How Automation Can Improve Data Integrity and the Productivity of Data Stewards

Editor's Notes

• #5: What are we going to talk about today… Agenda: (Note to sales: You will likely modify this to fit your specific customer meeting needs)
• #12: I would like to share with you Monster Energy's process transformation story.
• #13: This Energy Drinks was using spreadsheets and emails to track their product launches (They call it NPW – New Product Worksheet).  Their process even required project managers of new products to invest hours each day tracking down status to report back to meetings and management – just another task that was eating up time.  In their words it was “organized chaos”. <click>
• #14: Then the energy drinks company entered into a partnership with a major global soft drinks company. This gave the energy drinks company access to aspects of their global distribution network <click> and dramatically increasing the number of new product launches (it quadrupled the number of open projects). Their current manual process simply couldn’t scale… <click> [Notes: To be clear the soft drinks company doesn’t own the energy drinks company, however they do have a 17% stake in the company] and getting the data into SAP for all the global sites soon became the bottleneck holding Monster back. So, let me share with you a little about the Energy Drinks company’s transformation journey. <click>
• #15: First, we mapped out their existing process – something they had never done before – and there were some real aha moments here. This is where Precisely’s professional services team really began to shine – by looking beyond just the tools. Like any good process transformation project, we reviewed the people, process and technology.  This was the beginning of the true Transformation that included automation, process redesign and organizational changes needed to allow the Energy Drinks company to move at a faster pace.   <click>
• #16: Out of the process workshop we identified 3 different business solutions, Point-of-Sale Materials (these are salable materials for items like T-shirts, hats and stickers – Note that Merchandise is a big part of the Energy Drinks company revenue stream), Raw materials (ingredients) and the product manufacturing process – the overall process needed to launch a new product.  The product production solution includes more than 8 SAP product data objects, and our modular architecture allows you to dynamically link the sub processes needed for each specific launch, even calling the independent raw material process if needed. It was obvious that the Energy Drinks company needed to help immediately <click>
• #17: At the first pass they have already reduced their product launch cycle times by 50-75% depending on launch type. They now have tools and controls in place that easily allows them to collect the right data at the right time from the right people. <click> They have the visibility they need to effectively manage their product launches, <click>and the governance in place to allow business teams to take true ownership of “their” data. <click>This gives the Energy Drinks company trust in a repeatable process that allows them to bring new products to market faster than ever before! <click>
• #19: Here is how the new products fit into our landscape. Desktop Studio, Studio Manager (Server based) , and Evolve (Server based). Studio Manager contains all the features of Studio desktop. Evolve has all the features of Studio Desktop and Studio Manager.
• #21: Note to sales: Use this slide to introduce at a high level the features that make Evolve unique. You do not need to go through each one. For deeper conversations and follow-up meetings there is content around many of these features in the Evolve slide library.
• #22: Note to sales: Use this slide to explain that our platforms can make an impact across their SAP landscape—whether it’s master data or transactional data use cases.
• #24: Note to sales: Automate Evolve is built with a modern, intuitive user interface to speed up solution development.
• #25: Why Portals? A common request we have received from customers is to extend vendor/customer onboarding scenarios to stakeholders outside the organization. With Evolve Portals, you can build your own supplier self-service and customer self-service portals. And you will also be able to use this for internal portals, to build specific landing pages for specific groups of users. This extends Evolve use cases and opens up new opportunities for you to deliver more and better service for your customers and suppliers. External Portal deployment is available as an add-on to Evolve 20.2 and later. Talk to your sales rep about pricing for external portals based on your needs. You can also develop and deploy portals for internal audiences at no cost. In our conversations with Gartner, it’s been evident that this is an area that is still largely unsolved for a lot of customers. Companies are left trying piece together their own solutions. With Evolve Portals we are providing the fastest path to a custom portal.
