SAP - Intelligent Enterprise Resource Planning

By 2020, the global Gross Domestic Product is predicted to originate in 50% from the digitized activities with a growth in each industry (International Data Corporation, 2017). In the scenario where the digital transformation will be following the business in everyday activities, companies like SAP are assuming an important role. Established in 1972 as a team of five colleagues, after more than forty years SAP is considered a world leader in enterprise applications. SAP has been supporting businesses (80% SMEs) as ambitiously exposed by its slogan “Helping the world run better”. SAP has changed enterprise software and reinvented how the business was done and nothing seems to stop its willingness to innovate. The cloud ERP, powered by the Internet of Things, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Machine learning, Analytics, and Business Intelligence are the challenges that SAP customers are starting to address. The Intelligent Enterprise framework recently developed represents the highest expression of how SAP is being aligned with the most advanced technologies. The focus of the company was and will remain to bring those technologies to solve the business problems. In the situation where one-third of technology investments will be driven by the digital transformation initiative in the next few years and where this transformation will move towards cloud-enabled ERP and enterprise applications SAP with its applications, technologies and platform seems to be the right partner. In this chapter, through the experience of two Italian companies - Feralpi and iGuzzini illuminazione - the development of the right solutions by SAP in the adventure of digital transformation is presented.