're really starting to remove the margin of error from business. We're starting to remove excess capacity, become fit for purpose through that dynamic applicability of insight and analysis. How much can we squeeze out? Do we have a sense of how substantial these business network capabilities will become? What sort of payoff are we anticipating when we can remove that margin of error, with tighter integration across ecosystems? What’s the gold piece that we are going after here?

Haydon: Well it’s a big, big, big number. Even if we go back a couple of years -- and there’s some good work being done on just the inefficiencies and the first sort of magnitude on paper -- and that’s just moving something from a paper format and dematerializing that into an electronic format. Four years or five years ago when a study was done on that, that was conservatively somewhere between $600 billion and $1 trillion just in the Global 2000 corporations.

There is an order of magnitude more opportunities globally from just this compression of cycle times, in the broader sense, and responsiveness and adaptability throughout the whole world globally.

At SAP Ariba, we just passed a great threshold in 2015. We ran more than $1 trillion in commerce across our business network. If you just start doing a little bit of math around what a one percent or two percent improvement of that can be from better working capital management, or more flexible working capital management, just pure straight productivity and just competition, of leveling the playing field for the smallest micro-supplier through the largest international supplier, and just leveling that all out. There are stupendous gains on both sides of the balance sheet.

Adoption patterns

Gardner: When it comes to adoption patterns, some organizations may have been conservative and held back, perhaps resisted becoming cloud-based. What sorts of organizations are you seeing making a bold move, not just piecemeal, and what can they get a lot done in a relatively short amount of time?

Haydon: In industries where they are traditionally conservative, they really do need to change their value chains, because that’s what their customers are demanding. And so, financial services, where historically you would think the old “big iron” approach. Those types of companies are embracing what they need to do on cloud to just to be more adaptive, to be faster, and also to be more end-user-friendly, and the total cost of ownership approach from the cloud is really there.

But we're a long way away from on-premises applications being dead. I think what the cloud gives enterprises is they can go largely to the cloud -- and we see companies doing that -- but that the legacy-hybrid, on-premise model is really important. That’s what’s great about the cloud model. You can consume as you go. It doesn’t all have to be one big bang.

For pragmatic CEOs, CFOs, or CIOs, that blend of hybrid is the legitimate strategy -- where they can have the best of both worlds. With that said, the inextricable pool of cloud is there, but it can be a little bit more on their own terms, on what makes sense for their businesses.

We talk about our cloud applications, and we have leading, leading practice, widely, broadly adopted source-to-pay cloud applications in a fully integrated suite.

Gardner: We have been at the 70,000- to 80,000-foot height on this discussion. Let’s bring it down a bit lower. Help our readers understand SAP Ariba as an entity now. What does it consist of in terms of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) services that have been acquired and built, and how that then fits into a hybrid portfolio.

Haydon: Number one, we fundamentally believe in Ariba, and it had to give differential outcomes to our customers, that linking cloud applications with the business-network construct will give you better outcomes for the things we just spoke about earlier in the conversation: visibility, supply chain, adaptability, compliance, building on networks of networks to be able to deliver different outcomes, linking to payment networks like we have done with Ariba and Discovery, linking to content networks like we have done with eBay, but bringing them into the context of the business process can only really be enabled through networks and applications.

From an Ariba perspective, we like to think of it in three pillars for everyone. We talk about our cloud applications, and we have leading, leading practice, widely, broadly adopted source-to-pay cloud applications in a fully integrated suite.

From a cloud perspective as well, you can have the Lego-block approach, where we can take any one of our modules, from spend visibility all the way through the invoicing, and start your journey there, if that's your line-of-business requirement, or take the full suite approach.

Intrinsic to that offering, of course, is our business network. Why I bring that up is that our business network and our cloud applications are agnostic. We don't actually care, from a cloud perspective, which back-end system of record you wish to use.

Of course, we love and we believe that the best out there is S/4HANA from SAP, but there is also a larger market, whether it's the mid-market or whether there are other customers who are on other journeys on the enterprise resource planning (ERP) for legacy reasons. We can connect our cloud applications and our network to any one of those.

Three levels

So, there are three levels: network, our end-to-end cloud applications, and last but not least, and which is really relevant from the technology journey, a rock-solid platform. And so I am moving toward that platform that runs our cloud apps and our network in conjunction with SAP for the security, for the privacy, for the availability, for all of these really important things that enterprise customers need.

