As COVID-19 continues to spread and cause unprecedented economic disruptions, businesses and consumers alike have had to pivot and adapt to the new normal and the accelerated shift in digitalization. It is critical now more than ever for enterprises and the global community to embrace digital technologies and build a more sustainable society.

Since its foundation in 1898, NEC Corporation—then known as  Nippon Electric Limited Partnership—has been committed to providing “solutions for society” that ensure the safety and assurance of people, support fairness in society, and boost efficiency in economic activities. As a self-proclaimed social value creation company guided by its corporate message of “orchestrating a brighter world,” the company aims to facilitate digitalization, remote and safe working environments, and labor-saving initiatives to further contribute to producing new social value projects. 

In a press release regarding the company’s response to COVID-19, President and CEO of NEC, Takashi Niino said:

“Even during this global crisis, the NEC Group is continuing business operations so as to serve our valued customers, partners, stakeholders, and people around the world by working to support the social infrastructure and enabling a more safe and secure environment. All while giving the highest consideration to the safety and health of NEC Group employees and their families.”

Becoming an Intelligent Enterprise with SAP Solutions

As part of its digital transformation strategy in becoming an intelligent enterprise with SAP, NEC Corporation started its project to modernize its procurement of indirect materials with SAP Ariba solutions. With the cloud-based procurement system, NEC expects to reduce spend, enhance operational efficiency, and increase compliance in its procurement process. NEC Management Partners Co. Ltd.—based in Kanagawa, Japan—will be the first to roll-out the solution, with the rest of the group companies both domestically and globally to follow.

NEC Corporation will be implementing the full suite of SAP Ariba solutions from strategic sourcing to payment:

• SAP Ariba Strategic Sourcing Suite – SAP’s software solution that supports a single, closed-loop, source-to-contract solution bundle for managing materials sourcing and suppliers across all spend categories 
• SAP Ariba Buying and Invoicing – a user-friendly procure-to-pay (P2P) software solution that features streamlined catalog maintenance and a configurable interface

With these solutions that are connected to SAP Ariba’s robust supplier network, NEC Corporation will be able to negotiate the best-value sourcing agreements, achieve sustainable savings, gain better control over global spend, and simplify commerce.

Additionally, NEC is also set to introduce the following SAP software solutions to enable remote work and to achieve more efficient and advanced analytics:

• SAP Signature Management application by DocuSign – a solution that allows organizations to keep documents 100{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} digital and send them for signature from within their workspaces for a seamless, end-to-end electronic contracting process
• SAP Process Mining application by Celonis – a data-based approach to business automation that helps identify opportunities for automation and improvement, as well as prioritize, structure, and streamline projects
• SAP Analytics Cloud – SAP’s business intelligence (BI) solution that utilizes machine learning technology to highlight key business drivers and insights for better business decision-making

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Right now, the hiring term that best fits it is referred to as “digital native.” A lot of countries has been welcoming the younger generation into their workforce. The Indian IT industry has been hiring many young engineers because they could be paid less and do what they were told to do. Nowadays, that is no longer the case.

The digital natives generation consist of young professionals who were born into the digital age. Compared to a digital immigrant who is already familiar with digital systems, digital natives know the value of processes. They are also very comfortable with technology.

The digital natives generation is also a natural multitasker and risk-taker. Plus, they have immense problem-solving skills. And compared to their predecessors who had to cultivate and nurture it, digital natives generation have these innate skills. Additionally, they are very open to learning and utilising new technologies and capabilities.

Supaul Chanda, TeamLease Digital’s business head, shares:

“India has a rich mix of millennials in their population – 37{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} off 134 crore people. Given the rapidly changing landscape of technology and the amount of new technology being introduced, digital natives are the preferred breed.”

Suresh Bethavandu, Cognizant’s vice-president and global head of talent acquisition, tells how digital natives are essential to the consuming population, given that they are the more significant consumers of digital products and services.

He said:

“This helps save significant time and effort. Digital natives fit this idea to a tee as they are multi-skilled by nature, have shorter learning curves, and are highly agile, thus bringing down the overall time-to-market. A case in point is the shortening shelf lives of mobile phones, electronic goods, and IoT/smart devices, down to months or weeks from a time when we had a ‘model’ release every year.”

SAP Lab India’s MD, Sindhu Gangadharan, agrees with Bethavandu’s statement.

