Supply Chain & Asset Management Experts Share Stories on Change & Innovation

By CIOReview | Wednesday, May 2, 2018

The 2018 SAP-Centric Conference uncovered critical themes on change management in today’s complex digital landscape

Austin, Texas (USA): The 2018 SAP-Centric EAM conference co-located with SAP-Centric Supply Chain hosted the event’s largest crowd in four years with nearly 600 professionals. Attendees represented numerous industries across North America and beyond with the common goal of gaining innovative strategies for managing supply chain and their assets in today’s complex business landscape.

Over the course of three days, case studies and expert speakers shared thought-leadership on the hottest topics in asset management and supply chain like data and analytics, mobility, user experience, IoT and predictive maintenance. The key theme that emerged was all about change and innovation.

The Canadian Royal Navy kicked things off with a keynote highlighting their fifteen-year journey from digitizing and integrating core business processes to utilizing analytics to drive performance. A simple way they identified their business priorities? Followed the money.

Vice Admiral Ron Lloyd stressed the importance of predictive maintenance and analytics-based decisions to maximize readiness and results. In their quest for improvement, the Navy employed SAP’s Digital Supply Chain solution. Their implementations had the common theme of engaging people first and always striving to configure rather than customize.

Next SAP’s Global Vice President of Digital Logistics, Markus Rosemann, and Vice President of Supply Chain Solution Management, Patrick Crampton-Thomas, took the stage. They shared SAP’s latest solutions to stay innovative. For example, SAP Transportation Management provides Steel Case with full visibility on their products, drivers and trucks allowing them to see financial opportunities they could never see before.

Solutions to help you stay competitive amidst heighten consumer expectations and ways to leverage SAP in S/4HANA, Cloud, Leonardo, Networks and ‘digital twins’ was uncovered in their presentation.

The special guest keynote was NBA All-Star Mark Eaton. After playing 12 years with the Utah Jazz, he became a business leader, entrepreneur, radio and TV personality. He shared what motivated him to succeed and how you can use the same guiding principles.

A story of true innovative was shared by UPS. The Vice President of Corporate Strategy, Alan Amling, gave an inside look into how their established brand reinvented themselves in the logistics space by embracing 3D printing. On-demand manufacturing techniques like this as well as robotics, drones and AI are the future of supply chain.

“Change isn’t new, but the speed of change is new,” Alan said in his keynote presentation.

By embracing change and innovative, UPS is more agile and has the ability to scale quickly and efficiently.

Luiz Leal, IT Asset Management Manager, and Rocha Bruno, Workforce Effectiveness Project Manager, presented Vale’s case study. Vale, a multinational Brazilian mining corporation, expanded across 27 countries over the last 10 years. With this expansive growth, an intelligent maintenance operation to manage assets across the globe became a key area of focus.

After four weeks of design thinking, the Vale team is now utilizing SAP Leonardo, Machine Learning and IoT to address paint points and achieve sustainable productivity improvement. Luis highlighted the importance of predictive analytics to reduce maintenance costs and improve health and safety.

A panel of experts closed out SAP-Centric. Questions were provided by conference attendees and followed on the theme of change and innovation. Challenges like how to manage change and how to sustain success while staying on the cutting edge of technology were addressed.

Key takeaway from Tim McLain, the Senior Manager of Warehousing & Inventory at Incitec Pivot Limited, was to involve your employees in the process and create a culture of change beginning with leadership.

The 14th annual SAP-Centric EAM conference created an environment for innovative by uniting some of the biggest players in asset management and supply chain. The 2018 event was co-located with SAP-Centric Supply Chain and took place in Austin, TX. Don’t miss out on next year’s event!

Produced by Eventful Conferences in collaboration with ASUG (Americas’ SAP User Group) and SAP, SAP-Centric EAM & Supply Chain will take place in March 2019. Visit www.sapeamconference.com or www.sapcentricsupplychain.com for more information.