Q&A with Tom Raftery, Global VP at SAP

MEDIA 7 | September 19, 2019

Q&A with Tom Raftery, Global VP at SAP
Tom Raftery, Global VP at SAP is an Innovation Evangelist, Futurist, and international Keynote speaker. Prior to joining SAP, Tom worked for a number of companies at Group IT Manager/CTO level, and as an Industry Analyst. Tom is a global thought leader and ranks among the top 10 Internet of Things influencers in the world. 

MEDIA 7: If I were to say to a bunch of people who know you, ‘Give me three adjectives that best describe you’, what would I hear?
TOM RAFTERY: 
I would like to think that I am a good communicator, maybe smart and hopefully generous. You will have to ask people other than myself though. They would be a better judge.

M7: What is the role of a technology influencer in driving environmental sustainability?
TR: 
The role of someone like me would be to raise awareness of the issues that are happening and potential solutions to them, particularly technological solutions. A lot of people are busy in their day-to-day lives and they might not be aware of some of the more pressing environmental issues that are happening in the world and that might impact them. So, raising awareness with people, of the importance of these issues, and the potential technological solutions to them is the role I think that influencers should be playing.


"Raising awareness with people, of the importance of environmental issues, and the potential technological solutions to them is the role that influencers should be playing."

M7: SAP is celebrating the 10th anniversary of strategic sustainability this year. What are the initiatives being taken by the company to help the world run better and achieve the UN sustainable development goals by 2030?
TR:
We are involved in a lot of different projects in this front. We work for example, with Vestas Wind Systems who are the only global energy company dedicated exclusively to wind energy. We help them with their backend systems to help optimize the delivery of windfarms and turbines to windfarms, so that they are keeping their costs down and deploying the windfarms with the highest efficiency. We work with Munich Re and the European Space Agency. Munich Re are one of the largest reinsurance companies in the world and for them, they need to predict, and try and mitigate the damage of natural disasters. We use data from European Space Agency to help Munich Re do that.

We work with Brazilian company, Stara who are an agricultural company. They manufacture agricultural equipment, and the work we do with them is what’s called precision agriculture. Precision agriculture means that we can help their machines be far more precise in things like spreading fertilizers, spreading seeds to make sure that the seeds don’t overlap, the fertilizer doesn’t overlap and you’re doing it row by row. You have to sow the seeds and spread the fertilizer very accurately to avoid an overlap. Because if you have overlap with fertilizer, it can reach toxic levels and damage the plants that you are trying to help. If you have overlap in seeds, you can have excess competition between the seeds and then you get reduction in yield. Whereas if you are optimizing using precision agriculture, you are massively reducing your inputs and you are maximizing your outputs. So, you are able to feed more people with less land and less resources which obviously, as we are reaching higher population levels year-on-year, this becomes more and more important.

We work with NGOs like this one in Africa, called Elephants, Rhinos and People which was founded to preserve and protect the wild elephants and rhinos in Southern Africa. We work with local people to make sure that it’s more profitable for them to protect wildlife than it is to be poaching wildlife. We put collars on elephants and rhinos with geo-tracking in them. We use drones, to track the elephants and rhinos and if they start approaching borders of the parks that might expose them more to poaching. We send off alerts and help move them back into places where they are safer. Since we started the initiative in that area, no elephants rhinos, or humans have been harmed since the deployment of the tracking.

We work with Swiss Federal Railways, the largest energy consumer in Switzerland and they are also an energy producer - they produce electricity. So, we work with them to help reduce the peak loads, the peak demand for electricity by flattening their load which then means, they don’t need to build extra generation plants, reducing their carbon footprint and making their organization more efficient.


"Making our workforce aware of what we are doing as our external constituents is important for our employees to feel engaged and part of something important."

M7: You have been on the SmartCitiesWorld Advisory Board. How does SmartCitiesWorld help in developing smart cities of the future?
TR:
The SmartCitiesWorld is a publication. It raises awareness of smart cities initiatives that cities can take to make the cities run better, reduce their energy requirements, reduce their footprint, increase their air quality, reduce noise pollution, and lots of different initiatives like that. So, as a publication, it’s primarily responsible for raising awareness and helping cities find better ways to increase quality of life for their constituents.

M7: How does SAP embrace an innovative culture in the company?
TR:
Obviously, as a technology company it is very important for SAP to embrace an innovative culture in the company and what the company typically does is, it spends a lot of money on research and development and it does a lot of communication internally and externally highlighting the innovative solutions that we have come up with for our customers. And making our workforce aware of what we are doing as our external constituents because it’s important for our employees to feel engaged and part of something important. And as a consequence, every time, every year, we run this survey internally on how happy our employees are working for SAP. And our rate of employee retention is extremely high.

