KUALA LUMPUR: Enterprise applications provider SAP believe its 'Rise with SAP' initiative would empower flexibility to accelerate the speed of digital transformation.
SAP president and managing director Southeast Asia Verena Siow said businesses in Malaysia and across Southeast Asia are at a crucial transformative point to achieve long-term competitive growth.
"Regardless of industry, businesses must embrace true business transformation into intelligent enterprises while keeping in mind that customers are the lifeline to survival and sustainable growth," said Verena in a recent statement.
Rise with SAP is essentially business transformation as a service, with the aim of providing customers with the basic components of an intelligent enterprise in one bundle, complemented with premium services and tools.
The initiative provide the ability for companies to tailor their intelligent enterprise to meet their respective business needs.
According to the its website, Rise with SAP means that customers and partners alike can easily complement, extend, and integrate with any other of our line-of-business and industry solutions, partner, or third-party solution, using exactly the same data model and business services as SAP apps.
This allows them to run their core and industry-specific processes – seamlessly, end-to-end, and top-to-bottom, with full 360 degrees transparency.
Meanwhile, SAP Malaysia managing director Hong Kok Cheong said by transforming their business models into becoming intelligent enterprises, local organisations would be able to respond to individual customer needs, engage talent in new ways and create disruptive business models that are critical industry imperatives.
"I trust that SAP's business transformation as a service called Rise with SAP will help Malaysian enterprises to holistically transform their business with faster time to value — at their own speed and terms, regardless of their starting point," said Hong.
The statement also outlined findings of a new study of enterprises in Southeast Asia, including Malaysia, on the state of businesses and their strategic priorities, as well as challenges and opportunities for post-pandemic growth.
The regional study - entitled Digital, resilient, and experience-driven: How enterprises in Southeast Asia can prepare for the new economy – revealed that enterprises in Southeast Asia are gaining steady momentum prioritising growth and customer experiences. However, they face significant challenges in the areas of talent attraction and retention, cloud adoption, and gaining insights from data.
Enterprises in the region identify customer experience as a strategic imperative for survival and growth, with more than a third or 35 per cent saying service excellence is now their primary source of value and differentiation.
Positive customer experiences have also become the foremost strategic consideration for businesses in the region, with key factors being personalisation for the customer (59 per cent), providing high-quality products and/or services (55 per cent), ensuring data protection and privacy (53 per cent) and offering competitive pricing (51 per cent).
For large enterprises in Malaysia, the percentage was even higher for service excellence at 39 per cent.
Meanwhile, emphasis on improving the customer experience, service excellence and product excellence were at 45 per cent, 39 per cent and 27 per cent respectively.
On the data protection and privacy, and competitive pricing fronts, the percentages were at 66 per cent and 81 per cent, respectively.
Conducted in collaboration with Oxford Economics, the study surveyed 600 senior executives — including 400 from small and medium enterprises (SME) with less than US$500 million in revenue — across Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines.