Digital Transformation Overview & Opportunities

A continuously connected digital world is creating new opportunities to upgrade, expand and enhance the environments and infrastructure that support a 24/7 digital business. Digital transformation creates significant opportunities in customer service, high traffic, greater conversion and higher revenue. Early adopters are achieving +9% revenue creation, +26% impact to profitability and +12% market valuation.
Recently Birlasoft hosted an informational webinar with O.C. Tanner, an Employee Recognition Strategies and Solutions provider. Birlasoft guided O.C. Tanner through the process of evolving their digital transformation project. Transforming to the digital core leads to more customer focus and better real time activities with activities with all business partners. This requires more responsive, modern systems and best in class solutions such as S/4HANA and Hybris. O.C. Tanner approached their transformation project with the following goals:
  • Enable contextual experiences
  • Deliver and develop consistent and relevant content
  • Deliver relevant timely offers
  • Engage visitors
  • Flexibility in providing new products
  • Gain customer insights
The full webinar "The Journey to a Digital Core with SAP S/4HANA & Hybris" tells the O.C.Tanner / Birlasoft story and how they transformed a digital business.

Watch this short video clip to understand why a digital strategy is important and how Birlasoft is an experienced partner in the journey.

O.C. Tanner Business Drivers
O.C. Tanner had been live on SAP for 15+ years using SAP modules Sales and Distribution, Manufacturing, Purchasing, Inventory Management, Finance and Controlling. Their systems were technically upgraded over the years, but not functionally upgraded. This means they were not able to take advantage of new features and innovations. Their pricing, catalog and order management systems were custom, making it harder for them to grow and service their customers. Deliver and develop consistent and relevant content Deliver relevant timely offers Engage visitors Flexibility in providing new products Gain customer insights.
The company needed to simplify and modernize their systems so that they could be more agile in their ability to bring new products to market and provide great a superior customer experience. The key drivers included:
  • Disparate Systems
  • Customized Solution
  • Lack of User Analytics
  • Lack of Scalability
  • Lack of AgilityFlexibility in providing new products
Does this scenario sound familiar? Does your digital enterprise include customizations and home grown bolted on solutions? Read on to find out how O.C. Tanner approached their project.

This short video clip describes O.C. Tanner's pre project environment and how they decided to look forward and leave customized solutions behind.

Discovery, Scope and Outcome
Birlasoft , SAP and O.C. Tanner participated in workshops to review their current environment, identify new technologies and build a roadmap for the project. The discovery process included the following tasks:
  • Business Challenges & Opportunities Identification
  • Develop the Value Hypothesis and Identify Risky Assumptions
  • Validate the Hypothesis Seek to Eliminate Risk
  • Review with Everyone
There was a lot to do, so O.C. Tanner decided to capture low hanging fruit and closely examine the risky assumptions. They wanted to know if Hybris, CPQ, and ERP; with varying configurations in production order management could really do what they needed it to do with their made-toorder products. If the proposed solution was successful they could replace their custom code and move their resources onto projects that differentiate O.C. Tanner in the marketplace. There was another risky assumption around whether the proposed pricing solution was as robust as they perceived their custom solution to be. The third risky assumption was could SAP work for them out-of-the-box. Over the years they had heavily customized SAP and wanted to see if they could avoid this in the future. The POC proved that they could accomplish 98% of their goals without customizations.
The company was gratified to find that most of what they wanted to was possible with pure configuration instead of customization. They considered this to be a huge boost in agility because configuration takes minutes, hours and sometimes days whereas customization takes weeks, months and in some cases, years.

This short video clip shows how O.C. Tanner determined where to start with their POC and what the outcome was.

Executing a Thin Slice Project Approach
Instead of trying to boil the ocean and implement the entire system at once, O.C. Tanner chose to take a more agile and iterative approach to their project. They identified their simplest customer and put them onto the system and into production first. They refer to this as a “thin slice” approach. By using thin slice, they were able to get their customers on the system and their products to market much faster than if they had taken the big bang route.
The value realization for O.C. Tanner goes from multiple years to a single year, moving to a goal of six months, and finally meeting their ultimate goal of delivering value to their customers daily.

Watch this short video and find out how O.C. Tanner shortened their time-to-value.

Delivering Transformation Objectives in Partnership with Birlasoft & SAP
Delivering a dynamic and relevant customer experience requires the integration of many systems, and often brut force from IT and Business. hybris Customer Experience is designed to enable retailers, resellers, and manufacturers to provide contextual experiences to their customers with an integrated, intelligent and automated content management solution.
Birlasoft Solutions Delivered
  • Hybris for B2B E-commerce
  • Hybris CPQ/PIM – Data Hub for ECC
  • Integration for Product Configuration-Price-Quotation
  • ECC Business Suite on HANA – S/4 Platform
  • S/4 HANA Finance – SAP Accounting
  • UX with Fiori with Smart Business Cockpit, receivables manager
Transformation through S/4HANA Finance & Hybris Omni Channel
Good data quality supports growth objectives, reduces data management costs associated with data remediation and reduces operational inefficiencies. NOV realized these benefits and many more when they teamed up with Birlasoft for their data discovery project.
Digital Transformation Q&A – Ask the Experts
Following the webinar, Birlasoft experts and Ethan Kennelly from O.C. Tanner answered several questions from the attendees.
The following questions were answered during the informative Q&A session of the webinar:
  • Can you talk more about agile process metrics?
  • Have you achieved a continuous delivery model for business customers? For example, requirements, configuration, testing, transport, go-live?
  • What's the average time frame for delivering a new functional requirement?
  • Can you comment on the integration between Hybris and S4/HANA as opposed to ECC? How easy or complex was it and what key takeaway would you give on this topic?
  • What are the best practices or lessons learned during Hybris integration and CPQ? How much customization do you have to do enable this?
  • What version of Hybris are you using?
  • Did you have to write customer WCMS responsive components to ultilize CPQ UX / UI?

Watch this short video to hear the experts respond to the questions asked at the end of the webinar.

How Does Your Digital Commerce Platform Stack Up?
Has a change in your business, your customers' needs, or your current software vendor's offerings brought you to an inflection point with your digital commerce platform? It may be time to reassess your digital strategy and measure it against your current platform's capabilities to ensure future growth and evolution. See how SAP's Hybris solutions can help you make commerce simple, regardless of channel or touchpoint.
Explore specific topics covered during this webinar:
  • Digital Transformation Overview & Opportunities
  • O.C. Tanner Business Drivers
  • Discovery, Scope & Outcome
  • Project Approach
  • Delivering Transformation Objectives in Partnership with Biralsot & SAP
  • Q&A
For more information about Birlasoft's SAP Practice – S/4HANA, CPQ, and Hybris, contact us at SAP[at]Birlasoft[dot]com