Czech Republic ready for the digital transformation
On June 1st the Prague conference hall Forum Karlín hosted another forum, SAP Forum Prague. Six hundred visitors spent their afternoon and evening in the world of digital transformation with the main focus on finance, media and production.
The conference was opened with a discussion about digital transformation and by comparing the situation in the Czech Republic, Germany and Austria. Stefan Höchbauer, President SAP Middle & Eastern Europe, and Klaus Sickinger, Managing Director SAP Austria, shared their experience from the neighboring markets with Roman Knap, Managing Director SAP Czech Republic.
“We’re fully absorbed by the digital transformation when successful companies have to rely on modern information technologies and they have to use them to a radical change of an established business model,” said Roman Knap. “This is a revolution that can transform the market leaders into small players and bring success to the small ones vice versa. No one had known Airbnb or Uber before. If the company wants to succeed it has to integrate information technologies in the business and use it for its development, this is the only way how Czech companies can catch the train of digital transformation.”
Rouven Morato, Head of Enterprise Analytics SAP, confirmed Roman’s words and demonstrated the future of successful companies on Digital Boardroom. Other speakers followed on the topic of digitization in media, finance and production. Chris Shaw, Director, Sales & Marketing IT for EMEA & ASIA Intel, talked about trends in the Internet of Things where SAP and Intel share the same vision, and seeing a huge potential in Industry 4.0 for the Czech market.
For the first time the SAP Quality Awards ceremony for the CEE region was part of the SAP Forum. Most of the awarded customers from the region came to collect their prizes and enjoy the moments on the stage together with Stefan Höchbauer and Jiří Synáček, Quality Director SAP CEE. The gold-medal winners in the categories Fast Delivery, Business Transformation and Innovative Project are from Hungary and Poland, silver and bronze medals go to Albania, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Montenegro, Poland and Slovenia. The three companies that received the Gold Award – KNYKK (Hungary) in Fast Delivery Category, Hungarian Public Road Nonprofit PLC in Business Transformation category and PKP Poland in Innovative Project category –- automatically qualify for SAP Quality Awards EMEA/MEE finals where they will compete with the absolute winners of more than 200 expected nominations from the EMEA/MEE territory.
“During this year’s SAP Forum, we took all of our guests through the digital transformation in several areas of business. We demonstrated the success achieved through the digitization on the concrete cases and projects of the companies from the whole Central Eastern Europe region, The Czech Republic was represented by KS Kolbenschmidt with its project and solution implemented by Mibcon among the medalists. It was a pleasure to have a chance to congratulate most of the winners in person here in Prague. I believe they’ll all build on successes achieved by implementing SAP solutions,” Knap said.
SAP’s partners also had a chance to demonstrate their projects implementing SAP solutions during the DEMO JAM, out of 5 competing teams KCT Data was chosen by the attendees through the event application as the winner. The event was crown by a concert of Olympic, a legendary Czech rock band that made the crowd dance to their famous songs.
Simply said: SAP Forum Prague run LIVE!