ONEX Holding: Digital Customer Engagement

With the new generative artificial intelligence (AI) copilot Joule, SAP is uniquely positioned at the intersection of business and technology, opening up an enormous opportunity for economic value creation on a global scale. To help customers capitalize on this opportunity fast, SAP is also embedding AI and intelligent technologies in its customer engagement motion.

“The value, relevance, and velocity demanded from a cloud leader extend to both the solutions provided and the end-to-end customer engagement. Industry research shows that by 2025, four out of every five B2B customer engagements will be executed through digital channels,” said Sam Masri, global head of Digital, Customer Success, SAP. “Our customers need to achieve the business outcomes from their digital transformation much faster with streamlined interactions, reduced engagement complexity, and robust tech-enabled capabilities that make the buying journey agile, personalized, and memorable.”

With operations spanning more than 10 sectors and 80 business units across Europe and the Middle East, ONEX Holding entrusted SAP with its five-year digital transformation plan. For the 35 legal entities in its oil and gas division, ONEX adopted SAP S/4HANA Cloud, among other solutions, complemented by SAP Sustainability Control Tower to support its sustainability strategy. In six months from the initial digital contact, ONEX’s digital transformation journey was mapped out and the implementation successfully kicked off. Such velocity was gained through digital customer engagement with about 90% of the entire process being completed virtually, through SAP’s digital hubs in Cairo, Egypt, and Barcelona, Spain.

SAP digital customer engagement is executed via digital hubs, attractively located on five continents. The hubs are home to highly collaborative teams of diverse, digitally-native talent that help deliver end-to-end, virtual customer engagement services. By continuously applying AI and the latest technologies, these teams help drive our customers’ business outcomes at an exponential velocity while maintaining memorable and personalized customer experiences.

“Our experience with SAP was frictionless and seamless,” said Waqas Butt, ICT and digital transformation leader at ONEX Holding. “SAP digital engagement gave us an incredible jump start on our digital transformation and removed all the lags you typically experience with a traditional, in-person buying journey. With the immersive, tech-driven capabilities, we had access to the demo versions of SAP solutions that had already been mapped to our KPIs, enabling us to experience what these cloud solutions could do for us in an engaging way and at our own pace.”

“The best part of our experience was having immediate access to SAP’s 50 years of leadership in enterprise processes. We had SAP’s industry, solution, and value best practices at our fingertips, made available fast through digital modalities and powered by cutting-edge technologies,” added Butt. “Although digital, the experience felt more like we were seated at the same table with top minds in SAP who had profound knowledge of all the regions and sectors ONEX operates in, including energy, oil and gas, power generation, and even infrastructure management and investments.”

Part of ONEX’s digital transformation journey includes the development of a new way of working, called “Digital Workplace,” focused on embedding digital approaches into routine business processes to gain efficiencies and promote sustainability.

“Digital transformation is not a transaction; it is a partnership in which both parties need to be like-minded. When we finally shook hands in person with the SAP digital customer engagement team, we did it because we spoke the same language – we both understand the power of starting a digital transformation, digitally. We know we are in good hands on our path to redefine how ONEX runs,” stressed Butt.

“The relationship between ONEX and SAP is a beautiful example of how virtual immersive engagements can enable and scale human relationships and interactions, not diminish them. We call this human-led, digitally-powered customer engagement with a mandate of ensuring that all SAP customers have the same path to success with SAP, regardless of where they are or when they needs us,” concluded Masri.

Edina Manuel is part of Digital, Customer Success at SAP.