Recently a friend of mine told me that their organization is embarking on to the journey of digital transformation. I said wow, what exactly it is doing for which his response was that their implementation of portal system for logging records. Does it quality to be called a digital transformation ? is it so ? Actually, for many, digital transformation is digitization of their processes which can be a mere implementation of IT tools replacing their legacy modes of operation. Indeed digitization does not advocate replacement of legacy applications with new age tools. Rather it advocates tight integration of organization competitive tools which have evolved over years with new age technologies to stream line the user experience and operational excellence. 

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Hello All,

Sometime back I wrote a blog on Use of AI / ML for managing Incident Management, it has received good response. I have received many requests to know in detail on how to implement the same and details surrounding it and some even requested me to share the source code.

In this current blog and series of upcoming blogs I would like to share some short course on Introduction to Data Science and how it is used for managing the EHS issues. There are many relevant issues which can be solved using AI / ML, be it Descriptive Statistics, Predictive Analysis of incidents / exceptions for air permits or equipment based pollution deviations or even customer / supplier perception of the risks around the products being sold by the organization, automatic classification of dangerous goods based on past history, prediction of product compliance based on source and many more proprietary uses.

I would like to take the example of Incident Management / Risk Assessment to create two separate case studies on how those can be used to manage operational risk in major industries. I am going to use tools like Python or Knime / R & Azure Hope it helps all. I got 90 days free trail access of SAP Cloud Platform wherein I can access Leonardo, IoT, AI / ML platform, I am not sure if i can demo the scenario.

I am providing a Introductory video on Introduction to Data Science for helping those who are not aware of the content surrounding AI / ML. Do share your inputs / comments which help me to prepare content. I do not promise the content to be available immediately but based on my free time I would like to create blog posts  / video sessions on a regular basis.

Thanks

Jak

Hello All,

There has been some changes happening in the field of SAP EHS being it introduction of S/4HANA; S/4HANA Cloud based EHS solutions. Be it Business Suite applications or Product Compliance suite for S/4HANA Cloud, it is changing the way the EHS is working till now. In this short video I tried to give an overview on different EHS business processes covering all modules of EHS which have been introduced till date excepting for modules like SAP Carbon Impact 4.0 or Tools like Document Analyzer, Web based MSDS hosing, SAP Product and REACH compliance, CfP, Data Editor etc.

All the content which has been presented is from the Literature available in open google search using Internet explorer. Please do let me know your thoughts and comments on the content.

Thanks – Jak

I have involved in couple of assessments over the adaptation of Robotic Process Automation for meeting Regulatory Compliance. It was a detailed analysis of existing processes for the RPA potential. I would like to share the some of the experience from the exercise.

To begin with you need do the process discovery. Identifying or discovering the process for a potential automation is very critical for successful automation projects. A mix right knowledge of business processes along with capabilities of diverse RPA Tools is critical for the process discovery exercise. Usually it helps to conduct process discovery workshops with key stakeholders comprising of Business Analysts, RPA Architects and Developers to disaggregate each process and identify the automation potential. The detail steps include i) Listing down the processes to be validated for automation ii) identify the consideration consisting of technical & process landscape iii) give relative weightages of the consideration based on experience iv) compute the score for overall automation tools. Some of the questions considered for assessment include complexity of the activity, tactical/operational / strategic nature of the activities, stability of the application which is being tried to be automated, volume of the activity and other criteria like FTE, process standardization or reengineering requirements, is used based on experience. Some of the RPA Tool vendors also provide process discovery tools for assessing the automation potential.

Once the list of automation potential is identified choose the best case for a Proof Of concept which can be used to buy in stakeholder confidence. For EHS, SAP EHS already offers streamlined process which automate the stewardship activities, but in real nature the organizational processes are not completely automated and significant manual effort is used to manually work on different activities to compile the information. Some of the processes include for example, vendor SDS management process, Assessment & Processing of report shipping orders where different reasons of SDS failure can be identified and based on it data creation request or business decisions can be automated, similarly another area is around automating poison centre notification procedures, which to begin seem too regulatory to be risk to be automated but has significant savings. Other processes like manual SDS shipment, DG management, SDS authoring and other block managements, depends on the organizational maturity level in product stewardship activities, which are proprietary in nature to be discussed here.

Regarding the tools section for automating the scenarios there are many tools available in the market which have simple automation capabilities to built in artificial intelligence capabilities via Microsoft Azure integration or Python coding capabilities. It needs detailed assessment to choose the right tool. But many researches and analysis reports from Gartner for example, suggest having a mixed landscape for tool selection as best features are spread across multiple vendors and it is valuable to have a mix tools. SAP also released its product on Intelligent Process Automation using RPA, details of which can be found in Open SAP course scheduled during September 2019. Contextor eLearning  videos are available in YouTube

Thanks
Jak

As you must have noticed that Development of Machine Learning / AI projects largely aligned to specific groups inside the organization. Those who have specialized skills handle the development, testing and operationalization of the components. In deed this way of managing AI/ML projects offer benefits to the organization due to its specialized nature, it also poses barrier for the rapid transitioning of the organization to develop other innovative developments.

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