Also, you have to have the security to run these business processes, because they're entrusting those to us, and that's really what cloud means. It means entrusting your business processes to us to get a differential outcome for your business.

Gardner: As organizations try to become more of a digital business, they will be looking to bringing these benefits to their ERP-level business applications, their supply chain and procurement, but increasingly, they're also looking to manage better their human resources and recognizing that that's a dynamic marketplace more than ever.

Haydon: Yes.

Gardner: So let's talk about how the business network effect and some of these synergistic benefits come to play in that human resources side of running a digital business?

Leading companies today want to have agility on how many full-time employees they can hire, and how to manage contingent or temporary labor aspects.

Haydon: That's also one of the great parts from an SAP portfolio. I like to think about it two ways. There’s human capital management internal, and there’s human capital management external. Leading companies today want to have agility on how many full-time employees they can hire, and how to manage contingent or temporary labor aspects.

From an SAP perspective, what's great is that we have the leading cloud for Human Resource Management and Talent Management solutions with Success Factors, and we have also have the market-leading Contingent Labor Management solution with Fieldglass.

Together with Ariba, you're able to, one, have a one-visibility view into your workforce in and out, and also, if you like, to orchestrate that procurement process to get sourcing, ordering, requisitioning and payment throughout.

From a company perspective, when you think about your spend profile, 30 percent to 70 percent of the spend is about services as we move to a service-based economy. And in conjunction with SAP Ariba and SAP Fieldglass, we have this broad, deep, end-to-end process, in a single context, and -- by the way -- integrated nicely to the ERP system to really again give those best outcomes.

Gardner: When people think about public clouds that are available to them for business, they often couple that with platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and one of the things that other clouds are very competitive about is portraying themselves as having a very good developer environment. But increasingly, development means mobile apps.

Haydon: Yes.

Mobile development

Gardner: What can we gain from your cloud vision as being hybrid, while also taking advantage of mobile development?

Haydon: From a platform perspective, you need to be “API First” because if you're actually able to expose important aspects within a business process, with an API layer, then you give that extensibility and that optionality to your customers to do more things.

Let’s talk about concrete examples. An end-to-end process could be as simply as you could take an invoice from any third-party provider. Right now, Ariba has an open invoice format. If someone chooses to scan it themselves and digitize it themselves or something that a customer wanted to do, we could take that straight feed in.

If you want to talk about a mobile API, it could be as simple as you want to expose a workflow. There's a large corporate mandate sometimes to have a workflow. If you travel, there's a workflow for your expenses, a workflow for your leave request, and a workflow for your purchase orders. If you want that cost – the end-user that has five systems or would rather come to one, you can have that API level there.

There is this whole balance of how you moleculize your offerings to enable customers to have that level of configuration that they need for their individual business requirements, but still get the leverage of not having to rebuild it all themselves.

That's certainly a fundamental part of our strategy. You'll see that SAP is leading in itself under our HANA Cloud Platform. SAP Ariba is building on that.

That's certainly a fundamental part of our strategy. You'll see that SAP is leading in itself under our HANA Cloud Platform. SAP Ariba is building on that. I don’t want to flag too much, but you’ll see some interesting developments along that way as we open up our platform from both an end-to-end perspective and also from an individual mobile perspective throughout the course of this year.

Gardner: Now this concept of API First, it's very interesting, because it doesn't really matter which cloud it’s coming from, whether on a hybrid spectrum of some sort. It also allows you to look at business services and pull them down as needed and construct processes, rather than monolithic, complex, hairball applications.

Do you have any examples of organizations that have taken advantage of this API First approach? And how have they been able to customize their business processes using this hybrid cloud and visibility, reducing the complexity?

Haydon: I can certainly give you some examples. This just starts from simple processes, but they can actually add a lot of value. For example, you have a straightforward shipping process, an advanced shipping process. We know of an example where a customer took 90 percent of their time out of the receiving and made the matching of their receiving receipting process almost by 95 percent, because they can leverage an API to support their custom bar-coding standard.

So they leveraged the standard business-network bus, because that type of barcode that they need to have in their warehouse, and their part of the world, was there. Let’s wind the clock back three or four years. If we had asked for that specific feature, to be very candid, we wouldn’t make it. But once you start opening up the platform at that micro level, you can actually let customers get the job done.

