What were the biggest business themes of the year? In this episode I look back over the past 12 months to see how work, life and business responded to change and the environmental crisis. New technologies like RPA offered lots of opportunities but came with a warning – look after your people, their mental health, their work life balance and the company culture you offer them.

Lots to dig into there – so please enjoy this reflective episode, my review of the year…

Do subscribe, like and comment if you enjoy the podcast! You can find all the episodes in full here

My guest this month is a leading tech player, change agent and one of the first people to break the disability glass ceiling to become an executive and a leader. David Dame is head of accessibility at Microsoft – born with cerebral palsy his parents were advised to put him in an institution. Luckily they didn’t listen and their tough love has helped shape the leader he is today.

David’s strengths are extensive and his experience of living in an environment that doesn’t meet his needs has made him a powerful advocate for many groups, including those outside his immediate experience of disability; like the elderly, those with hidden disabilities and stressed mental health. What’s brilliant for us, is that in his role at Microsoft David is in a position to do something about it.

Listen in as we talk about the invisible tax people with a disability must pay as they struggle to use technology, how leadership needs to change to accommodate the needs of the post-covid workforce and the issues around caring for today’s valuable knowledge workers.

You can find our more about Dave on his website here which includes a link to his Ted Talk.

Robotic Process Automation or RPA is one of the most exciting recent developments in business technology and is one of the top trends shaping digital transformation today.

DEFINITION 

Robotic process automation is a form of business process automation technology based on metaphorical software robots or on artificial intelligence /digital workers. It is sometimes referred to as software robotics. Wikipedia

RPA is a smart way to remove repeatable, volume-based tasks from employees who gain very little from carrying out this work such as creating Sales Orders from Purchase Orders or entering data on new suppliers. When you add up the time taken up by these small, daily repetitive tasks, the time saving potential is enormous.

Adopting RPA is now a key to growth

RPA is one of the key tools the business can use to push broader digitization of internal processes and unlock growth.

The process begins by identifying tasks that could be carried out by automation and often these will be found within the finance function, but IT, operations, HR and more can all win back time when their routine work is handled by the metaphorical bots!

With RPA the entire organisation can focus on creating value.

According to CFO.com, more than three-quarters (77%) of their survey respondents said that at least 1 in 20 members of their finance team were “virtual,” meaning they were using RPA and other automation capabilities.

SAP Business ByDesign leads the way

There’s a lot of talk about automation in the software market today and the great news is that SAP Business ByDesign is responding to demand by including a number of bots as standard to benefit customers.

SAP Best Practices for Intelligent Automation gives you access to the first wave of automation bots, which you can use out of the box.  With one click, you’ll get your own SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation applications, at no extra cost, to help busy people build and run tasks “Hands-Free”.

See our product page here.

Here are some of the areas where RPA can make a huge difference:

• Speed and efficiency e.g invoice matching
• Compliance e.g. automated company checks when setting up a new supplier
• Functional – set to carry out routine functional tasks
• Interfaces to pull data from other applications – pull in individual customer price lists to match with customer data
• RPA is an invaluable tool in the drive for digital efficiency and is a big step forward in the dream of creating an automated back office.

A key task is to identify key areas for automation, and we can help you with this. Then you can use the new Intelligent Robotic Automation functionality to allow the bot to process the tasks more accurately than ever before.

The first 6 best practice bot templates are available from the SAP IRPA Store and are ready to implement in minutes:

1. Business Document Extraction from E-Mail
2. Proof of Delivery Note Upload in the Outbound Delivery
3. Schedule Report Refresh
4. Supplier Invoice Upload for Intelligent Invoice Scanning
5. Sales Order Creation from Customer’s Purchase Order
6. Account Master Data Enrichment for Document Information Extraction

This is a completely new solution available for SAP Business ByDesign and so some learning may be required so do click onto the following blog and scroll to the bottom for links to the training materials which are available from SAP:

Detail of the offer for SAP Business ByDesign users

With this new release every SAP Business ByDesign customer may:

Use up 1 block of 1 unattended concurrent session and 1 block of 10 attended concurrent sessions of SAP Intelligent RPA as a service of SAP Business ByDesign for no additional fee (see Additional Licensing Implications under SAP Help)

Use any of provided by SAP Best Practices bots out of box with no additional development or integration work (see the SAP IRPA Store)

Modify any of provided by SAP Best Practices bots and adjust them to customer specific needs with minimal amount of effort

Create brand new bots tailored to their custom needs for the areas where automation will bring the highest value.

