Enabling Autonomous SAP Operations

VS Joshi: Hello and welcome to the Digitate webinar on enabling autonomous SAP operations. I’m the host, my name is VS Joshi, I’m the global head of Product and Solutions marketing here at Digitate. We are going talk about enabling autonomous SAP operations. And with me is Biswatosh Guha. Biswatosh Guha is the global product manager for Ignio AI.ERPOps product , one of our leading products from Digitate. And Biswatosh has a tremendous experience in the SAP world, and he had worked for the big four systems integrators, Accenture, KPMG. He has implemented SAP in multiple fortune hundred companies, and he also manages more than 50 plus AI.ERP ops customers for Digitate. Welcome, Biswatosh, welcome to the Digitate webinar on SAP Operations.  

Biswatosh Guha: Thank you VS. And thank you all for joining. 

VS Joshi: Biswatosh is based on the east coast, and I am on the west coast so we are covering from coast to coast. Here’s a quick overview Digitate. Digitate was founded in 2015, so we are seven plus years old company. We are headquartered in the heart of Silicon Valley in Santa Clara. Our mission is to enable autonomous enterprises through insights and actions, insights, that the customers might get due to AI and machine learning and actions, due to the intelligent automation Digitate igno provides.  

With AI operations and machine learning, we have 80+ patents. Digitate IgnioTM is our flagship product created in June 2015. Today we have 250+ enterprise customers, and most of them are in the global 2000 list. Digitate has many positive customer stories.  Digitate customer case studies can be found on our website. Our customers have realized tremendous value from implementing our AIOps and SAP operations solutions. Whether it is enterprise resiliency, business assurance, improved business agility superior customer experience, higher productivity, SAP operations, you will see multiple cases on our website where customers have given quotes on these particular values that they have achieved. This presentation is our way of showing you how to lead your enterprise into the autonomous future.   

When it comes to enterprise customers and enterprise applications, SAP is the number one end to enter enterprise application software in the world. And 98% of the hundred most valued brands are SAP customers. And this number surprised me that 77% of all the worldwide business transactions touch an SAP system. Now, these are humongous numbers. And when we are talking about making your enterprise autonomous we had to address this particular application, and that’s why our product, AI.ERP Ops was born.   

Here you’ll see that in the space of IT operations we focus on multiple domains within it. Whether it is IT operations, workload management is about the batch management this is the AI.ERP Ops here where we focus on the SAP operations or whether it is the end user experience management space you have about the AI digital workspace. 

So, as you will see that for all these products, our platform is the same Ignio platform, it’s the same low-code Ignio platform, and these products are essentially instantiation of that platform in the specific domains that that I listed about. And yes, the basic principles remain the same. Yes, we manage alerts, we detect the anomalies, we handle incidents with faster root cause analysis and automation. And due to this automation we eliminate the repetitive manual task to succinctly capture the whole what we do. It can be captured because Digitate ignio predicts, prescribes and takes actions to prevent issues and incidents from happening. That’s a very quick summarization of what we do.  

Today we focus on Ignio AI.ERPOps. There will be other webinars where we’ll be focusing on AIOps and other products, but today we are going to focus on AI.ERPOps and that’s the reason why we have Biswatosh Guha here who’s the expert in this field. Biswatosh on the agenda slide, we have the following topics; What are the challenges that the customers face and how Ignio AI.ERPOps helps them? What are the various use cases? And we’ll go through a couple of customer case studies also. And with that Biswatosh, would you like to take over?  

Biswatosh Guha: Thank you VS. Our observation of the customer challenges is that we found almost all customers are having similar complex issues. They have SAP integration with non-SAP applications, or batch or other third-party system or some other credit card application, some other payroll interfaces. These are all complex integrations and SAP products cover the SAP landscape. So how we can cover our customer end to end? These are all the major challenges. And we do have those solutions. We will talk more about that.   

Support is very reactive. At this point we see a lot of S/4HANA implementation going on, and all the core running on S/4HANA or there is your supply chain, whether you are finance, whether you’re auto cash, or procurement.  In the core when anything goes wrong your billing will stop, right? So, that’s a huge risk. So major risk your customer experience is affected.   

Customer experience is very important to brands and enterprises. Every time we see that there is a delay in your order or delivery on billing, even one hour delay that can cause your customer satisfaction. There is a loss of opportunity, or if there is a failure in shipment you can lose money or a month in closing is delayed and there could be a regulatory penalty.   