But they can still leverage that larger framework, that platform, that business process, that cloud that we give them. But when you extend that out for what it could mean, again, full payment, or for risk, or for any of these other dimensions that are just typically organizational processes to the current -- whether it’s procurement or whether it’s HR recruiting or whatever it's like -- it gets pretty exciting.

Big data

Gardner: One of the other hallmarks of a digital business is having aspects of a business work in new ways together, in closeness, that they may not have in the past. And one of the things that’s been instrumental to business applications over the past decades is this notion of a system of record or systems of records, and also, we have had this burgeoning business intelligence (BI) now loosely called big data capability.

And they haven't always been that close, but it seems to me that with a platform like SAP HANA, combined with business-networks, that systems of record and the data and information in them, and the big data capabilities, as well as accessing other data sets outside the organization, make a tremendous amount of sense. How do you see the notion of more data, regardless of its origin, becoming a common value stream to an organization?

Haydon: This becomes the fundamental competency that an organization needs to harness. This notion of the data, and then the data in the context of the business process, and then again to your point, how that’s augmented in the right way, is really the true differentiation for where we’ll go.

We're  working with our customers to identify and remove forced labor in the supply chain, or advance global risk management or even expedited delivery and logistics.

Historically, we laid down the old railway tracks on business processes,  but there is no such thing as railway tracks anymore. You rebuild them every single day. Inside that data, with the timeliness of it, is sentiment analysis so that from a business-network context, it enables you to make different and dynamic decisions.

Within SAP Ariba, we're fundamentally rethinking how we can have the data that’s actually in our environment and how we get that out -- not just to our account managers, not just to where our product manager is, but more importantly, out to our end users. They can then actually start to see patterns, play with it, and create some interesting innovations. We're  working with our customers to identify and remove forced labor in the supply chain, or advance global risk management or even expedited delivery and logistics.

Gardner: Okay, we talked about business-networks in the context of applications working together for efficiency, we’ve talked about the role of hybrid cloud models helping to accelerate that, we've talked about the data issues and some of the development and customization on mobile side of things. What have we missed, what is the whole, greater than the sum of the parts component that we’re not talking about that we should?

Haydon: There are probably two or three. There’s certainly the notion of the user experience and that's a function of mobile, but not mobile only. The notion of reinventing the old traditional flows and thinking that was prevalent even five years ago on what constituted one type of work channel no longer exists.

There's the new discipline of what a user experience is about and that's not just the user interface, that’s also things like they’re just the tone or the content that’s presented to you. It’s also what it does mean on the differential devices and way you’re working. So I think that's an evolving piece, but cannot be left behind.

That's where the B2C world is blazing and that's now the expectation of all of us in that, when we go to work and put our corporate hat on, as simple as that. These two are security and privacy. That is top of mind for a number of reasons and it's really fair to say that it’s in a massive state of flux and change here in the United States, but certainly in Europe. It doesn’t matter which region you are in, APJ or Latin America as well.

Competitive advantage

That's another competitive advantage that enterprises and providers in this space like SAP and SAP Ariba, can, and will, and should, lead on. The last point, maybe a trend, is that you're really seeing very quickly the transition between the traditional service and material flows that exist, and then the financial flows.

We're seeing the digitalization of payments just exploding and banks and financial institutions having to rethink and look at what they're doing. With the technology and the platforms we have, that linking of that is physical flows, whether they be for services or materials and that crossing over to that payment and then the natural working capital because, at the end of that, commerce follows money.

It’s all about the commerce. So it's the whole space in that whole area and that technology is the trend as well. Security UX and the whole payment working capital management or the digitalization of that are the three large things.

Gardner: And these are areas where scale really helps. Global scale, like a company like SAP has, when the issues of data sovereignty come up and you need to think about hybrid cloud, not just in its performance and technical capabilities but the actual location of data, certain data for certain periods of time and certain markets, is very difficult to do if you're not in those markets and understanding those markets. It's the same with the financial side. Because banking and finance are dynamic, it’s different having that breadth and scope, a key component of making that possible as well.

We're seeing the digitalization of payments just exploding and banks and financial institutions having to rethink and look at what they're doing.

There's one last area we can close out on and it’s looking a bit to the future. Some competitors of yours are out there talking about artificial intelligence (AI) more than others, and when you do have network effects as we’ve described, big-data mesh across organization thinking of data as a life cycle for a digital business, not just data in different parts of your organization.