Find out more in the video here

https://youtu.be/sOL4xOjxArw

Case Study

Alan White, VP of Information Technology at SEF Energy has to process 13,000 to 15,000 manual invoices a year – that’s about 10 to 15 invoices per hour.

Using the new feature in SAP Business ByDesign he now only needs to validate and correct the scanned document before submission, reducing manual processing time by 10 to 20%

The result is an annual savings somewhere in the region of $27,000 US dollars, on a conservative estimate. It could be closer to $70,000 US dollars.

You can read more about the subject in this excellent Diginomica article by Jon Reed here;

and dig into what an automation strategy could mean here;

Start when you’re happy! That’s the powerful mental health message from this month’s podcast guest Matt Champion. Matt is an SAP mindfulness coach and wants people to feel comfortable bringing new skills – like mindful moments – into the workplace to help deal with stress. As globally we all continues to wrestle with issues around the return to work, there has never been a better time to chat mindfulness with Matt.

If you’d like to find out more about the SAP mindfulness practice or if you would like to explore setting up something mindful in your own company then here are some links you might find useful.

www.sap.com/mindfulness

www.championofyou.com

https://insighttimer.com/en-gb

https://www.headspace.com/

Do we need new ways of thinking about business technology?

With the next 30 years set to bring about massive change, this episode of the podcast goes “Beyond ERP” with Chris Gabriel. Chris is the head of IT at Sapphire Systems but in reality he is much more than this. He is a visionary and a futurist – imagining how we can use technology to do exciting things – today.

Chris talks to me about technology which not only makes people’s lives better, but which is already available, consumable and with innovation built in. No business too small – so press play and let’s go.

Keep on top of the Beyond ERP presentations from Sapphire by visiting this page to sign up for the next masterclass.

Getting to grips with digital trends in the media: Disruptive change has swept through the media industry in recent years. It’s a familiar story, digital technology has merged with access to faster Internet and more sophisticated mobile devices. CDs have been replaced by Spotify and  BBC, ITV and C4 have been joined by multiple streaming channels.  Our choice of TV, music, games, audio books and podcasts has never been greater. In fact with so much content and so many different services vying for our attention, we are getting picky. With finite resources for multiple subscriptions, we are increasingly opting for just 2 or 3.

This makes the market very tough

These conditions are driving media companies to sharpen up their capabilities with new business strategies and operating models. Until recently when distribution outlets were limited, content could be created and made available for a very short period of time. This would drive maximum traffic before it was withdrawn.

Now, with so much quality content everywhere, the media and entertainment industry is trying out new approaches to content development. At the forefront of this change are technology companies – like Amazon – who just announced a huge deal to buy MGM for $8.45 billion. It will surely be the first of many moves from large technology companies to acquire legacy media studios with rich back catalogues and production capabilities.

Data Driven Future

The industry is being re-shaped as we watch and like the rest of the entertainment sector its future is being driven by data. High volumes of the stuff, keeping a record of every movie we watch and every song we listen to. Its hugely important because it helps companies give us what we want – like playlist and movie suggestions, as well as being a means to pay the creators. Yes – let’s not forget them!

Royalties are still used to pay media creators for their work according to how much of it has been read, downloaded and listened to. According to Richard Whittington SAP’s head of media business transformation, one global record company currently processes up to 300 million transactions a day in royalty payments – so the volumes are huge and the calculation can be complex.