So those are all our observations with all these interfaces and a huge MTTR reactive in nature. Then the best of your best resources get into action and face challenges with how to keep this knowledge in house and how best to resolve these issues. It’s a major challenge for the IT managers.   

With these observations of our typical customer challenges how can we resolve these challenges.  Digitate ignio solutions provides these solutions to these challenges. Digitate ignio is an AI ML based product. It’s SAP certified, and it covers technical and functional towers.  Technical, like your basis security AAP areas , functional, like your supply chain, order to cash process and functional like how we can resolve issues, resolve failures by providing the root cause analysis and with the approval apply and take action autonomously. And this taking action we are going to show a demo.  

VS Joshi: Biswatosh, you are saying that Ignio AI.ERPOps is not just about detecting anomalies and predicting certain things, but it is also about taking actions. So the automation part is built into the product?  

Biswatosh Guha: Exactly VS. Typical challenges are finding the root cause.  Is it your RFCs or your IDoc failed, why it has failed, if we can find out the root cause that will help us to find a solution.  

VS Joshi: You’re reducing the MTTD and the MTTR at that point in time, right? 

Biswatosh Guha: Exactly. And with the stakeholder’s approval the solution can be automated so that there is no manual intervention.  We’ll review a customer success story that shows how Digitate Ignio has taken action, simple action, and the value derived from this action has multimillion dollar benefits for the customers.  

Vs Joshi: So, basically what we’re saying Biswatosh is customers who have SAP in their environment, they have software, but they do not have the automation capability, they do not have the automation features and Digitate ignio, AI.ERPOps, when it is implemented, it takes care of those aspects. It kind of highlights the various places where certain manual processes can be automated, and it actually does that automation, right?  

Biswatosh Guha: Exactly. So, one part is the automation and another part is the inside intelligence, like it can provide feed the team the analysis so that the team doesn’t have to spend time. The customer IT operations and SAP operations time is optimized and their employee decisions are much more expedited.  With faster resolution the business user satisfaction goes up. A win-win for both teams.  

Vs Joshi: Let’s go into the Digitate ignio product benefits a bit deeper. 

Biswatosh Guha: . Digitate ignio AI.ERPOps is SAP certified with out of box coverage from S/4HANA 2021 to cover 2022 S/4HANA as well. Of course, ECC is in there and we have 50 customers globally with either ECC or S4HANA or migrating over from ECC to S/4HANA transformation journey . The solution manager is also part of the coverage. Also, if you see the green box, a green loop, that box, we cover each and every tower of SAP operations. That means securing your analytics, compliance, service request, functional health check with your incident management, infrastructure and operations areas, essentially all business administration, hana, database administration, everything is covered in one product. So that means your technical, functional all the aspect of SAP operations our supporter covered.  

VS Joshi: Okay. So, on the right hand side, I see these two SAP certified logos. Can you just throw some light on what these logos are about the SAP certified thing?  

Biswatosh Guha: Yes, thanks VS for asking. This SAP certification is for the SAP certification for S4HANA, and also we are certified for ECC as well. But the top one SAP certified integration with SAP applications. So, that means out of box, we are covering your Espo or ECC. However, IGU can be integrated with other SAP applications also, like some of the customer side, we have integrated SAP with Ariba, other applications or for the success factor or APU advances planning optimizer.   

Digitate ignio can be integrated with all landscape and the SAP middleware, whether it is a Java stack or a rough stack. So, that’s the way SAP based practices SAP has given us two logos. One is for the integration point of view, application point of view, and other S4HANA ECC specific.  

VS Joshi: Okay. This is good then. 

Biswatosh Guha:   Our use cases are also certified by SAP. That means SAP team certification team that sat with us in our lab. We have demonstrated and we ran live all those use cases in S/4HANA or ECC on IGNIO applications. And if you see that some of the live dashboard also available, like for system Health check, we how we can bring the MTTR reduce the MTTR by 90%, 95% as soon as failure rocker suppose your RFC fails by the time basis team, they come to know by the time damage is done. So, this is the live dashboard almost near real time. Immediately you will come to know that this is failed. And immediately Digitate Ignio can trigger in workflow approval process with the approval ignio you can apply cell field.   

In these various areas where basis system health check, IDoc business functional service request more on the functional areas or service requests related to user management security , we see a huge number of service requests on those areas. Incident management across the supply chain, finance, procure to pay solution manager alerts point of view, Digitate ignio can take action.   

