Sap Se
A Comprehensive Path To The Intelligent Enterprise

Digitalization has touched every aspect of today’s life, and without a doubt, it brings new and exciting opportunities for the telecommunications industry. To succeed, telecommunications companies today strive to strengthen their position as the providers of digital services beyond connectivity while focusing on profitable growth across their key customer segments by embedding intelligence into every step of the value chain. Telco operators are expected to provide reliable connectivity for smarter cities and take the lead as the orchestrator and platform provider in the enlarged ecosystem.

To help telco operators transform their business and become intelligent enterprises, and SAP has developed a unique strategy using its expertise and solutions to deliver on its vision, enabling intelligent enterprises to turn insight into action. SAP supports telecommunications companies in becoming intelligent enterprises – providing integrated business applications that use smart technologies and can be extended on SAP Cloud Platform to deliver breakthrough business value.

SAP delivers fully intelligent business solutions and networks that span company boundaries and promote purpose-driven businesses. These solutions will be the most empathic symbiosis between machine intelligence and human ingenuity. By bringing together world-class innovators, industry and emerging technology expertise, proven use cases, and design thinking methods, the company helps telcos develop innovations that deliver impact at scale.

“We have identified four strategic priorities necessary for telecommunications companies to transform their business. It includes approaches focused on customer first, operational excellence, revenue stream diversification, and intelligent connectivity,” Carl Kehres, Global Vice President Telecommunications, SAP SE.

Customer-centric Approach

Technology progress and changing government regulations provide consumers more flexibility and options to choose their communications service provider. Telcos must differentiate themselves by delivering the best-personalized experience for their most valuable customers by monitoring every interaction of their customers’ experiences to identify opportunities for improvement. In the experience economy, the cycle time to sense, analyze, and respond to the customer experience is a big competitive differentiator.

With SAP solutions, telcos intertwine their business systems’ operational performance data, or O-data (explains what is happening), with experience data, or X-data (explains why it is happening), which comes “in the moment” from customers. Combining O-data and X-data helps ensure that every business decision is based on both facts and feelings. By connecting the front office and back office, telcos link all their internal processes with the customer experience – for example, optimizing their device supply chain to deliver the right devices through any channel and at any time customers want.

Operational Excellence

Telcos are expected to make massive investments in network infrastructures, which create severe challenges in asset management. Telcos have faced high maintenance costs and low return on investment along the asset lifecycle due to broken processes and inconsistent, inaccurate data; the 5G requirement only adds oil to the fire. The introduction of digital twin technology to the telecommunications industry clears the path toward the operating model for the next-generation networks that are evolving toward sharing and collaboration. With functionality enabled by SAP software for connected assets, telcos can streamline infrastructure operation through a collaborative working model. They can provide visibility and transparency of contingent workforces, equipment, network sites, spare parts, and cables to equipment providers, maintenance contractors, and tower owners. At the same time, they can assure the consistency and integrity of the asset record by creating a digital representation of the network sites in the cloud with 100% visibility. By unifying the physical view of network assets with financial and logical views, telcos will be equipped with granular financial performance data insights, such as profit per antenna and operational performance – including energy efficiency and equipment utilization per antenna – driving more granular optimization and fine-tuning of investment returns.
Revenue Diversification

As telcos diversify from offering communication services to working with partners to provide digital services and solutions to consumers and enterprise customers, their legacy business support systems can’t keep up. The systems, which have been focused on the monetization of communication services, cannot provide the agility and flexibility required by the new approach. The power of an agile and ecosystem-friendly lead-to-cash platform becomes apparent. SAP provides integrated, cloud-native applications for intelligent monetization, allowing telcos to transform their end-to-end lead-to-cash process.

These applications enable telcos and all participants in their ecosystem to configure, price, and quote complex offerings together intelligently by combining connectivity, infrastructure, solutions, and services. They help ensure that incentive and commission plans are intelligently optimized and accurately executed for telco-internal and partner and dealer sales forces. They also provide cutting-edge mediation and charging capabilities, which are required to monetize new network capabilities from 5G, such as network slicing, and new business models, such as B2B2X, which telcos would charge and bill on behalf of their enterprise customers in serving end consumers. Last but not least, they enable flexible pricing mechanisms and proper billing and revenue distribution along with the ecosystem for complex bundling of new digital offerings.

Unleash the Power of 5g with Intelligent Connectivity Services

The potential of 5G, when combined with new technologies such as AI, machine learning, and edge computing, will be significant. And as we move from a 4G to a 5G world, the size and quantity of data streams will grow exponentially. As a result, there are significant challenges for enterprises regarding data management and data strategy. SAP’s data management platforms will be critical components of enabling 5G adoption for our customers across 25 industries. And with the growth of edge computing, telcos are well-positioned to deliver data management as a service and platform as a service, so the value chain for SAP’s software stack and telco’s infrastructure capabilities will be closely tied together. Intelligent connectivity services enable telcos to bundle SAP’s data management platform, including edge services, with next-generation connectivity, providing enterprises the technology foundation to scale from on-premise and cloud to the edge of the network for data transmission optimization, latency-sensitive use cases, and deterministic performance of business processes. Enterprise customers can make their assets and employees