“Where Royalties used to be a relatively simple process – you are now looking at a huge number of micro payments – to Ed Sheeran or Cardi B for example – these all have to be aggregated and calculated accurately.  We need to find a way to manage the financial complexity of all these shifts in consumer behaviour and consumer content consumption.” Richard Whittington SAP Head of Media Business Transformation.

Complex Environment

From the contracts companies must draw up to acquire the content, to the distribution channels which make it available to consumers, the entire environment has become hugely complex.

With large volumes of data involved, there’s no time to keep moving it from one system to another to carry out a specific calculation or process. In order to manage all this real time data efficiently you need a single integrated system which can calculate the vast volume of small payments automatically. This is essentially how artists and authors and composers are getting paid, so it raises the stakes. You need to be swift and accurate to maintain trust.

Royalty Management Inside your Finance System

Rights and royalty functionality which lives inside your core finance system is the answer to this problem. Royalty Management software streamlines the complex calculation process and provides you with a statement of payments to keep you and your stakeholders up to date and informed. It saves you days of data manipulation and payment calculations.

Digital natives like Amazon and Spotify get this – they understand that they need one system – but older companies, struggling to keep up, need to get on top of this now.

To sum up, the great experiences we have as consumers – watching movies whenever we want, tuning in to sports events all over the world – this is only possible because of complex licensing and royalty deals. Without the right back-office software, processing all this will become an overwhelming admin task.

It’s time to think of investing in technology that will manage your royalties from the inside. And every pound you save in reducing back-office complexity is a pound you can spend on signing up new talent or commissioning new content to drive engagement.

Our solution – Royalty Management for SAP Business ByDesign

Our rights and royalty management software streamlines the complex calculation process and provides you with statements of payments to ensure you keep up to date and informed. Royalty Management is a digital solution for intellectual property holders in the music, games, film and media publishing industries for managing royalties and content rights which sits INSIDE your finance system. You can find out more in the SAP Store here.

Benefits

• Brings new levels of efficiency to a complex environment
• Eliminates the need for costly manual reconciliation
• Creates an auditable record of each contract between digital rights owners and licensors in an efficient manner
• Scalable across thousands of royalties and content partners
• Manages high volumes
• Automates processes
• Improves stakeholder satisfaction and enhances compliance, transparency and payment accuracy

The Royalty Management Solution sits within SAP Business ByDesign – a flexible cloud ERP solution for growing business which streamlines all your financial processes. You can get the app on the SAP store here  the online marketplace where customers around the world can discover, try, buy, and renew solutions from SAP’s trusted partners.

Get the must have industry resource pack on royalty management here

You can find out more about the Royalties Solution HERE and SAP Business ByDesign HERE.

Hello! Our podcast this month celebrates one of our best customers – the successful British company Aspen Pumps. Aspen won the coveted Queen’s Award three times in recognition of its ongoing and notable growth in overseas markets. And it was no accident, Aspen set out with big plans and needed the technology to support that growth.

Step forward Jonathan Phillips who took the big decisions to select SAP Business ByDesign. He liked it so much he went on to implement it at least 7 times for Aspen companies all over the world.

No wonder I wanted to talk to him about his journey (watch out for news of a new role!) He spoke to me amidst the usual family chaos we have all had to contend with over the past few months so please bear with the occasional  background noise!

Do you have the gift of the gab? If not don’t worry – you can still succeed in the cut throat world of sales, make useful connections and help people with your products.

In this episode I’ve discovered that natural extroverts don’t necessarily have the edge over their more reticent counterparts when it comes to business. Introverts make great sales people and networkers – they just have to think a bit harder about how to do it.

That’s the subject of our podcast – What gives Introverts the Edge with Matthew Pollard. He reminds us that story is at the heart of good sales and that fostering good relationships is something everyone has a shot at.  Do give it a listen and pick up some valuable tips!

Get more from Matthew here www.introvertsedge.com