Digitate Ignio can absorb solution manager all alerts because solution managers throws actionable or non-actionable all alerts, but Ignio can take action. Security compliance area basis, waste level, DB control level, we have the compliance in place. ABAP done panel Ignio will not take any correction or edit any existing code, customer code. However, it’ll provide the ABAP panel and it’ll provide the recommendation. Also, some of the job native jobs is for, or ECC it has, and it can monitor, and it can send the all allow on the background.  

From an analytics point of view, Digitate Ignio can adjust the threshold based on the solution manager KPIs . It can correlate, it can predict also, it can improve the performance transport assessment. We see these issues during this implementation S/4HANA or in the support areas.  An example of this could be one production system goes down because the wrong transport moved. And despite having so many cab process, cab approval process, still, we used to have this issue so that’s why ignio TM can provide the dependencies and impact assessment well in advance in development or in quality UAT before moving into production. Master data we have with the demo, we see that typical S4 or our ECC areas, 30 to 40% across supply chain, across order to cash finance areas. The failures come related to the master data, either master data missing some attributes or functional attributes, whether it is a mandatory or optional.  

And due to the master data, your business transaction is failing. Your billing is not able to happen on time or order processing. The similar SAP ECC and S/4HANA functional health checks are also part of the use cases. So, these are all typical certified use cases we have out of box, so the customer can see the benefits within three months.  There are no enhancements or further development needed, it’s just a plug and play. Digitated Ignio is integrated as soon as your customer is for an ECC.   

All these use cases out of box can go live, and customer can see the benefits within three months or three to four months’ timeframe. They can see the benefits are coming up. So, before I get into the case study quickly, we will show you the product.  

VS Joshi: Are the three use cases you’ll be getting a bit deeper into these use cases? 

Biswatosh Guha: Correct. So, we will get deeper on this. Let me first showcase IDoc. 100% (one hundred percent) of your inbound outbound IDocs are covered. If you have custom IDoc, everything is covered standard and 20 IDoc failed in status, need immediate attention. 12 IDocs and handle issues. So, when IDoc fails, then only IGNIO gets into the action. Otherwise, Digitate ignio provides the simple analysis report and also it provides the financial impact so that you can prioritize based on the customer and based on the financial impact. So, which one to be taken, various reports status, summary error code by summary, message type summary and business process summary. So, various reports analysis available for business stakeholders to look to a partner and it includes a summary.   

How Ignio differentiate among as a product by taking action? So simple example if you see here here, the IDoc has failed, right? If you see that line item 30, I mean line item 30, IDoc has failed and self-filled. So, that is the self-filling part that where ignio TM has taken action and ignio has self-filled, self-filled is means ignio has found out that, this is the root cause that purchase order number, so and so has having incorrect quantity and Ignio and you refer the original purchase order and found out that quantity is incorrect. Ignio can trigger an email in the workflow with the provide this root cause analysis, and with the business user approval, ignio can apply self-fill and reprocess the IDoc also.  

So, this is one of the example of Ignio can take action even in multi-line item. Ignio can identify which line item is having error and identify the root cause and take the approval and apply cell fill. So this cell fill means Digitate ignio has taken the action to correct PO quantity 30,000. The PO has been updated in IDOC and ignio reprocessed. So, that’s what the ignio action self-fill fixed part. So, that is an example where Ignio has taken action.   

We have seen IDoc management, IDoc dashboard, and example of self heal capability. Also if you see on the deck we mention about the master data, like where Ignio has taken preventive action, like master data. You have customer, you have material, you have vendor, various master data, it could be any of the master data. 

It’s a large volume of master data that’s being used on your business transaction, whether it is order to cash processing the order, or billing your customer. So, if your customer master missing the payment terms your billing outstanding report goes for a cost, right? All billing will not get generated without the payment terms. So, similarly if your material master is having classification, not having classification mrp, so various attributes are missing in the master data. So, that can cause the business transaction failure. So, how we can prevent those 30 to 40% this transaction failure. So, these are all the examples where ignio found out, does this material it’s 98.2% are inconsistent. Of course, we created the data, but this would run in exactly the customer development, quality, and production environment, and it’ll provide the exact analysis that where the inconsistencies and what is missing. Suppose if you click on this material inconsistent, so you get to know that where on which attributes are missing and where is the inconsistent data. So, similarly, the source list, missing storage, location missing.  

