Deloitte and SAP Collaborate for Machine Learning, IoT and Blockchain

To help clients rapidly develop capabilities for addressing some of tomorrow’s most complex challenges, Deloitte Consulting today announced its intention to team with SAP America, Inc. to build a new suite of services for enabling digital transformation.

Deloitte Consulting and SAP are expected to co-innovate on the development of offerings that will help organizations benefit from the expanded SAP® Leonardo portfolio—to automate processes, gain deeper insights for decision-making, and deliver innovation and value throughout the enterprise. SAP Leonardo is a Digital Innovation System that combines machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities, blockchain technology, analytics, and big data on SAP Cloud Platform to enable rapid innovation that can scale across the entire organization.

Deloitte Consulting and SAP also intend to create new “micro-services” that extend the capabilities of SAP Leonardo, with an initial plan to focus on offerings that address evolving machine learning, analytics, and IoT needs in finance and throughout the supply chain.

“As businesses strive to adopt digital business models, they are seeking trusted technology that enables them to operate with more agility, to deliver more effective results and to simplify their operations,” said Rob Enslin, member of the Executive Board of SAP SE and President of Cloud Business Group, SAP. “With SAP Leonardo, we are delivering industry-specific innovation capabilities and services that integrate with core business applications, so that customers can build a seamless bridge between operating and innovating. Working closely with Deloitte Consulting, we expect to develop truly innovative digital solutions.”

The first solutions planned to launch under the new co-innovation initiative will provide clients with “Lights Out Finance” and “Live Factory” capabilities. With Lights Out Finance, clients might deploy cognitive and robotic extensions to help automate financial processes, including shared services. Live Factory will be aimed at helping organizations connect the shop floor through SAP Leonardo, enabling predictive decision-making to help improve throughput and reduce bottlenecks.

“These solutions are just the beginning. Through this collaboration, we’re building a foundation—a set of co-innovation practices and processes—that will help position Deloitte Consulting to continuously develop and refine digital solutions for clients across industries,” said Jim Moffatt, Deloitte Managing Partner, Global Consulting. “By working together to invent digital solutions that address tomorrow’s finance and supply chain needs, SAP will gain Deloitte Consulting’s in-depth business process knowledge and understanding of how organizations will use technologies in the future. In turn, we are gaining from SAP deeper insights into the art of the possible with the power of SAP Leonardo and upcoming enhancements to SAP S/4HANA.”

What’s next? Additional offerings under the umbrellas of “Finance Innovation” and “Supply Chain Innovation” are planned for design and release in the future. Deloitte Consulting and SAP also plan to develop and release a series of industry-specific offerings to help organizations accelerate digital transformation with software as a service (SaaS), providing “SaaS Innovation for Digital Core” to industries.

Finance, the supply chain, and SaaS represent potential hotbeds of activity when it comes to the future of digital. Many leaders seeking to gain an edge in tomorrow’s economy understand that these are areas in which they will have to innovate if they want to simplify core functions, manage the bottom line, deliver new products and services, leverage the cloud to streamline business, generate new value, and remain competitive.

“It’s a terrific fit,” Moffatt said. “SAP technology solutions such as SAP Leonardo and SAP S/4HANA Cloud allow organizations to ‘run simple.’ And Deloitte Consulting—as a technology enabler and thought leader—can help organizations deploy those SAP solutions while also positioning them to realize new value in the rapidly evolving digital economy. Clients looking to gain an edge to compete in tomorrow’s environment will want the kind of solutions Deloitte Consulting is bringing to market through this new collaboration.”

As used in this press release, “Deloitte Consulting” refers only to the Deloitte member firms’ Consulting practices