Episode 176: The New Era of Field Service and Asset Management with SAP's Ryan Jones

You cannot scroll through LinkedIn these days without running into the word autonomous.

So [laughs] looking ahead, what does the journey toward autonomous operations actually mean for supply chain leaders?

So it starts back on what we were talking about there with the trusted data foundation and end-to-end business processes.

If we can't get that down, it's gonna be tough to do orchestrated business processes that are completely autonomous.

But what I would say is it, it doesn't remove, or it doesn't mean removing people, right-

Mm-hmm

... first of all.

So it means systems can increasingly sense risk and recommend action and prioritize work and schedule resources, support execution, and continuously learn from these outcomes.

And from supply chain more means a lot of the same things, but intelligent orchestration, right? And for us, it's really how asset management and field services fit into the supply chain to make sure that we're keeping these assets running to prevent these type of supply chain disruptions.

SAP recently announced a new offering for asset and service management.

Maybe you can walk us through this announcement and what it means for our customers.

Yeah.

We have two big ones, and they come together a- a- as well here, right? So the first one was field service and asset management.

So this is really the evolution of our field service management solution into co- incorporating more asset management capabilities, so focusing directly on the maintenance plant for manufacturing specific industries, and not just allowing them to service their equipment in the aftermarket, but also maintaining the equipment that builds these machines and equipment.

As well, what we're doing here is we see there's a lot of synergies between traditional enterprise asset management with the asset context and the reliability angles with the field service and the agility that it provides for scheduling and routing and execution.

And a lot of our customers really need all of these different solutions coming together.

They don't want to be defined in terms of their solution capabilities by traditional market categories.

So we're bringing these different solutions together so our customers can benefit from all of these different capabilities that it provides and also reduce the amount of solutions that one customer would need to buy.

Now, the second big part about that is, you probably heard about this, but there's this new thing called AI.

[laughs] It has come up once or twice in our podcast series.

Wow.

Yeah.

Go figure, right? So this is also a big differentiator now, and what we're trying to do here and we're doing is bringing in more autonom- autonomous operations into field service and asset management as well.

We announced six agents at Sapphire just for FSA, from advanced schedule optimization to creating scheduling policies from scratch with agents to working with business rules.

But how can we bring AI and all the other parts of the SAP portfolio together to orchestrate from an asset signal to creating a work order with all the different parts to doing that schedule optimization to a fully informed and briefed technician, right? So the two parts were, again, were really the field service and asset management, but how we're bringing AI agents and autonomous operations into that to really bring it to the next level.