Equipping virtual teams to connect and innovate anywhere everywhere
I don’t think I’d be overstating it to say that we’re living through the biggest shift in ways of working in living memory. Sure, before COVID-19, we were no strangers to business disruption. If you’ve been working in technology for as long as I have, you’ll have seen a constant flow of disruptions that has affected pretty much every aspect of the way we do business. Nevertheless, the physical dimension of work — in other words where we work — has rarely been the focus of technological innovation — until now.
COVID-19 forced billions of people in millions of organizations around the world to change their working habits overnight. Through necessity, digital adoption soared, and shifts that were happening anyway accelerated beyond anything we could have imagined. Organizations were forced to take drastic measures to keep business going and employees safe. This involved issuing a work-from-home directive and doubling down on technology solutions to keep everyone productive.
It proved beyond a doubt that the office is not the only productive working environment. Nevertheless, many organizations approached these changes as short-term solutions to a temporary problem. But what happens now? Do we revert to old ways of working? It seems unlikely. More employees will want to be able to work in a greater variety of locations — wherever they happen to be that day — and as technologists, we must be ready to support them. This is a challenge that my colleague Steve Deliën and I have been thinking a lot about recently.
Rethinking the workforce model for the evolving world
When people can work in the environment of their choosing, they can do their jobs in different or even brand-new ways. Each person will be free to choose the best working environment for them — whether that’s their home, the office, the airport, enterprise partners’ offices, or somewhere else — or a combination of all of them. The advancement of remote collaboration tools and remote monitoring technologies during the pandemic have only made this approach more effective and more promising. I’d like to bet that three years from now, successful organizations will be the ones who resisted the urge to race everyone back to the office in favor of rethinking their workforce model for the evolving world. Opportunities to lead abound, and they all start with continuing, then accelerating, the technology transformation initiatives that the pandemic suddenly rendered essential and urgent.
Success will require more than adopting new digital solutions at scale. To get the best from a physically dispersed workforce, enterprises need to toss out convention and reimagine how their workforce model can best support and enable their people, and they also need to reimagine how remote employees and on-premises employees collaborate.
One of my priorities as Europe Innovation Lead for SAP at Accenture is to explore how new technologies can help our SAP clients capitalize on the virtualized workforce. SAP solutions can play a big role in enabling frictionless distributed workplaces, as we explored in our Technology Vision for SAP Solutions 2021. One of the ways that our SAP clients can adapt is by equipping these flexible work environments with tools that make it easier for individuals — within and beyond an organization — to collaborate across different platforms and environments.
Discovering new ways to collaborate with Microsoft Teams and SAP technologies
One of the coolest topics we’ve been working on over the last couple of months is the collaborative workplace experience, integrating SAP’s solution suite with Microsoft Teams. We have a multidisciplinary team, selecting and developing different scenarios. This team’s goal is to draw on the combined power of Microsoft Teams and SAP technologies to discover new ways to collaborate that simplify and streamline processes in the workplace. SAP S/4HANA is central to this effort, as is SAP’s technology platform in the cloud: Business Technology Platform (BTP). With SAP BTP, the SAP S/4HANA backend can be kept “clean” while extensions, integrations and innovations, such as this one, can be added in an agile way using a well-balanced mix of SAP and other cloud-native solutions. With the solutions we’re developing, users can set up a Teams meeting from the SAP system without switching applications, and inversely, SAP information is accessible during a Teams call via an embedded application.
We’ve all been there — you’re in an online meeting, and you’re trying to grab and share documents from across applications. While we’ve come a long way recently in our ability to share workspaces, the integration of SAP S/4HANA and Teams allows for much faster collaboration and decision making. It provides a consistent user interface for everyone and removes all the technical steps involved in joining different screens together. With the technical “noise” and administrative load removed, teams can focus on taking decisions together. What’s more, it means that everyone can log out of the meeting without a long to-do list. During the meeting they have taken the necessary decisions and acted on them. The changes captured in the in-meeting application are synced back to SAP S/4HANA in real time.
It’s a solution that can benefit many different industries and use cases. With SAP and Microsoft, we’ve been working on three examples that rely heavily on extended collaboration: supply chain, cashflow forecasting and loans approval.
Our supply chain solution makes it easy for buyers to schedule connections with their suppliers and align on purchase order details. Thanks to SAP BTP integration, real-time data can be streamed directly from SAP systems to Microsoft Teams. So, as soon as something happens, such as a supplier notification that part of an order can’t be fulfilled, the relevant team gets an immediate heads up without having to leave its primary workspace. This functionality can be further extended with a chatbot that allows users to interact with the SAP system from within Teams. It means they can access and update details of the purchase order and schedule a call with the supplier, all in the same workspace. Integrations with Qualtrics (to gather experience data from each supplier contact and use it in the supplier evaluation score card), Microsoft PowerBI (for supplier analytics across SAP and third-party data) and risk analysis data from Interos further extend the capabilities and make for a comprehensive 360° view of the supplier relationship.
We’ve also been looking at the loans approval process and considering how we can use the robotic process automation layer of SAP’s Business Technology Platform: SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation (iRPA); to redirect resources to high-value activities and processes. The intelligent bots in iRPA can be used to collect relevant documents together and put them in a purpose built Teams channel that is linked to SAP S/4HANA. All users need to do is log into a meeting in Teams, check out the documents and take the decision directly in Teams. It’s reflected automatically in SAP S/4HANA and automatically launches the next steps. All administrative tasks are effectively removed, maximizing their time and decision-making power.
We also looked at how we could help the collaborative process in cashflow forecasting. We wanted to find a way to streamline the back and forth that is an inevitable part of preparing and approving a forecast. Being able to provide context by sharing SAP Analytics Cloud documents directly in Teams eliminates the awkwardness of sharing screenshots via email. It gets everyone up to speed quickly and makes for much quicker approvals.
Those are the three use cases we’ve dived deeply into — so far. There are many more to come. Our goal is to help our clients enable their physically distributed workforces, to make them creatively connected, empowered by technology, and able to innovate from anywhere.
If you can think of other use cases to explore or want to discuss how we can help to simplify and streamline work, please get in touch.
