Procurement & Supply Chain Executive Exchange

It says here, Max, the meeting is being live streamed.

Yeah, so I'm setting up the YouTube live streaming right now. Okay, so then I'll give you, I'll give you a link and then you can share it.

Can you please share it directly to Jenny or Jenny or Charlene, Max, because I don't have—I can't use my computer right now to email them.

Oh oh oh oh oh! Hold on.

Okay.

Yes, I will.

Okay, see it. Change slide.

Okay.

So your pointer kuya don sa screen na? Ah ah. दो अन्य का पॉइंट्स स्टेम। सिगिता। ओके। ओके। हम पंद्रह चेंज कमीना स्लाइड्स को या आना ना मैंने। अभी बंग। Pause share or stop share now?

Stop share.

And then we'll open another one.

Okay, the YouTube feed is working. I tested it. And I share the link on the WhatsApp group as well for, you know, for Charlene. To to share it if she want if she need it.

Okay, Max.

Okay, so we're live on YouTube already. Okay, but it's fine. It's working. I will not do Facebook. Okay, I think YouTube is enough. Okay. Anyway, we can only do one. So I just— it's either Facebook or YouTube. We cannot do both.

All right. So can you see the screen, Max? I'm trying to—

You need to share. You need to share from Zoom. You need to share your screen and share your PPT.

Okay, share screen, share PPT.

Okay, I'm sharing screen. Is there any sound on your presentation? No, there's no sound, right? I don't think so.

They didn't say. Okay, share screen and then enable.

Yeah, I can see it. No problem.

Does that work?

Yeah, it's all good. Yeah. And you should have it on the screen too in the room at the same time. Okay, okay, it's fine. Can you change the slides?

I want to start now.

Okay, it's okay, it's working perfect.

I'm trying to I'm trying to, what do you call this? Test all of the presentations that I got from them.

Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, let's do it one by one.

Yeah, yeah, one by one. Ah, okay. Voila.

Merhaba, merhaba.

Audio makusim. Hey, Crystal. Good morning. I know.

Ah, me agenda. All right, Max. Um, let me test this presentation. Crystal is also here.

All right. Hi, Crystal. Good morning.

Um, share screen.

So it takes a while for my computer, a little bit. Okay, seems working.

Yeah, so good for me.

It's all good, Max, for all the presentations. Do you want me to— do you want me to put up the holding slide?

Yes, please. Yeah.

Okay.

Okay, what's— I was thinking.

All right, can you see it?

Yeah, no problem.

All good.

Okay.

Yeah. So just display settings. Hold on. Are you on a full screen? Yeah, you are. Yeah. Okay, that's good.

And then you said last time, if the speaker starts presenting, I should spotlight. Is that right? No.

So just one thing. When you are looking at your slides on your laptop, Do you see the notes on the right side?

Yes, but I don't need it.

Yeah. Can you— so go to your display setting on the top. And I think there's a way that you can remove that.

Disable annotation? Which part?

I think there should be a way for you to remove the next slide and the notes which are on the right side of your screen. Now, from the display setting also—

Hold on, hold on. Yeah, yeah.

Let me get the other one that has actually notes. I think it was Aidan's.

Click on— yeah, click on slideshow.

Okay, so Aidan has notes at the lower right of the—

You can hide that. You don't need to show it.

But she might need it.

Oh, do you think she will need it? The problem is that— okay, display. Just go ahead. And the problem is that we can see the notes on Zoom as well.

You could see it on Zoom. Okay, so what do I do?

So go ahead, play the slides. Start your slideshow.

Isn't it already?

No, it's not. You need to do it from, from Zoom. You need to start your slideshow first, I think.

Okay, hold on. Let me go back.

Yeah. Yeah, I know it's on your screen right now. Start your slideshow. And after, go back to Zoom and share your screen.

Hi, Max.

Hi, good morning.

Okay, I'll start the slideshow. And then—

Okay, then go back to Zoom after you load the slides and share your screen from Zoom.

All right. Hold on.

Okay, share screen. Am I sharing the Zoom screen or the presentation screen?

You're sharing your presentation screen. Okay, it's coming. Okay, I still see the notes. So on that screen on Zoom, you have on the top left, you have display settings. Yeah, click on that. Duplicate slideshow.

Duplicate slideshow. It says screen sharing has stopped as the shared window is closed. What happened?

Okay, try again. Share your screen again from Zoom. Okay. It's not a big deal, Elvie. Okay. The notes are not bothering people. Go ahead. Put it full screen. Okay. That's— it's good for me. Is it good for you on your screen?

Seems okay.

Yeah. So this is good. Okay. There's no notes now. Okay.

So do I do— do I change display setting each time I load the presentation?

I think it should be okay. Don't worry, it's not, it's not a huge deal. Okay, whether there's notes or no notes, it doesn't, it doesn't really matter.

Okay, okay, okay. Let me put up the holding slide then.

Yeah, okay, so we're good on, on the, on the online access. Everything works now.

Okay. Okay.

Live streaming is working. Our cameras are set up. Does SAP have any banners that we can place next to the screen?

Yeah, they do.

I think it would be good to have one banner on the right side of the screen if you have space, or put one in the corner.

That's also the main. Um, the main thing, see how I am alone. I'm here alone. Is that right? Sorry. So, Max, is it extremely long? Yeah, I think it's a little bit long. Should we do all the names?

We can do.

Hi. Hi. Hi.

Okay, all good.

All good.

Nice to meet you. Your slide. Uh, Tuhin is here, Max, to check his slides.

No.

Can you see the SAP banner, Max?

No, it doesn't work. Okay, put it on the other side facing— you see you have a GCC banner on the right side. Put it on the left side.

All right, so—

Anyway, that banner, we cannot see the SAP logo. So it doesn't really work because the chairs are hiding the logo. The logo is at the bottom, right?

At the bottom. And the chairs are going to block them.

OK. All right. OK, it doesn't matter. OK, that's fine. OK. OK, your holding slide is gone.

Yes, because Touheen is on my computer.

OK, OK, no problem. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Okay. All good. Okay. Okay. I'll mute myself for now. Okay. Elvy, do you have your phone with you? How do I chat with you?

You can contact me WhatsApp or Teams. I have an extra phone with me all the time.

Okay. All right. So no problem. I'll mute myself if you need. Hello. Good morning. If you need me, let me know.

Okay. Hold on. Elvy?

Yes. Can you try again to load a PPT? I just Fix, added both the audience and speaker view as spotlight view. Can you just load one PPT from Zoom share screen?

One second, Max.

Okay, thank you. For registration, Anna will be outside Yes, she's already outside. Okay. All right.

Oh, no. Hang on. Hang on. Hang on.

When you don't have anybody testing the laptop, you can keep holding slide on it. I think it will be better. Yeah.

How's that? Is that okay? Yeah.

Okay, is that all right?

Full screen? It's down. Okay, all right, okay, so good. No problem.

All right, so some people are starting to arrive and they're just talking outside.

Okay, no problem. Okay, but we can let them in, right? Yeah, yeah, uh, you mean online or—

No, no, no, yeah, on the table. We could already sit.

Of course, of course. Yeah, they can. Breakfast is already ready?

Uh, not yet. 9:30. It's still 8:40.

Can they serve it earlier? Can you ask them to send it now?

I'll ask them. Yeah.

Okay.

They're still discussing, Max.

Elvie, if— can you hear me?

So we have 3 microphones, one of each, maybe for the—

Hello, thank you, thank you.

Good morning.

Can I just ask, where will the panel be?

Yeah, would you like bar stools, or?

That would be great.

2 bar, 3 bar stools. Yeah.

Hi, Shiraz.

I'm Hannah. I'm with Charlene in marketing. Thank you so much. And welcome to the Philippines. Thank you so much for all that. No problem. Happy to. Hopefully this is a good turnout, same time with the before with GSC. Yeah. All right.

Are you seeing?

Okay, Max.

I'll have to get some bar stools for the, for the panel. Is the audience view okay, Max, on your side?

Yeah, so good. Yeah, no problem. Okay. Okay. Shira. Yeah. Okay, I'll mute myself for now. Okay.

Morning, how are you? Good, how are you? You last night?

Yes.

Long day. Nice to meet you. Very nice. Thank you. Did you stay here? Uh, I'm staying at the Marriott. Yes, yes. No, I've been here since Monday, Tuesday, Tuesday, Tuesday. Yes, I was there. Yes, one guest today as well. Yes, yes. Ah, thanks again. अलग ही है हाँ। चले मिला first two। उसमें चले कुछ मिला। Max, चले कुछ मिला। इन देख कैसे edition face audience। बस। सही नहीं ना। And then, पैसे ना पाँच। ये extension आता है। ये खुद लोग इन तुम सेटअप हो। For charging कितना पड़ेगा? Do you need it here or—

There's a—

Sure, we'll use— Di to, ya.

Asik gusto lang na yung maghintap.

Balikin pa kasi at lumbarstuna.

Tukpapano miyo kaya at napalang.

Tatlolang, tatlolang. Silo silo lang kisa lalawa. Tiket-tiket sila pa le ka. Makaape ako nung So, extension. Kwedi nating i move ito hindi sa center kung di sa other side maybe. Tan mo gusto dito. Tan mo pina hang kasi kuya tatlo yung page, tatlo yung channel. Kaya ba? Ang ganjin lang mo. Saan po ba yung paper? Kasi talang po yung problems. Ito blue. Bakit pwede niyo ko nena? Sangli pa tayo. Hindi kasi ito facing the audience. Pag di to kasi, pag may unpu di to. Pweding ano to kuya diba?

Matasa.

Matasa nito i?

Yes po.

Ano pa yung matasa nala?

Dito po.

Dito na lang. Mina sa livestream naba, holang man? Hola palaman. Enter tipan. Hay ten, ten. Kaya na ako na asma.

Kasi pag may nukuna, kama ano sa una?

Para ganarme. Ahí está, más que tal. Nice, nice to meet you. Tienen apoyo emocional. How about me? पपास दी तो मैं में डालेगा Okay. Do I have a mic? That's the bio. Yes. Hi, how are you doing? Good morning. My name is Raj. Thank you so much for coming out. I hope you all enjoyed. And hello, Robin. What do you all do? Oh, all right. So, do you have a seat? Let's try that. Oh, it's quite high. It's high. It's kind of— but yeah, it's not— yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, that one is different.

This one is different.