It’s not unusual in Europe to talk to SAP employees who have been working for the company for 10 or more years, which in the technology industry is unusual. So, that’s how we embrace the innovative culture and we talk of the things that we do, we work closely also with our customers because we do a lot of co-innovation projects with our customers where we take our customers into our co-innovation centers and we talk through their problems with them and come up with innovative ways to solve any particularly gnarly issues that they might have.


"A lot of people are busy in their day-to-day lives and they might not be aware of some of the more pressing environmental issues that are happening in the world and that might impact them."

M7: What is your favorite part of working at SAP?
TR:
I started working for SAP in September 2016, so it’s just over 3 years ago now. And, prior to working with SAP, I had worked primarily with startups and small companies. I have never worked with a global mega vendor before. So, I was wondering what it would be like and I had my doubts, and if you would ask me in 2016, I would have said, “Yeah, I’ll probably last about three months with SAP”. But, three years later, here I am. And, a lot of that is down to the fact that the company is so big, and it has close to 100,000 employees, it means there are always people I can approach, if I need help in any country or in any industry. Because my role is across industry. So, if I need to talk to somebody who is in the transportation industry, I can just go straight to the transportation business unit and talk to people there. If I need to talk to people in the hospitality industry, same story. If I need to talk to people in the airline industry, the mining industry, the electricity industry, we cover all industries, we cover all regions globally. And, there’s a culture within SAP of helpfulness which is great. Apparently, it’s unusual. For me, it’s the norm if people bring up and ask me for help, I would say, “Yeah sure, absolutely, no problem.” And that’s the way most people in SAP are! You pick up the phone or send an email, and they are happy to help, no matter what. Apparently, that’s not the norm for big companies, but it is the norm for SAP which is great and that’s why I love working for SAP.  

M7: When did you start working, how old were you, and what was it?
TR:
My first job was when I was 14. I worked on a building site where I was a builder’s mate, helping raise the scaffolding on the building and also help ferry bricks that were delivered to the site from the ground up to the brick layers on the top floor. So, that was my first job.

ABOUT SAP

SAP is a global software application vendor. SAP is the market leader in enterprise application software, helping companies of all sizes and in all industries run at their best: 77% of the world’s transaction revenue touches an SAP system. Our machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT), and advanced analytics technologies help turn customers’ businesses into intelligent enterprises. Our end-to-end suite of applications and services enables our customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and make a difference. With a global network of customers, partners, employees, and thought leaders, SAP helps the world run better and improves people’s lives.

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Optilogic Introduces Personalized Risk Profiling in Cosmic Frog Supply Chain Network Design Platform

prnewswire | May 26, 2023

Supply chain design software innovator Optilogic today announced personalized risk profiling, available as part of its Cosmic Frog supply chain network design solution. Cosmic Frog is the fastest network design solution and provides a risk score on every scenario to help companies proactively minimize risk and volatility. The OptiRisk score is calculated based on weights of different risk components. With the new personalized risk profiling feature, businesses can create customized risk profiles to emphasize risk areas that matter in their business domain, including climate risk, network complexity, and geography. "At Optilogic we know that risk is a part of every strategic supply chain decision, whether you measure it or not," said Don Hicks, CEO of Optilogic. "For the first time, risk is on equal footing with financials and service in supply chain network design, allowing companies to choose the future that's right for them. If you don't know what risks you're throwing at your company, you're like a baby at a poker table. If you're able to measure and quantify risk, you're a professional risk taker." Using risk scenarios, supply chain practitioners can easily compare results across several risk profiles to make the best design decisions. Download Guide to Considering Risk in Supply Chain Design Optilogic considers risk in the big picture and breaks it down to the granular level to help guide supply chain decision-making. Cosmic Frog's risk engine can identify and quantify risks on multiple levels: Supplier risk Facility risk Customer risk Network risk These include external risks like proximity to a nuclear power plant and operational risks like percentage of volume that is single-sourced. The engine assesses risk and potential impacts according to analytic data collected by sources like the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO). "When supply chain modeling tools like Cosmic Frog are exercised, every scenario displays the financial impact of a risk event and potentially a risk assessment," said Greg Schlegel, founder of the Supply Chain Risk Management Consortium. "Companies can use this data to develop risk mitigation plans. The SCRM Consortium calls this 'stress-testing the supply chain' and deems it an SCRM exemplary company best practice." About Optilogic Optilogic offers cloud-native supply chain design solutions that enable businesses to evaluate trade-offs across financial performance, service levels, and systemic risk to design resilient supply chains even in the most dynamic, challenging environments. Its Cosmic Frog supply chain design solution tackles enterprise data at scale, runs models faster than ever, automatically converts legacy models, and requires no IT footprint. Cosmic Frog is the only supply chain design platform to combine optimization, simulation, and risk engines, and includes a risk rating on every scenario. Solutions include network design, intelligent greenfield analysis and site selection, M&A analysis, near-shoring/reshoring, CapEx planning, cost-to-serve, product flow, and many more.