• #26: With the 20.2 release of Winshuttle Evolve, the platform now includes a set of RESTful APIs that enable Evolve to manage and automate broader, end-to-end processes by connecting multiple systems and cloud services with SAP.  These API's help solution developers efficiently integrate systems to and processes to eliminate manual data management that often leads to poor data quality and ungoverned process tracking. For teams creating seamless, end-to-end solutions, Evolve automates business processes that require complex SAP data interactions with other, third-party systems like Salesforce, or that use the ODATA protocol. Traditionally, processes like these required inflexible, custom solutions that do not easily adjust to dynamic business environments. Evolve  gives you the agility and flexibility you need to compete and thrive in today's business landscape.
• #27: With Evolve 20.2 we are including access to three RESTful API’s that will further enhance your digital transformation and automation efforts. They are: SAP Data API: REST API that enables direct integration with SAP for scenarios that don’t require data enrichment. It acts as the last-mile into SAP for other applications and combines eliminates the need for RPA bots to screen-scrape the UI to deliver faster, more stable process automation. Evolve Digital Access API: This RESTful API allows you to seamlessly launch Evolve workflow processes for either human-assisted workflows or completely automated sequences with your SAP ERP system.  Evolve 3rd-party API support: This RESTful API enables Evolve solution developers to easily integrate with other systems of record that have RESTful APIs, such as Salesforce or SAP’s ODATA service. You can query data from these third-party systems into your process or send  This combination of API’s available with Evolve 20.2 delivers a significant benefit to SAP teams looking to be part of larger, more complex digital transformation and automation efforts.
• #28: This slide shows how these other system of records may start or update an Evolve workflow (so both Process and Data are involved in this workflow interaction). Similarly, the workflow may connect with these systems to store or retrieve information as part of the workflow execution.
• #29: In fact, we’re increasingly encountering more and more non-SAP systems in our use cases. Even though SAP is still the dominant system of record, there is often a need to also connect to several other systems for complete automation of a use case. We have a deeply integrated experience when it comes to SAP and we also support a number of generic protocols for connecting to other systems and data sources. Evolve can now support EnterWorks natively as a data source. In addition to that, we will continue to expand the generic protocols we support for connecting to other systems. More specifically, we’ve added support for REST and ODATA APIs which are typically the APIs you’ll find in a lot of cloud-based third-party applications. This will be how Evolve solutions will connect to other SAP products that support ODATA. Depending on the specific third-party system, there may be additional future work required around authentication methods, but we have connectors for S/4HANA as well as Salesforce and we support a variety of authentication methods for connecting with third party systems coming out with this release. Next slide None/Anonymous: No authentication. Basic Authentication : Required User name and password when accessing APIs Http Headers : Where system key or secret or license key etc are required to send in Request HTTP headers. SAP Hana Basic: Required User name and password when accessing SAP Hana APIs
• #31: I’m going to start with some of the benefits of a cloud-first IT strategy. There are many more than are listed here but I wanted to call out some examples I’ve heard from our customers: Optimizing your IT infrastructure Lowering electricity expenses Reduced staffing Lower, more predictable capital costs Improved reliability without the need for redundancy Reduced carbon footprint
• #32: Ok, so, what does our offer include compared to an on-prem deployment? And I just want to cover these at a high level, but: Deployment options – We offer hosting through AWS. Hosting & managed service agreement – this means you have one group to work with for supporting your Automate deployment. Development & production environments – You get both a non-production and a production environment but you can add additional environments as well. Infrastructure support – meaning the servers themselves are managed by the Precisely DevOps team. OS & database support – This included patching for the OS & database, and again, would be covered by our DevOps team. Application support – This still comes out of our customer support team so no change here Managed services – This is kind of a catch all line for any type of support for the environment. Items like system monitoring, daily backups, environment testing, etc.. Evolve/SM upgrades – You are also entitled to upgrades for your Automate platform at no additional cost. Scalability to meet new demands – This is part of the flexibility of the cloud, if you start out with a smaller group of users and expand, the system can expand with you. SSO configuration – Out teams will work with your SSO team to configure single sign on on the system. Security management – Our team provides proactive vulnerability management as well as 24/7 monitoring and protection from intrusion.