I think right and sit there, and you can sit here. So I'm going to find the one that has the. Sure, I'll be. I'll be. Okay. Yes, so they speak. You like how it was here? Thank you so much. So, first of all, I'm going to talk. Ah, thank you.

First of all, ano mo kung katangin sa website?

Present. Yeah. Hindi ko alam. Present na naman? Hindi. Pag naku-present lang naman eh. Okay. Sige, some of it naman eh. Thank you. Thank you. Hi, good morning, everyone.

Morning. So, uh, I'm Crystal Angeles. I'll be your host for today. Um, we'll be starting exactly at 10 AM, so we have available light snacks and refreshments outside, so please help yourself. Thank you.

Hi again, good morning.

This is Crystal. Hi, hello. May we request everybody from outside to start settling in inside the room, and please take your seat on your assigned, uh, tables. Thank you. We'll start at 10 AM.

We'll start in a few minutes, so may we ask everyone to please come in?

All right, welcome everyone.

Welcome and good morning. I am Crystal Angeles. I'm actually a general manager for a supply chain solution company, CZ Philippines Incorporated, but I'm with Global Supply Chain Council for today as your host, right? Yes. So for today's event, I can see that there's a lot of top executives and industry experts here. We're very excited to have a dynamic exchange of perspective with you Here in this event or forum entitled Procurement and Supply Chain Executive Exchange by Global Supply Chain Council in partnership with SAP or SAP. All right, so we'll start with welcoming remarks. First off, the person I am about to introduce is the Regional Vice President And head for SAP Southeast Asia Division, responsible for ensuring customer and partner success, defining go-to-market strategy, and influencing product strategy of combined experience as a procurement operations and digital procurement transformation. Let us all welcome Chirag Gidwani.

All right, thank you very much. And, and thank you everyone for coming down today and taking the time to, uh, to attend the event. Uh, the, the folks at, uh, SAP and NTT are very grateful for your presence. Um, so as I start off, I, I've just started this role about 6 months ago coming from Australia. I've been in the procurement digitization space for about 15 years. And as I entered into the Southeast Asian region being headquartered in Singapore, I started to realize that we, we had very little procurement and supply chain related events throughout the year. And if you were to get a ticket, you would have to travel to Singapore, Malaysia, or somewhere else. For that, and building my career in procurement, I always found value from events like this. So as we started off with my leadership team in Southeast Asia, we've decided to do the inverse and start going around to every country and hosting events like this so we can bring both leaderships to the teams in countries like. Manila, Thailand, Indonesia, so on and so forth. And we can bring that content to your team and you can bring your teams down as well. So I hope you guys find this event valuable. There's something you can take back from it. If not, there's free lunch outside as well. Yes. So with that, I also want to thank our partners NTT for co-sponsoring this event. with us and bringing in that thought leadership on digital transformation, and also our speakers as well on the panel. Now, as we go through the event today, we're going to bring in topics such as the Economist Impact Study that SAP has sponsored from a global point of view to share some highlights and some thoughts that leaders across the world are focusing on. That's, that's That's one. The second thing we're going to speak about, uh, we're gonna hear about an organization's end-to-end transformation journey as well, lessons learned, um, so on. And, uh, with NTT, you know, coming in with a how as well. The third point we're gonna cover today is more on, uh, supply chain. How, how if you have your ERP— how many SAP customers here? Can I get a show of hands? Okay, so some are and some are not, right? So a lot of folks in SAP, uh, have IT-driven projects where you work within the confines of the ERP system that you have. There are elements where you need to collaborate with your suppliers and flex, thinking outside the box. We're going to talk about how you can have better communication and reliability with the vendors. And then we're also going to touch on a topic, um, which is starting to pop up a lot, uh, post-COVID, which is in the area of travel and expense as well. All right, so, uh, quite a packed day today. Uh, we have broken the sessions down in about half an hour sessions, and we've also, um, set things up where we can have discussions on every table as as well, because I think one thing I know, procurement professionals would like to speak to their peers as well, right? Apart from comparing prices, comparing processes as well. So feel free to network and get to know other people around. We have spoken to some customers that are doing some interesting components as well. Find out what each and everyone's doing. So With that, I'd like to say thank you again. We really appreciate your presence here, and we hope it's of value for you all.

So thank you very much.

Thank you, Chirag. Well, I'm not so sure about the price exchanges. It's company policy. There should be a signed NDA, right? But thank you so much. And yes, it's very exciting today. We have a lot of good lineup of discussions. And so I hope that You'll be with us until 2:00 PM today and participate in those discussions. All right? Okay, so for next talk, 20 years of strategic sourcing, procurement consulting, digital procurement and solutions sales. Wow. Formerly procurement director for a global telco company and a former senior procurement director for packaging, food packaging for Asia Pacific, Middle East, and Africa region. Now head of procurement value advisory SAP Wang Tai.

Good morning, everyone. Ah, that's nice. Everybody's happy on a Friday morning, right? You get out of the office, come to a nice event, have some okay coffee, and hopefully some good food. And we'll also play the game of how many people can we squeeze in a room, right? That's awesome. So thanks for the introduction. So again, thank you for coming down this morning. I'm here to kind of talk about one of what we see as procurement imperatives, right? So there was a study, you know, let me— sorry, let me take a step back, right? I think we're living today in a very, very volatile world. I think everybody recognizes that, right? Since this was published, the world has gotten more volatile. Right? Especially a couple of, you know, in the past couple of weeks. But the trends that I'm going to talk about are still highly relevant. And sorry, I'm just— I've been told I need to stand here. Okay. And so hopefully this gives you some insights into what are seen as trends in the world of procurement. Am I blocking the screen? Trends in the world of procurement and what companies are looking to do to try and address some of these challenges that's coming up. Right now we did a interesting. All right. So we always have to deal with challenges. Okay, let me just cover it a little bit, right? So we published a study in collaboration with The Economist. Everybody knows The Economist, right? Where we wanted to look at what is the procurement imperative? What are executives thinking about when it comes to procurement, right? So we did a study across 500 C-suite customers. Right. Is it still not moving? Okay, 500 C-suite customers. But we didn't just want to take the point of view of chief procurement officers or CPOs, right? We actually— yeah.

Okay.

We actually wanted to get the point of view across the C-suite. So CEOs, CFOs, CHROs, CPOs, and what they are thinking about and the expectations for procurement and challenges that they see. Right now, what we saw is that companies do recognize that there's this increased need for transformation, right? And we looked at looking at doing a global study, right? So as I mentioned, 500 respondents, you know, multiple C-suite representatives, 100 of each of these profiles, CPOs, CFOs, Chief Supply Chain Officers, It was a truly global study, right? 100— yes, sometimes these can be a little bit Western-centric, but 154 companies in the US, more than 170 from EMEA as well as APAC. So that's a representative view, right? 240 of these companies had a billion-plus in revenues, and 260 were in that $300 to $1 billion. So a representation of not just the large enterprise companies, so huge companies, but also the smaller and medium-sized companies as well, right? So that was the scope of what the economists did for us. Okay. Again, in the world of procurement, huge surprise, right? Cost and risk management. Wow. Nobody's ever heard of this. But yeah, that's still one of the biggest areas of emphasis when it comes to the C-suite, right? But I think in addition to just looking at cost savings and risk reduction, right? Elements around supply chain visibility is still extremely important. Again, no big surprises for anybody in the room. Number 2, which is an interesting point which I'll touch on later, right? They are also looking at what operating model changes are needed, right, for the procurement function to perform more effectively, right? And there's a huge emphasis, and I'll touch on this slightly later on as well, on supplier relationship management. How do you evolve supplier relationship management beyond what you're currently doing right now, right? Uh, one another area of, uh, interest, you know, any IT people in the room? Okay, cybersecurity, right? As the world increasingly moves to cloud, and SAP is no different, right? Um, cybersecurity and your data security is obviously an area of, uh, importance and area of focus. And last but not least, uh, huge point as well, and something of increasing importance is around sustainability. And I'll talk about sustainable procurement later on as well. Okay, but these were the— this is one of the trends, right, or one of the imperatives that came up is that the C-suite is still very focused on cost management, right, and risk management. Okay, so SAP does have solutions to address this across the source-to-pay process. I'm not here to sell, I'm just kind of saying, you know, of course I'm SAP, I have to say these things. But we do have elements that look at the processes across source to pay and how you can manage all these different elements better, right? Another area which there's an increased emphasis on is in the area of category management, right? I think category management, you know, we've been talking about category management since procurement became a strategic function, what, 20 years ago, 20+ years ago. So I was lucky enough to be at the beginning where people started looking When I started my career, I'm a bit older than I look, but when I started my career, the CPO wasn't really a function, right? There was very, very, very, very little CPOs, not in the state, not, sorry, not in North America, not in Europe, and definitely even less in Asia Pacific. But we've seen that change along the way. And category management or category strategies, right, is actually something that was talked about as a concept saying, well, how do I manage a category strategically? Where do I identify my suppliers? What are the risk elements I need to take care of? Do I do low-cost country sourcing? Do I do nearshoring? Do I do, you know, well, do I source locally? All these elements that come with category management, right? But category management as a whole, I think, has, as a function, while it has been practice for the past 20 years, you know, 20-plus years, the structured capabilities around technology and the intelligence supporting category management has always been a little bit of a lag, right? So there is increasing recognition that having a structured way of managing categories, having intelligence, artificial intelligence or otherwise, to support your category management is also seen as an area of increasing importance. How do I have not just the concept of category management, but also how do I have the right tools and the right setup to help me manage it in a more proactive way, in a more intelligent way, right? So category management, areas around category management, right? Should-cost analysis is important. Strategy identification is important. Process management is important. And then obviously industry analysis, scenario planning. These are all elements of category management. And of course, from our point of view, it's not moving again. Okay, there are— we've just launched our category management solution, right? For those of you who pay attention to what SAP does, maybe some of you are not so interested, but for those who pay attention to what we do, we've just launched category management as a solution with some really pretty cool features, even if I do say so myself. Right? And oops, what happened? Okay, right. So those who are interested, obviously come have a chat with us on how we look at category management as well as spend analysis. Right? Next one. Companies are also starting to realize the importance of strengthening your supplier relationships. Right? So those of you who know SRM, right, from the past, supplier relationship, that's not just a tool that SAP has, it's also a process which is practice, right? How do you manage supplier relations? And this has got to do with innovations. It's got to do with managing a supplier profile, managing a supplier performance. These are all elements of supplier relationship management. But the emphasis now for supplier management is not just the simple way of saying, well, how do I onboard my supplier? How do I qualify my supplier, right? Now there's also an increased emphasis on what more can I do with supplier? How do I build with my relationships with my key suppliers so that they are more in— they do more innovation with me, they're willing to go the extra mile for me, right? So a couple of weeks ago, and, you know, for those of you who are connected with me on LinkedIn, I was in Jakarta, I was in Indonesia, right? And I met a CPO of a telco company. And this CPO was very candid and really very interesting person. And he told, and first time in my life I've heard, hey, I don't care about cost savings. Now it goes against my first point today, but he said, hey, I don't care about cost savings. I said, oh, but why? Why don't you care about cost savings? You're a CPO. It's like, oh, well, you know what? Cost savings comes naturally. His whole emphasis was around the singular point of what can I get out of my strategic suppliers, right? How am I going to co-innovate with my suppliers? When I do my negotiations with them, it's not on the cost and the price that I'm, you know, trying to drive with them. It's all around, okay, I'm gonna give you this piece of contract, but what can you bring to the table? Can I get first access to innovative solutions that you bring to the market, right? How are you going to work together with me to optimize my operations, my processes, so on and so forth. And say through that, my savings, yeah, it's going to come, but I'm not measured on it. I don't want to be measured on it. I'm going to look at all my supplier relationships, my key supplier, top 10, top 20 suppliers, and take this approach with them where I say I want to manage the relationship with them better. Now, and one of the interesting studies here is that executives, you look at the C-suite, the 500 respondents, 3/4 of them, which is significant, say yeah, supplier relationship management is important, but only half of them, right, believe that it's being done well, right? Now, of course, there's a structured way in which you can go about managing the standard stuff, right, across the registrations, the onboardings, the contracts management with them, so on and so forth. All those are elements of supplier relationship management. But I think as procurement, what we need to start doing is to think beyond and say, well, how do I extract more without obviously, you know, burdening, overburdening my supplier, but having a— elevating myself as a customer in the eyes of a supplier so that they are willing to come to me proactively with ideas and innovations to say, well, through doing all these activities, this is how you can actually not just save costs, but also, you know, generate more revenue, you know, take on less risks. and so forth, right? So that's another imperative that was identified from the C-suite. All right, again, solutions are there. You don't have to memorize the names. There's no test, but that's something that's there. And something that interestingly has still— that's still a point of relevance is around the user experience. But the user experience here is not just about do you have a catalog solution that you can use to buy stuff. Right? User experience here is also about, as procurement, I think we all recognize it. I've been in procurement, as mentioned, right? When procurement, we have to serve our internal customers. We are an enabler for the businesses, right, to go about doing stuff, right? You know, anything that a company needs to do typically involves procurement, right? So as procurement, it's incumbent on us to have to provide our stakeholders with a user experience, right? Not just on the technology side of things, but also from a service side of things where, okay, am I serving my internal customers well enough that they come to me and I have a seat at the table when they're taking decisions, right? That's not necessarily around purely procurement, but it's about, okay, hey, new product launches, right? Do we have a seat at the table? Hey, I'm going to open a new— I'm going to take a— I'm going to acquire a certain company. Procurement, can you come here and look at where the synergies are in that area? so that, you know, we can generate more margins, more profits, right? So these are all elements around the user experience that procurement still also needs to deliver to its end users, right? Of course, there's still the base considerations or table stakes to say, hey, if you have a good user experience from a solutions perspective, you're able to drive compliance, you're able to drive, you know, auditability into your procurement processes through a— and this is a phrase I like to use— through a solution that gives you freedom without choice. Anybody heard of this phrase before? Freedom without choice means— and this is my, my ex-boss long ago coined this phrase— says, because hey, if you have a procurement solution, you know, those who raise PRs, POs, those of you who are familiar catalogs, fantastic, you can go in there, it's like an Amazon experience, I can shop. But what you can shop for what you can put into your shopping cart, right? Everybody loves shopping carts, is controlled 100% by procurement, right? So that's freedom without choice. I give you the illusion— IT shouldn't hear this— but procurement gives you the illusion, right, of giving you freedom to buy whatever you need to buy, but really your choice is controlled by us. So that's freedom without choice, right? But that's the important thing now. But through a— you, when you have a Oh, I hear some interesting talking there. You want to talk about freedom without choice? So as procurement, again, it's incumbent still, if I want to drive compliance in my organization, if I want to drive better user behavior and user business and business user behavior in my organization, the user experience has to be good for them, right? So that they believe, number one, they're getting the best out of procurement. Number 2, they're also willing to partner with procurement, right, when they're going out, going about with their BAU activities. Yeah. Okay. And there's lots of elements that we're introducing. So it's not just core solutions. You know, SAP obviously has made some big announcements around AI as well. You've launched a new AI tool called Joule, right? Microsoft has a Copilot. We have a Copilot too. It's called Joule. But it's interesting because it's all within the confines of— not confines, but within the context of your organization, right? Your business data. How do we make use of that in combination with the GPT-like capabilities of the large language models? And those of you who want to talk about AI, happy to have those conversations as well. But really interesting developments that's on the horizon, right? And that is going to— and there's some basic stuff, AI chatbots and things like that, which are which are actually already a reality, right? And those are elements that uplevel the user experience, but at the end of the day, makes life easier for procurement as well. All right, okay, I've breezed through that because I know this next part— I've run over time by at least 10 or 15 minutes in all the previous sessions that I've done. But this is something which, having heard the imperatives, right, and these are really just what executives are concerned about, and this was published in June this year, right? So not too long ago, but of course conducted way before that. But what I'd like the audience to do right now, right, is in your tables, right, I would like to hear from you, or everybody I think would like to hear from each other, right, on a really simple topic, right, in the area of procurement or in the area of supply chain, right? What is one key initiative your organization is undertaking in the next 6 to 12 months. Okay, this is meant to be an in-table discussion. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna ask for you to discuss this within your table for and share with each other for about 5 minutes, right? 5 minutes. Maybe I need to give more time. There's quite a lot of people per table, but 5 minutes. And then nominate a volunteer Oh, well, nominate a volunteer. Sounds— it's a bit of a nominate a volunteer, but it's true. Nominate a volunteer to kind of share what your table talked about, right, with the rest of the room. This is not for my benefit, right? Okay, so key challenge— oh, sorry, key initiative that your organization is undertaking, right? Could be sustainability, could be anything, right? And what is the key challenge that may prevent you from achieving success in this, in this, with this initiative. Okay. All right. So your time, 5 minutes. We can start now. If you don't mind, please go ahead.

Okay. Anyway, ano siguro just introduce kami kayo na yung grup na may mga family. I have with me Joel Sebastian, director, and Roser Castaneda. Michelle from NTP, so I'll just be listening in to the chat. Joyce from URC. Actually, we were URC. I'm Lau, same URC idea. Thank you. Let me share some secrets for the time of travel. I think the next 6 to 12 months, we're kind of heavy right now with sustainability and Managing transactions. With sustainable procurement, with green procurement, because number one, we have our, we have our conglomerate which is Alliance Global Incorporated, which is actually also very much sustainable. So it goes, it goes down all the Companies under the umbrella. Then probably next to that is, of course, all of our hotels actually have their own principals to report to, and they would have their own sustainability programs that's actually cascaded to the location. Then for us, we have travelers We are actually the first IR integrated reporting practice that is sustainably certified by Earthship, a global certification body. So we've just been silver certified in 2020. This is actually our second year applying for another silver certification. So amongst all that, we actually made a lot of programs that Related to us.

Yeah.

Uh, be, um, encompass all the ESG. And, uh, at least for procurement, of course, to support sustainable programs, be it environment, social, and, uh, 6 to 12 months, I mean, that's, that's, uh, interaction. That's probably one of the key challenges in the administrative timing because for sourcing, major— the Philippines is nothing that heavy on sustainability. So most, most of the influence, of course, in the Philippines is actually coming from outside. So that's actually one of the challenges, probably. Problem na namin sa pagkoko ng sustainable products. Another probably is the cost. You know, it goes without saying that when you want to go sustainable, you have to pay the price. So yeah. Stages parin kami assessment song ano yun procurement solution. Kasi ano kami, kasi bibili parong siya ano yung bibili ba o itedebolong. Kasi ngayon karete iba ibang system sa a ang nakasamen nakaimplemento may SAP, may Nansen CP. So putul putul from spend management sourcing sa postpatiyo sa payment. So iba ibang system sa pagkantamin. Ah, ito yung key challenge una yung sa budget. Sempre ko hindi magjustify ko. Award ba na bumidika or award ba na magdevelop ka? Yung challenge na as sa IT sa IT perspective nila challenge na nyan ko bibile or magdevelop.

Take one minute to wrap up.

One more minute.

Meter party ka naman? Meter party. Ah, U R C ka.

Ah, okay.

Under— Bago ng weya. May bago nung klinga?

K J.

K J, ah. Ka iba eh? Magkabi, magkabi ba may corporate procurement ka meh, may BU procurement ya. Alignment between the two company memberi sangat jadah. You're using different system. Yeah. Ah, okay.

If we could wrap up, please. Extension? So I feel bad. I feel bad for stopping or interrupting your discussions because I still see a lot of it going on. That's why I always run over. This is why I always run over. So it's not my fault, it's your fault. But I love it. I love the discussions that's going on at tables. I love the fact that everybody is sharing and everybody's interacting. You know, we started this series of events, one of the questions that we always got, ah, hey, if we do roundtable discussions in a room in Southeast Asia, do you think people will speak up? Say, well, we'll give it a shot, right? And to not my surprise, but I think it's been great because everywhere I've gone, every country that I've gone so far, there has been great discussions around the table, right? And really, this is what this event all about. It's about not me standing here talking about a bunch of slides. Hopefully that's valuable, but it's also about the interactions and what you're going to share with the rest of the room. Now, I hope every table has nominated a volunteer, as I've mentioned, right? And share with the room what the table— I think I saw Jules there diligently writing notes. You're in my line of sight, couldn't avoid it. So if you could, yeah, please, you know, why don't we start from this table and then you can share what the table talked about?

Yeah, thank you.

So good morning, guys. I'm Jules from Smart PLDT Procurement, right? So I interviewed the team and we have, of course, our partner here also, Jollibee, and I asked them, 2 particular questions. So one is, what is important, strategic important? The strategy from Jollibee for, for the next 6 to 12 months is like exactly what you said. It's the supplier relationship, right? So they're building a structure whereby they're creating a supplier segmentation, right, trying to understand each and every profile of the vendors and suppliers based on spent and also their capabilities. So they'll— they're going to do that. No, um, they're trying to see where they can classify each and every vendor based on tiering, right? Could be a Tier 1, Tier 2, or Tier 3, and which one would have the best one who will be able to deliver such capabilities. That's more important to Jollibee, right? And they plan to do also a roundtable discussions between the suppliers, right? To understand how they will be able to co-innovate with them, right? And trying to see where they can find very strategic partners across all these suppliers. Now, the challenge now is because Jollibee is a very diverse, huge organization, they need to see, make sure that everyone will be able to, you know, comply to a particular strategy. So that's one of their challenges. And for EPLDT, I also introduced interviewed them. For them is they're looking into more of a price integrity. So that's one of their strategy, establishing all the unique prices that we have, because they're one of the resellers also, they want to make sure all the prices are intact and well negotiated. So, right. And they're also looking for— also, they're looking Looking also into the vendor spend and the capabilities of all their suppliers, right? And right, and JG Summit, interesting part also is important thing for the next 6 to 12 months is more on the process improvements, trying to automate the process from an auto, from a manual PR and PO, which takes them how much time do you You have normally 7 days to process that.

We need to talk.

Within 7 days to issue the PO. So now they're finding ways to where they can work on an auto PR, auto PO, and improve that process. So they try to improve the turnaround time for that, including also the contracting process. So yeah, so all those 3.

So process improvement, supplier relationship management. Yes. Right. Primarily these two, and of course, classic cost, price and cost visibility. Right. Yeah.

Fantastic. Thank you, Jules. Thank you too.

Thank you. Maybe we could go to the next table behind there.

You know what, Wang?

They are already practicing what you're preaching. Freedom without a choice. Yeah. Hi.

Good morning, everyone. My name is Nana. And I had procurement for development.

Yeah, that's the mic.

No, thank you.

So in on this table, we just left with Juan to— for him to give his inputs. But again, on our side, the common theme and the common subject that all of us are working on is sustainability. So we are at different stages. Some of us are exploring at ADB. We shared that we have been exploring, as well as San Miguel colleagues are also working on the, on the same. They are a bit more advanced. They are looking into a system to make sure that the sustainability can be monitored, tracked, inventorized, monitored, and tracked. So I always call it as aim. So we need to go through some process on these stages. So sustainability is one of the, of the the biggest one that we are talking— we have been discussing in different sites. On the other side, it is very interesting to learn from L'Oréal about their program on Living Wage Partner. So very interesting. I have heard it for the first time, but again, it's under the broader umbrella of ESGs, and that's what they are working on. There has been challenges shared by our San Miguel colleagues on the implementation of systems. And here I'm sure everyone can resonate to that, that when there are new systems implemented in any organizations, there are birthing pains, there are teething pains. And most of the time what I have always heard is the adoption. Adoption, if I capture it correctly, adoption is the favorite subject then at that time in the organization. And it has to go right. There is no other formula to it. And my theory and practical suggestion has been bring the stakeholders in the room, have them accountable, have them have the say so that later they can buy in. If it's done later, it's too late for them to adopt. So that's one of them. I think from From PAL, we were still waiting to hear, but let me pass on the—

Hi, good morning. I'm Cheska from PAL. So unfortunately, we weren't able to get the chance to share our piece due to the 5-minute limitation that you gave us. Yes, but I guess for PAL, I'd like to speak on behalf of my colleagues here too. Our key initiative for the next 6 to 12 months is really digital transformation. So since we're implementing SAP in January, so this is our top focus. So include part of which is also, of course, you have strategic sourcing, you have process improvements, a lot of these things. And since we are an old company, 82 years, another challenge here is driving change.

Yeah.

As what Nadia said, it's really adoption. Yeah. And change management. These are birth pains. Teething pains, but hopefully we'll get through that and we'll work on it to move past that stage.

Okay, thank you.

Well, our company is a multinational company. Well, we are producers of cement and ready mix, meaning that this is a Iniciativa de las Minerías y Compañías, to you know limit our CO2 emissions. No, we were we are one of the sectors, industrial sectors that they produce more CO2. So we have a global agreement, no, that we are going to reach net zero CO2 by 2050. We are already moving into that. Actually, we are one of the first movers. It's called the First Mover Group. So we are there. And basically what we are doing is to extend this to our suppliers as well. No, it's not only you know the scope one, two, or three. Probably you are already familiar with that. But what we are doing now is to make sure that our suppliers are accredited in the sense that we are using a third-party accredited company to evaluate our suppliers and whole supply chain to ensure that they are also compliant and aligned with those targets and goals. So, well, this is one of our many initiatives for next year. Of course, here in the Philippines is very complicated because the level of maturity of Several suppliers are not there yet. So it comes with a lot of education, a lot of discussions, and supplier relationship management, which you just mentioned.

So yeah, that's it. Thank you very much, Marcos. So sustainability and the holy trinity of change management: people, process, technology, right? And this has not changed. 20 years ago, I know, maybe not 20, 15 years ago, I was speaking at a conference conference, and a customer in front of like, I think, 500 people say, hey, Wayne, what's the biggest challenge that you see in our organization? Well, it's going to be change management, right? And that has not changed at all in the past. It's still the thing that you need to address the most, right? And that addresses adoption, et cetera, et cetera. All right, thank you very much. I'm going to say this is table 2.

All right.

This table, please. Any?

Good morning.

I'm Henry Batallio, SAPL, PJ Lulu, your group of companies.

My table, our tables are all conglomerates here: Aboitiz, PLDT, and Central Bank, of course. Banco Central of the Philippines. Oh, Merahalco. Sorry, Rory. There. I'm just mentioning the the companies that recently bought SAP. Anyway, so we're all SAP users. So we're Forhana, Ariba. So avoid these are just implementing, going to implement soon, or implementing that. Yeah. And then PLDT they have Forhana since 2021. Yeah. Us I think kap lang. I think last year, last year we have Ariba and Forhana. So as our key initiative, we're not able to discuss the key initiatives because we're just talking, we're just talking, we just spent 5 minutes for getting to know each other. So, so I think the key initiative is to optimize the system that we have now, SAP. And one key challenge, common key challenge, is the change management, the adoption, because a lot of people, our users, are thinking, they thought that their lives would be easy with SAP. But actually, procurement side has become easy because we pass everything to them. They encode the asset code, the call center, all everything. They used to do the request via email only, but now they have to do everything. So, and they thought they're doing it on their own, but actually we control the inside of the system by putting all the policies and the processes. So that's— you're right. Maybe 30 years ago, it's already change management issue, not only for SAP but for different systems. But that's our dilemma now, especially we're big companies or big conglomerates, and we have several people using the system. Yes, and different locations at the same time.

Yeah, thank you.

Thank you, Henry. And last but definitely not least, the stable. Where's the nominated volunteer? Do I have to nominate a volunteer?

Yeah, I think yeah.

I'm not the one who was passed on to me, so I better speak for the group. But anyway, I'm Dennis Uy, Director of Procurement for Travelers International Hotel Group, Newport World Resorts, and I actually have here our friends from Manila Water. The Westin Manila and the Universal Robina Corporation. And just to share with you, at least for Travelers International, we've been with SAP since we've started. No, that's back in 2008. We've had 7 years experience with Ariba as well. And I think our friends from Manila Water is also using SAP Ariba. Same with our Friends with Universal Rubino Corporation, and I speak on behalf of Travelers International. At least for the key initiative for the next six the next six to twelve months, we're really heavy on sustainability, as as also shared by our friends from ADB. We're working actually heavily on sustainability because of our directive from our conglomerate, which is Alliance Global. Incorporated, the group of companies from Dr. Andrew Tan. And of course, our hotel partners also have their principals: Marriott, Sheraton, Hilton, IHG, and Hotel Okura Manila, all of which reports to the principals, and they have their own global initiatives for sustainability. And proud to say that Travelers International is actually the only integrated resort in in the Philippines. It's actually silver certified by EarthCheck, a global sustainability certifying body. And we've been— we're actually on our second year vying for the silver certification again. So we're really very heavy, heavy on sustainability. That's our— and as procurement, we are actually directed by our senior management team to be heavily involved with sustainable procurement, definitely. And probably one of the challenges that we're facing is, of course, the Philippines is not yet that heavy on sustainability, and everything that you buy sustainable is really— it comes with a hefty price. So that's actually one of the two, actually, of the probably challenges that we're facing if we're going to take on that key initiative in the next 6 to 12 months. And since we do not have any volunteer in the table, I may have to pass this on to my friend from Manila Water, Miss Joanna, to speak for Manila Water. Thank you, Max Henry.

I'm Joanna again from Manila Water, from procurement. So in the next 6 to 12 months, we're currently— we're starting developing our Ariba sourcing platform. And we're also currently in blueprinting of our enterprise asset management. So that we have right now is the timing of the implementation, because we're also planning to transition from SAP ECC to S/4HANA. So we're quite, you know, It's a challenge for us to decide if we need to integrate the existing system or improve the ECC, or we'll just wait for the S/4HANA. So actually, we're benchmarking with the other company how they do their S/4HANA transition.

Thank you. All right. Any other— no? Well, good. Everybody's shy already, suddenly. Okay. All right. Thanks everyone for sharing with the room. And I certainly see themes, and sustainability was mentioned in, well, at least 2 of the tables, right? And this is a nice segue to kind of what I'm going to touch on next, right? And again.

We're checking, just we're checking the chat. There's a lot of good comments.

Hold on.

