Tools to boost productivity
As managing director of SAP Canada, Mark Aboud oversees a workforce of almost 2,500 — including about 1,700 research and development jobs in labs in Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto — and maintains relationships with 2,300 businesses across the country that use SAP’s products. Like the global company, SAP Canada has expanded its offerings to cloudbased and mobile solutions in recent years. But Mr. Aboud said his approach is to focus first on helping clients from a business perspective and let that dictate the particular products SAP recommends. In this edited transcript of his conversation with Financial Post reporter Christine Dobby, Mr. Aboud explains his strategy.
Q Many Canadian companies use SAP but people may not be familiar with your company. What is it that you do exactly?
A If you kind of boil it down, SAP helps its customers become more competitive. In Canada that’s important because Canadian productivity numbers have been declining since the 1980s. So making companies more competitive to compete on a global market is what we do here in Canada. We do it in three major ways. We have software that helps these companies become more productive and more efficient, we have software that helps them analyze the information about their business and make business decisions, and we have software that helps put that on a mobile device — a BlackBerry, an iPad, etc. — so they can have access to their business from wherever they are.
Q How has the company changed since you first took over?
A. When I joined SAP, you could call it a bit of a sleepy ERP ( enterprise resource planning) company and all we really did was help companies run their businesses more efficiently and more simply. Since that time, we’ve expanded to offer our customers much more in terms of helping them understand their strategies, deliver on their strategies and deliver impact to their bottom line. We ultimately sell technology, but we’ve been highly successful in engaging with customers across Canada at a business level, where we work with them on their business strategies. Today we’re working with our customers on a business level, not really on an IT level.
Q What new customers or opportunities have you been pursuing?
A Our biggest newest market is in financial services. We’re working with all the major banks on various projects to help them with things like improving customer experience. A lot of the financial institutions — and a lot of companies in general who have great contact with customers — want to improve their experience because that tends to create more loyal customers. We’re also doing some work with leading companies on loyalty programs that would be run off your mobile device and allow them to give you promotions as you walk into the store as opposed to mass mailings.
Another thing I would say is most companies are also trying to improve employee engagement to get better productivity and culture. So we provide tools to make employees more engaged and effective. Tools that are enterprisewide, like business processes that allow employees to either view information they never had access to or to contribute to the organization in a way that is more seamless and just allows them to come to the office and be more productive and more satisfied with their job.
Q Where do you see SAP Canada going in the next four years or so?
A I would tell you I think if we’re not now, we’re going to be the most valuable software company in the world in terms of what we do for companies. SAP Canada in particular, I think we’re world leading in terms of how we engage with customers to determine how we can help their business. I have a lot of people on my staff who have business degrees or MBAs who work with customers on developing business opportunities. Later on we get down to sort of the technical aspects but that comes way down after we’ve built out what the business opportunity is. Our business in Canada is growing extremely rapidly and I think that’s the main reason.