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In a world where innovation is happening at an unprecedented pace, businesses are finding themselves at a crossroads. They are presented with new opportunities to reimagine the way they work, collaborate, and invent. But businesses of all sizes, in every industry, are struggling under the weight of disjointed and disparate technology stacks that distract them from growth, resilience, and innovation.

That’s where clean core comes in. With a clean core strategy for your business technology – starting with your ERP – you can stay focused on what matters most to your business.

Operating with Greater Control and Agility at Your Core

Clean core is a concept designed to keep your organization’s core ERP systems transparent, flexible, consistent, and efficient. It provides the foundation for igniting innovation in the areas of your business that matter the most, allowing your systems to keep up with your business needs more easily, enable innovation, and even support a transition to the cloud.

Clean core has long been the primary goal of enterprise resource planning. After all, the point of having an ERP system is to keep your business running smoothly and adapt quickly to changing market conditions. Yet somewhere along the way, many businesses got lost – they adopted sprawling technology stacks with significant customizations and redundant integrations that negate the purpose of a modern, intelligent ERP system. Why? Too often, businesses believe they are so different that almost every process warrants a nonstandard approach.

In reality, most businesses have more in common than they realize. In terms of finance, accounting, HR, procurement, and many other core business processes, you’re probably very similar to your competitors and others in your industry. Clean core identifies those parts of the business that are standard and enables you to focus on your technology needs related to the nonstandard processes that set you apart from the rest.

Explore the value of a clean core strategy Learn about RISE with SAP Setting Your Business Apart with Strategic Differentiators

Take a luxury fashion brand and a fast-fashion retailer, for example. They both have the same core business goal – and related processes – of designing, manufacturing, and selling apparel and accessories. However, the luxury fashion brand likely focuses more on customer service and the procurement of high-quality materials, while the fast-fashion powerhouse probably places greater importance on rapid design and production cycles. 

Despite their differences, both these businesses would benefit from using the same standard ERP and best practices designed for their industry. Doing so empowers them to focus on the strategic differentiators that make them unique, whether that’s creating custom solutions for the customer experience or innovating ways to cut costs.

So, what are SAP customers doing to differentiate themselves from the competition? Hitachi High Tech (HHT) replaced its highly customized, multinational business landscape with a move to the cloud, investing in SAP S/4HANA Cloud. With a two-tier public and private cloud model, using a side-by-side development approach on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), HHT reduced 9,000 custom code developments to 472, allowing it to facilitate major upgrades every year and minor updates every six months. Moreover, it’s adopted a clean core mindset as part of the strategy going forward. By embracing the change, HHT moves from a legacy approach to a future-ready intelligent enterprise.

The Clean Core Journey: A Starting Point, Not an End

The industry is sending a clear message: cloud is the default, and it’s rapidly becoming the new normal. However, to truly future-proof their business, organizations should adopt a clean core strategy, a concept that is revolutionizing the way businesses innovate. For many businesses, upgrading to a cloud-based ERP system is the natural next step.

But there are steps you can take to get closer to a clean core and prepare yourself for the future, even before you are ready to make the jump to the cloud. To start, determine what parts of your ERP drive value. Create two categories: one for differentiating elements that deliver value to your business and another for basic functions that don’t create value but keep your business running. By determining which parts of your business set you apart – and whether they’re locked behind fragile integrations and custom code – you can begin thinking more strategically about whether your core ERP system is helping you achieve your goals. You can build on this foundation, enriching your systems to incorporate your competitive differentiators and create a business platform that sets you apart in the marketplace.

The future belongs to those that embrace the clean core and leverage it as a launchpad for innovation and growth. The time to embark on this transformative journey is now.

Claudio Muruzabal is chief business officer at SAP.

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In an ever-changing world, businesses require data-driven, real-time insights from HR reporting and analytics to make informed decisions that affect their workforce. But many HR teams still rely on older technology and struggle to fulfill demands for reports that encompass an increasing volume of metrics and data. The time they spend gathering, extracting, and transforming data across a patchwork of tools and spreadsheets detracts from other urgent tasks. Despite their efforts, the resultant reports are limited in usefulness by past data and often contain inconsistencies that require additional time to resolve. 

Global specialty materials company Eastman overcame its HR reporting challenges by implementing story reports in SAP SuccessFactors solutions, making its reporting easier and more efficient. For example, a standard talent report – once a labor-intensive task that took several days of precious time – is now generated in under two hours complete with detailed graphics that are continuously updated with live data. Indeed, an SAP study found that with the analytics tools available in SAP SuccessFactors solutions, customers reported a 74% decrease in time spent on report generation, saving days and even weeks on HR reporting.  

“The ability to give our [HR] information to leaders as they need it is huge,” says Nina Nabors, manager of Talent Systems, Eastman. She summarizes the transformation in improvement over past reporting methods. “Before, it was lagging data. It was never data that was live. Having that benefit of building the story report in SAP SuccessFactors and it continuously updating with the latest information is very nice.”

