SAP Innovation Awards 2021 Entry Pitch Deck

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SAP Innovation Awards 2022Entry Pitch DeckArobot - AI Flavors & FragrancesHuabao Group

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Company Information

Headquarters

Industry

Web Site

Hong Kong

Consumer Products

http://www.hbglobal.com/en/

Huabao International Holdings Limited was established in 1996 and listed on Hong Kong Stock Exchange (00336.HK)

in 2006, with major business in R&D, production and sales of flavors and fragrances (for tobacco, food and

personal care), aroma raw materials, tobacco raw materials and ingredients (including RTL, expanded stems and

innovative tobacco materials) and condiments. With customer demands as the core and technological innovation as the

motivation, Huabao insists the development strategy of “Concentric Diversification” and has become a modernized and

internationalized multinational conglomerate. The corporate’s vision and mission are:

❖ Establish an innovative organization and management mechanism to accomplish the strategy upgrade of Huabao

group to become the ‘Leader to a Better Life’.

❖ Modernize and digitalize the flavors and fragrances technology to form a future oriented, globalized and diversified

industry cluster and sustainable business centered around flavoring people’s life

❖ Build up technology innovation platform and flavor industry ecosystem to grasp the trend of consumer upgrade

❖ Expand the footprint of aroma raw materials segment and establish a leading production base of aroma raw

materials in Asia and in the world

http://www.hbglobal.com/en/


Challenge Solution Outcome❖ Digitalize scents and trawl flavor and

fragrance knowledge with digital

formulation generation

❖ Apply Machine Learning (ML) and

Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create new

fragrances with minor tweak by skilled

perfumers

❖ Leverage ML and AI to analyze and

predict consumer flavor preferences by

maximizing the olfactory performance,

generating enhanced formulas without any

bias, recommending the new fragrance.

❖ More efficient and optimized

fragrance innovation and making

process - enhance formulas, identify

new ingredients combinations with

fewer human expertise tweaks.

❖ Personalize fragrances for unique

customer experience – more

efficiently understand consumer

preferences to provide customized

scent to improve consumer satisfactory

and experience.

❖ Whole fragrance-making process and new flavor invention heavily depend on the personal experience of perfumers

❖ Dozen years to develop perfumers, requires professional and intelligent tools

❖ Knowledge with perfumers only, lack of extracting knowledge and organizing formulation library

❖ Lack of consumer insights during new flavors and fragrances development

Huabao Group

3 Mins

Consumer2Manufacturing Collected 461 personal flavors and fragrances surveys, predicted and produced customized fragrances during the 4th China International Import Expo

461Knowledge Base Analyzed and extracted 20,235 formulation of perfumes and fragrances by machine learning modelling

20K+

Arobot - AI Flavors & Fragrances

Intelligence and Automation With AI powered and automated formulation to production process, a new fragrance is created and made in 3 minutes


Arobot illustrates the huge potential of leveraging AI in

our digitalization journey, it’s the right way to go in the

future flavors and fragrances making process, and we’ll

broaden and deepen the technology innovation practice

in our products innovation especially for our core

business of food and beverage flavors.

- Lei Shi, VP of R&D, Huabao


Business Challenges and Objectives

Business Challenges Project Objectives

• The status quo fragrance-making and new

flavor invention process heavily depend on the

personal experience of perfumers, which

takes as long as a dozen years to develop,

and the formulation knowledge is saved

nowhere other than with the perfumers.

• The new fragrance or flavor tailoring process

for every enterprise customer is long and

iterative as customers’ requirement or desire

of scents cannot be explicitly described, the

perfumers can only randomly try to look for

what customer may be satisfying with

• This slows them down from new innovations

and understanding customer or consumer

need, not to mention predicting the trend

• To improve efficiency of flavor and fragrance

making process, the breakthrough idea of the

project is to digitalize scents, so that we make it

possible to leverage AI to do the job of trawling

scent knowledge, generating formula and creating

new fragrances

• Automate formulation to production process to

realize digital manufacturing and improve fragrance

making efficiency and reduce cost

• To lead the digitalization and innovation of flavors

and fragrances for a better life, Huabao would like

to better understand customer and end consumer

preference. The project will use machine learning to

predict and customize fragrances that customers

may like.


