Hello everyone, thanks for tuning in. I hope all of you are staying safe, in these unprecedented times. I am Nandagopal Prasad and I head an organization called as Partner Innovation Lifecycle Services at SAP. SAP strongly believes in the power of co-innovating with partners for customer success, and our team enables that globally. I speak about what I see as the adaptations in our own company, and then move on to what are the opportunities in the post COVID era, and those I think, will transform at a pace like never before accelerated by the pandemic, and the experiences gained from it.
From my perspective, the impact has been felt across all stakeholders, be it employees, customers, or partners. From an employee perspective, we were forerunners in ensuring safety and allowing people to work from anywhere. While we did that, we provided them all the tools and ensured there is no productivity loss. In fact, we saw in most cases improved productivity, perhaps due to the savings of travel time, technology allowed us not only to track, monitor and control footfall into our offices, but we also built many of the tracing apps for some of the countries. We also were empathetic towards the customers, supporting them in their businesses, through our enterprise applications, with increased importance on logistics and business networks.
Companies already need to gear up for the post COVID era and one important factor will be tracking and distribution of vaccines. We already have standard and custom-built solutions for example, to ensure authenticity of medicines, using cutting edge technologies like blockchain. We heard a lot about specific temperature requirements and logistics. Our IOT based solutions will ensure that we are able to manage these and other requirements and logistics solutions will help streamline the distribution. And of course, our ERP solutions will help manage the rest be it manufacturing or warehouse management and so on. In my opinion, while there will be many changes across sectors, I want to speak about three of them, which will changeand evolve because of the experience gained and tools created during the pandemic.
Workplaces – I doubt in future any of the companies will plan for one is to one workspaces. Given the flexibility and no negative impact in productivity, I see we will perhaps start planning three is to one five to one workspaces in offices. This would lead to impact on real estate both commercial and residential and also more and more people working from their hometowns. I hope and feel this will positively impact and reduce pressure on urban infrastructure, be it reduced pollution or reduced transportation requirements. Of course, IT innovation will remain the backbone providing the analytics and the necessary planning tools.
The other two sectors where I see a lasting impact is healthcare and education. Let’s look at health care. While some diseases need physical examination, many don’t, and imagine a doctor in Bangalore treating a patient in Delhi. Even for those that need physical examination, repeat visits, perhaps we’ll all go online, which will enable efficient and good doctors scale across geographies far easily than before. Now this will need not only the current tools that we have in terms of booking appointments, but it will also give rise to a lot of tools, which can store patient history, patient records, so on and so forth.
Many tools have evolved for online education and the same principle works if supported by regulatory guidelines. If we further develop and evolve these tools, imagine the ability to scale quality education with no physical boundaries. That’s all for me this time. I could go on and on, but want to close by saying many things will never be the same again. And there is a great opportunity for IT more than ever before, to try innovations across multiple sectors that make our customers successful, employees happy and leave a lasting positive impact on the society. Thank you. Have a great day. And again, do stay safe.
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