Based in Tennessee, U.S., Eastman Chemical Company was founded in 1920 as a subsidiary of Eastman Kodak. It has a workforce of 14,000 employees in 15 countries. Energized in its purpose to “enhance the quality of life in a material way,” Eastman engages with customers in 100 countries to deliver innovative materials found in items people use every day, including safe, durable medical materials; premium plastics for eyewear frames and lenses; food and beverage packaging; sustainable fibers for luxury home furnishings; and energy-efficient window glass for the construction industry, among others.

Cloud HR Delivers Sustainable Value with Exceptional Employee Experience

To future-proof its workforce, Eastman set itself up for success by moving to the cloud with SAP SuccessFactors solutions. Eastman was already using an on-premise human capital management (HCM) solution from SAP, but wanted the scalability and cost-effectiveness of a cloud-based HR solution. “Delivering [HR] services in the cloud gives us an opportunity to make the technology available to our employees in a way that is more sustainable than having it housed on our servers,” says Nabors.

Prachi Sathe, director of Global HR Technology and Solutions, Eastman, underscores the value of receiving the latest innovations and new features with each biannual SAP SuccessFactors release update. “We also wanted to make sure our HR platform is sustainable in terms of how we support it, how we grow it, and how we make more functions available to our employees. Going to SAP SuccessFactors just made sense for us,” she says.

Put employee experience and engagement at the heart of your organization with SAP SuccessFactors HXM Suite Learn more

Eastman uses a range of solutions in SAP SuccessFactors Human Experience Management (HXM) Suite – including SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central and modules for recruiting, learning, compensation, variable pay, performance and goals, career development planning, and succession – to help harness the efficiency of end-to-end integration and provide an exceptional experience throughout the employee journey from hire to retire.

The SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting solution, for example, is a key driver of Eastman’s talent strategy. “That’s how we bring our new talent into the organization. That’s really their first introduction to our tools,” says Nabors. “We’re bringing great talent into the organization. How we do it is very important, and SAP SuccessFactors is a part of that.”

Accelerating Efficiency with Real-Time Analytics

Eastman needed a streamlined approach to HR reporting that accelerated efficiency and optimized value by fully using the analytics and data in SAP SuccessFactors solutions. “We were using separate tools outside of SAP SuccessFactors solutions to pull our reporting together,” recalls Sathe. “The challenges with that [were figuring out] how we get data out of SAP SuccessFactors solutions and feed it into those reporting tools.”

Eastman’s customer success partner for the SAP Preferred Success plan identified SAP resources to help Eastman increase value from its use of SAP SuccessFactors People Analytics. Eastman also joined a hands-on lab session at SuccessConnect 2022 to gain experience working with story reports, a tool available in the report center of SAP SuccessFactors solutions. Story reports can deliver real-time data analytics and generate reports faster by using live data from across SAP SuccessFactors HXM Suite, displaying presentation-style reports in a clear format with detailed visual graphics that communicate insights in an understandable way. As Sathe notes, “When we saw [story reports], it was so motivating for us that data is already there and tools are there. We came back and started working on our first dashboard.”

“We’re so happy Eastman joined us at SuccessConnect,” says Maryann Abbajay, chief revenue officer, SAP SuccessFactors. “Hands-on lab sessions like the one Eastman participated in are invaluable learning experiences. Eastman is a great example of how customers are applying that new knowledge to unlock value with SAP SuccessFactors. With story reports, they are already able to deliver the type of data-driven insights that transform HR into a strategic partner for the business.”    

Data-Driven Insights That Advance People Strategy

Eastman began working with a manager dashboard, one of the many time-saving templates preloaded in story reports, and later built its own version tailored to the information requirements of its organizational leaders, supervisors, and people managers. The HR team also developed custom objects to use in its story reports, including an organizational hierarchy table with extensive drilldown capabilities and a currency exchange table to help executives track international labor costs. The story reports, customized with the look and feel of Eastman’s branding, quickly gained broad acceptance with Eastman’s organizational leaders.

Explore stories in SAP SuccessFactors solutions Read the guide

The HR team recently built a dashboard showing a holistic view to help leaders identify opportunities to advance the organization’s people strategy. This dashboard uses data from SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central and will later be augmented with data from the recruiting and learning solutions. A talent dashboard is also forthcoming to Eastman’s HR community, which includes talent partners and leaders. Sathe notes, “By creating the stories, as its name says, we are bringing various data sources together.”

Michael Glenn, talent assessment and analytics manager, Eastman, is building a new learning dashboard that will go out to all learning administrators and supervisors to enable them to see how many people are overdue on their learnings and what learnings are coming up in the next 30 days – and how many hours are required to complete the learning sessions. This information is especially important for production teams that work on fixed schedules, as it enables managers to plan the learning hours into the employee’s schedule.

To ensure the reports provide the right level of information to each recipient based on their role, Glenn intends to use the role-based access permissions available in story reports. So far, he is impressed with the feature, which saves him time from performing manual activities and distribution list maintenance. “We’ve been testing out role-based permissions and it is just working great,” he says.

