This afternoon, we heard from the other co-CEO of SAP, Léo Apotheker (I think that I forgot to mention Henning Kagermann’s title of co-CEO in my post this morning), starting with some fairly general comments on the nature of competitive differentiation in business, and the power of collaboration.
He was joined on stage by a couple of customers:
- Proctor&Gamble, who discussed how they’ve used SAP as essential infrastructure for innovation and growth in the consumer products industry; P&G has become well-known in social media circles for crowdsourcing their R&D after being featured in the book Wikinomics.
- Harley Davidson, who are using SAP to provide the information necessary to enrich their customers’ experience, further deepening the relationship and increasing loyalty in order to increase revenues.
- Coca-Cola, through a really funny sequence using voice-activated ordering, picking and delivery, ending with a real person from their warehouse delivering two Cokes to the stage, then giving a short (and rehearsed) bit on how it helps his day-to-day work. A Coca-Cola executive was there to help serve the drinks. And, oh yeah, talk about how SAP and a service-oriented architecture have improved their warehouse operations.
All of this is about business processes, and I don’t mean just the narrow view of process that we have in BPM: this is about the business processes embedded within every business application, from legacy ERP to agile composite applications.
Apotheker talked explicitly about NetWeaver BPM and what it brings in terms of process agility; this product announcement is obviously a big deal for SAP, since it’s mentioned in both of the CEO keynotes today. He talked about the power of picking and choosing components from the core SAP applications and assembling them into composite applications for new functionality and increased agility, while maintaining the power of the underlying ERP functionality.