Overcoming Economic Challenges PwC offers a package of tools, templates and pre-configured solutions across a range of SAP products and business functions through its Value Platform. “As a $6 billion company delivering thousands of projects of all kinds, we at PwC realised we created a center of excellence specifically to harvest things like leading practices, requirements and capabilities across all those projects,” Briner said. “We’ve been able to consolidate all that – whether they are SAP or not – coming together as good business leading practices.” PwC offers SAP-centric architectures and solutions through its Edge Solutions products and are available in different iterations for virtually every industry, including utilities, energy, chemicals, process industries, consumer, lifecycle and transportation. “Pre-configured means that the offering has more than just a couple of configuration settings – it’s the operating model you would execute that in, its capability model down to level five, it’s all the SAP configuration, training and everything else we need to deliver so we can deliver faster and it becomes more repeatable in terms of quality and risk to our clients and their projects,” Briner said. Benchmarking supply chains PwC uses a benchmarking model called SCOR, or Supply Chain Operations Reference- model, to measure supplier reliability, responsiveness, agility, cost and more. “PwC in 2011 acquired a company called PRTM, which was the inventor of SCOR, and has since injected the model into the DNA of PwC’s supply chain practice,” Briner said. “The original SCOR was ‘plan, source, make, deliver’, but we’ve evolved it a little further out to include ‘support, operate and maintain’ to form a whole end-to-end lifecycle of everything that could impact supply chain in there. We’ve also embedded cyber, controls, ESG and clean data. “We can take SCOR in more dimensions now than just the supply chain organization too – it also integrates into the entire organization now with the way we’ve deployed it.” Supply chains have leveraged data and intelligence to make them run more efficiently, but the recent explosion of AI is also opening possibilities in further improving performance and visibility. PwC’s supply chain intelligence capabilities include providing data ingestion tools and using advanced analytics and AI to convert operational data into actionable and insightful visualizations. Within the SAP context, these intelligent solutions are part of the company’s Industry 4.0 product range like industrial internet of things (IIoT) and smart manufacturing software. “Industry 4.0 looks much deeper at the end-to-end view of a customer’s data from either an operational point of view, a supply chain or a procurement,” Briner said. “It almost doesn’t matter because all that’s built into SCOR, but Industry 4.0 gave that vision end-to-end around how to be efficient and effective when you start integrating operations and engineering and maintenance and supply chain and having more accurate and timely financials and cost view to what you’re doing.”