Okay, and I also want to touch on all those who have joined us online. If you do have any questions, right, just pop them into the chat. We'll try and address them as soon as we can. So the next part is around sustainable procurement. Now, you know, I think Given the number of procurement professionals in the room, I think it's not obviously a topic that's new. It's been around for many years. Of course, increased emphasis over the past, I'm going to say 2, 3 years, right, on sustainability. And I don't know if you've heard these statistics. So this is what I've sort of read and heard over the past few years, right? The world's problems, climate problems, are going to be solved in Asia, right? In Asia, we are responsible for 50% half of the world's emissions. Do you guys know that? We're responsible for half of the world's emissions. Now, I also just read an article in The Economist this morning, actually just popped up, talking about how global warming or climate change has actually accelerated over the past, I think, 5 years. And the slope is like this. It's kind of like what we don't want to see. But that's what's happening. And so it is an urgent problem. The UN chief himself has come out and said the world is boiling, right? So that's the other thing. So these are all data points, both from a quantitative as well as qualitative aspect, right, that we need to address if we're going to leave, well, hopefully a habitable world for our kids and our grandkids. And procurement, not to sound too down on this, but procurement has a huge role to play in this. A McKinsey study that was done last year indicates that about 2/3 of an organization's carbon footprint actually comes from your suppliers, which is Scope 3. 2/3, right? Could be more, could be slightly less, but that's the number that McKinsey put out. And what this means is that from a procurement point of view, we obviously have the ability to impact our suppliers and we have the ability to make a meaningful difference right, in how we approach sustainability, right? Not just on the environmental front, but obviously from a social, on the overall ESG perspective as well. But, you know, obviously there's a big emphasis on the, on the, on the, um, um, yeah, okay. Oh, it's moved. All right. Now, you know, and some of these may have seen this, but, you know, SAP does take this very seriously. What, what are we aiming for? We're aiming for zero emissions, zero waste, and zero inequality. So addressing all elements of ESG. So we want every enterprise to become a sustainable intelligent enterprise, right? And we want to bring everybody into a global network. And there's some interesting developments, exciting developments that we have on our— in our procurement solutions areas and in our best business network area, which I think we'll talk about later on, that touches on this, right? So what are we going to— what do we need to do? We need to record, right? We need to deploy in our world. We're looking at, okay, from your purchasing or your procure-to-pay activity, how can that be used as a system of record to enforce your ESG policies, right? As well as to minimize the supplier risk, right? That's the record part. Report, right? So how do we have the data, have the information in order to measure the impact that we are having on on ESG. And then if you have visibility, if you can record, you can report, then you can actually take decisions, right, and derive strategies in terms of how you address your sustainability. So, right, what this means is that you need a foundation, you need good governance around it, you need to manage not just for your own organization but sometimes regulatory bodies as well. How do you report on that? And that's what you're gonna make it. That's how we're gonna make it to net zero, right? So in procurement, right, which is where we're gonna dive in next, really, there are 4 pillars that we see that's impactful from a sustainability perspective. The first is around source to pay. Again, bread and butter for most of us in the room, right? How do we make sure our sourcing and procurement processes, sourcing and procurement processes support our ESG policy? policies, right? Our ESG targets, right? Next, how do we leverage a business network, right? Which is really a network of organizations interconnected all around the world, right? How do we level— how do we use that to get better visibility and better transparency into my supply chain, right? So that I can drive and I can record and I can measure and I have visibility to all these transactions as well as the data that's involved in Third is around how do I manage my external workforce, right? When I hire people who are not on my payroll, right? So this, you know, some of these, some of you who might be in agribusinesses, I don't know if any of you are, but you might be working with farmers, contractors, right? How do you make sure that they're being treated fairly? They're getting paid a decent wage. That's all around external. external workforce management. That's a social element to it. I think we talked about what— there was a mention of some of that earlier on. And last but not least is our travel, right? I mean, I don't know about you guys, and it's bad for me to say this, but I love to travel, right? But how do I travel while making the least possible impact, right? So when I travel, am I taking the lowest carbon emission flight that I could take because it's a more efficient engine? And we're actually doing this, right? When I book a plane right now— sorry, I can't book a plane. When I book a seat on a plane right now, our travel system actually tells me, here, if you take this flight, it's going to be 50 kilograms of carbon emissions for this flight. And it gives me an indicator of whether that's green or not green. So it's really interesting, but I still like my Singapore Airlines. But anyway, But there are 4 pillars around sustainable— 4 pillars that you can drive ESG and you drive sustainability, right? And these are, you know, elements around that. I'm not going to dig into any of this, but safe to say that across your source-to-pay process, right, it's whether you're analyzing your spend, getting the data to do that, whether it's in your sourcing where you're incorporating sustainability criteria. into your award decisions, whether it's in your contracting, right? Do you have ESG clauses in your contracts? Are you enforcing these ESG clauses in your contracts? How do you make sure that they are present in your contracts with your suppliers, right? And then how do I drive user behavior, or how do I provide more freedom with more choice to pick a sustainable supplier for certain things that I'm buying, right? And how do I ensure that the end users in organization who I might not meet on a day-to-day basis is aware of what's available for them to buy so that they are supporting a social cause, so that they are supporting a, you know, small and medium business enterprise, they are supporting a local supplier, supporting a, you know, I don't know if Philippines has this, but indigenous or minority suppliers type of thing, right? You can drive that through your procure-to-pay process, right? So these are all elements that solutions can play an active role to enforce and promote your ESG policies in and out of the organization. All right, that's on the source-to-pay side of things. And then we talked about business network, right? And I talk about the fact that just like LinkedIn, how we have an interconnected web of buying and selling organizations as well as financial organizations all around the world. But what this does is that this increased collaboration and this ability to have these data flows or information flows across different types of organizations. And we have, you know, some announcements around what we call Carbon Data Exchange as well coming up, right? Information that's available on the network, just like on Facebook, you post your social status. Now imagine a business network where you can post your ESG credentials. Right? And that's made available or transparent to all the other organizations that you happen to be working with, or organizations who happen to be looking for new partners or new vendors to be working with. That's all part of having a business network that touches on whether it's, you know, digital collaboration, right? Electronic transactions, which are lower carbon footprint, looking at finding suppliers, as I've talked about, tracking and tracing, right? Material traceability. right? Chain of custody type of considerations, right? How do I do asset management to make it more efficient, therefore less costly and less impact on the environment? As well as making sure that we have the ability to promote data standards, right? Whether it's talking about data, carbon is one of the easiest things to think about, right? How much carbon footprint is there in my product? And how do I make sure that organizations that work with me are aware of that? That's all elements of how a business network can help promote and exponentially increase these considerations. All right. Okay. I think I'm running— I'm actually running over time, so I'm gonna move on a little bit. This is my last one. For those of you who have sustainability initiatives, and I know a lot of you have, right? SAP can actually help facilitate sustainable procurement workshops, right? Right? There's a QR code. I don't know if that's gonna be very big, but there's a QR code which actually— it's a QR code, but it's actually gonna send an email to somebody that we have. And this is still— I mean, we're still running it this way, but we can organize sustainable procurement workshops where we can look at, okay, well, what are procurement priorities? Help you look at leveraging your current technology. What are the capability gaps, what are global best practices, right? And then network with peers, just like what we're doing in the room, except in a much more focused manner, right, in sustainable procurement. Okay, so I didn't mean to rush through that. I do apologize, but I am running over by 5 minutes, and I still have to take Q&A on the chat. Anything that I need to—

So far, none for now. So later on, we'll have— we'll Collate everything that we may have during the panel discussion.

Thanks. All right, thank you everybody. Thanks for your attention.

Thank you so much, Meng. Okay, so, um, we're gonna switch things up a little bit, so we'll have a 10-minute break, okay, uh, for now. But, um, in that 10-minute break, we would like to ask you to take photos together in the session outside, and then there will be a survey Be placed on your table. So after the break, or during the lunch break later on, maybe you can fill it up. Alright, so they're setting it up already outside. Then maybe we can be there for a group photo. Thank you.

Thank you.

Again, go at the back.

All righty. Ah, okay. And noy miyong na ka. Thank you. Right? Okay. Works. Yes, yes.

Yes, just allow.

Just now, so I know I will do my very best. Sabi ko, mayong questions? Kasi kasi sayo. Sayimin mo. Mabaya. So, may mga gagawin na? Yung flow. Yeah.

Kayo kayo mo. Alam mo actually dapat to?

It's a U shape table. Kasi kailangan. Kailangan.

This is sedam. Abi ko pakabagong tanggaling niyin yung shape table.

Kasi nayo, they're smart and they're still in the team. It's true.

So, alam natin sa rin kahapon na hindi mo nakuhay yung email.

Extra forwarded views.

Kasi mina siya siya, bikong may sinense yung. So, ay to talk in sa Singapore.

I'm sure, I'm sure.

We wouldn't be here if it wasn't for that.

Thank you. I mean, my best. I cannot say no to David.

All right, so let us request everyone to please join us back in inside the holding room. If we can ask the rest of the participants to please come back in so we could already continue Hello.

Multi-skilled. Thank you.

All right, may we ask everyone to please come back in so we can continue our discussion on Procurement and Supply Chain Executive Exchange?

All right.

So welcome back. You're still with us in Procurement and Supply Chain Executive Exchange. So we're next off, we'll have a panel discussion regarding driving the digital agenda in procurement and supply chain. So for this panel discussion, it will be moderated by Wang Tai, and our panelists are Ray Antonio de Jesus, Vice President for Procurement, PLDT. Let's give them a warm applause. And second off, it's Noemi Encarnacion, Chief of Operations from NTT DATA Philippines. All right, so I'll give it away to you, Wang.

Thank you. Uh, it's me again. All right, so I'm gonna try and find an okay place to stand. Do we want to— is this in your eyes? Do you want to switch it off? Is the light in your eyes? It's okay. All right, so do we have everybody back in the room? All right, okay. So thank you, Ry. Thank you, Noemi, for joining us in the panel. I think first things off, let's get some basics out of the way. Just tell us the organization that you're in, the structure, I guess, that you have in your business, and just an overall introduction of the business. Ry, why don't we start with you? Thank you.

Thank you, Wang. It's my pleasure to be here. There was supposedly a person from PLDT to present today, so, but I cannot say no to SAP except when I'm negotiating with them. So I think for PLDT, so we're represented by PLDT Smart and ePLDT, so we're actually the leading telco industry for both fixed and wireless business in the country. On the ePLDT side, last week we're the leading ICT arm of PLDT, so we were leading on 2 fronts, from a data center business and also from an ICT business, especially on the local engagement in-country. So thank you. Happy to be here.

Thank you, Ray. Noemi?

Good morning, everyone. I'm Noemi Encarnacion, Chief Operating Officer of NTT DATA Philippines. I would like to claim that we're also the leading partner of SAP here in the Philippines. But yeah, I asked Ray to introduce himself first because we're also related, because NTT also is a partner of PLDT, and at the same time, we have that share. So we're kind of related in terms of our companies.