We can think about expertise in vertical industries being brought to bear on insights in the markets and ecosystems. When and how might we expect some sort of an AI, value, API, or set of APIs to come forward to start thinking things through in ways people probably haven’t been able to do up until now or in the near future.

Haydon: The full notion of something like a [2001: A Space Odyssey’s] HAL 9000, is probably a little way away. But then again, what you would see within the next 12 to 18 months is specific -- maybe you call them smart apps rather than intelligent or smart agents.

They already exist today in some areas. You will see them augmented because of feedback from a system that’s not your own, whether it’s moving average price of an inventory. Someone will bring the context of an updated price, or an updated inventory and that will trigger something, and that will be the smart agent going to do all that work for you, but ready for you to make the release.

There still is a notion of the competency, as well, within the organization, not as much a technology thing, but a competency on what Master Data Governance means, and the quality of that data means, and being able to have a methodology to be to manage that to let these systems do it.

So you will see probably in a lower-risk spend categories, at least from a procurement perspective indirect, or may be some travel and these aspects, maybe a little bit of non-inventory materials repair and operating supplies, you probably fair way away from fully releasing direct material supply chain in some of these pretty, pretty important value chains we manage.

Self-driving business process

Gardner: So maybe we should expect to see self-driving business processes before we see self-driving cars?

Haydon: I don't know, I'm lucky enough to live in Palo Alto, and I see a self-driving car three days a week. So we'll back out of that one.

But there is a really important piece, at least from Ariba perspective and an SAP perspective. We fundamentally believe that these business-networks are the rivers of data.

It's not just what's inside your firewall. You will truly get the insight from the largest scale of these rivers of data from these business-networks; whether it be Ariba or our financial partners, or whether it be others. There will be networks of networks.

It's scale and adoption. From the scale and from the adoption, will come that true benefit from the networks, the business process, and the connectivity therein.

This notion of having a kind of the bookend of the process, a registry to make sense of the actors in these business networks and the context of the business process, and then linking that to the financial and payment change, that's where the real intelligence and some real money could be released, and that's some of the thinking that we have out there.

Gardner: So, a very bright interesting future, but in order to get to that next level of value, you need to start doing those blocking and tackling elements around the rivers of information as you say the network effects and putting yourself in a position and then be able to really exploit these new capabilities when they come out.

Haydon: It's scale and adoption. From the scale and from the adoption, will come that true benefit from the networks, the business process, and the connectivity therein.

Gardner: I’m afraid we will have to leave it there. You’ve been listening to a BriefingsDirect thought leadership podcast discussion on how advancements in business applications and the modern infrastructure that supports them portend new and higher degrees of business innovation. And we have heard how the power of business networks is combining with these advanced platforms, and mobile synergy and data analysis, to change the very nature of business and commerce.

So, please join me now in thanking our guest, Chris Haydon, Chief Strategy Officer at SAP Ariba. Thanks so much, Chris.

Haydon: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: And a big thank you, too, to our audience for joining this SAP Ariba-sponsored business innovation thought leadership discussion. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator. Thanks again for listening, and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: SAP Ariba.

Transcript of a discussion on how advancements in business applications and the modern infrastructure that supports them portends new and higher degrees of business innovation. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2016. All rights reserved.

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Beyond Look and Feel--The New Role That User Experience Plays in Business Applications and Process Innovation

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on the heightened role and impact of total user experience for both online, mobile and existing apps.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app for iOS or Android. Download the transcript. See a demo. Sponsor: Ariba, an SAP company.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.

Gardner

Our business innovation thought leadership discussion today focuses on the heightened role and impact of total user experience improvements for both online and mobile applications and services.

We'll explore how user expectations and rethinking of business productivity are having a profound impact on how business applications are used, designed, and leveraged to help buyers, sellers, and employees do their jobs better.

We’ll hear about the advantages of new advances in bringing instant collaboration, actionable analytics, and contextual support capabilities into the application interface to create a total user experience.

To learn more about why applications must have more than a pretty face to improve the modern user experience, we're joined by Chris Haydon, Senior Vice President of Solutions Management for Procurement, Finance and Network at Ariba, an SAP company. Welcome, Chris.

Chris Haydon: Thanks, Dana. Nice to be here.

Gardner: Chris, what sort of confluence of factors has come together to make this concept of user experience so important, so powerful? What has changed, and why must we think more about experience than interface?