She said:

“It’s important for us that our employees come with a strong cloud mindset, focus on tech to improvise, and increase profitability. This comes naturally to the young because they get their music from the cloud, data from the cloud, they have robots in schools teaching them physics.”

HR heads say that tech organisations are most likely to engage up to 30{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} digital natives. BPO and KPO companies hire up to 70{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} of digital natives because onboarding is a breeze, and they get endorsed to production fast. They are now needed even in support functions.

When asked about retaining digital natives, Shailesh Singhla, head of the human capital management business at Oracle India, shares:

“One of the best ways to retain them is to foster a culture of mentoring. Digital natives look for mentors, not managers. They prefer monthly/weekly goal setting, not the annual feedbacks. They want their work to be intuitive, flexible, and fun.”

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Why making better business decisions across the board has never been more important. 

At bottom, managing a business means making decisions. Dozens of daily ones to keep the enterprise humming along and, less often, larger and more strategic ones about the health and future direction of the company itself.

Business intelligence tools can be useful aids for executives weighing up their options and deciding which way to jump.

Too often though, they only provide insight into one aspect of operations, not the bird’s eye view that’s needed to allow business leaders to appreciate all the ramifications, both positive and negative, of the critical commercial decisions they’re called on to make.

Augmenting traditional business intelligence solutions with corporate performance management tools can deliver the additional decision support capability businesses need to make optimum decisions across the enterprise.

The make or break decisions Australian enterprises face in 2019 and beyond

Doing so successfully has never been more important. Digital disruption, uncertain political and economic conditions and changing consumer tastes are making ‘business as usual’ an impossible proposition for thousands of Australian enterprises.

An astonishing one-third of the local economy faces substantial disruption – soon – from digital technologies and business models, according to Deloitte’s Digital disruption: Short fuse, big bangstudy of 2017.

Digital innovation is driving change across markets and economies and reinventing the way companies relate to their suppliers and customers, the report notes.

‘Digital reduces barriers to entry, blurs category boundaries, and opens doors for a new generation of entrepreneurs and innovators’, it states.

The collective opportunity these new market entrants enjoy represents an existential threat to existing businesses which are unwilling or unable to start doing things differently.

Taking an evidence-based approach to transformation

Making decisions about what needs to change; when, where and how, is key to the process of digital transformation. Taking a strategic, long-term approach, rather than embarking on a series of tactical or knee-jerk responses, is the modus operandimost likely to serve an enterprise well in uncertain times.

Working out where you want to go and how you’ll get there is less daunting for leaders who have a deep understanding of how the enterprise is faring on a number of key fronts, and an understanding of the probable consequences specific decisions and actions will create.

Business intelligence can provide some of the pieces of the puzzle, in the form of data which details revenue, sales and marketing investment and activity and the like.

Typically though, it’s just a snapshot of where things are at now. It’s ‘must know’ information but, it doesn’t offer any insight into the input that’s likely to be needed to effect a desired outcome – such as whether putting additional resources into the sales department will lead to more business in a key market segment, for example.

This is where Corporate Performance Management (CPM) software can help. It includes forecasting, budgeting and planning functions and uses graphical dashboards to summarise and present salient corporate data.

CPM software makes it possible for decision-makers to map project progress and performance against corporate goals and strategies and the key performance indicators associated with them. Typically, these include turnover, return on investment, operating costs and capital expenditure.

Seamlessly linking the data that’s used for analysis and reporting allows decision makers to undertake planning and forecasting activities based on that data. Modeling different scenarios makes it possible to identify the course of action most closely aligned to corporate goals.

It’s about bringing data-driven insights to life – harnessing them to inform decisions that are made on hard evidence and likely outcomes, not gut feel and hope.

In these times of rapid and unprecedented change, the latter is something companies rely upon at their peril.

The right tools for a digitally driven future 

Will Australian enterprises crash and burn or revive and thrive, post the fourth industrial revolution, which continues to up-end established industries and business practices around the country?

Making smart, timely choices to evolve, adapt and pivot will be critical to survival and ongoing success. Businesses which fail to do so can expect to see their profitability and viability erode, in some cases rapidly, as more agile upstarts make inroads on their market share.

Against this backdrop, supporting the business decision-making process with technology that allows enterprises to exploit the insights contained within their organisational data to the full is more than merely a nice idea. It makes sound commercial sense, for Australian companies that would prefer to enter the digital era on the front foot.

www.board.com

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