I am so excited to announce that Gartner has named SAP a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises with SAP S/4HANA Cloud being evaluated.
Answering the call from our customers, SAP S/4HANA Cloud transforms the way businesses operate and helps them run at their best. The recognition is based on our completeness of vision and ability to execute in the cloud ERP market for product-centric enterprises. This has come quick on the heels of the recent recognition by Gartner, where SAP was named as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Service-Centric Enterprises in July 2022.
This is very good news, and we believe our positioning reflects our role as an enabler of innovation and in helping organizations become intelligent enterprises.
The core capabilities of product-centric cloud ERP suites, as mentioned in the report, are:
- “Operational ERP: Supply chain and manufacturing-related functionality such as demand management, order management, material requirements planning, inventory management, supply chain/direct procurement, manufacturing control capabilities and distribution/logistics.
- “Financial management functionality: Financial accounting, subledger accounting, consolidation and financial reporting.”
Cloud ERP impacts companies in product-centric industries by fulfilling their current and future technology needs and helps them manage finance and material resources in a sustainable way.
According to the Gartner Magic Quadrant description of Leaders, “Leaders demonstrate a market-defining vision of how ERP product-centric systems and processes can be supported and improved by moving them to the cloud. They couple this with a clear ability to execute their vision through products, services, and go-to-market strategies. They have a strong presence in the market and are growing their revenue and market shares. In the cloud ERP suite market, Leaders show a consistent ability to win deals with organizations of different sizes. They have a good depth of functionality across all areas of operational and administrative ERP. They have proof of multiple, successful deployments by customers. Their system integrator partners frequently use their offerings to support business transformation initiatives.”
SAP S/4HANA Cloud is at the core of this transformational process that enables companies to grow, optimize, and transform on their own terms while providing for the smooth integration of all business processes.
A great example is REHAU China and its intelligent transformation journey to more countries in Asia under their “Cloud Asia Until 2025” plan. According to Chengbo Yu, CIO, Asia-Pacific Region, REHAU AG China, the company looked to build “a cloud-based business platform that’s fit for the future in a dynamic market and facilitating business process standardization and integration across Asia Pacific and the world, and achieving supply chain excellence along the industry value chain.” That is the value they unlocked with the latest intelligent technologies, products, and solutions from SAP.
Our modular cloud ERP solutions use standardized industry-leading best practices to improve efficiency and quality. Highly automated processes help reduce errors, redundancies, and variances and pave the way to operational excellence.
Komax Group could count on a stable, reliable, and innovative ERP such as SAP S/4HANA Cloud in its transformational journey, which helped provide the process standardization and simplification that the company needed. This helped to consolidate multiple legacy ERP systems on SAP S/4HANA Cloud and supported the journey of intelligent transformation without stopping. Standardization and multi-tenancy mean that switching to the cloud reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) and frees up resources to focus on value-added innovations.
While it delivers fast time to value, standardization alone is not sufficient. Extensibility is key to the differentiation of business processes for customers, such as CEWE, one of Europe’s leading photo service providers, which acquired and integrated WhiteWall to expand service and reach. According to Dzifa Buati, program lead for CEWE Stiftung & Co. KgaA, “The essence of the project is to create a foundation for growth. With SAP S/4HANA Cloud, we believe we have a system that can grow with us and form the basis for a billion-dollar company.”
SAP S/4HANA Cloud offers both user and developer extensibility. In this way, customers can maintain agility. With such extensibility options for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, customers no longer need to choose between innovation and standardization, but can pursue both while safeguarding their need for flexibility.
In 2021, we launched RISE with SAP, an offering that includes products, processes, and services to help customers unlock new ways of doing business. The intelligent suite natively integrates end-to-end business scenarios by bringing together finance, procurement, supply chain, logistics, human resources, research and development, services, and sales.
The core functionalities of SAP S/4HANA Cloud can be extended across the SAP portfolio by integrating line-of-business and industry solutions. SAP S/4HANA Cloud can be integrated to achieve consistent data across end-to-end processes by serving as an actionable single source of truth. SAP technology stores master data in a central location in order to create a single and reliable source of truth that can be distributed where needed.
And in the light of the challenges that we have faced in recent times, organizations have had to quickly recast key operational business processes and can expect this to be the new norm going forward. Business processes must be readjusted on a constant basis by moving to automated flexible, analytic-driven, project-oriented, and industry-oriented applications that play within a larger ecosystem.
While we are proud of our success, we also know that it is also only possible thanks to our customers, partners, and analysts and their confidence in us. Delivering the modular suite and enabling organizations to inspect business processes holistically are key strategic goals for SAP. This can give our customers the required agility, flexibility, and time to value that they need.
Businesses need to think about where they are going to be in five years; they must think about what is lurking around the corner, how that may disrupt their business environment, and how they need to change their business model accordingly. With the democratization of intelligent ERP, SAP S/4HANA Cloud is the answer for companies of all sizes, enabling both business transition and business transformation. It supports organizations no matter where they are and offers a solution that can fit best to their needs.
We look forward to welcoming more customers into the SAP community and providing them with the solutions needed to succeed in a changing world.
Jan Gilg is chief product officer and president of SAP S/4HANA.
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises, Greg Leiter, Dixie John, Robert Anderson, Tim Faith, 26 September 2022.
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