Meet the First 2020 Speakers!

Gain key takeaways this year from SAP customer success stories on topics such as SAP S/4HANA®, data analytics and reporting, and the intelligent enterprise.

Check back often as we’ll be announcing new 2020 speakers in the coming weeks.

Patrick Thompson

CIO, Albemarle

Keynote: Albemarle Digital Journey – As Simple as ABC

Albemarle is a leading lithium, catalyst, and bromine specialty chemical company with a mission to…

Read more >

Lisa Entrekin

Logistics Operations and Systems Manager, Ascend Performance Materials

Automating the Freight Payables Invoicing Process through ERS

Issue: The process of submitting freight invoices through a third-party TMS provider was becoming an…

Read more >

Balaji Sundaram

Business Intelligence Analyst, Benjamin Moore & Co.

Benjamin Moore & Co.: From Traditional Reporting to an SAP Analytics Cloud Blend of Visual Analytics and Machine Learning Models

With the flood of data available, businesses these days are more interested in knowing “what…

Read more >

Aaron Benner

Analytics Architect, Ascend Performance Materials

Slashing Product Costs with Material Ledger and Actual Costing Analytics

Dynamic commodity fluctuations and pricing in the chemical industry demand a watchful eye on all…

Read more >

Mark Roberti

Founder and Editor, RFID Journal

Using RFID to Manage Assets and Improve Safety

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has been around for decades, but the technology has reached…

Read more >

 
 

Thanks To Our 2019 Sponsors!

View All
 
  •  
    Accenture
     
    Platinum
     
  •  
    NTT DATA
     
    Gold
     
  •  
    Innovapptive
     
    Gold
     
  •  
    Sigga
     
    Gold
     
  •  
    HCL
     
    Gold
     

Keynote: Albemarle Digital Journey – As Simple as ABC

Albemarle is a leading lithium, catalyst, and bromine specialty chemical company with a mission to power the world through sustainable solutions. Learn about the Albemarle digital journey of using the SAP S/4HANA platform to deliver IT business digital transformation, helping achieve its mission. Hear the ABCs of transformation at Ablemarle:


  • IT transformation

  • Business transformation

  • Digital transformation


Key takeaways:

  • Remove technical debt

  • No code change and use best practices

  • Digital transformation

Automating the Freight Payables Invoicing Process through ERS

Issue: The process of submitting freight invoices through a third-party TMS provider was becoming an expensive procedure with Ascend’s rapid growth and complex logistics network. Over 80,000 invoices are submitted annually via electronic data interchange (EDI), portal entry, or pdf, each with its individual transaction cost and time to process. Solution: We had already implemented evaluated receipt settlement (ERS) for large raw material purchases and wanted to duplicate the efficiencies in the area of freight payment. Instead of carriers submitting invoices, we are using ERS to queue up their payments in SAP immediately after good issues and nightly batch job.

Benjamin Moore & Co.: From Traditional Reporting to an SAP Analytics Cloud Blend of Visual Analytics and Machine Learning Models

With the flood of data available, businesses these days are more interested in knowing “what has happened” and “what could happen.” Companies with huge amounts of data in hand can do analytics, but it has been a major hindrance in answering questions such as how and where to start and what type of analytics is appropriate.

We at Benjamin Moore & Co. had similar problems that other companies face. For solving this puzzle, Benjamin Moore used tools such as SAP BusinessObjects 4.2, SAP BW 7.4, and SAP HANA to extract meanings from the huge amount of data in real time, helping to improve decision-making. The analytics in the company did not stop just with that—steps were taken to drive the analytics for predicting the future for instantaneous decision-making. As a first step, a regression model was built with the help of SAP BusinessObjects and Excel 2007. But this model did not provide the results as expected. After a lot of research, the company then used SAP Analytics Cloud for developing a blend of interactive visual dashboards and machine learning models (clustering and regression models). Decision-making that used to take weeks now takes just a few hours.

Key takeaways: 


  • How to transfer from traditional reporting to predictive analytics gradually

  • How machine learning models help in decision-making

  • How visual dashboard and machine learning models improved data literacy in the company

Slashing Product Costs with Material Ledger and Actual Costing Analytics

Dynamic commodity fluctuations and pricing in the chemical industry demand a watchful eye on all production and supply chain costs. Our company was experiencing monthly unexpected volatility in cost structure that was taking days of manual effort to diagnose and determine the source. An automated approach was needed. Using product costing analytics in SAP HANA, fueled by the material ledger and product costing data in Tableau, this project was able to identify commodity, freight, and warehousing cost overruns. The out-of-the-box material ledger data was aggregated and fine-tuned to flush out actual period costs of production versus consumption.

Results: A set of dynamic dashboards coupled with detailed SAP cost data allowed comparisons of actual versus standard cost to highlight monthly deviations and cost leakage. The project utilized transfer pricing data to compare make versus buy decisions at multiple levels in the production process. The tool also identified new commodity cost overruns where bills of material deviated from annual operating plan.

Conclusions: By utilizing a best-of-breed approach, making use of both SAP and non-SAP data in a hybrid data model, significant cost reductions and drill-through to identify emerging cost trends can be quickly identified.

 

 

 

Using RFID to Manage Assets and Improve Safety

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has been around for decades, but the technology has reached a stage of maturity where chemical companies and others are using it in a wide variety of applications. In this session, you will learn how chemical companies around the world are using RFID to track containers and other assets and how they are using the technology to improve worker safety. You will also get tips on how to deploy an RFID system successfully.