Describe your current job role and a summary of the business model of your organisation?
Kholiwe is the Managing Director for Southern Africa at SAP, where she leads a team of technology and industry experts in supporting the cloud adoption and digital transformation efforts of organisations large and small throughout the region. As a market leader in enterprise application software, SAP is suited to help businesses run as intelligent and sustainable enterprises. The business achieves this through simplifying technology for companies to allow them to adopt new innovations and build new capabilities that ensure their current and future growth and success.
What strengths and abilities do you bring to the above role?
A drive to put customer centricity at the core of how SAP runs its business – and supports customers – throughout Southern Africa. A focus on collaboration within our business, to ensure the broader SAP Southern Africa team work together to solve customer problems and drive the success of the business. And an entrepreneurial spirit that encourages ownership from every employee to lead change in their clients’ businesses. After all, you do not need a fancy title to lead, you lead by example from the position you occupy.
Please describe the expectations of the end customers that you address. What are their pain points today?
Modern organisations have a universal need to leverage technology to drive innovation, optimise efficiencies, protect against disruption and future-proof their business models. Companies that embrace technology are better positioned to adapt to changes in their operating environment, take advantage of emerging opportunities, and overcome challenges.
SAP acts as a strategic partner to companies wishing to adopt new capabilities through technology, providing insight, expertise, and technology to bring their vision to life. Through the SAP Business Technology Platform, companies gain access to a single business platform for application development and automation, data and analytics, integration and AI capabilities, allowing them to adopt and deploy new technologies and capabilities with ease while improving and enhancing core business processes.
Programmes such as RISE with SAP can transition your current ERP data and processes to the cloud with less risk and without compromise. The bundle of tailor-made ERP software, transformation services, business analytics, and partner expertise guides you along a personalised path to the cloud
Which technologies and innovations can make a difference to your end customer’s business?
For mid-size and large enterprises, a scalable enterprise resource planning system is still crucial to their long-term success and their ability to manage complexity within their own business and in their broader operating environment. Cloud ERP holds particular relevance to companies in our region, as it provides a cost-effective route to a broad range of new capabilities. A cloud ERP system enables organisations to make better data-driven decisions, accelerate innovation, and quickly integrate and deploy new technologies.
An exciting new development on this front is the launch of GROW with SAP, a new offering that helps mid-size companies adopt cloud ERP quickly and seamlessly. GROW with SAP provides companies with preconfigured best practices that they can quickly adopt to bring immediate benefits and improvements to end-to-end business processes.
With the accelerated adoption services and a healthy ecosystem of implementation partners throughout the region, companies can leverage GROW with SAP to go live with their new capabilities in as little as four weeks.
How can a channel partner in your industry disrupt the regional market and gain a leading competitive position?
SAP is fortunate to have a vibrant partner ecosystem, with highly-skilled and experienced technology companies supporting our vision for customers throughout the region. For channel partners to succeed in our fast-paced, cloud-first world, there needs to be a focus on long-term value engineering where channel partners work hand-in-hand with customers to drive continuous innovation and deliver ongoing value from their technology investment.
The most successful channel partners have also enhanced their skill sets to advisory and business value generation, in addition to expert knowledge and capabilities in deploying cloud solutions.
Which aspects of your job role do you find rewarding and which are challenging?
The most rewarding parts of my job is the joy of leading a team of experts and collaborating with our industry partners to deliver technology-led solutions to our customers, thereby empowering them with new capabilities and unlocking additional opportunities for innovation. The fast-paced nature of our industry can be a challenge, making it all the more important that the entire business works together to support our customers throughout the region.
How do you best like to de-stress and recharge off work?
Outside of work I spend time with my kids, read extensively, and ride motorbikes, cycle and hike in the great outdoors. Any activity that reconnects me to nature can be therapeutic.
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