Offered by SAP
SAP consulting tasks immediately contain an unlimited quantity of documentation, a number of stakeholders, and compressed timelines, which regularly require guide data retrieval from on-line SAP documentation. On the identical time, cloud ERP packages now demand sooner design cycles, steady enhancements fairly than big-bang rollouts, and near-real-time decision-making. Joule for Consultants, SAP's conversational AI answer, was designed to assist meet these expectations and assist consultants all through their day by day duties, from reconciling greatest practices and validating design issues, to navigating SAP’s increasing AI, information, and utility panorama.
The end result: consultants work extra productively than ever earlier than, with superior outcomes, and ship sooner, high-quality SAP cloud transformations.
That promise attracted early consideration from KPMG companies, which turned a number of the largest SAP enablers taking part within the Joule early entry program, and certainly one of SAP's largest clients general. The group has onboarded 29 KPMG member companies around the globe thus far, and now 1000’s of KPMG consultants are utilizing Joule for Consultants of their day by day work.
"For us it wasn’t about experimenting," says Valentino Koester, world head of the SAP360 and SAP AI program at KPMG Worldwide. "It was extra about positioning our folks and member agency purchasers on the forefront of AI-enabled consulting."
Information on a world scale
"Aggressive strain is intense within the SAP implementation market," Koester says. "The core asset you could have as a consultancy is data and expertise, bundled in all types of how. AI and Joule for Consultants enable us to scale that data immediately throughout our world community, ensuring clients can entry it from everywhere in the world, regardless of who they discuss to within the group."
Whether or not it's a junior advisor or a senior supervisor, Joule ensures SAP greatest practices, business benchmarks, and the innovation a corporation has invested in for years just isn’t siloed someplace in a group, or someplace in a rustic the place it may well’t be shared at velocity and with accuracy.
"This makes our groups extra agile in responding to rising consumer wants or regulatory shifts, when new market entrants emerge or know-how modifications," Koester says. "The agility our consultants achieve permits us to advise clients not simply reactively, however proactively. In lots of instances, it turns into a type of early forecasting."
For instance, consultants can spot potential provide chain dangers early by means of AI-enabled course of mining they’ve applied for a buyer, or apply analytical capabilities with SAP Analytics Cloud earlier than these dangers truly materialize.
Overcoming challenges, assuaging ache factors
KPMG buyer transformations sometimes comply with KPMG’s Transformation methodology, which is intently aligned with SAP’s RISE methodology. RISE strikes by means of six SAP Activate phases: uncover, put together, discover, understand, deploy, and run, and every has recurring challenges that may sluggish momentum if not addressed early, Koester explains.
Within the uncover part, groups make investments closely in business-case modeling, benchmarking, and stakeholder alignment — actions which can be time-intensive and tough to finish with out full visibility. The put together part introduces intensive challenge mobilization, reporting calls for, early threat identification, and governance setup, any of which may stall progress earlier than execution begins.
Through the discover and understand phases, lengthy design workshops and piles of documentation can bathroom down decision-making. Defects and bottlenecks should be recognized as early as attainable, or they threat cascading downstream as rework. Within the deploy and run phases, organizations should develop and ship coaching content material whereas overcoming change resistance, which requires sustained communication to keep up adoption. As soon as dwell, steady KPI monitoring and course of optimization helps forestall points from settling into the working mannequin and eroding worth over time. AI might help consultants carry out these duties, in addition to any vital assessment and corrections, with a better diploma of accuracy, and extra shortly than ever earlier than.
"By adopting instruments like Joule for Consultants, we need to improve the work our professionals do, making them more practical and extra productive, so that they have extra time to deal with what issues most," Koester stated. "That's the consumer relationship, strategic decision-making, and delivering measurable enterprise outcomes. "
How AI modifications the transformation strategy
Joule for Consultants isn’t solely decreasing repetitive work; it’s additionally reshaping how KPMG approaches SAP-enabled transformations. The AI software has surfaced insights that historically required deep experience and fast recall, enhancing consultants’ means to reply to market dynamics and aggressive strain.
For instance, in early design workshops with clients, except there have been extremely skilled consultants on web site who, in actual time, may reply each query about enterprise processes, in addition to clarify the design issues and all of the technical logic within the new system, consultants often needed to defer solutions or validate them later, particularly when novel questions or edge instances got here up, slowing the momentum of the transformation.
“With Joule for Consultants, we had been hoping to validate the steerage our consultants may give on the spot, in actual time, to keep up implementation momentum and strengthen consumer confidence of their SAP system and KPMG advisors," Koester stated. "Our folks can immediately floor SAP greatest practices, pointers, and threat situations throughout workshops now, permitting our groups to maneuver ahead, serving to scale back delay inside the engagement."
They’re seeing the identical success throughout inside studying and enablement or sales-related actions. Joule has supercharged KPMG's inside SAP College, a studying program for brand new staff. Just lately, junior consultants have been capable of put together and current complicated and technical RFP responses with confidence, regardless of restricted expertise, as Joule guided them by means of every step in a structured, high-quality manner.
Making a profitable roll-out
To make sure a easy inside roll out course of to analysts, KPMG positioned Joule not because the introduction of a brand new software, however because the adoption of a brand new manner of working.
"We emphasised the organizational impression it will have, with Joule enabling smarter, more practical methods of working," Koester stated. "Consultants shortly noticed advantages, resembling much less time spent trying to find technical data and extra time to spend advising their clients and doing the useful work we’re very robust at."
Accountable AI remained a core pillar of the rollout. Along with aligning the initiative with KPMG’s Trusted AI Framework, each taking part KPMG agency performed a threat evaluation to mitigate potential dangers for purchasers and guarantee compliant, safe use of Joule for Consultants. Early adoption due to this fact started with awareness-building conversations throughout the community, serving to groups perceive what these “new methods of working” appear to be and the place AI can genuinely assist supply. KPMG additionally appointed a devoted enablement group to make sure Joule for Consultants is built-in into the broader organizational image.
"We’re working week after week on rising the lively adoption by consultants, whereas additionally utilizing the prospect to get their suggestions," he explains. "Our grassroots innovation suggestions instruments don't simply ask what they like and dislike, however what profitable use instances they're uncovering, and the way a lot time they suppose they're saving."
The purpose, he provides, isn’t to automate consulting, however to allow consultants to do their jobs higher. And since Joule for Consultants is continuous to evolve, KPMG expects its function to increase considerably over time. SAP continues to boost function units and response high quality with every launch, whereas it really works on creating AI brokers that collaborate with consultants and automate some parts of chosen workflows intelligently. KPMG is collaborating intently with SAP to responsibly combine these capabilities into extra phases of transformation tasks as they mature, in order that Joule turns into part of its general strategy to consulting.
“If early alerts maintain, Joule for Consultants isn’t only a useful software — it’s on observe to grow to be a regular in how SAP tasks are delivered,” Koester says.
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