SAP Model Company propels SAP customers into the digital world and is the key to unlocking nonstop innovation.
The idea is simple and compelling: Instead of starting customer projects from scratch every time, SAP or one of its partners provides a prepackaged jump-start service, complete with industry and line-of-business processes, matching business content, and implementation tools.
Along with making implementations faster and less costly, this approach helps everyone involved tackle a project with confidence. After all, it is based on decades of valuable experience that SAP has gained from software implementations bundled into best practices.
In 2016, a group within SAP Digital Business Services, led by Stephan Klein, began molding and refining the best-practices approach to creating an all-embracing strategic concept called SAP Model Company. Today, the service is generating a growing buzz among customers.
The Hasso Plattner Founders’ Award is the highest
employee recognition at SAP, awarded annually by the
co-CEOs to an individual or a team.
Customers Love the Added Value
Canadian integrated energy supplier Suncor relied on SAP Model Company to kick-start its transformation project. The company had implemented approximately 44,000 customized modifications to its legacy system, so SAP Model Company was a blessing to navigate its way back to a standard implementation.
SAP Model Company also accelerated the on-premise implementation of SAP S/4HANA for U.S. specialty chemicals giant Albemarle. Sources inside the company cite time-savings of six to nine months.
These are just two examples among many. SAP Model Company is now available for 18 industries and 12 lines of business, and that list will grow.
Integral Part of the Suite
With SAP Model Company, SAP wants to deliver the market standard for industries and lines of business. The objective is to create a comprehensive, central content repository of business process models, best practices, business configurations, modelling and deployment variants, options for experience management, and enhancements for intelligent technologies — such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and blockchain.
“We will fully integrate SAP Model Company in the cloud,” says Klein. As the future repository for the intelligent enterprise suite, SAP Model Company will become the lifeblood of the product and will be embedded in the subscription model for customers.
The business content will be updated regularly to match the rapid pace of innovation, but it is also important that on-premise SAP customers are also able to continue benefiting from SAP Model Company, Klein says.
Given that partners perform approximately 80 percent of all SAP implementations, Klein and his team now want to incrementally bring more partners into the channel program, currently in the pilot phase. The extensive SAP partner ecosystem will deploy SAP Model Company itself, help anchor it across the SAP customer base, and, based on the market standards, develop processes that fit their customers’ specific needs.
Klein and his team still have much to accomplish. Future plans include integrating SAP Model Company into the services and training portfolio as a business content platform and using it in sales to help produce compelling product demonstrations.
Finalist Fast Facts
- Submission title: SAP Model Company: Lifeblood for the Intelligent Enterprise
- Team: Marisa Lopes, Sinje Seidler, Silke Huesmann, Abdul Rajbhoy, Andreas Elting, Arend Weil, Dietmar Schulz, Kai Siegmund, Klaus Berghoffer, Tony J. Naylor, Stephan Klein, among others.
- Board area: SAP Digital Business Services
- Achievement: Design, planning, construction, and extension of a business content platform for comprehensive, industry-specific model companies that enable customers to implement and run high-quality SAP solutions and leverage the latest technology to transform business.
- Impact: SAP Model Company delivers on the company’s cloud pledge to customers, including rapid added value, lower total cost of ownership, and non-stop innovation.