Project or Use Case Details

❖ Scent Digitalization

▫ Note Circles

▫ Typical Notes

▫ Characteristics

▫ Note Pyramid

❖ Digital Perfumery Master

▫ Perfume Knowledge Base

▫ Fragrance Library

▫ AI Fragrance Creation

❖ Fragrance Formulation

▫ Essence Library

▫ Note Contribution

▫ Formulation Generator

❖ Fragrance Recommendation

▫ Preference Questionnaire

▫ Preference Prediction

▫ Fragrance Customization

Arobot is a tool which deploys machine learning to analyze and predict consumers' preferences, trawl

scent knowledge, generate formulas and recommend new fragrances catered specifically to different

personalities. Behind the scenes, the model digitizes the scent notes, symbolic ingredients, and

formula combinations. It also absorbs and learns from existing knowledge to create a formula library

that will innovate, optimize, and enhance the formulas with minimal human expertise tweaks.

Core functionalities and use cases are:


Business Process Details

Process Before Process After

The current development of new flavor is composed of

product imitation, component analysis, essence ratio,

composition design and sampling experiment.

Basically, the current research process of new

flavor products mostly relies on the personal professional

experience and artistic appreciation of senior perfumers.

The research cycle of new product is quite long, and the

perfumers are still working on office software or even

paper forms manually, lacking digital and intelligent tools.

After the new formula is designed, a lot of manual

experiments are needed to prepare and sample for the

raw materials to make the essences. These experiments

require high precision and cost a lot.

Furthermore, it’s difficult to adopt data-driven approach by

market trends and consumer insights in the research

process of new flavor, which causes considerable risks

when they go to the market.

On the other hand, since there’s no good enough or

digitized domain knowledge base and formula library for

rapid learning and growth, junior perfumers still rely on

senior ones for 5-10 years of long-term counseling and

teaching to get started.

Arobot is changing the status quo.

Based on the digitalization of the notes, perfumers can analyze the characteristic of the structured note, the contribution of raw materials aided by the visualization of the fragrance formulation. By using AI fragrance application, even junior perfumers can fine-tune and modify existing fragrance formulations to generate new ones. Even, AI fragrance can generate new formula by itself based on learning large scale of existing fragrance notes and formula data and then evaluate new products.

Digitalization and intelligence of new product research process can support perfumers effectively produce a large number of formula combinations, conduct trial and error. Meanwhile the perfumers can optimize, and sublime formulas generated by AI.

At the same time, the questionnaires collected from the market research will help to effectively design the market trends and consumer preferences in the process of new product development, and quickly realize the flexible production of personalized fragrances.


Benefits and Outcomes

Business or Social IT* Human Empowerment

* IT benefits are required if you are using SAP Business Technology Platform products

❖ Enable Direct to Consumer

business model, produce

personalized fragrance for

consumers in segment of one,

and integrate with digital

manufacturing to automate the

E2E Consumer2Manufacturing

processes

❖ Close the loop from obtaining

consumer insights, to fragrance

creation, production, and

feedback collection to

accelerate product innovation

and with lower cost

❖ Successfully transform from

the traditional production

process into an innovative,

digitalized, intelligent and

efficient way of developing new

products.

❖ Turns the cumbersome

fragrance making process

which requires massive

human expertise work and

years of development into a

semi-automated efficient one

that only needs a few

minutes with minor human

interactions

❖ Productivity gain of skilled

performers so they can

spend time on more valuable

tasks in fragrance invention

and tweak

❖ Prominent efficiency,

productivity gain and cost

saving with the digitalized

fragrance innovation and

making process

❖ Presents the huge potential

AI could bring to the

manufacturing business,

leading the trend for AI

technology becomes the

norm in developing new

flavors, personalized

cosmetics and other

consumers product.


Architecture


SAP® technologies used:

Date

Number of end usersDeployment status

Number of customers

Transaction Volume

Deployment Details 1 of 2

SAP

product

Primary

productDeployment status LIVE or POC [proof of concept]

Contribution

to project

1SAP S/4HANA Consumer

Industries Cloud

POC SAP Consume Industry Cloud offers the foundational platform for this

intelligent application as various business services.