Haydon: Dana, it’s a great question. There is a confluence of factors, as you say. There is the movement of hyper-collaboration, and things are moving faster and faster than ever before.

Haydon

We're seeing major shifts in trends on how users view themselves and how they want to interact with their application, their business applications in particular, and more and more, drawing parallels from their consumer and how they bring that simple consumer-based experience into their daily work. Those are some of the mega trends.

Then, as we step down a little bit, within that is obviously this collaboration aspect and how people prefer to collaborate online at work more than they did in traditional mechanisms, certainly via phone or fax.

Then, there's mobility. If someone doesn’t really have a smartphone in this day and age, certainly they're behind the eight ball.

Last but not least, there's the changing demographic of our workforce. In 2015, there are some stats out there that showed that millennials will become the single largest percentage of the workforce.

All of these macro trends and figures are going into how we need to think about our total user experience in our applications.

Something more?

Gardner: For those of us who have been using applications for years and years and have sort of bopped around -- whether we're on a mobile device or a PC -- from application to application, are we just integrating apps so that we don't have to change apps, or is it something more? Is this a whole greater than the existing sum of the parts?

Haydon: It’s certainly something more. It’s more the one plus one equals three concept here. The intersection of the connectivity powered by business networks, as well as the utility of mobile devices not tied to your desktop can fundamentally change the way people think about their interactions and think about the business processes and how they think about the work that needs to be done throughout the course of their work environment. That really is the difference.

This is not about just tweaking up as you open up a user interface. This is really about thinking about personal-based interactions in the context of mobility in a network-oriented or network-centric collaboration.

Gardner: When we think about collaboration, traditionally that’s been among people, but it seems to me that this heightened total user experience means we're actually collaborating increasingly with services. They could be services that recognize that we're at a particular juncture in a business process. They could be services that recognize that we might need help or support in a situation where we've run out of runway and don't know what to do, or even instances where intelligence and analytics are being brought to us as we need it, rather than our calling out to it.

Tell me about this expanding definition of collaboration. Am I right that we're collaborating with more than just other people here?

The best total user experiences are bringing that context to the end user managing that complexity, but contextualizing it to bring it to their attention as they work through it.

Haydon: That’s right. It’s putting information in the context of the business process right at the point of demand. Whether that’s predictive, intelligence, third party, the best user interfaces and the best total user experiences are bringing that context to the end user managing that complexity -- but contextualizing it to bring it to their attention as they work through it.

So whether that’s a budget check and whether there is some gaming on budget, it's saying, "You're under budget; that’s great." That’s an internal metric. Maybe in the future, you start thinking about  how others are performing in other segments of the business. If you want to take it even further, how are other potential suppliers doing on their response rate to their customers?

There is a whole new dimension on giving people contextualized information at the point where they need to make a decision, or even recommending the type of decisions they need to make. It could be from third-party sources that can come from a business network outside your firewall, or from smarter analysis and predictive analysis, from the transactions that are happening within the four walls of your firewall, or in your current application or your other business applications.

Gardner: It seems pretty clear that this is the way things are going. The logic behind why the user experience has expanded in its power and its utility makes perfect sense. I'm really enthused about this notion of contextual intelligence being brought to a business process, but it's more than just a vision here.

Pulling this off must be quite difficult. I know that many people have been thinking about doing this, but there just isn't that much of it actually going on yet. So we're at the vanguard.

What are the problems? What are the challenges that it takes to pull this off to make it happen? It seems to me there are a lot back-end services, and while we focus on the user experience and user interface, we're really talking about sophisticated technology in the data center providing these services.

Cloud as enabler

Haydon: There are a couple of enablers to this. I think the number one enabler here is cloud versus on-premise. When you can see the behavior in real time in a community aspect, you can actually build infrastructure services around that. In traditional on-premise models, when that’s locked in, all that burden is actually being pushed back to the corporate IT to be able to do that.

The second point is when you're in the cloud and you think about applications that are network-aware, you're able to bring in third-party, validated, trusted information to help make that difference. So there are those challenges.

I also think that it comes down to technology, but technology is moving to the focus of building applications actually for the end user. When you start thinking about the interactions with the end user and the focus on them, it really drives you to think about how you give that different contextualized information.

When you can have that level of granularity in saying, "I'm logging on as an invoicing processing assistant", or "I'm logging on as just a casual ad-hoc requisitioner." When the system knows you have done that, it’s actually able to be smart and pick up and contextualize that. That’s where we really see the future and the vision of how this is all coming together.

