Chief Digital Officer, Schneider Electric SE
Patrick Weckesser (Schneider Electric) & Thomas Saueressig (SAP) talk about digital transformation
During SAPPHIRE The Hague, we spoke to Patrick Weckesser (Schneider Electric) and Thomas Saueressig (SAP) on Schneider Electrics mentionable digital transfomation journey.
Thank you for joining us in The Hague! Missed the keynotes? Find replays at SAP Sapphire Virtual ▶️ https://sap.to/6056zTvR4
SAP Nederlands is a subsidiary of SAP AG and responsible for all activities in the Netherlands. The head office is in 's-Hertogenbosch. SAP is active in more than 50 countries worldwide and more than 190,000 customers use the software to operate profitably and grow sustainably.
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Transcript (13 segments)
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SAP Podcast Host0:01
Welcome to the SAP Podcast with SAP Sapphire 2022. I'm here in The Hague for the regional event, and I brought the SAP podcast to collect real-life customer stories. During the keynote, the digital transformation journey story of Schneider Electric really stood out, and to find out more, I'm joined here by Peter Weckesser, Chief Digital Officer from Schneider Electric, and Thomas Saueressig, member of the SAP Executive Board responsible for product engineering. Welcome to the SAP podcast.
You just gave the keynote, and I think the story of Schneider Electric really stood out on your digital transformation journey. Maybe you can elaborate a little bit on what you just explained.
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Peter Weckesser0:47
If I'm asked to explain what digital transformation means at Schneider, it's really a business transformation. Digital doesn't mean that we only introduce a couple of new tools across the organization, but we are looking at this as a digital business transformation. This business transformation has two dimensions for us. The first dimension is really about our value proposition, about our portfolio, where we have emerged from a very classical electromechanical product portfolio in low and medium voltage—motors, drives, PLCs—to a much more software-defined and digitally-defined value proposition. This has been a journey going on for a good number of years already, with exogenous as well as endogenous investments. EcoStruxure, our IT platform, is the core of this enhanced value proposition. We see sales numbers growing really nicely, particularly to drive more software and service sales in the future. That's one dimension. The other dimension of our digital transformation is really about productivity and efficiency across all of our business processes—from PLM, CRM, SCM. We have created a model which we call our Power Couple model, where we have one partner being the business process owner and the other partner is the owner of all the technical platforms for that respective business process. This is business and IT—they go hand in hand. From my viewpoint, this is the only way to drive a business transformation. It needs to go hand in hand. You need to challenge each other between business and IT, sometimes rap on each other a little bit. At the end, we are asking these Power Couples not only what are the problems you need to fix next quarter, but what is the target state you would like to reach in three to five years. What is that target picture on the business process side as well as on the digital platform side?
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SAP Podcast Host3:01
Thomas, maybe you can explain how SAP supports Schneider the best way in their digital transformation journey?
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Thomas Saueressig3:08
I think what we talked about on stage is agility. There's a need for speed in implementation projects—time to value—and that's exactly why we team up as partners to think about how we can help with our S/4HANA public cloud solution to get the speed into that, because speed is of essence in these very unprecedented times. From our aspect, we have three big ambitions which line up perfectly to Schneider Electric: business transformation as a key aspect—Peter mentioned it, it's for me a best role model of how businesses in the lead try to change together with an IT function enabling that with agile software—but then also the supply chain topic, supply chain resiliency, and last but not least our common shared goal about sustainability. That's exactly where we believe with our modern S/4HANA cloud solution we can help Schneider to achieve the goals we actually share.
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SAP Podcast Host3:58
So digital transformation is one challenge, but how do you also face the sustainability challenge?
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Peter Weckesser4:06
Sustainability and transformation are basically two sides of the same coin—and not only for us at Schneider Electric, but for any company out there. Every company needs to rethink their business models and drive sustainability through all scopes—scope 1, scope 2, scope 3, and even scope 4 is important. We all realize scope 3 is by far the biggest piece of that challenge, so we need to really look into our supply chain—not only Schneider, everybody needs to do that—upstream as well as downstream, and really manage our supplier network, help our suppliers to achieve their sustainability ambitions. This is really key for us. I personally believe we have too many standards out there; I hope that these converge very quickly. I believe also in sustainability there's a lot of potential in partnering between SAP and Schneider Electric in the future.
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SAP Podcast Host5:04
How can SAP support you the best way in this sustainability journey?
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Thomas Saueressig5:09
Let's start with supply chain, which is of course in the current supply chain crisis one of the bigger challenges for many companies. SAP is the core platform that we use in our own supply chain management, and many of our customers use SAP in their supply chains. We need to connect supply chains across the whole value chain, from raw materials until a product is delivered into the market. Schneider, particularly in the supply chain crisis, realized they have clear areas for improvement—creating company-wide standards wherever that makes business sense. Traditionally, through many acquisitions, they didn't have that level of integration, and now they believe RISE with public cloud is the solution to achieve that. They want to decommission 70 ERP systems in the course of the next years—that's a huge transformation. I believe in very quick deployment, and this is only doable in public cloud, because the whole commissioning can happen much faster compared to the classical approach of procuring compute hardware and setting everything up. Commissioning out of public cloud will be much faster, and that's the recipe to drive a transformation like this relatively quickly. That's the best proof that we had in mind when we came up with RISE with public cloud.
It's a perfect story, and what is so exciting is the approach Schneider Electric takes. The technology works, our products work—we have more than 20,000 S/4HANA customers around the globe already, significantly increasing. But actually, how to do it, how to approach it—that's the key challenge. Schneider Electric is again a role model for how to do that together with the business, seeing it as a strategic enabler for all of that. I have to say I'm really excited that we are able to join that journey together to make that a reality.
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Peter Weckesser7:27
An amazing journey. Thank you very much.
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Thomas Saueressig7:29
Enjoyed it. Enjoy your SAP Sapphire. Thank you.
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Peter Weckesser7:31
Thank you. Pleasure to be here. Thank you.