2SAP Business

Technology Platform

POC SAP Business Technology Platform supports the industry cloud by K8S

which is offering capacity of the elastic computing and resources.

3SAP HANA Cloud POC For persisting the data of consumer surveys, digitalized perfumes and

notes, the composition of fragrance.

4

5

2021/10/15

20~30POC

1

100+ Surveys, 60+ Perfumes per day

X


The following offerings from SAP Services and Support were utilized during the implementation

or deployment phase

SAP MaxAttention™

SAP ActiveAttention™

SAP Advanced Deployment

RISE with SAP for Industries

SAP Innovative Business Solutions

Other:

SAP Value Assurance

SAP Cloud ALM

Deployment Details 2 of 2

SAP Advisory Services

SAP Customer Experience Solutions

SAP Preferred Success

SAP Solution ManagerSAP Innovation Services

SAP Enterprise Support

Contribution to the project

❖ SAP Innovation Services worked together with SAP S/4 HANA Consumer Industry Cloud team in designing and running a Design Thinking workshop together with customer Huabao, in which the idea of Arobot was incubated, i.e. leverage AI and Machine learning to transform and customize the fragrance making process by predicting and capturing consumer preference

❖ It is being planned for SAP Innovative Business Solutions to provide digitalization services to help Huabao in bringing the Arobot POC to productive usage

X

X


The following advanced technologies were part of the project.

Advanced Technologies (1 of 2)

Technology

or use caseProduct *

Contribution to project and how product

used integrates with SAP products

1 Intelligent technologies Machine Learning Foundation Services of

recommend algorithm, recognize service of

note digitalization, regression and

classification of perfume preference

The core functionalities of Arobot is realized by

machine learning services and algorithms. Note

digitalization, intelligent perfumery and

composition generator. Even more, Arobot

applies the recommend and classification on

personal perfume prediction.

A) Machine learning or

artificial intelligenceConversational AI, AI-based knowledge graph,

AI Business Services, Robotic process

automation

B) Blockchain

C) Internet of things

2 Intelligent data managementMulti-cloud and or hybrid deployment,

data virtualization & governance, privacy

compliance, cloud data lake service

SAP S/4 HANA Consumer Industries Cloud

SAP Business Technical Platform

Arobot is a native cloud application. The

consumer industry cloud which based on SAP

BTP offers the foundation of elastic computing

and resources.

*If this is not an SAP product, explain how it integrates with SAP products.


The following advanced technologies were part of the project.

Advanced Technologies (2 of 2)

Technology

or use caseProduct *

Contribution to project and how product

used integrates with SAP products

3 Advanced cloud integrationNew business models using API’s, Connecting

business partner(s) with API’s, Integration Advisor,

Digital integration hub architecture, Event Mesh

Open APIs of integrating with

the digital manufacturing

machine

Arobot offers the open APIs for the manufacturing machine to

communicate. The machine access the VPN network created by

SAP BTP and accept the production order of perfume which is

forecasted by personal survey of perfume preference.

4 Advanced and augmented analyticsReal-time and streaming analytics, spatial

analytics, natural language processing, machine

learning to identify trends, patterns, and outliers,

predictive analytics and planning)

Word cloud of the

comment analytics from

consumers

Dashboard of the metrics of

AI perfumery

Arobot collects the comment of consumer from market and

analyse the data as the critical input of the AI perfumery.

Meanwhile some predefined metrics during the production are

monitored by the application.

5 Combined transactions and analytics on single data setReduce data latency and footprint from dedicated

data marts, data warehouses and data lakes (>

1TB)

*If this is not an SAP product, explain how it integrates with SAP products.


Additional Information

Arobot Debut at 4th China International Import Expo

Customer Traction & Showcase VideoReport by China People’s Daily

https://peoplesdaily.pdnews.cn/trending/concoct-your-own-fragrance-at-4th-ciie-within-2-minutes-235662.html

https://video.sap.com/media/t/1_0dq1wbuc

https://peoplesdaily.pdnews.cn/trending/concoct-your-own-fragrance-at-4th-ciie-within-2-minutes-235662.html

SAP Innovation Awards 2021 Entry Pitch Deck

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