During his appointment last August 2022 as Managing Director of SAP in the Philippines, Abrahams said that his focus as the new leader of the tech company is to address the most pressing challenges that the customers, partners, and communities face. Specifically, he mentioned driving business transformation in the cloud, building a resilient supply chain, and working towards a sustainable future.

Two months into the new year, Abrahams shared insights on the Philippines’ industry trends for 2023. Out of the eight industry trends that encompass business, technical, and social developments mentioned by Saueressig, Abrahams iterated some that are also evident in the country.

SAP Philippines: On 2023 Industry Trends

“These are the industry trends that we believe will share the world of business this 2023 and beyond. On our part, SAP remains committed to helping organizations transform into fully digital, resilient, and sustainable enterprises, enabled with data visibility into their business functions and processes to make the most critical strategic and operating decisions,” Abrahams said. 

Circular Economy

In the country, the government and private organizations are championing ESG initiatives in their operations to contribute to a circular economy. 

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the national government regulatory agency charged with supervision over the corporate sector, the capital market participants, and the securities and investment instruments market, had earlier released the Sustainability Reporting Guidelines for Publicly-Listed Companies to promote achieving global sustainability targets such as UNSDGs and national programs such as Ambisyon 2040. In addition, the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) Act of 2022 (Republic Act no 11898) has also been passed to require large enterprises to recover and manage their plastic packaging waste.

SAP Philippines MD commented:

“A circular economy fosters new business prospects while preserving the environment. The advantages of implementing circular business models will significantly outweigh the existing investments that organizations must invest in.”

“Recovery is a subset of the more significant idea of EPR. This law emphasizes the obligation of organizations to ensure that the resources and waste that is generated can be recycled or decomposed sustainably instead of ending up in landfills,” he added.

Resilient Supply Networks

According to Saueressig, building a resilient supply chain means creating real-time transparency through close collaboration and data exchange among trading partners in an open yet secured digital network. Abrahams shared a similar insight on the impact of having a resilient supply chain for business operations as well as on decarbonization. He stressed:

“As disruptions still happen across various industries, digitalizing supply chains help organizations ensure that they provide consumers consistently with the goods and services they need and reduce their carbon emissions.” 

Business Transformation

Abrahams said that leveraging technology to allow for a business transformation is crucial to the adoption of ESG initiatives. AC Energy (ACEN) and Globe Group are some of the Philippine organizations that have use case scenarios wherein SAP solutions were utilized.

ACEN deployed SAP S/4HANA, which encouraged its workforce to learn new technology, and embraced a digital platform that streamlined business processes, enhanced corporate governance, reduced cybersecurity risks, and lessened paper wastage. Globe Telecom migrated to SAP S/4HANA to overcome fragmented processes and drive automation for data-driven decision making. The telco also deployed SAP Fiori for better user experience and insight gathering. 

The post SAP Philippines Shares 2023 Industry Trends  appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

Since 1865, the Mumbai-based Shapoorji Pallonji and Company Private Limited has been fortifying India’s infrastructure and has established a trusted legacy of engineering excellence. An Indian conglomerate that delivers end-to-end solutions in six business segments namely Engineering & Construction, Infrastructure, Real Estate, Water, Energy, and Financial Services, it is inevitable that the company experienced massive growth in recent years. 

In the last five years, Shapoorji Pallonji has expanded into new business areas and has dramatically grown its engineering and construction division in terms of project size, geographical reach, and revenue reaching over 200 projects in progress across various regions. To continue on delivering innovative solutions and technologies to its clients across 70 countries as well as reach its goal of doubling its revenue by 2020 while expanding into international markets, the company needed to partner with SAP to accelerate its digital transformation and drive sustainable business growth.

The Need for a Robust, Scalable Digital Platform

Essentially, Shapoorji Pallonji needed to establish a scalable, flexible, secure, and robust platform that could support business transformation initiatives and continuous innovation across its diverse businesses. The conglomerate tapped SAP to equip employees with cutting- edge, integrated technology, and increase automation to deliver excellence, consistent user experience using the latest UI features for better decision-making.

Recognising the Challenges

The company listed several challenges that led to the decision to fast-track digitalisation. Shapoorji Pallonji identified that a heavily customised legacy ERP solution lacks the integration and scalability required to expand into new business sectors. Reports are static and paper-based that critically hampered employee productivity. Financial consolidation across the businesses and HR processes also needed to be streamlined.

The Change Management Approach

At the start of the partnership journey, SAP ensured that the stakeholders are involved in the transformation process. SAP arranged workshops with stakeholders to help them understand their key functionalities, technology trends, and other industries’ innovations.

The “first, get convinced and then convince” approach enabled the IT team to conduct pilots that would validate the road map and increase adoption with minimal disruption. Train-the-trainers sessions and regional training, which required a champion per region, were also conducted to educate users on the new technology and processes.

Manoj Bhoota, Vice President IT, Shapoorji Pallonji Group shared:

“SAP was always by our side in the entire journey, providing us the required boost whenever required. The SAP team is determined to ensure that Shapoorji Pallonji achieves its desired business outcomes by effectively using SAP solutions and leveraging available support services. Whenever we face challenges, I know that there is someone in the background working for us, and they will definitely come up with a solution.”

