Inside Insights: Successful SAP Transformation with Lisa G. Smith

In this latest episode, Lisa Smith joins Mustansir Saifuddin to dive into the world of SAP transformation and process improvement. Lisa shares how to leverage SAP to streamline supply chain processes, optimize business operations, and drive significant improvements. Listen in as Lisa dives into the importance of business objectives, alignment, effective change management and so much more.

Lisa Gonzalez Smith is a trusted global procurement leader transforming global end-to-end supply chain processes and driving organizational change management. Lisa is a seasoned source to pay executive with over 30 years in global automotive procurement (Direct & Indirect) and a proven record of delivering SAP Ariba global programs at Ford Motor Company on budget and ahead of schedule with state of the art, cloud-based technology

LinkedIn: Lisa G. Smith Innovative Solution Partners

Mustansir Saifuddin

X @mmsaifuddin

Episode Transcript:

[00:00:00] Mustansir Saifuddin: Welcome to Tech Driven Business, Lisa. How are you?

[00:00:38] Lisa Smith: Doing great, Mustansir. How are you?

[00:00:40] Mustansir Saifuddin: Doing wonderful. Thank you. I'm so excited to have you on our show. And today we would like to talk about SAP transformation and process improvement and what other person can talk about that? , Especially in the context of supply chain processes.

[00:00:56] So I really look forward to this session with you.

[00:01:00] Lisa Smith: I certainly appreciate the invitation to do it, and I'm excited to be here, and thanks for the opportunity. I enjoy being able to share some of those learnings and have these these fun discussions, so.

[00:01:11] Mustansir Saifuddin: Absolutely. So let's get into it. You know we talk about companies leveraging SAP. When you talk about leveraging SAP to identify and eliminate, basically the idea is inefficiencies in the supply chain processes. How can they do that? what's your take on this?

[00:01:29] Lisa Smith: Well, I think, you know, first of all, great technology can be used to really drive change around how business gets done. So defining what's important for the business to have going forward. Defining what is important and what they need then allows for SAP's technology to drive how that gets done. But with that, there's a lot of change to those processes, or if you really want to transform the business, there should be and, but with that, you need to be mindful of the [00:02:00] change impact.

[00:02:00] That comes along with that. The change that impacts the people, be it internal employees, be it external with suppliers, for example, and you want to bring those folks along on that journey and get them excited about the change, right? One of the things that I find is tremendous is being able to leverage SAP's technology to streamline, commonize and simplify processes across the enterprise.

[00:02:25] And it has the great. breadth and depth in order to do that. And that process capability depth and breadth allows for that to happen. And so it allows you to then ask yourself as an organization, why can't we do business, for example, the same way everywhere, unless there's a legal or regulatory or tax reason why do we have to be different?

[00:02:48] How can we simplify this? How can we take some of that inefficiency out of the process? And the software can really help drive that.

[00:02:56] Mustansir Saifuddin: That's excellent point. I think what I'm hearing from you is as much as you can commonize