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SUPPLY CHAIN

Celonis Launches New App to Help Supply Chain Leaders Improve End-to-End Lead Times

businesswire | May 24, 2023

Celonis, the global leader in Process Mining, today launched its new End-to-End Lead Times App at the kick off of the Celonis World Tour 2023. The App analyzes the entire lead time to procure, manufacture and distribute finished goods, the impact of each of these processes on the end-to-end lead time, and the bottlenecks delaying the entire process to accelerate cash conversion and exceed service levels. To assess end-to-end lead times with traditional process mining would be highly intensive, with multiple event logs created, because this requires data about so many different objects and parallel processes - from procurement, to production, to distribution. The Celonis End-to-End Lead Times App, however, builds on Celonis’ newly launched Object-Centric Data Model which expedites insights to rapidly identify the entire lead time to procure, produce and distribute finished goods, the impact of each of these processes on the end-to-end lead time and the critical issues delaying that individual process. Armed with this information, supply chain leaders can then intervene much more accurately and quickly to improve service levels and accelerate cash conversion through better working capital. Understanding end-to-end lead times - in other words, the time it takes to initiate and complete the entire supply chain process for a finished good within the boundaries of one company - has always been crucial to supply chain leaders for various reasons: so that they can identify ways to compress lead times to reduce working capital and accelerate cash conversion; find ways to exceed service levels; and be able to set accurate timelines with customers even if unexpected disruptions occur. Capturing the actual lead time for every finished good globally, however, is challenging because of the volume of goods that need to be tracked, the number of locations that the goods can exist in and the variations to creating that finished good. Without a way to effectively leverage data to map out every way materials are procured, manufactured, distributed and fulfilled, supply chain leaders are left with assumptions about their end-to-end lead times, which do not consider all process variations; solutions at the mercy of data accuracy in the ERP system, which can result in outdated and also inaccurate lead times; and no way to know where to start when they want to improve their end-to-end lead times. With the Celonis End-to-End Lead Times App, supply chain leaders can: Track the movement and location of each component through each process required to create a finished good, ensuring they see every path that is required to sell the finished good; Surface the finished good with the lowest service level or finished good with excess inventory, thereby enabling a focused approach to improving end-to-end lead times; Identify potential root causes to the end-to-end lead time bottlenecks, like outdated master data resulting in longer lead time calculations - allowing them to take immediate corrective action to improve end-to-end lead times. “We will reduce working capital across all production sites by about 10 percent with the Celonis End-to-End Lead Times App,” said Kai Führer, Director Global Supply Chain Controlling at Freudenberg Sealing Technologies. “Furthermore, with this end to end transparency, we can find ways to deliver the same service in an even shorter time frame and act faster and be more flexible even when disruptions occur. I’ve worked in Supply Chain for over 20 years. This level of transparency has never been possible. But with Celonis we can stop arguing over the variations and align on a path forward to create a more agile and resilient supply chain.” “Capturing the actual lead time for every finished good globally is challenging, due to the volume of goods that need to be tracked, number of locations the goods can exist in and variations to creating that finished good,” said Peter Budweiser, Supply Chain Product Lead at Celonis. “Without the E2E Lead Times App, it wasn’t possible to effectively leverage data to map out every way materials are procured, manufactured, distributed and fulfilled. I am thrilled that now, with this App, we can enable supply chain managers to accelerate their cash conversion cycle while still ensuring they meet service levels.” The Celonis World Tour kicks off on May 23 and covers 10 stops across the US, Europe and Japan. It is Celonis’ global process mining roadshow where customers, prospects and partners share how, with Celonis, they are able to find and capture business value within processes, enabling them to perform at levels they never thought possible. The Celonis World Tour kicked off shortly after Celonis was named a leader in Gartner’s® first-ever Magic Quadrant for Process Mining Tools. The report catapulted process mining into C-level consciousness and placed Celonis highest and farthest to the right on both axes, Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. About Celonis Celonis enables customers to optimize their business processes. Powered by its leading process mining technology, Celonis provides a unique set of capabilities for business executives and users to continuously find improvement opportunities within and across processes, and execute targeted actions to rapidly enhance process performance. This optimization yields immediate cash impact, radically improves customer experience, and reduces carbon emissions. Celonis has thousands of implementations with global customers and is headquartered in Munich, Germany and New York City, USA with more than 20 offices worldwide.

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