“Any new initiative is very well supported by SAP, and it brings in a sense of belonging. We have very good success stories that would not have been possible without SAP services,” he added.

Transforming into an Intelligent Enterprise

Shapoorji Pallonji and SAP have implemented the massive transformation achieving the flexibility and agility needed to support continued innovation and sustainable growth. The scalable, digital platform comprised of an integrated suite of SAP solutions has helped the company become an intelligent enterprise through:

• A robust core and central system of record to enable end-to-end business processes and accelerated reporting
• Advanced analytics and a single snapshot of business performance and project health to make more timely, informed decisions using SAP Analytics Cloud
• An end-to-end platform for digitalisation of HR processes with SAP SuccessFactors solutions
• Faster, more efficient development of SAP Fiori apps using SAP Cloud Platform and SAP Web IDE
• Seamless authentication of more than 7,000 users across several integrated applications enabling greater security with the Identity Authentication service

Shapoorji Pallonji’s digital transformation continues as it partners with SAP for the company’s plan of SAP S/4HANA migration to provide access to new finance and analytics functionalities, enable further simplification of its IT architecture, and increase flexibility, speed, and scalability that would future-proof that company.

“As IT people, we have to be self-motivated and keep on improving. At the same time, whatever we’re doing should benefit the business. SAP is helping us to manage this balance,” said Bhoota. 

The post Shapoorji Pallonji and Company Private Limited Achieves Sustainable Growth with SAP appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

How we do business has changed. The lines are being blurred between work time and home time, between office, home, and public spaces, and between work devices and personal ones. People in coffee shops are submitting purchase orders on their phones, and then checking Twitter.

SAP has positioned itself in this new environment with Fiori, a UX-optimised app experienced powered by SAP HANA. Fiori is designed to allow on-the-go access to commonly used SAP systems.

This is incredibly convenient, in many ways. Sales reps can submit orders and reports easily while out in the field. Manufacturing staff can upload images and data from the plant floor. Suppliers can send through specs and quotes while in transit.

However, it’s not all sunny news.

When a company’s SAP environment extends beyond the boundaries of their protected corporate network, the risk surface increases exponentially:

• Fiori is often accessed via mobile devices, which may or may not be well-secured by the manufacturer. In addition, users may be careless with their device security, leaving it unattended or failing to implement a secure screen lock.
• Accessing Fiori on public, unprotected wi-fi provides no network security to users. With the public server acting as a midpoint, redirection attacks are a significant risk.
• In crowded public places, cyberattackers could easily film a user typing in their credentials, using them later to enter the system and wreak havoc.

As a result of Fiori’s increased attack surface, SAP systems could face an onslaught of cyberattacks.

This is extremely bad news for many companies: Most organisations that use this type of enterprise software wind up interweaving it into multiple business functions. A typical resource extraction company, for example, could use SAP for their human resources, their accounts payable and receivable, for purchasing, and to track production. If the SAP system is breached by cyberattack, a couple of things could happen:

• The cyberattacker could sabotage systems, either on a large scale, or in small and subtle ways that lead to a domino effect of critical mistakes.
• The cyberattacker could also steal confidential data. Data on personnel could be sold on the black market to identity thieves, while corporate data could fall into the hands of competitors.

And either way, companies’ reputations tend to suffer when it’s publicly revealed that they’ve fallen victim to a major cybersecurity breach. In some cases, it’s been a death knell.

There are multiple types of attacks that cybercriminals can use to penetrate SAP’s defenses. One (among many) is MIME-type filter evasion.

SAP and MIME type checks

Typically, when somebody uses a Fiori app to upload a file to an SAP system, the file extension is reflective of the file within. A .pdf indicates a PDF file. A .docx indicates a Microsoft Word file. It’s pretty straightforward … usually.

But what if that .pdf file is actually an .exe file?

It turns out that cyberattackers send disguised malicious files through to organisations’ SAP systems, simply by changing the file extension.

As a trick, it’s brilliant (yet incredibly frustrating) in its simplicity.

Even more frustrating is according to our research, 30 per cent of SAP installations do not implement any filtering or restrictions on the types of files accepted by the application. And even if they do, SAP’s built-in file-type filtering relies solely on the extension of the filename. So if an organization is one of the 70 per cent that does filter file types, it may be all for naught, if cyberattackers are simply changing the extension and slipping through anyway. And they are slipping through: More than 60 per cent of the systems we tested allowed uploading of arbitrary files as soon as the extension was changed to a permitted extension type.

The tip of the iceberg

There are multiple ways that cybercriminals can stage attacks on SAP users and applications, with Fiori apps providing a more porous attack surface with which to do so. Companies need to be vigilant in ramping up their SAP cybersecurity, using a multi-pronged strategy to reduce risk.

Learn more about the other types of attacks Fiori might let slip through and the specific steps your company can take to protect its SAP system by watching our webinar, ‘Protecting Fiori and SAP Applications From Content-Based Cyber-Attacks‘.

This article is sponsored by bowbridge Software. Joerg Schneider-Simon is the chief technology officer and co-founder of bowbridge Software, which offers SAP cybersecurity solutions for organisations worldwide. With over 20 years of security and IT experience, Joerg is a popular international speaker on traditional IT and network security, malware, vulnerabilities and exploits, and SAP infrastructure.

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