Thank you. Thank you, Noemi. All right. So I think let's dive straight into it, right? So I think we've talked about, you know, obviously earlier in my session, we talked about some of the imperatives, right? What C-suite is thinking about. But I'm going to start this, start with you, Ray, right? In terms of, you know, what are some of your insights In terms of the current state of supply chain resilience, which has been a big topic over the past couple of years, especially during the pandemic, right? And in light of the recent global disruptions, you know, what's your views on supply chain resilience, and how has PLDT sort of adapted to some of these challenges?

Okay, so I'll answer it both from a macro and micro perspective. So I think from a macro perspective, I think from, you know, the supply chain is very dependent on one chipset company, which is TMSC.

Yes, sir.

So yeah, so that company mostly controls 80% of the chipset demand across the globe. So we have acknowledged that from PLDT and Smart. So we're trying to work on multiple supply chain initiatives addressing that. But again, from a macro perspective, we're very dependent on that chipset company. And I think most of our suppliers as well, especially regardless if they're Western or from Asia. Second, from a Philippine perspective, our GDP is declining from 6%, 6.4% in Q1. It's now down Q2, I think it's around 4.3%. So that impacts the buying power of our consumers. And from a business like a telco company, not unique in the Philippines. I was actually, I was with the guys in Singapore during the ProcureCon Summit. I was talking to Singtel, to Telkomsel, with Indosat. It's a very competitive industry. So even— and we are launching a lot of unlimited in-country, so meaning all of our spend is going up, but because of our competition, our revenue is almost flat. So how do we strike a balance both from a procurement and supply chain perspective, addressing our customers but also helping as well our bottom line? From a micro perspective, also, that's from a micro perspective, I think there is a lot of suppliers within PLDT, around 700 to 750. But when we look at our top 10 suppliers, that's almost 50% of our spend. So I'm hearing the, you know, some of the solutions being offered, the sharing. From each of the procurement professionals here. And I think SRM, or supplier performance management, depending on what you call it internally, I think that will actually drive us or elevate the procurement function. Because if you don't know how to properly classify your supply base, it's going to be very challenging as well on how to manage and deal with them. So this year, actually, in contrast related to what Wang was saying, we actually started in PLDT and Smart to do a reverse. So procurement professionals, they like to use the Kraljic model, strategic leverage, routine bottleneck. I did a switch. So we call it, you know, it's not— we can't coin them because it's basically used in other countries, but it's called Supplier Perception Model. So how does our supplier view our own companies. So are we strategic with them, or is there an opportunity to develop us as their customer? Are we their core customer, or are we nuisance, or are we exploitable? So we're looking at our suppliers on how they view PLDT and Smart, and then from that we also determined some of our supply chain and procurement strategies.

So that's it.

All right, thank you. Right, uh, Noemi, have— what have you seen from, I guess, uh, for the entity customers, right, around, uh, some of the supply chain resilience?

Well, I would say, well, during the pandemic, um, you know, as a system implementation partner, we were able to help customers during the COVID lockdown, um, digitalize their systems, their processes, and transformation. One logistics company that we were implementing during the lockdown, the height of the lockdown, we were able to transform them from an on-premise into ERP and procure-to-pay processes and bringing them into the cloud and help them kind of survive all these challenges during pandemic of how to transform from a face-to-face transaction into now a hybrid work processes.

All right, thank you, Noemi. I guess go back to Ray, right? You know, and given that sustainability always was a topic, right? Philippines is a huge country, right? Very diverse supply base. How do you approach supplier diversity or inclusion in your strategy? And have you seen any benefits coming out from this approach?

It's a Very hard to answer that question because if I make up answers, most of the people here knows knows me and knows Phil. Then smart no. So I would say I would say it's a journey. I think there's couple of elements that we have to look at. I think most large conglomerates, multinational companies, they have a very well set up supplier diversity program. So. When I was with Citibank with this guy, we actually partnered with WeConnect. So it's a woman, you know, it's led, it's basically pushing or sponsoring and encouraging multinational companies to spend with majority woman-owned businesses. So WeConnect in partnership, when I was working with Citibank, we actually pushed that as part of our annual sourcing plan. In parallel, we also put up CSR as 10% of our supplier selection criteria. So that's what we were doing when we were with Citibank. But again, that's a multinational company setting. I'll be very pragmatic and look at it from a Philippine setting. So supplier diversity would only be able to be achieved by an organization if you know how to stratify your suppliers, if you know how to properly segment them. So until you don't— until that is not a sustainable and effective process, we will always end up looking at cost. I'm very pragmatic and honest here. But with the way we are looking at sustainability being part of our annual reports, especially for PLDT and Smart being a public traded company, we have actually established a sustainability office. So we have a Chief Sustainability Officer. She helps drive our sustainability plans, and that's not just for procurement, but, you know, as an entire organization. So, you know, there's a difference right now in how we're dealing with it in-country, but I think Philippines, as you know, in general, we all want to do it. We have a— we know there's systems that would be able to help us make it happen. I think we will definitely push that together with our push in digitalization, you know, sustainability, digitalization, and of course equality in country. So thank you.

Noemi, any insights on this?

Yeah, I would like to share From my previous experience as a procurement to PSS manager, and I conglomerate a global global company. We actually value that supplier diversity, you know minority companies within suppliers give equal chance. But in entity data, as a system implementation partner, we were able to help conglomerate also put that in their processes. in implementing commercial SAP Ariba and putting that into having a minority supplier as one of the checkpoints in procurement initiatives and, you know, P2P process.

Okay, so a little bit of what we actually talked about just now across the source-to-pay process, right? Being able to input your sustainability considerations, whether it's, you know, contract sourcing, whether it's P2P, and driving some of those policies, right? Thanks for that. We're going to move on to the risk part of things, right? You know, unfortunately, and I thought we'd be over this by now, the Ukraine war is still going on. Now we have a new war that's also going on. And so there's a lot of risks in the supply chain, right? So this is managing the risk, as we talked about earlier in some of the economist Cost management, risk management is an important consideration, right? Again, I hate to go through the sequence, but Brian, it's you again. Is there a recent story or example where you faced a supply chain risk and had to take mitigating actions? And how did you manage that? Yeah, maybe it's a semiconductor story. It sounds like it might be.

Yeah, I'm thinking of what story I can share that's not controversial. So, okay, so for a telco company, you usually have what we call like preferred or approved suppliers. So I'm trying to tread the line. And we want— so we noticed that because our core business— Thank you for reminding me. Business is network. So we spend around 100 billion pesos a year, and majority of that will be related to network. When we look at our spend, especially when I took over the role, I noticed that it's all, you know, certain segments are dominated by 1 or 2 suppliers. And usually it's because of our internal strategy, of having, you know, Western and Asian types of suppliers or manufactured suppliers. But we realized that actually it's either you do one, you centralize them into one, or you add more. The risk actually, it's a recent, you know, case wherein we decided to expand. A couple of things why we decided to expand our suppliers. It's because when we look at our competitors and also our other telcos in our neighboring countries, we realized that having dual suppliers or single suppliers, it actually depends on how much you value risk and also cost. So right now, it's a journey because, you know, You have to go through certifications, you have to look at the risk if you change one supplier and combine them to one. But right now we're trying to expand our suppliers so that we can have more competition. And as you mentioned, right, it's not just looking at the cost but the value. Can we ask from them we should be the one who will have the first, you know, first info on their R&Ds? And it's more than cost, but what value or value management that you can give to us as an organization.

So I guess for entity side, are really on the other side of the fence is how do we keep, you know, our business and how do we help enable ourselves to help our customers address those risks in the supply chain process. So we continue to innovate through the technology solutions that we offer, and at the same time, we continue to also work with our industry experts because sometimes in the procurement space, it's not— there are some processes that are horizontal, but we also have to look into industry-specific requirements that we would be able to advise, provide advisory and consulting to our Customers and clients.

And thanks. And that's a nice segue, actually, I think, to probably the last question that I have, right, to Noemi. Obviously, in NTT DATA, you deal with a variety of customers, right, who are at different stages of maturity in sourcing and procurement and supply chain. How have you seen the role of technology, right, or digitalization help these organizations? How much impact has it had? And is it— is it— I mean, I feel it's always very real and tangible, but what are you seeing from your customers?

Oh, thank you. Very good question. I can speak about kind of 2 businesses from NTT, as probably most of the people here know that we have diversified company businesses as well. We have NTT Limited, who also works on the office space infrastructure, data center and also entity data, which is on the application side. So for— we do help our customers in various ways, like green initiatives for office spaces, workstations, diversity, even on setup of office spaces. But also on the application side, we help them digitalize their processes, for example, turning them from paper transactions to paperless technology. So that's— those one of the things that we Innovate within our customer base, regardless of the industry. But we do also provide industry expertise, as I've mentioned earlier, to adopt, you know, help our customers adapt to changes in business transformation. We provide some transformation roadmap discussions and workshop sessions to help address challenges, business pain points within our customers.

customer base. Okay, thank you. Right, I guess, you know, given that you are quite experienced, I guess, with us as a technology partner, I expect you to say only good things. But, you know, how is the role of technology, I think, especially particularly in this area of sourcing and supply chain, right, or procurement supply chain rather, how much impact has it had on your organization, the way that you work, right, and the tangible benefits that your organization recognizes?

So actually, I had a refresher this morning, thank you to April. So actually, before, we had siloed process from our contracts management, PRPO, and RFP or competitive bid. So with SAP, I think we were able to connect. It's still a journey. I wouldn't say it's perfect, but the journey is that to link all of the procurement processes and make it one, make it efficient. And we're doing that not because we want less work, but we want to be more efficient and help enable our business partners. So the faster that the procurement teams can convert the PR to PO or deliver the requisition of our business helps us as a company deliver the tools needed for our business teams to to sell. On a bigger picture, I think PLDT and Smart were actually powering cities to become much more smart or technologically enabled. Like I know for a fact that Cavite. It's the first provincial smart city and actually powered by PLDT Smart, meaning all of the government institutions, schools, streets, etc., it's all connected by our mobile broadband networking system or MBNS. So it helped power, you know, online work, online school, It gave 5G accessibility. Even though you're riding in a jeepney or in a tricycle, you're powered by the internet. And then maybe second to the last point is that we're also enabling the country to become the data center hub in Asia Pacific. So the Philippines is building the first hyperscale data center and how important it is as a country. It actually will give us around $1 billion in terms of economic growth or economic movement. Building that first hyperscale data center in Santa Rosa actually opened up a lot of other investments, like from our friendly competitor, even from construction company like Megawide, others starting to build their own hyperscale data center. And the cost of building one, you know, on an average, it's around $1 billion. So that economic growth powered by PLDT and ePLDT actually helps the country, you know, our country's drive for digitalization.

