Industry Cloud North America Partner Summit – Regulated Industries
Groupsoft has been engaging with SAP at multiple levels to increase our collaboration and sales alignment in support of our delivery excellence. In addition to our massive Retail and Fashion footprint, we are now (for the last couple of years) expanding in the areas of Healthcare and Education.
As a part of that above effort, SAP invited us to participate in their Partner Summit built around Regulated Industries (industries where there is government oversight or funding). Amitabh, Arjun, and I took the opportunity to attend this summit on August 1 and 2 in New York.
This was a very diverse event, with big partners ranging from AWS, Accenture, KPMG, Infosys, and Kyndryl, as well as boutique partners such as Makeshift Technologies, TSC, and Workforce Software.
We experienced the different push areas of a variety of partners and, based on our strengths, were able to connect with a few good partners for a joint Go-to-Market strategy.
However, the biggest impact of this summit for Groupsoft was to understand the thrust areas where SAP is focusing in the Regulated Industries market. Some of the focus areas are highlighted below:
SAP Signavio – A process management tool that has the potential to use existing data (SAP or non-SAP) and assist in the design, analysis, and eventually process improvement of all areas it can be plugged into.
SAP ARIBA – E-procurement is a big topic for regulated industries, and the amount of compliance that is needed in procurement is mind boggling. This is where SAP is working to build / enrich standard content in these areas and has shown interest in working with partners to certify solutions covering industry specific content.
HXM – Human experience management is another hot spot, as SAP has the best-of-breed HCM solution in Successfactors and is seeing a significant uptick in Hospitals and public entities implemented in their diverse landscape.
BTP – A singular platform to allow seamless integration as well as provide out-of-the box capability to analyze data being generated and provide valuable real-time insights both from a predictive and historical perspective.
Partner Solutions – A variety of partners showcased their own extensions and bolt-ons, which enhanced:
- Shift / Schedule Management: Managing and planning shifts where certain partners have built content to support healthcare specific requirements
- Time and Attendance Management: Since many of the regulated industries are part of unions, some partners have built content in this space for healthcare as well as utilities (which is a regulated industry in Canada).
- Contract Management: To simplify the contract management process and enable contract intelligence
- Audit: to enable seamless audit to gain visibility on total spend analysis
- GIS apps: Locana, an ESRI-based GIS app that adds online and offline GIS (Geographical Information system) data to complement SAP Mobile Enterprise Asset Management apps.
We are aware of and have been working on many of the technologies mentioned above. However, it was interesting to hear the specific use cases of these technologies in the healthcare and higher education areas.