The reality is that in most companies for the foreseeable future there will be some degree of on-premise applications that continue to drive businesses, and then there will be side-by-side cloud businesses.

Gardner: When we spoke a while back about the traditional way that people got productivity was switching manually from application to application -- whether that’s an on-premise application or a software-as-a-service (SaaS) based application -- if they are losing the benefit of a common back-end intelligence capability or network services that are aware or access an identity management that’s coordinated, we still don't get that total user experience, even though the cloud is an important factor here and SaaS is a big part of it.

What brings together the best of cloud, but also the best of that coordinated, integrated total experience when you know the user and all of their policies and information can be brought to bear on this experience and productivity demand?

Haydon: There are a couple of ways of doing that. You could talk here about the concept of hybrid cloud. The reality is that in most companies for the foreseeable future there will be some degree of on-premise applications that continue to drive businesses, and then there will be side-by-side cloud businesses.

So it’s the job of leading practice technology providers, SaaS and on-premise providers, to enable that to happen. There definitely is this notion of having a very robust platform that underpins the cloud product and can be seamlessly integrated to the on-premise product.

Again, from a technology and a trend perspective, that’s where it’s going. So if the provider doesn’t have a solid platform approach to be able to link the disparate cloud services to disparate on-premise solutions, then you can’t give that full context to the end user.

One thing too is thinking about the user interface. The user interface manages that complexity for the end user. The end user really shouldn't need to know the mode of deployment, nor should they need to know really where they're at. That’s what the new leading user interfaces and what the total experience is about, to take you guided through your workflow or your work that needs to be done irrespective of the deployment location of that service.

Ariba roadmap

Gardner: Chris, we spoke last at Ariba Live, the user conference back in the springtime and you were describing the roadmap for Ariba and other applications coming through 2015  into 2016.

What’s been happening recently? This week, I think, you've gone general availability (July 2015) with some of these services. Maybe you could quickly describe that. Are we talking about the on-premise apps, the SaaS apps, the mobile apps, all the above? What’s happening?

Haydon: We're really excited about that. For our current releases that came out this week (see a demo), we launched our total user experience approach, where we have working anywhere, embracing the most modern user design interactions into our user interface, mobility, and also within that, and how we can enable our end users to learn the processes and context. All this has been launched in Ariba within the last 14 days.

Specifically, it’s about embracing modern user design principles. We have a great design principle here within SAP called Fiori. So we've taken that design principle and brought that into the world of procurement to put on top of our leading-practice capabilities today and we're bringing this new updated user experience design.

What we are doing differently here is embracing the power and the capability of mobile devices with cloud and the work that needs to be done.

But we haven’t stopped there. We're embracing, as you mentioned, this mobility aspect and how can we design new interactions between our common user interface on our mobile and a common user interface on our cloud deployment as one. That’s a given, but what we are doing differently here is embracing the power and the capability of mobile devices with cloud and the work that needs to be done.

One idea of that is how we have a process continuity feature, where you can look on your mobile application, have a look at some activities that you might want to track later on. You can click or pin that activity on your mobile device and when you come to your desktop to do some work, that pinning activity is visible for you to go on tracking and get your job done.

Similarly, if you're on the go to go and have a meeting, you're able to push some reports down to your mobile tablet or your smartphone to be able to look and review that work on the go.

We're really looking at that full, total user experience, whether you're on the desktop or whether you are on the go on your mobile device, all underpinned by a common user design imperative based upon Fiori.

Gardner: Just to be clear, we're talking about not only this capability across those network services for on-prem, cloud, and mobile, but we're taking this across more than a handful of apps. Tell us a bit about how these Ariba applications and the Ariba Network also involve other travel and expense capabilities. What other apps are involved in terms of line-of-business platform that SAP is providing?

Leading practice

Haydon: From a procurement perspective, obviously we have Ariba’s leading practice procurement. As context, we have another fantastic solution for contingent labor, statement-of-work labor and other services, and that’s called Fieldglass. We've been working closely with the Fieldglass team to ensure that our user interface that we are rolling out on our Ariba procurement applications is consistent with Fieldglass, and it’s based again on the Fiori style of design construct.