All right, thank you. Right, I'm gonna open it up to the floor. Does anybody have any questions for the panelists right now? I don't know if there's online questions, but anybody wants to ask or comment on anything that, uh, that's been talked about?

Or maybe to add on some of the experiences you may have had to relate? None?

Okay. All right.

All right. Thank you very much, Noemi. Thank you very much, Rai. Yes, sorry. Oh, there is a question. No? Yes? Oh, okay.

Sorry, this is just an inquiry regarding the procurement. Module of SAP. I'm just wondering if there are any government agencies implemented the Ariba, because government agency is very different. It has a very different procurement system. So I'm just wondering if SAP has a client on the government side.

Are you referring to the Philippines or are you referring to—

Philippines.

Kat, you want to take that?

Yes, we do. Of course, relative to the private sector adoption, it's not as broad, but we do. In Indonesia, one of our long-term customers for SAP Ariba is equivalent of, I would say, the department of the DICT. It's called Bakti. And then in Singapore, which is the equivalent of the Ministry of Health and the entire clusters of hospitals that provide medical services to the country are also running their procurement on our solution, enabled by our solution. In Australia, it's a well-adopted solution at different levels of government. We can share some of their use cases and also the stores that they had to Intel that they have shared publicly with you post this forum, if that would be fine.

Yeah, I think also worth mentioning the Government of Canada. So the whole of Government of Canada, right, small country, uses our procurement solutions end-to-end. It's actually public if you go to canada— canadaBuys. I can't remember, it's .ca or .com, it's one of those called CanadaBuys. You'll see their entire sort of— they laid it out why and what they're doing and things like that. But when we look at government procurement, I've worked with the healthcare institution that Kath was talking about, right? When it comes to government, really it's around, okay, number one, data security, right? Is your data secure? That's an important consideration. Second area is around government really cares about compliance, right? And fraud prevention, right? And these are all elements in the solutions. And public sector— sorry, private sector organizations look at same things, except I think the emphasis from a public sector perspective is to say those really have to be locked down watertight, right? And that's something that, you know, most, many of the governments that we, or public sector agencies that we work with, right, are very concerned about and certainly something that we can address. Yeah, go for it.

I would like to add on to that, especially with regards to dealing with government. Last Thursday, EPLDT and PLDT actually launched the first sovereign cloud in the country. So the value of that, because Kat opened up the ICT, we actually worked on getting the sovereign cloud up, focusing on the ICT, especially with all the recent instances happening with some of our government agencies in the Philippines. right? So PLDT strategically wanted to enable, to support our digitalization, our effort in-country, to support them to— of having their own cloud but not hosting it outside of the Philippines, building an own infrastructure to be hosted in the country, which will enable them to migrate their workloads from on-prem to the cloud but still within the Philippines, giving them the 22 layers of cybersecurity requirement which the government requires, because again, it's very stringent. So I relate to the question that it's very challenging to, you know, for government institutions to award to a particular system. So companies like us, if you want to sell to the government, it should be within their standards. There should be control. But I think that's one initiative wherein PLDT was able to address a need that's being— that's happening right now with all of the incidents from our government agencies. So thank you.

Thank you so much for that, Ry. So we also have another question here from Christina. She's from Manila Water.

Okay. Just regarding on the supplier diversion, I would like to know, how do you classify your vendors when you're going into the green procurement, right? And how would you go about that as to identifying on the percentage of women or if they're in a minority? How do you classify them? Of course, I believe you Correct. Yes, and I just want to know the steps on how were you able to really classify, to put them in there based on not only on the industry basket, but on what they really can offer and how can they affect your green procurement? Oh, okay.

Actually, we work with also diversity groups to be able to help identify those minority suppliers, gender equality. So not— there's not really a percentage set in terms of setting this minority vendors in setting it up in the system, or having that checkpoint to be able to identify. But usually it's within the, you know, 10% range of being able to conduct business with minority, gender equality, and other diversity vendors. groups, whether it's also religion, is also, you know, some sort of that, that the social equality groups that we partner with and do some benchmarking activities and benchmarking study to kind of set that standards for diversity.

Does that answer your question? Yeah. How were you able to classify and identify these or which reach to that? And I mean, really on the detail side.

Yeah, I can share with you some of the benchmarkings. I can share with you some information because I think we have that benchmarking study that we did. I'd be happy to get your information and I'll share with you those details.

And maybe I can add one point to this is that also we, you know, obviously there's specific expertise that you can get, but we also start to see organizations when they're looking at green suppliers and looking at sustainability ratings of that sort, they also partner or take on the services of third-party services, right? People like Ecovadis, for example, right, who do risk ratings on sustainability specifically, right? And they can audit suppliers, they can do all sorts of things, and they specialize in that area. So that's another area from a supplier relationship management perspective that organizations are increasingly looking at to say, well, Do I go Ecovadis? Do I look at some other, some of these third-party agencies who can then contribute to my overall supplier profile and my overall supplier risk management and strategies?

Yeah. And maybe just to add, a couple of weeks ago, we actually launched the eSIM. related to sustainability. The importance of that is that in a year, Philippines consumes around 20 million SIM cards because we're majority prepaid, you know, a prepaid country. So the impact of that, imagine 20 million waste now because in the physical SIM card, you just use that small piece and the rest of the card you throw it away. So strategically, as part of our sustainability effort, we pushed for eSIM. Of course, there's going to be adoption. It will require time because not all phones can use it, except if you're an iPhone or Apple user. But the value of that for the country is reducing 30 million just for PLDT alone. Imagine, multiply it by 2, that's 60 million waste of SIM cards that that we can probably save and help the environment. For our data center business, agree with when we do use Ecovadis, they help audit our existing suppliers. They give the rating, and then we actually incorporate that in our strategy, in our sourcing strategy, which ones can we award based on the result of their assessment. So thank you.

All right, thank you. I think we have another question. Okay, so some sharing.

So I'm Matthew from Meralco. We launched back in 2022. We launched MS Cube. No, it's Meralco Sustainability Scorecard, and how we've implemented sustainability is the other way around. So we, we kind of influenced our suppliers instead of working on looking for suppliers that are sustainable. What we did is we incorporated a scorecard as part of our accreditation process.

That's right.

So now it influenced our suppliers that for you to become a supplier of Meralco, you need to be sustainable. Um, we provided several trainings, we've guided our suppliers, so we never left them sort of at the, at the dart, where if you're not able to comply with our accreditation, you're out. So that's why now 90% of our suppliers are passing that scorecard. And for the scorecard, we didn't start with a very stringent scorecard. Instead, we started with a phased approach where we identify just a portion first of Sustainability items, implemented it, and evolved that scorecard to a higher level of sustainability goal and initiatives.

All right, 90% sustainable suppliers. Impressive. Thank you, sir, for sharing that with us. And I think that will conclude our panel discussion for this morning. Thank you so much, Rai. Thank you so much, Naomi and Wang.

Thank you. Thank you.

All right, so next up, 18 years of strong consulting and end-to-end SAP experience. Currently, intelligence spend and Business Network Solutions Advisory in Southeast Asia. Let's welcome Tuhin Auzar.

Yeah, let me make sure first this is working. Still not? Okay, yeah. I've learned from the previous experiences. So, okay. Good morning, everyone. My name is Tuheen, and I'm part of the spend management team at SAP. What we're going to talk about today is, I think when Chirag started The session, he asked, and I think many of the table raised the hand on SAP as one of your system you use as an ERP. Yeah. So now what you got about how you can use SAP solution with Business Network and how you can extend the capabilities of it beyond the 4 walls of your organization. How can you more proactively collaborate with your suppliers? Trading partners, service providers, whoever it is. Yeah. To start with, I know we have a diverse group in this audience, but we, to make it simple, we have taken a simple case study of a beverage company. Now let's say this beverage company makes a fruit-based drink, and then they have a supplier on one side who provide them raw materials. They have some bulk bottling capabilities. And on the downstream side, what we call about logistics, they have capabilities to send it to customers via carriers, shippers, retailers, so on and so forth. Yeah, very simple. And if we make it some of the challenges with this Oops, this has stopped working again. I think you need to go back. Okay, so some of the challenges which this company is facing is more from the transparency point of view, right? Let's say typical beverage companies have this process of planning. So next 3 months, 6 months, 9 months, 12 months, how much I need from raw material point of view? I was talking somewhere outside with one of the customers. They're saying, oh, we can do this in S/4. You can do this in ECC. Our planners do it easily. Then I asked, do you share this document with your suppliers? Yeah, we share it. How? Excel. Excel and email. Yeah. So the challenge, typical challenge in Excel and email is that, that first of all, they are not live document. And secondly, I don't know any of here are from planning team, but planner keeps changing their parameters. So they come up with a constraint. They come up with, oh, I mean, I was here in the month of August. There was a fever, right? So there's a surge in the demand. Does your supplier know about it? So the first issue is that, that Your plan has to be accurate. Secondly, it has to be real time. So although you can do all this in your backend, does your supplier know about it? So that's the first issue from problem statement point of view. The second is, I mean, we we talk about I think in the initial session with Wang started on the collaboration side, right? I know a big can't name the customer, a big CPG company in. Indonesia, and they say we use WhatsApp to send purchase orders to our supplier. Yeah, so that's how the challenges are. So how do I make sure that we use SAP solution to send the purchase order? Not only send it, get a confirmation on it, right? So it's not that I will deliver it specifically in this industry. Let's say you ask for 10 quantity. Supplier can only fulfill 8. What will happen to remaining 2? You need to know when is it coming. You also need to let your production team know so that there is no underutilization of your plant, so on and so forth. Most of our customers don't use that. They send purchase orders over emails, hard copies, and then it goes like that. So that's the second issue. Also here, if we talk about the quality part of it, In this industry, rejection rates are as high as 10 to 20%. So how do I ensure that when you receive the raw material, when you receive the finished component, or when you receive the semi-finished part, they are tested by supplier even before you receive it? So that is where the quality collaboration comes into picture. It's not about just sending a purchase order and receiving goods. Yeah, making sure that you get the right amount of goods, and also you receive at the right quantity and the quality which you asked for. So that's the, uh, second issue. Now third one is more from distribution point of view. So after going through all this, let's say we make a beverage drink finally. Now how do I ship it? When I ship it, what kind of issues I get? Say for example, this part of the world typhoons coming. How do you get end-to-end visibility, which Wang has raised in his session? Once it goes from your warehouse and before it reaches your end customer, it will go through multiple legs. Could be seaport, could be going through port congestion issues, could be other custom issues, whatever it is. How do you make sure your customers are notified about it? Not only customers, your internal stakeholders, your marketing, whoever is there notified about it? So that's the third issue. And fourth is everyone's pet topic, higher cost. Make sure that you put category strategy around it. In this industry, raw material and packaging is almost 40 to 50% of the cost of goods sold. So how do you make sure that you identify the supplier, you compare with your peers and competitors, so on and so forth? So that's the 4 problem statements we have. And now let's see how SAP Business Network helps to solve that. So I lost it. I think your slide is gone. Yep. So this is what you have in the left, your typical SAP system, which I think most of you are using, where you run your Procure to pay, order to cash, design to operate. There is this planning system here at the bottom, which is IBP, and on the right-hand side there is a supplier. And our challenge is there is a big gap between this and this. Yeah, so how do you send data to your suppliers? Using emails, hard copies, WhatsApp, fax, whatever it is. So what SAP Business Network does, it fills that gap. I think some of the customers are already using it for core procurement processes like PO collaboration, sourcing. But what we are talking about is more advanced collaboration. 2 challenges which we discussed for this company, the case study we have started, right? How can I share my forecast with the suppliers on real-time basis and also get commitment from that? Okay, so I need 100 quantity next 3 months, 6 months, 9 months. Let your supplier commit that, okay, they will be able to furnish it. And then you change your demand plan, you change your production plan accordingly. Typically, if you don't have it, then this whole process will be manual. The second thing is more on the PO collaboration side, right? So when you send a purchase order of, say, quantity 8, your supplier has to commit they can only fulfill 6 out of it. And two, they will send after say one week. You change in your backend, your production plan has to be accordingly updated. That doesn't work. And third point which we talked about is the quality collaboration. Say you define your quality parameters. It could be color. It could be your— I think there is someone from the cement. Yes, it could be your density or whatever it is. So you identify that and you let Supplier know beforehand, even before they ship the good, they can check all that, and only then after they will ship it. So you'll the the rejection rates are reduced up to 20% in some of the case. Yeah. So that's the that's the value from from solution point of view. Oops, I think I lost it.

