Day: February 20, 2018

ICYMI: I am profiling market data APIs as part of my partnership with Streamdata.io. It is a process I enjoy because it provides me with a number of interesting stories I can tell here and on API Evangelist. Many of the APIs I profile just frustrate me, but there are always the gems who are doing interesting things with their APIs and understand providing APIs as well as consuming APIs. One API that I’ve been profiling, and I am able to put to use in my work to build a gallery of real-time data APIs, was 1Forge.

1Forge provides dead simple APIs for accessing market data, and surprise(!) – you can sign up for a key, and begin making API calls within minutes. It might not sound like that big of a deal, but after going through 25+ APIs, I only have about 5 API keys. I’m working on an OpenAPI definition for 1Forge, so I can begin to poll, and stream the data they make available, including it in the Streamdata.io API gallery I’m building. However, as I was getting up and running with the API, I noticed their quota endpoint, which allows me to check my usage quote with the 1Forge API –something that I thought was story worthy. https://goo.gl/tw93uj #DataIntegration #ML

By Scott Campbell

As one of the largest companies in North America, Johnson & Johnson has a keen grasp of the corporate social responsibilities often expected from companies its size. Whether it’s child health care sourcing more from women-owned businesses, the New Jersey-based pharmaceutical and consumer goods giant is always looking for ways to leave a more positive impact on communities around the world, according to Len DeCandia, chief procurement officer.

As part of its “Health for Humanity 2020” project, Johnson & Johnson has earmarked a number of improvements to reach, including investments to help develop healthier people, places and business practices. That includes a target goal of ensuring that 80% of its spend occurs with suppliers enrolled in its Sustainable Procurement Program and to double the number of countries with established supplier diversity and inclusion programs.

“One of the hopes we have as a very large organization is how do we use what we bring to world to be able to benefit minority-, women- and veteran-owned suppliers around the world,” DeCandia told Alex Atzberger, former president of SAP Ariba (now president of SAP Hybris) in this video.

A recent implementation of SAP Ariba is helping the company reach those targets, DeCandia said. Selecting a new platform to improve its supplier procurement strategy was an important decision because the technology needed to fit Johnson & Johnson’s culture as well—which meant getting support from the company’s procurement, human resources, finance, IT and other departments. No easy task to get that many companies to agree on anything, but SAP Ariba fit the bill, he said.

“This now gives us the platform to be able to provide greater access and fundamentally engage our 130,000 employees to be part of that journey,” DeCandia said. “We believe in [social responsibility] very strongly and we know [SAP] believes in it as well.

About 80% of Johnson & Johnson’s spend now flows through SAP Ariba and the company has processed more than 250,000 purchase orders on the platform. The implementation allows a 130-year-old company to change the trajectory of health care, DeCandia said, touching one billion people a day.

“This gives us more connected, deeper relationships with our supplier base,” DeCandia said. “[We are able] to use innovation to be insightful through digitization and making the right decisions with the right information to be more responsive to the needs of patients and customers. It’s been an enjoyable experience because the technology has worked and it has to work every day.”

SAP and our Partners. Improving Lives. That is our purpose.

Ashley Tully
Ashley.Tully@sap.com
Director, Global To-Partner Marketing

Follow Ashley on Twitter – @AshleyTully2 http://bit.ly/2EIn6Zr #SAP #SAPCloud #AI