We're moving toward where an end user, whether they want to interact to do detailed time sheets or service entry, or they want to do requisitioning for powerful materials and inventory, on the Ariba side find a seamless experience.

We're progressively moving forward to that same style of construct for the Concur applications for our travel and expense, and even the larger SAP, cloud and S4/HANA approaches as well.

Gardner: You mentioned SAP HANA. Tell us how we're not only dealing with this user experience across devices, work modes, and across application types, but now we have a core platform approach that allows for those analytics to leverage and exploit the data that's available, depending on the type of applications any specific organization is using.

What we are really seeing is that the customer interactions change because they're actually able to do different and faster types of iterations.

It strikes me that we have a possibility of a virtuous adoption cycle; that is to say, the more data used in conjunction with more apps begets more data, begets more insights, begets more productivity. How is HANA and analytics coming to bear on this?

Haydon: We've had HANA running on analytics on the Ariba side for more than 12 months now. The most important thing that we see with HANA is that it's not about HANA in itself. It's a wonderful technology, but what we are really seeing is that the customer interactions change because they're actually able to do different and faster types of iterations.

To us, that's the real power of what HANA gives us from a technology and platform aspect to build on. When you can have real time analytics across massive amounts of information put into the context of what an end user does, that to us is where the true business and customer and end-user benefit will come from leveraging the HANA technology.

So we have it running in our analytics stack, progressively moving that through the rest of our analytics on the Ariba platform. Quite honestly, the sky's the limit as it relates to what that technology can enable us to do. The main focus though is how we give different business interactions, and HANA is just a great engine that enables us to do that.

Gardner: It's a fascinating time if you're a developer, because previously, you had to go through a requirements process with the users, but using these analytics you can measure and see what those users are actually doing, or progressing and modernizing their processes, and then take that analytics capability back into the next iteration of the application.

So it's interesting that we're talking about total user experience. We could be talking about total developer experience, or even total IT operator experience when it comes to delivering security and compliance. Expand a little bit about how what you are doing on that user side actually benefits the entire life cycle of these applications.

Thinking company

Haydon: It's really exciting. There are other great companies that do this, and SAP is really investing in this as well as Ariba, making sure we're really a data-driven, real-time, thinking company.

And you're right. In the simplest way, we're rolling out our total user experience in the simplest model. We're providing a toggle, meaning we're enabling our end users to road test the user experience and then switch back. We don't think anyone will want to switch back, but it's great.

That's the same type of experience that you experience in your personal life. When someone is trialing a new feature on an e-marketplace or in a consumer store, you're able to try this experience and come back. What's great about that is we're getting real-time insight. We know which customers are doing this. We know which personas are doing this. We know how long they are doing this for their session time.

We're able to bring that back to our developers, to our product managers, to our user design center experts, and just as importantly, back to our customers and also back to our partners to be able to say, "There is some info, doing these types of things, they are not on this page. They have been looking for this type of information when they do a query or request."

First and foremost, and it’s important, our customers entrust their business processes to us, and so it's about zero business disruption, and no downtime is our number one goal.

These types of information we're feeding into our roadmap, but we are also feeding back into our customers so they understand how their employees are working with our applications. As we step forward, we're exposing this in the right way to our partners to help them potentially build applications on top of what we already have on the Ariba platform.

Gardner: So obviously you can look this in the face at the general level of productivity, but now we can get specific with partners into verticals, geographies, all the details that come along with business applications, company to company, region to region.

Let’s think about how this comes to market. You've announced the general availability in July 2015 on Ariba, and because this is SaaS, there are no forklifts, there are no downloads, no install, and no worries about configuration data. Tell us how this rolls out and how people can experience it if they've become intrigued about this concept of total user experience. How easy is it for them to then now start taking part in it?

Haydon: First and foremost, and it’s important, our customers entrust their business processes to us, and so it's about zero business disruption, and no downtime is our number one goal.

When we rolled out our global network release to a 1.8 million suppliers two weeks ago (see a demo), we had zero downtime on the world’s largest business network. Similarly, as we rolled out our total user experience, zero downtime as well. So that’s the first thing. The number one thing is about business continuity.

The second thing really is a concept that we think about. It’s called agile adoption. This is again how we let end users and companies of end users adopt our solutions.

Educating customers

We have done an awful lot of work, before go live, on educating our customers, providing frequently asked questions, where required, training materials and updates, all those types of support aspects. But we really believe our work starts day plus one, not day minus one.