So, these are some of the examples where Digitate ignio identified.  Similarly, this customer master account assignment groups are 228, account assignment groups are missing. Shipping donations, missing payment terms, missing as mentioning about payment terms. So, here the payment terms are missing. Ignio is finding out that this is the customer number, and these are all the payment terms are missing. So, if you use this customer, your billing might fail. So, that’s the reason we call this use case master data, functional consistency check as a preventive. It can prevent from the business transaction failure in advance. So, these use cases can be preventive. And so, these are some of the examples, how ignio TM can prevent from the business transaction failure in advance. 

Biswatosh Guha: So, now quickly we’ll go over some of the case study customer case studies. 

Vs Joshi: Okay, I think the first one is the Canadian retailer, right? So, I think… 

Biswatosh Guha: North American retailer that’s correct. 

Vs Joshi: Yes. Okay. So, I think this is, again, a hundred-year-old company retailer, one of the famous, and again, they are more than 2000 stores, 26 distribution centers. And one of the leading companies and with the annual revenues of about $50billion or so, and I think one of their business challenges was essentially shift from the legacy IT operations which contributed to substantial manual effort and to handle like a hundred thousand tickets per month. So, that was shifting from the legacy IT operations . I mean, you know, you can imagine higher MTTD, higher MTTR, and how do we adopt the newer technologies into their IT operations? So, those were some of the challenges.   

And again, you know, like all the retail companies, they are under tremendous pressure thanks to Amazon being much like Amazon, where the margins are getting lower and lower, and the customer experience becomes extremely important. The customer experience becomes important. Managing your cost becomes very important. And so this was one of the I mean, these were some of the problems that were faced by this company. And maybe Biswatosh you can just highlight us to what we did over there.  

Biswatosh Guha: Correct. So, one of our oldest customers, and this is a North American one of the largest retailer, like they used to have some of the purchase order fail that it used to fail over 90 million purchase order every month is to fail. And those purchase orders so that was before ignio, and the customer used to pay poor purchase order almost like 450 purchase order is to fail every month costing almost worth of over 90 million. And they used to pay every failure as an incident. They used to pay on level one, level two, some fees to the service provider, and that was before Ignio. Now they, they implemented ignio, and we have developed a purchase order solution for them so that ignio can intelligently understand. We develop that logic for that customer that Ignio can understand that this is a failure.  

Any purchase order is locked less than one hour. It’s a failure. It’s more than one hour, means that business user is actively working on some simple business rules we have developed for them, and we have implemented that. And now Ignio automatically self-heals purchase order failure and, and avoiding those 90 million failure every month, just one simple use case.   

In this use case where Digitate helped reduce the 90 million failures each month to a automate and remediate the solution autonomously, there were other use cases. One other use case with that large $50Billlion dollar company is they used to have five business days for onboarding with over 12,000 consultants (like employees) joining or onboarding or offboarding – leaving for their retail store operations. So, it takes five business days for them to have their laptops in the system with all the access and fully operational in five business days.  They would have to wait for that before Digitate provided a much better solution.  After this customer implemented Digitate Ignio, all those onboarding process triggering those employee IDs, laptops in their procurement, everything, now takes only five minutes using autonomous Digiate Ignio solutions.  

So, five business days to five minutes this is how the productivity increased.  That’s why this customer now sees USD $16million savings every year and more to come and we are covering them end to end. It’s a huge success. And we have many other retail customers as well in North America as well, that is also largest retail store chain. Similarly, also these to have same failures not on file. And all their store operation is to get impacted due to that not on files so that articles is missing, and the store cannot scan and check out.   

Multimillion dollar business transaction get impacted at the store before Digitate ignio. The ROI using Digitate Ignio has increased. Digitate Ignio is identifying and the root cause and the failure autonomously and resolving that, pushing the IDoc so that it is on file. The article is on file so that the store can scan the check out the process immediately. So, that that improved the sales revenue. Not only the failure, but everything also has loss of opportunity. It’s a huge multimillion dollar loss of opportunity now Digitate Ignio is resolving in the retail areas.  

So, next we will go 40,000 incidents, and also, we have next case study years. This is. 

