Enabling the Intelligent Enterprise in the Energy and Natural Resources Industry with Partner Collaboration

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Today’s businesses are striving to move from routine, run-of-the-mill work to value-added activities that can enable better processes, and result in happier people and impact to the top or bottom line. In order to facilitate this change, companies want to become ‘intelligent enterprises’. Companies are looking to leverage emerging technology and digital systems that transform enterprise resource planning and processes into future-ready models of business.
 
SAP has been at the forefront of enabling digital transformation for companies across the globe, and partner collaboration in conjunction with SAP technology has been a key golden thread. The ideal SAP ISV partner brings deep experience in various industries or lines of business, and digital technology know-how.  They are well versed in the typical critical customer business problems. SAP partners can package the above expertise into a digital app that can then be resold, configured and tweaked to meet customer-specific needs.
 
By taking this approach, the customer does not have to start from scratch but rather leverages the partner’s app, which aggregates best practices from many customers in the industry. This digital solution can substantially improve business processes and outcomes. Moreover, the customer does not need to own and manage custom applications and this minimizes risk and typically reduces the total cost of ownership.
 
Many businesses are already using SAP solutions such as S/4HANA, SuccessFactors and more. With an existing SAP infrastructure in place, a partner adds incremental value with their pre-packaged applications. There is a reduced time-to-market, as the app is already built and more than likely already addresses 80% of the needs. After configuration and if needed, customization, they have a full-fledged solution to address their business needs. Now it is more than one consulting project benefiting just one customer. The input and needs from one customer are getting absorbed into the core product for everyone’s benefit.
 
Furthermore, SAP provides SAP Cloud Platform as the ideal business platform as a service for partners and customers to use to extend or integrate with SAP and third-party business solutions. SAP Cloud Platform provides a scalable and reliable framework for partners to build and deploy apps reducing disruption for the end customer and supports open industry standards and technologies to avoid vendor lock-in.
 
Incture is one of the SAP partners who has demonstrated expertise in creating end-to-end digital systems for the future, on SAP Cloud Platform, that are based on tried and tested digital apps.
 
One industry where their work has created ripples across the SAP ecosystem is the Energy and Natural Resource Industry. For one of the top North American energy companies, Incture created an electrical pole inspection solution that predicted maintenance needs for a vast system of poles. It leveraged the Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities of SAP HANA and SAP Leonardo to predict when a pole needs maintenance before the wood decays. The customer used the solution to cut down on instances of decayed poles becoming non-functional by more than 60%.
 
Another prominent Incture project is in the Oil and Gas sector, where they have created a Digital Field Ticket application for one of North America’s biggest oil companies. The app enabled template-based ticket creation on mobile for on-site resources at the oil field to make service-entry requests to their suppliers. By utilizing the application, the parties involved can speed up the payment process and improve the overall supply chain operational efficiency.
 
SAP is proud to partner with Incture in their effort to help customers transform their businesses and become intelligent enterprises with Incture’s pre-packaged SAP Cloud Platform apps.

David Sacks

About the Author: As the Senior Director of Platform Ecosystems in the Americas, David manages the SAP application developer ecosystem in North and Latin America. His areas of expertise include channel sales, value-added distribution, professional services, information technology, OEM and ISV, presales, program management, product management and operations. He is an innovator with a strong work ethic and has led high performing, diverse, remote teams with solid, goal-oriented execution. David has also helped companies create new strategic partnerships and routes to market focusing on both cloud and on-premise solutions.