Unveiled at the inaugural SAP Forward Together virtual event, SAP released the results of its poll of 4,500 Southeast Asian business leaders. According to the study, 40% of the businesses polled are still adopting a “wait and see” approach in response to the pandemic, which raises concerns about COVID-19’s impact in the long run.

The German multinational software corporation, however, reaffirms its goal to help Southeast Asian businesses “innovate and transform” to elevate their competitiveness in a post-COVID-19 world. In a wider context, this will help ASEAN maintain its status as one of the world's fastest-growing markets supporting consumers and businesses.

“The Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in the world economy going through a period of ‘reset’ for the ‘rebound’. The race for competitiveness has already started again, and countries that sprint forward now will leave others trailing behind,” said Rachel Barger, President & Managing Director, SAP South East Asia.

“For countries and companies that are complacent with a ‘wait and see’ attitude, they would be left behind – and may even become ‘irrelevant’.” she said. "As businesses recalibrate their strategies for the long-term, it is crucial to shift away from an expectation to revert to normalcy as before. In a new reality, intelligent enterprises can ‘do more with less’, deliver best-in-class customer experience, build resilient supply chains, while inventing new business models and revenue streams.”

The digital era is evolving into an ‘intelligent’ one whereby businesses are facing mounting new challenges amidst digital disruption and new rules to the game. Winning companies are those that transform through innovation, more so in today’s ‘digitally disruptive’ world compounded by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Implications of COVID-19 on SEA businesses

The majority of regional business leaders (63%) surveyed have already seen changes in customers’ purchasing behavior and motivations since the beginning of 2020, although 21% of businesses are unsure or lack insight on changes in their customer’s needs. Amidst this shift, organizations are still moving conservatively with their digital transformation efforts, with many adopting a protective stance with the mindset that disruption from COVID-19 will pass in due course.

Although businesses have pivoted their operations towards e-commerce and online selling, smaller businesses still worry over implementation costs of digital platforms and juggling operations to meet the sudden influx of demand. Around 20% of businesses foresee a need to adapt their customer experience strategies to meet evolving expectations and needs of customers across platforms.

Supply chain and operations are also other aspects that businesses are keeping a close watch on, with 22% of businesses expecting significant change in the future. Alongside changing customer consumption patterns, supply chains have shifted in the wake of safe-distancing measures of lockdowns, leading to a stop-&-go pattern in business-to-business operations.

As businesses make sense of the new post-pandemic economic reality, worries and uncertainty over the long-term prospects of growth and survivability has emerged as the foremost concern. Over 80% of regional business leaders surveyed expect significant/massive impact to change their business model or operations, with just 1% expecting “business-as-usual” in the long run.

With business-as-usual no longer an option, regional business leaders are adjusting organizational priorities with a focus on business transformation (21%), enhancing customer engagement (15%), making business processes more efficient (14%), ensuring business continuity (12%), and supply chain resilience and redefinition (9%).

According to the Boston Consulting Group, high-performing companies who successfully tackled crises and major economic downturns demonstrate a similar pattern, that have allowed them to emerge as winners during and after past recessions. High-performing companies who managed to improve their top-line and bottom-line positions adopt a proactive approach, using the downturn as an opportunity to drive large-scale transformation like digitalization.

Accelerating business transformation in a post COVID-19 world

Prior to the COVID-19 crisis, the drivers of technology were focused on cost reduction and productivity. The goal was to make well run businesses run better. As we adapt to the new realities caused by COVID-19, the roles of technology will have to evolve to:

• Achieve resiliency – to steer your company through challenging times with agility
• Deliver profitability – with transparency across both the top and bottom line, supporting business growth and increased productivity and
• Act sustainably – by reducing carbon footprint, minimizing waste, and transitioning to the circular economy

We can all start now to build our journey towards an Intelligent Enterprise to greatly reduce the impact of this crisis, while helping ASEAN businesses to innovate and transform into winning companies. For example:

• Intelligent technologies can be used to provide real-time visibility into the availability of raw materials, people, and assets.
• Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning can be used to constantly reassess and re-plan activities.
• Robotic Process Automation can be used to automate labor intensive activities and focus our workers on more value-added and efficacy-driving activities.

SAP’s efforts to lend a helping hand

To support business continuity through these challenging times, SAP has opened up access to selected technology solutions.

As a result, SAP is providing free access to SAP Ariba Discovery, the world’s largest business network until December 31, 2020, so any buyer can post their immediate sourcing needs and any supplier can respond to show they can deliver. Free access to Qualtrics Remote Work Pulse has also helped organizations understand how their employees are doing and what support they need as they adapt to new work environments.

Additionally, businesses can also access the SAP Value Lifecycle Manager, an industry benchmark tool that supports businesses to measure, monitor and optimize value across their enterprise. To help businesses go digital and transform into intelligent enterprises, the SAP Experience Center Singapore provides an innovative space for businesses to deep dive into the latest technologies like AI, Big Data and data intelligence on the cloud to develop solutions tailored to the organization’s unique challenges. (Source: SAP)

By MediaBUZZ