SAPinsider Technology Executive Forum Issue 1 2021

Q. When SAPinsider surveyed our CIO community in our 2021 research, one of the questions we asked was about primary driv- ers of current strategies. The top responses were increasing process efficiency and supporting new business models and new business strategy. A third primary driver was managing through this disruption. Do those priorities resonate with you? Those do resonate, and for Ingevity, I would add that a top driver for us is to become more agile. We had an antiquated platform that was limiting our ability to really do new and innovative things with SAP. We were on an enhancement pack that was some- thing like 12 versions behind where SAP currently is on ECC. So for us to even implement some new functionality that had been available for several years, it would have required significant effort and regression testing and all sorts of work for us just to turn on one piece of new functionality. Moving to SAP S/4HANA leap-frogs us forward with all of the new functionality available in the latest version, and in preparation for the migration journey we moved all of our new and existing SAP systems to the cloud — to Microsoft Azure. Ingevity is constantly looking for opportunities to grow both organically and inorganically and so moving to the cloud helps us become more agile and better positioned to very quickly and easily spin up the services that we need to support that new business. Ultimately, we're building a digital platform for the company so getting the core in now helps us position ourselves for technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotic process automation. Q. We also asked leaders what skill sets and technology investments they’re prioritizing, and they identified cloud and SAP S/4HANA, as well as analytics, automation, and artificial intelligence. Why are those skill sets and technologies important from an investment standpoint for Ingevity? I’ll start by talking about analytics, and for us to get there we actually had to take a step back and focus on master data management and master data governance. We did not have a serious focus in that space as a company and we weren't really positioning ourselves to leverage data as an asset. As part of our transformation initiative we're put- ting in a master data governance platform and tools, which ultimately, by re-engineering our business processes through SAP S/4HANA, gets us to a point where we can start slicing and dicing the data and doing real-time analytics. We're excited about the analytics side of it and integrating machine learning into our business func- tions with our plant floor operations. Then we can start looking at things like predictive and preventative maintenance, not just scheduling maintenance for equipment. There's a ton of oppor- tunity in that space and we're starting to invest in our people to help them learn and train up on these skillsets as part of this business transformation. Q. Can you say more about how you are bringing these skillsets into your organization? That’s the topic of the day right now: organizational design. We're focused on business processes and SAPinsiderOnline.com 39