How are we working with our customers after this is turned on by monitoring, to know exactly what they are doing, giving them proactive support and communications, when we need to, when we see them either switching back or we have a distribution of a specific customer group or end user group within their company? We'll be actively monitoring them and pushing that forward.

That’s what we really think it’s about. We're taking this end user customer-centric view to roll out our applications, but letting our own customers find their own pathways.

What we saw was that within a month, we had 25 percent of our customers already activating this mobile solution, and they did that themselves.

Gardner: We're coming toward the end of our allotted time, but I want to see if quickly we could illustrate the power of the total user experience benefits. Do you have any examples or use cases that come to mind. I don’t know whether you can name the organizations or not, where they have gone to that total user experience, they have jumped into the deep end of the pool, if you will, and are now getting something back in return. Is there any way that we can illustrate what happens when you do this correctly?

Haydon: We've just launched. Let me talk about two things. It’s amazing where we started from. It’s a little bit of human behavior, when we talk about we're rolling out this new user experience. It's about how do I test this and how do I make sure my training material is up to date? When we have been taking all of our customers through it, there is a massive positive response. That's from even some of our most conservative customers, whether they are in highly-regulated industries or financial industries.

When you actually take them through how we're doing agile adoption, how this is linked, to actually how we interact in our own personal lives, you can see the light bulbs going on. So it’s early in our journey. We will be monitoring how many people are turning on.

But if I can back up, I know when we deployed our mobile applications, which is also part of this user experience, we deployed our first mobile solution in the first half of this year. We're updating that in conjunction with our user experience update this month.

What we saw was that within a month, we had 25 percent of our customers already activating this mobile solution, and they did that themselves. I think that’s the power. The pent-up demand is there, and they can consume the capability of this user experience by themselves. That’s the power of the cloud. That’s the power of a really powerful user experience, when people are actually self-enabling rather than, if you like, the service provider pushing.

Organic path

Gardner: Before we close out, Chris, if users specifically are intrigued by this, want to go more mobile in how they do their business processes, want to get those reports and analytics delivered to them in the context of their activity, is there an organic path for them or do they have to wait for their IT department?

What do you recommend for people that maybe don’t even have Ariba in their organization? What are some steps they can take to either learn more or from a grassroots perspective encourage adoption of this business revolution really around total user experience emphasis?

Haydon: We have plenty of material from an Ariba perspective, not just about our solutions, but exactly what you're mentioning, Dana, about what is going on there. My first recommendation to everyone would be to educate yourselves and have a look at your business -- how many millennials are in your business, what are the new working paradigms that need to happen from a mobile approach -- and go and embrace it.

The second lesson is that if businesses think that this is not already happening outside of the control of their IT departments, they're probably mistaken.

The second lesson is that if businesses think that this is not already happening outside of the control of their IT departments, they're probably mistaken. These things are already going on. So I think those are the kind of macro things to go and have a look at.

But, of course, we have a lot more information about Ariba’s total user experience thinking on thought leadership and then how we go about and implement that in our solutions for our customers, and I would just encourage anyone to go and have a look at ariba.com. You'll be able to see more about our total user experience, and like I said, some of the leading practice thoughts that we have about implementations (see a demo).

Gardner: Very good. I'd also encourage people to listen or read the conversation you and I had just a month or two ago about the roadmap. We won’t go there today about what comes next, but there's an awful lot in the hamper that you're working on that people will be able to exploit further. So I encourage people to look that up.

But I'm afraid we will have to leave it there. You've been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast discussion on the heightened role and impact of total user experience for both online, mobile and existing apps.

We've heard how SAP and Ariba are advancing the benefits of bringing instant collaboration and actionable analytics and contextual support capabilities directly into the application interface and user experience.

Pease join me now in thanking our guest as we have gone through these issues. We've been here with Chris Haydon, Senior Vice President of Solutions Management for Procurement, Finance and  Network at Ariba, an SAP company. Thanks, Chris.

Haydon: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: And a big thank you too to our audience for joining this business innovation thought leadership discussion focused on a rethinking of business productivity via improved user applications and user experience.

I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this latest BriefingsDirect thought leadership discussion. Thanks again for listening, and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app for iOS or Android. Download the transcript. See a demo. Sponsor: Ariba, an SAP Company

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on on the heightened role and impact of total user experience for both online, mobile and existing apps. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2015. All rights reserved.

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