How Future-Minded Leaders Harness Cloud Technologies to Create a Sustainable Future

In a world where sustainability has become the new norm, technology is a key driving force for innovative businesses. Today, companies are looking for sustainable ways to reinvent the entire ecosystem of customers, suppliers, contract manufacturers, logistics service providers, and partners to support their supply chains from product design to operation.

Let’s look at last year’s SAP Innovation Awards (SIA2022) winner cases to see how future-minded companies are harnessing cloud technologies to create economic, social, and environmental impacts to improve people’s lives.

Improve decision-making with real-time planning

The 50th Anniversary Legend of the SIA2022 program, Freudenberg Home and Cleaning Solutions GmbH (FHCS), used different planning approaches and sources, which made it difficult to get a consolidated enterprise-wide view.

FHCS integrated its landscape built on SAP ERP and SAP Business Warehouse with specialized forecasting in SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP). Having a single, centralized source of data enabled the company to generate simulations, planning, and reporting solutions based on SAP Analytics Cloud. It now takes FHCS only two days to create an initial top-down production plan. By standardizing forecasting processes across its consumer products division, Freudenberg achieved 10x faster planning despite larger data volumes and greater granularity.

Agile decision-making is key in volatile business environments. The process involves several factors that create complications. That’s why having a closed-loop planning process based on a single source is essential for companies to plan not only values but also volumes at any level of detail, which helps them avoid discrepancies between financial and operational plans.

Utilize machine learning and artificial intelligence for sustainable logistics

As more and more companies step into the sustainability game, ensuring sustainable logistics processes is now less of a trend and more of a necessity. Companies that realized the importance of moving beyond financial measures have been using artificial intelligence and machine learning for having full visibility into the supply chain operations.

Arpa Industriale, the SIA2022 building products industry social catalyst award winner, needed to respond to explosive growth in demand. The company was looking for a way to optimize and stabilize that production process while meeting ambitious targets for renewable energy use and reduction of waste and resource consumption.

The Italian manufacturer connected all vehicles in the factory warehouse in real time to work autonomously 24/7 with the goal of loading and reloading bar-coded rolls of raw materials. The sales orders in the system automatically update SAP Extended Warehouse Management, SAP Manufacturing Execution, and SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence for raw material provisioning and production-line scheduling.

With real-time data and machine-learning algorithms analyzing every millisecond of their daily operations, the company reduced energy and water consumption by 80%. By using scrap monitoring dashboards in manufacturing operations, Arpa reduced scrap waste by 96% and saved €750,000 in the first year.

Synchronize physical and digital worlds in Metaverse

Imagine a digital world independent of physical conditions in which you can provide real-time information and a collaborative working environment for employees, business partners, and customers all around the world regardless of distance and physical barriers.

Automotive industry leader award owner Martur Fompak created a metaverse that synchronizes a convergence of the physical and digital worlds. The Turkish car manufacturer created digital twins of 45 robotic welding cells and integrated them into the virtual environment to monitor product and process parameters and calculate real-time carbon emission and energy consumption. The digital twins are implemented using two-way IoT connections with the SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence and SAP Manufacturing Execution platform and synchronized with the physical world.

By running real-time analytics, Martur Fompak reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 12%.

Generate renewable energy with predictive maintenance

As one of the most eco-friendly energy sources, solar panels are the cleanest and most abundant renewable energy source that helps companies save time and cost to reach net-zero emission goals.

ENGIE, the utility industry leader and winner of SIA2022, has moved to renewable energy with predictive maintenance in solar farms. The French energy giant utilized 7,600 solar panels in the scope of the digital twin project for maintenance management. This allowed the ENGIE subsidiary in Chile to get an insightful combination of data for optimizing maintenance activities under a cost-benefit evaluation. Generated alerts were 100% reliable, which helped ENGIE reduce the overall cost by 45% for the maintenance of solar panels and inverters.

Focus on end-to-end digitization, not on the problem

Even though companies started their digitization journey a long time ago they can end up with fragmented systems that hinder them to extract meaningful data. Focusing only on the problem area or one aspect may not be the most substantial solution when it comes to digitization.

SIA2022 transformation champion category winner, Fulton County Schools (FCS), is the fourth largest school system in Georgia, with more than 17,600 employees. The school’s existing ERP was more than 12 years old. In addition, the asset management was handled via a third-party solution and not integrated with SAP. Moreover, the system required business users to perform complex manual tasks in multiple disparate systems which increased the risk of human error.

With SAP S/4HANA, FCS created the foundation for a centralized asset data repository, work order management, and equipment tracking to increase overall equipment effectiveness, reliability, and audibility. And with SAP Intelligent Asset Management, the school could identify items that it needed to order and capture while having insights into on-hand assets.

By focusing on transforming the entire organization, FCS is now able to proactively make decisions based on real-time actionable data. This enabled FCS to achieve 52% more accuracy and insights into invoices related to vendors and suppliers while increasing real-time reporting and analytics by 23%.

Discover how future-oriented business leaders embed sustainability within operations to accelerate advancements in both sustainability and operational outcomes: IDC Spotlight: Integrated Supply Chain Planning.