Vs Joshi: This is the Engie case study. From a retail outlet in North America to the largest independent power producer in France, Engie is one of the largest independent power producers in France with 60,000 or so associates globally. They serve over 12 million contracts. 12 million contracts! Can you imagine a B2C operation for a B2C enterprise which handles over 12 million contracts?  Any problem and there is likely a direct impact on revenue and customer experience. Even if it is a small percentage, it results in huge losses. And again, reasons can be multiple incorrect invoicing, missed payment processing, maybe unavailability of the service delivery, human errors, whatever it is. Engie faced issues with operations which in turn had an effect on revenue realization and invoicing.  After implementing Digitate ignio TM AIOps, Engie is a great case study as far as revenue assurance is concerned. And maybe you can throw some light on how what we did over there, on this one.  

Biswatosh Guha: Sure. Engie as a typical energy company has meter rating and meter reading data which comes through interfaces into SAP and is utility SAP system . And then SAP system generates the billing to the customer. So, they used to have almost over 800K euro billing error every month. They also used to have meter reading sync up issues that created customer dissatisfaction. And they used to have the dunning issues all their payment loss, whether it is an incoming payment they get or outgoing payment to their vendor so that they used to lose the vendor discount as well. So, it’s a multimillion dollar loss because of these failures.  

Whether it is invoice payments, dunning is to get billing, is to get lock, unlock or with their mitigating data or status corrections. So, various failures. So, we have implemented almost 70 use cases for Engie. And customer is delighted that billing corrections positively impacts their revenue and also increases customer satisfaction and customer experience.  If you can’t bill your customer on time you lose revenues similarly on the payment side, but vendor payment side also they used to lose some of the vendor discount before Digitate Ignio.  After Ignio being implemented, Ignio is running live on its utility and Ignio is resolving issues autonomously. As a result, revenue realization has increased.  Up to 95% empty entity are being resolved for the failure. 4.2 million euros revenue realization is a very positive benefit.  

Vs Joshi: This is one of the benefits of the new platform we don’t speak much about but revenue realization should be an important factor when companies are thinking of implementing AI ops or ERP ops in their environment.   

Biswatosh Guha: Exactly VS that point, like most of the time service provider, they focus on incident failure service request, how many incidents, but there is a hidden loss of opportunity. There is a hidden customer satisfaction. There is a hidden, your goodwill, your revenues, your profitability. So, there is an opportunity lost and most of the time the service provider demonstrates they are resolving the incident on time. We call, it’s like a watermelon and everything is outside green, right inside is right? So, that when we go deeper into that, and then we saw some of the customer as losing 10 million just for this hundred shipping shipments or failures, shipment fail, and customer lost $10 million. So, these are all some of the examples, and we get those examples and figures direct from Digitate customers.   

And of course Engie can talk about how our product is being implemented. They’re free to go on a call for any prospect. Just recently, I was talking to this Engie stakeholders and they’re extremely, extremely delighted and they want to expand because the meter reading interfaces is involved with a lot of non-applications that also, as we know yes, was mentioning about the product that we cover the whole enterprise end-to-end, and they want to expand to in the batch areas as well. So, that we cover them end-to-end. So, it’s a journey sooner it starts it gets better so that, you know those loss of opportunity can be addressed not just by the incident trust service request, but there is a hidden loss of opportunity in terms of revenue or profitability or customer satisfaction.  

Vs Joshi: Okay. So, can you move to the next slide for a moment? Okay. I just wanted to highlight this particular aspect. I think Engie recently won the Hackett a very prestigious Hackett Group award. And essentially this Hackett Group award is essentially given, I mean, they gave award to only a few companies, and Engie received this award for implementing Ignio AI.ERPOp. And again, just to give you a brief about this award, these awards essentially spotlight companies that are on the cutting edge of technology, cutting edge of creating a competitive advantage, and delivering a measurable benefit at scale using the digital transformation solutions. And that’s what Engie did over here, and the example that you gave just now about essentially how Digitate Ignio SAP operations platform took care of the problems related with incorrect invoicing, missed payment processing, inconsistent payment records, and, you know, for such a large company with 70,000 plus employees, the cost savings that you show were $4.2 million euro revenue. This is a very large technology advantage and SAP operations solutions value  that the company received, and especially for this reason, Hackett Group gave Engie this prestigious digital 2022 award and it’s worth mentioning this particular implementation of Ignio ERP Ops that help them get this award.  

Biswatosh, thank you very much for taking us through the entire journey and taking us through the use cases of ERP Ops, what are the benefits that we provide, the couple of customer case studies that you have talked about, the technology and everything. So, thank you very much for that. And folks, as far as the next steps are concerned our account executives will get in touch with you, and if in case you want a free trial, on our website, just send us an email and our executive will definitely get in touch with you.