Okay. So how do we?

Close the deck.

Close.

Yeah, go back.

Open.

Nope, not moving. Okay, hopefully this will work. Sorry for that. Okay, so what does business network do? And the value more comes from the strength it has is that it has the 4.9 trillion transactions, right? So if you just put a context around this number is that this is as big as Germany's GDP. That's how the business network is. We have operations in 190 countries. And this is important from invoice processing point of view, right? Because each country has different invoicing rules. And when you collaborate with your suppliers for PO to invoice process, whether you're doing in Singapore, whether you're doing in Philippines. We have customers who are working in Indonesia. Vietnam has very unique rules for invoicing. So that all local invoice processing rules are supported through Business Network. And the other part is the 6 million trading partners. Yeah. So each time when you look for a new supplier, and this is quite important when you start, say, a new plant in, say, Thailand. Now in Thailand, if you want to look for a new supplier, Business Network can support that. I was also hearing there was a sustainability part. So we are also adding the sustainability elements here so that you can see the sustainability commitments for your new suppliers in the business network. You will also see moving forward the carbon emission through the system. So for example, if you send a purchase order, how much is the carbon emission on that, specifically on the Scope 3 side? Business network supported. The other important part here is the finance collaboration. So the dynamic discounting part. So how do you make sure that your suppliers get early payment discounts specifically on the invoicing side? That is also business support, network support from the value point of view. So if you see where we started is that I have an ERP and that's where I live. What business network does, it extends the capability of ERP beyond the 4 walls of your organization. You don't need to, you need only to have to expose your ERP to your suppliers, trading partner, but the business network does it for you. And it is like procurement, supply chain, asset management, and also the finance collaboration.

Yeah.

Okay. So some key point on the network. One thing is that this is multi-to-multi-network. And what do I mean by that? If we have customers who say, okay, we want to start, and I think we have a PLDT. So if you go and see that which of the PLDT suppliers are also providing goods or services to Globe, you can search it. Yeah, so, and vice versa. So that's how the Business Network works. We do provide that service for our new customers that you can give a list of your suppliers, and then we can do a search for you that how many are onboarded on the business network, how many are active, and how many are working with your competitors. I mean, I can't share that, but rest of the things we can share it. So, uh, the other important part is that the, the business context. Yeah, and this is quite important because the network is, uh, is industry agnostic. So we started our discussion with the beverage company, but we have telecom companies here. We have, I mean, I know one of the hotels provider in Singapore, like Polar Puffs. They provide puffs to all major hotels and resorts in Singapore, like Marina Bay Sands, Genting, and all. They use Business Network. Yeah, I was recently talking with a chemical company, and they're saying we need to find suppliers very fast. So how do I go and search for new suppliers? In the market, because in their business it's very important to quickly find new suppliers and onboard them. So again, business network helps you to do that. So we started with the beverage company example, but business network goes beyond that. It's industry agnostic. It also— the important part is that on this side you have your core ERP processes, whether you are using S/4HANA, whether you are using ECC. What business network does, it It expands that beyond your four walls. Yeah. Last point on the so one of the key challenge which we discuss is on the logistics side. Again, business network one of the component is on the track and trace. So we are talking about the how do I track my shipment once it moves from my from my warehouse? How do I know where is it reached? Whether it's the port, uh, whether it has stuck somewhere on, on some internal villages, uh, Business Network do provide end-to-end visibility through global track and trace, uh, whether you are shipping through sea, uh, air, uh, road. Specifically in this part of the world, there are typhoons and all, right? So how to ensure that those are covered, uh, or on a rail? Uh, we have a tie-up with a partner, Project 44, can real-time give you traceability of the solution. It also has another component which we, which we call as a material traceability, which is more relevant for the pharma companies who need to, say, manage their batches and recall it if required, track it because of the regulatory reason. So that is also part of the business network component. This is the logistics side. Previously, we discussed more on the procurement and supply chain side. And last but not least is the point Ryan covered briefly on his session is on the category. Everyone's— so SAP has released this solution in the month of August. What it does is that it gives you opportunity to manage your category in a structured manner. Any initiative which you're starting with the category, just talk about sourcing. Yeah, if you want to reduce a cost or if you want to make sure your supply chain more efficient, what are the initiatives you can take based on this category? So for example, we are talking about packaging material in this context. Sustainability could be one initiative. How do I track it? Who are the stakeholders who have to be involved? What are the goals I have for sustainability? What are the timelines? Which solution to be used? Everything is here in the one solution. And we start with the spend analysis first, that how much first time spending on this category? Who are my top 10 suppliers? Where are they listed? Where are they based? So on and so forth. And it also goes beyond of putting the— exposing this to your suppliers also, so you can get feedback from supplier. We also have a tie-up with the BOE who actually provide the market data insight that for this category, what are the cost fit analysis for, say, worldwide, how your peers and competitors are doing, what are the benchmarks, so on and so forth. So this is the latest offering, and I mean, if you want to talk about it, we can. take it offline. But this is where SAP is investing heavily. The last 2 topics is on the key innovation which is coming. And this is our new sustainability dashboard, which is from Scope 3 point of view. This is generative AI solution where you can track your emissions, Scope 3 emissions of your suppliers. Some you can get data points and some it gets from the internet and some other data feeds. Yeah, so quite powerful from GenAI point of view because I think there was a question that— I know the screen is not yet clear, but there was a question on how do I know the Scope 3 commitments. So what you need to feed to this system is your POs, invoices, and then generative AI will automatically calculate the Scope 3 commitments. Based on the spend control tower. This is as new as October Vienna Spend Connect. So it's just released, not yet available, but should be available in next few months. And the next one is which Wang covered, be quite that we are also including Julie, which is our bot in all our solution. This is like a copilot where you can type and then like you do on a bank website or anything. So now you can do this. This slowly will include this in all our solutions. Currently, it is only available in the category management, but then slowly it will go to the whole solution. Yeah. So that was the quick insight on Business Network. Any question?

Hey, sorry, quick one. Yeah. Could you touch on the asset network?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure, sure, sure. Okay.

Go back to that.

The point which Vang raised, yes, here, the asset management company. So business network actually has the multiple component.

Let me go back to the main slide.

Asset collaboration. So this is more relevant for the heavy asset industry. Maybe PLDT is one, or we have some oil and gas companies majorly who use this. And what does it do is primarily you create a digital twin of your asset. Your asset details are visible to your suppliers, to maintenance technicians, to service providers, to warranty providers. Typically how a typical asset maintenance does is you need to share all this detail with multiple stakeholders. What this solution or Business Network for Asset does is you put it in a network and then everyone can access, everyone can collaborate centrally. So that is the real value. So for example, in some of the oil and gas companies who have a large asset base, they also use that. So oil and gas, telecom, which is heavy asset heavy, and some of the others use that.

Yeah.

Okay, any other question? Nope. Then thank you very much for your time. I think we'll pass it to the next presenter.

All right, thank you so much. So for our next presenter, she began her career in expense and invoice management in 2016. Since 2014, working with small-medium businesses to multinational corporations, improves their travel expense and invoice management processes. She has developed a comprehensive understanding of challenges in this domain and has successfully implemented strategies to address them. So to discuss employee discretionary spend insights, let's welcome I.

Aiden Ambrosio. Hello. Hi. Actually, it's good afternoon. So thank you for staying.

Okay.

All right.

Okay. So again, thank you. My name is Aiden. I'm actually Solutions consultant for SAP Concur. So I would like to talk about employee discretionary spend insights. Okay, so what I will be presenting for you today is actually a report that's going to provide us with very valuable insights to actually enhance procurement strategies in terms of your travel spend and your deal spend. So I just have a short agenda for today because I believe my session is what stands between you and lunch, right? So I'm just gonna make it very light, very short in preparation for lunch. So I'm gonna spend— I'm gonna talk about the Spend Insights 2022 report by SAP Concur and Oversight. So SAP Concur is a leading provider for travel spend and— sorry, expense and invoice management solution. Now, Oversight is an