Empowering HR Administrators with User-Friendly Solutions for Improved Productivity

Nabors says that though she has no background or training in analytics, she found that she was able to get up to speed with stories very quickly. She recalls previously spending several days to build a single report that integrated data from SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central and SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting. In stories, she is now able to generate the same report in just one to two hours.

Also, troubleshooting and addressing gaps in data is much easier. “If there’s an error somewhere – for example, requisition data that shows up under the wrong person’s name – being able to see it in a story is very easy,” she says. “It’s easy to address that error quickly because you can go right to the error without having to dig through lines and lines of data, rows and columns of data.”

Better Analytics for Faster Decision-Making

Eastman plans to build on its early success with story reports to drive more insights for the organization. For example, there are plans to integrate data to track progress towards Eastman’s ambitious inclusion and diversity goals, which include increasing diverse talent and supporting employees in bringing their whole selves to work. Real-time information from SAP SuccessFactors solutions supports organizational leaders in advancing Eastman’s strategy to build a high-performing organization.

“We really believe in sustainability and sustainable outcomes,” says Sathe. “We want our employees to be self-service reporting employees and create better analytics that give them information versus data. What we were doing previously was giving them data. Story reports transformed this.”

For more information, read “A Guide to Stories in SAP SuccessFactors.”

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Bitcoin hodlers have been busy derisking — even before the ETF launch — and the BTC price desperately needs a liquidity boost.

Senator Elizabeth Warren used the U.S. Governmental Accountability Office report to show crypto in a negative light despite the report’s content offering a contrasting view.

Traders have again raised hopes over Dogecoin after a newly created payments-focused account for the platform quickly gained traction.

Within a week, the crypto industry lost two pro-crypto presidential hopefuls, though there’s some hope Donald Trump could be a secret wildcard for crypto.

The firm claims to have between $100 million and $500 million in estimated assets and liabilities.

Bitcoin is still taking stock of the ETF launch, analysts conclude, with BTC price lacking a convincing trend.

There has already been more than $300 billion in stablecoin transfer volume in January, eclipsing December’s volume.

Coinbase and SEC face off at hearing, Sam Bankman-Fried’s parents seek clawback dismissal, and the first trading days for Bitcoin ETFs.

Investors are focusing on more liquid, growth-ready startup opportunities as crypto venture capital continues to recover.

Trezor users who have contacted its support team since December 2021 may have been affected by the incident.

BENGALURU, India; Nov. 18, 2021 – Accenture (NYSE: ACN) has completed its acquisition of BRIDGEi2i, an artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics firm headquartered in Bengaluru, India. The financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

TOKYO; Nov. 18, 2021 – Accenture (NYSE: ACN) has agreed to acquire Tambourine, an e-commerce customer experience agency with award-winning capabilities in cloud-based technologies in Japan. Tambourine brings a proven track record in using Salesforce Commerce Cloud to deliver seamless commerce experiences for consumer goods and entertainment companies. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

WASHINGTON, D.C.; Nov. 18, 2021 – 5G fixed wireless access (FWA) services could serve 8.4 million rural households — nearly half the rural homes in the U.S. — with a “future-proof”, rapidly deployable, and cost-effective high-speed broadband option, according to a new Accenture (NYSE: ACN) study commissioned by CTIA, the wireless industry association.

PARIS, NEW YORK AND HONG KONG; Nov. 18, 2021 – Efma, an association of more than 2,550 retail financial services companies in 133 countries, and Accenture (NYSE: ACN) today announced the winners of the eighth annual Efma-Accenture Banking Innovation Awards during a virtual ceremony.  

NEW YORK and BELLEVUE, Wash; Nov. 18, 2021 – Accenture (NYSE: ACN) and Icertis today announced a strategic partnership that brings together Accenture’s digital transformation capabilities with leading contract intelligence technology from Icertis to help clients across industries get greater visibility into their contracts as well as manage risk and the contracting process more efficiently and effectively. The partnership builds on the success of Accenture’s own use of Icertis Contract Intelligence (ICI) across its global legal and procurement operations.

BENGALURU, India; Nov. 17, 2021 – Accenture (NYSE: ACN) announced the winners of its Accenture Innovation Challenge 2021, a national-level competition aimed at inspiring students in India to apply their technology skills and creativity to develop innovative solutions which create value for society and businesses. The grand prize was awarded to the team from Velammal Engineering College, Chennai, for their solution Agrivery bags, which works as an alternative to plastic bags and helps prevent damage to food grains from rodents and pests.

NEW YORK; Nov. 17, 2021 – Accenture (NYSE: ACN) has been selected by Organon (NYSE: OGN), a global health care company, to help establish and manage the transformation of the company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) technology into a cloud-based digital core that will improve patient and employee experiences.

LONDON; Nov. 16, 2021 – Accenture (NYSE: ACN) has acquired Founders Intelligence, an innovation strategy consulting firm that helps large corporations to create growth by using tools, techniques and insights from technology entrepreneurs and investors. The acquisition strengthens Accenture’s capabilities to help senior executives create and scale new business models and achieve sustainable value from innovation. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.