SAPPHIRE NOW is a critical stop on your road to digital transformation. The journey can seem daunting, but modernizing your business is a vital step toward prevailing against your increasingly fast and nimble competition.

Crafting a well-guided plan — and testing it ahead of time — is crucial to ensuring a successful implementation.

Helping you get the most out of every digital investment is a big reason why SAP will host its largest customer event, SAPPHIRE NOW + ASUG Annual Conference, next week: Organizations looking to become a Live Business can learn from customers, partners and SAP experts — and try SAP’s new tool for charting a path that’s tailor-made for your digital transformation.“This one step can help organizations avoid common pitfalls,” SAP’s David Sweetman stated last week in a blog post on how to plan a successful digital enterprise. “More important, it can establish the mindset and behaviors that are needed to get the most out of every digital investment.”

Learn from Those Who Know

Life is Good co-founders Bert and John Jacobs will deliver the ASUG guest keynote address, discussing how they got the most out of their digital transformation. The Boston-based clothing manufacturer — and ASUG member — relies on SAP technology to run its Live Business, selling merchandise through more than 4,500 retail outlets in more than 30 countries.

“The most measurable goals that SAP Apparel & Footwear solution has provided us is the KPI metrics in our distribution center to best plan everything from all our resource needs — including payroll,” Life is Good VP of Supply Chain Courtney O’Keefe said in an SAP video. “It’s to the minutiae level.”

What’s more SAP board members and other prominent customer and partner speakers will lead the Live Business Theater keynotes, which will cover analytics, machine learning and many other topics from the main keynote that precede them each day. These will include the head of the SAP HANA Cloud Platform business unit Björn Goerke’s keynote about the SAP Cloud Platform — and SAP Chief Design Officer Sam Yen’s keynote on user experience (UX).

Walk in the Cloud — Around the Showfloor

All of the topics related to digital transformation — machine learning, the Internet of Things and others — rely on cloud technology to reach their full potential, according to SAP’s Shelly Dutton. SAPPHIRE NOW + ASUG attendees can learn about a private managed cloud solution that offers enough control for IT teams to govern their entire architecture, ensuring compliance, innovative flexibility and more.

“If you haven’t jumped on the cloud bandwagon, it’s not too late,” Dutton stated last month. “But you should get started soon.”

SAPPHIRE NOW + ASUG is an unparalleled opportunity to learn aboutSAP Cloud Platform, according to SAP’s Dan Kearnan, who points to the myriad experts — and more than 150 sessions — there to help people of all cloud technology backgrounds extend their existing applications.

Navigating Your Digital Transformation

To help you better envision your journey to SAP S/4HANA before it begins, SAP will release at SAPPHIRE NOW the new SAP Transformation Navigator. This user-driven tool, designed with input from ASUG members, will recommend the best products for your unique digital transformation, based on your specific business values, IT preferences and much more — all to help you chart the course of your digital transformation journey, from the first mile to the last.

Every mile counts along your digital transformation journey. So let the experts at SAPPHIRE NOW help you make the most of your digital investments.“The last mile is the driver in the digital transformation of the customer experience,” SAP’s Felix Heckmann stated recently. “And it is the winning component to deliver the right output at the right time to the right person and device.”

Before you hit the ground in Orlando, check out Tammy Powlas’ very detailed — and valuable — summary of event logistics, agenda planning and more, based on ASUG’s 32-minute deep dive of the conference. Click here to register for SAPPHIRE NOW + ASUG Annual Conference, which runs May 16 to 18 in Orlando.

Follow Derek on Twitter: @DKlobucher

This story originally appeared on Business Trends on the SAP Community.