Jabil, a global manufacturing firm with over 100 sites in more than 30 countries, is treating technology integration as a strategic priority to stop disconnected systems from becoming a liability. The company is moving away from a mix of site-specific tools, spreadsheets, and manual workarounds that created data silos and delayed decision-making. Harish Manohar, SAP IT director at Jabil, says the firm adopted a “simplify-first, then-innovate mindset” to ensure adding new technologies does not increase complexity.
The strategy
Manohar argues that any innovation without simplification adds risk. The goal is to standardise processes and consolidate systems to build a consistent data backbone across the organisation. Modernisation efforts must add measurable business value, which means connecting processes end-to-end across the supply chain. Integration comes first because the backbone of any contemporary organisation is data. Data must flow across systems before companies can optimise, automate, or apply artificial intelligence.
Executing this across a global network is difficult. Jabil’s sites operate with different levels of process maturity, legacy systems, and localised workflows. Regulated businesses also bring additional compliance requirements. Standardising across regions means changing processes and governance without disrupting operations already in place.
What it means for the workforce
Integrated workflows give employees shared visibility into data and reduce manual data reconciliation. Workers can move from chasing information to acting on insights. For Jabil, the aim is to improve real-time visibility into supply chain events. This enables faster responses to disruptions and reduces operational risk.
With trusted data and integrated systems in place, Jabil is exploring predictive supply chain insights, intelligent exception handling, and AI-driven planning and forecasting. Manohar states that simplicity at scale is a competitive advantage. Technology investments must ultimately connect to business value and operational resilience.
This episode of Business Lab is produced in partnership with SAP.
Transcript highlights
Megan Tatum from MIT Technology Review introduces the topic of enterprise technology integration. She notes that consolidating tools and systems across the supply chain helps organisations operate more reliably at scale. Reducing tool sprawl and connecting systems effectively provides earlier visibility, faster response, and greater resilience across production lines.
Tatum speaks with Harish Manohar, SAP IT Director at Jabil. Jabil has been simplifying its technology landscape using SAP Integration Suite as the foundation to connect systems, retire fragmented tools, and enable more consistent operations globally.
Jabil is headquartered in St Petersburg, Florida, USA. The company has about 60 years of experience offering comprehensive engineering, supply chain, and manufacturing solutions. It has a global footprint of over 100 sites across 30-plus countries and employs 140,000 people. Jabil is a trusted partner for more than 400 of the world’s top brands.
Manohar explains that the global footprint brings complexity regarding site-specific tools. Sites have been in business for a long time and developed their own tools for their own processes. This created a disconnected mix of site-specific tools, manual workarounds, spreadsheet-based processes, and legacy applications. This technical debt spans the last 25 years.
The limited ability to see issues early across plants and regions made it hard to coordinate responses consistently. This complexity created data silos and delayed robust decision-making. Establishing a single trusted data backbone became critical to enabling faster coordinated responses across the network. Having the right data at the right time changes how the company responds to disruptions.
Manohar says the company adopted a simplify-first, then-innovate mindset. Whenever transformation is discussed, there is a focus on bleeding-edge technologies like AI, data, and cloud. However, the company put a stake in the ground to adopt a simplify-first approach because any innovation without simplification adds complexity.
SAP is the core digital platform. The company wants to bring more processes into SAP. Not all processes exist within SAP yet because the global company has been in business for a while. The firm is slowly trying to standardise those processes. Having them under one single source of data helps scale faster and avoid data silos across different systems.
From a cloud standpoint, Jabil uses SAP’s Business Technology Platform and Integration Suite. This serves as the center stage for all integrations across Jabil. The direction is to avoid having a slew of different integration platforms. Instead, the company tries to see where Integration Suite fits best and where smaller integration platforms add value.
The company adopted an API-driven, event-based integration approach. This is a best practice to avoid keeping data from one place to another, which is not good business practice in the IT world. Most integration architectures are API-driven and event-based. This is the focus.
The company wants to reuse capabilities as much as possible and standardise rather than buying one-off tools that solve point-in-case use cases. For major processes, a best-of-breed approach is adopted. For site-based use cases where a specific site has a particular need for a tool, the firm tries to standardise that and reuse what exists in a different site. There may be a need for business process change or minor process changes, but that is the direction.
Jabil is heavily aligned with SAP’s clean-core approach when it comes to customisation. Over the last 25 years, systems were heavily customised to cater to different customers across the globe. Most demands were customer-driven, so heavy customisations were put in play.
Now the company is taking a pause. The firm is moving systems into RISE, which would enable a clean-core journey in the future. Good governance criteria and review processes must be established that do not allow heavy customisation of the system. The company wants to move away from that model as much as possible.
Manohar says modernisation and transformation should add measurable business value. The company does not look at modernisation in terms of just upgrades, but in what it gets the business in terms of value. Most modernisation transformation approaches are focused on connecting processes end-to-end across the supply chain.
There is a concerted effort in the business community to standardise how plants operate globally. With 100-plus plants, different processes, different legal regulations, and different countries, it is hard to come up with one template across the globe. The firm is trying to standardise as much as possible. Jabil leverages SAP’s Signavio, a business process management tool, to help standardise these global processes.
Integration came first because the backbone of any contemporary or modern organisation is data. To get the right data at the right time, integration is the key aspect of the whole optimisation exercise. Data needed to flow seamlessly before the company started optimising, automating, or applying AI use cases.
The company wanted to create a single system of record across the operations. This is not just SAP, but the ability for the firm to create a unified view of data that supports the broader operational goals.
