The decision to adopt a new technology innovation is rarely taken lightly. Early on, businesses usually gather market research, analyst insights, and peer reviews. Business processes and practices are mettle-tested through a long cycle of brainstorming, prototyping, and scrutinizing of promising ideas. Then comes an array of detailed financial models, organizational plans, and competition comparisons.
Despite all this soul-searching and tactical planning, it’s exceptionally challenging to get an unbiased, unvarnished view into the viability of a digital strategy. Between the heat of competition and excitement for the potential opportunity ahead, it’s not unusual for business leaders to make a decision clouded by emotion, not grounded in a well-considered path to an intelligent enterprise.
Breaking Through Emotion to Uncover a Baseline for Intelligent Innovation
Fast and consistent innovation adoption is often integrated into business practices through a steady schedule of new releases, updates, and patches delivered by a technology provider. For many industries, such support can span many years – or even decades – as businesses demand long-term security for every digital investment in a proven evolutionary approach to expand with newest innovation and best practices.
SAP Enterprise Support services are designed to help derive every decision and action to adopt a new innovation from intelligent and well-informed choices, planning, and visionary precision. Our customers receive the guidance necessary to identify the most relevant digital technologies and capabilities in the context of their operational needs and desired business outcomes.
Accelerating Industry-Disruptive Innovation with Guided Planning
Breakthru Beverage is no stranger to such a journey. The North American distributor of premium wine, spirits, and beer brands is experiencing such swift growth that it needed to upgrade its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. The company’s leadership team, including IT, was not sure what to expect from the implementation over the long term. However, reviewing competitor benchmarks, potential improvements, and innovation opportunities for all its lines of business became a pivotal moment in the digital adoption.
Breakthru Beverage quickly gained consensus across the company on the potential of its SAP software investment and a road map justifying its path to SAP S/4HANA. “The value is twofold,” says Peter Monaghan, availability and production manager for IT at Breakthru Beverage. “IT has direction on business transformation opportunities and can talk to key stakeholders as active participants in projects.”
In short order, this insight led to the deployment of its digital, ERP-driven core, and the service continues to strengthen stakeholder relationships and engage finance into the planning of its digital future. The company can see precisely which operational improvements, process changes, and innovations can deliver relevant value to all areas of the business.
As Breakthru Beverage’s experience proves, on-demand access to this level of insight is an unparalleled advantage when becoming an intelligent enterprise. And Monaghan agrees with that assessment as he shares a sound best practice: “Our SAP center of excellence now uses the service at least once every six months to identify further improvement and innovation opportunities for our business.”
Over the next few weeks, we’ll offer an in-depth, real-world view of the opportunities of running an intelligent enterprise and how the SAP Enterprise Support offering can help your business realize them. Bookmark our series landing page and check it each week. In the meantime, read our brief, “Enabling the Intelligent Enterprise with SAP Enterprise Support,” for an overview on the SAP Enterprise Support offering.
Jens Bernotat is global vice president of Support Portfolio for SAP Digital Business Services. Follow him on LinkedIn.
