In today’s fast-moving world, businesses are constantly dealing with change. Only those who are able to adapt quickly can thrive in a changing environment. To stay ahead, they need to adjust to evolving customer expectations, create new business models, and increase supply chain transparency and flexibility.
SAP’s product portfolio addresses this need for agility. We deliver software that enables businesses to integrate and optimize their end-to-end processes, and ultimately to run as intelligent enterprises.
How to Get There?
Today, we launched RISE with SAP. With this new Business Transformation as a Service offering, we offer one bundle of products and services that help our customers start their journey to the Intelligent Enterprise at their own pace and on their own terms.
Together with our ecosystem, we provide our customers with services and tools from business process redesign to technical migration services and cloud infrastructure. The offering also includes access to SAP Business Technology Platform and SAP Business Network with access to over 5 million connected companies in more than 200 countries. Last but not least, RISE with SAP includes our market-leading intelligent enterprise resource planning (ERP), SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
Let me give you three key reasons why we are offering Business Transformation as a Service.
- In the past, we have seen customers moving to the cloud with a strong focus on the technical migration. But true value comes from business process innovation, which requires a holistic enterprise transformation and change process. That is what RISE with SAP is all about.
- Our customers are facing complexities when modernizing their—often highly modified—system landscapes. Many of our customers have individual needs, resulting from their customized landscapes, and these needs differ from those of customers that can directly start their journey in the cloud. That is why RISE with SAP offers customers from different points of departure to redesign their processes and enable the journey to the intelligent enterprise.
- To make lives easier for our customers, they consume one subscription-based offer from SAP consisting of hyperscale infrastructure, an attractive product bundle, and necessary services and tools to transform. In this way, our customers can focus on the value-adding business transformation aspect of their journey rather than the of technical details of the cloud migration. We want customers to benefit from migration services and custom code analyses so that they can move to SAP S/4HANA Cloud without losing configurations but also to keep the core clean. Additionally, we want to simplify the path forward for our installed base customers by enabling them to move from a license and maintenance model to a subscription model, which ultimately means from CAPEX to OPEX.
The Goal: Delivering the Intelligent Suite with RISE with SAP
The foundational promise of RISE with SAP is to give our customers a simpler and faster access to the intelligent suite so that they can take greater advantage of innovation in the cloud. We help our customers digitally transform – again, at their pace and on their terms.
SAP’s intelligent suite brings major business processes together and, more importantly, enables companies to reimagine how their business is run. At the core of the Intelligent Enterprise are continuous data flows across the demand and supply chain. The value of data is realized when appropriate context and semantics are in place to derive the relevant insights that support business decisions. And smart integration is the underpinning of any intelligent suite, enabling customers to drive innovation at scale, be that ongoing incremental operational efficiency gains or capitalizing on top-line growth opportunities.
SAP’s intelligent suite runs all solutions around the core: your engagement with employees, your supply chains, your collaboration with suppliers, and your connections with customers. These key categories are covered by our line-of-business solutions for People and Human Experience Management, Digital Supply Chain, Intelligent Spend & Business Network, as well as Customer Experience.
SAP S/4HANA Cloud, the central nervous system of high performing enterprises, is at the core of the intelligent suite, and is the enabler for new business processes allowing more insights, agility, and flexibility for the business user. SAP S/4HANA Cloud customers have seen heightened levels of speed and efficiency; for example, 67% faster financial closing or 95% faster material requirements planning. The comprehensive footprint of SAP S/4HANA is at the center of our customers’ digital transformation and is connected to the rest of our intelligent suite components that power employee, partner, supplier, and end customer relationships.
Foundational to our promise of “delivering” the intelligent suite, it also includes SAP’s most differentiated globalization and localization capabilities to let our customer activate their digital transformation initiatives in every market that they compete in. Just as an example, SAP solutions include 64 local versions of SAP S/4HANA and 101 localized versions of SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central. Globalization services are part of SAP Enterprise Adoption, covering a wide range of services to help users gain immediate value when adopting our solutions.
The glue between our product categories is a unified user experience that balances the needs of the user and meeting business requirements – all based on SAP Fiori 3. We embrace a modern mobile user experience, led by inclusive design principles, and additionally look at integrating augmented reality for where it makes sense.
The Foundation: One Platform
When adopting the intelligent suite, businesses need a technology foundation for two primary reasons. First, to make sure that all applications run in an integrated manner and to give customers extreme flexibility when it comes to deployment, SAP Business Technology Platform brings all functionalities needed to integrate SAP’s cloud solutions. It also enables hybrid integration scenarios, as many companies run hybrid enterprise system landscapes. SAP’s integration road map provides an overview of our integration plan in the cloud.
Second, to enable our customers to imagine and execute their own differentiated business scenarios that give them an edge in the market, SAP Business Technology Platform also allows for partner and third-party solution integration and extensions, while keeping the core clean.
I encourage you to read Juergen Mueller’s piece to dive deeper into SAP’s platform as a service.
The Value: Anticipating and Responding to Bigger Market Shifts
Going forward, we think there are four key value drivers that are vital for our customers to drive innovation based on truly integrated end-to-end processes: Business Process Intelligence, Industry Cloud, Business Network, and Sustainability – addressed through our Climate 21 initiative.
For a more in-depth view, this vision paper, developed with the German-speaking SAP user group, DSAG, outlines key growth areas for enterprises.
To close the loop, RISE with SAP serves as a vehicle from which our customers can benefit from all the innovation, speed, and agility the intelligent suite is offering. We support businesses at different points of departure in reaching one goal: to chart their course to the Intelligent Enterprise, enabling truly holistic business transformation.
For additional information on RISE with SAP, read blogs from Christian Klein, Juergen Mueller, and Uwe Grigoleit, as well as an interview with Jan Gilg.
Thomas Saueressig is a member of the Executive Board of SAP SE, Product Engineering.
