Business innovation ‒ every executive says it’s a priority, yet most efforts fall short of delivering on their promises. How can organizations set the direction of their endeavors to rapidly respond to evolving market dynamics and restore the stability of their operations cost-effectively and sustainably?
One of the first steps an organization can take is reassessing whether its digital backbone contains core components of business resiliency. They include cloud, security, collaboration support for remote and hybrid workers, and the scalability to pivot capabilities as needed.
While there is no single, straightforward path to digital transformation, companies would benefit greatly by adopting technology that supports four characteristics common among business-resilient organizations:
- Adapt and respond quickly with data-driven decision-making
- Drive high-impact outcomes with real-time enterprise insights
- Scale capabilities fast with machine learning and artificial intelligence
- Extend insights, processes, and communication across a global network of vendors, contingent labor, and supply chains
Acquiring these traits may appear to be a tall order at first. However, a modern, cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) system as the digital backbone can quickly, cost-effectively, and flexibly unify all functions – from HR and finance to manufacturing and supply chain. By providing real-time access to the same data, insights, and processes, the technology enables organizations to manage and prioritize business changes in unison to keep up with market dynamics, workplace expectations, and customer demands.
Optimizing the Potential of Every Innovation Investment
When considering an ERP system, organizations often weigh their options between a private or public cloud environment, which each have their own distinct differences. Private cloud allows companies with complex on-premise landscapes containing legacy systems to gradually move from an on-premise landscape to a cloud tailored to meet their needs while maintaining control over their processes. On the other hand, public cloud gives businesses with smaller, up-to-date IT architecture the opportunity to migrate their data and applications quickly and innovate continuously, securely, and with rapid time to value.
Ultimately, most larger customers prefer to fully transition their ERP data, processes, and user experiences to the cloud while maintaining existing industry functionality. But they also expect to accomplish these goals with optimized performance, lower costs, and intelligent capabilities such as predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, and process automation.
With SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition launched through the RISE with SAP offering, SAP customers can gain the best of both worlds, especially if they run large and complex system landscapes. They can fuel fast-paced, continuous innovation and digital advancement by combining a subscription pricing model for SAP S/4HANA and cloud services with a standard architecture and a set of extension capabilities. Plus, intelligent capabilities can be chosen and deployed at their pace, on their terms, and within the scale of their immediate and future needs.
One key benefit that draws most companies to SAP S/4HANA Cloud and RISE with SAP is the confidence that they can implement capabilities that complement their core competencies and resolve their challenges well. They can access the personalized support, expert-led services, proven methodologies, and intuitive tools of the premium engagements portfolio.
This level of support is available to SAP customers, whether they run a 24/7 global operation or a local plant of 1,000 employees, and can be delivered by the Customer Success organization at SAP. The premium engagements portfolio can be scaled to meet the customer’s unique needs and value with customized and predefined configurations, from the front to the back office.
Creating an Innovation Foundation Based on Expert Guidance
Premium engagements can provide the guidance organizations need to fulfill critical business expectations, such as cost reduction, higher efficiency, optimized productivity, and operational continuity. But more importantly, the portfolio allows businesses to map their challenges and opportunities to modern ERP capabilities – identifying impacts on existing operations and technologies, considering use cases for future innovation, and choosing suitable extension solutions.
Throughout the engagement experience, our customers can quickly realize an intelligent enterprise designed to pave the way for continuous and productive innovation. The reality of a cost-effective and on-schedule implementation with minimal risks and predictive costs fuels enterprise-wide confidence, compelling users to readily adopt the technology and resulting changes.
Most Fortune 500 companies choose the premium engagements portfolio to gain an integrated, transparent, and centralized digital landscape with a smooth implementation of SAP S/4HANA Cloud with RISE with SAP. The combination of our expertise, guidance, methodologies, services, and tools enables organizations to optimize their business processes, standardize data management, and enhance production traceability. Best of all, they can minimize the overall deployment effort and costs – even with remote service delivery.
Take Hilti AG, for example. Transitioning 11 software landscapes to the cloud is a daunting step to overcome when embracing a next-generation ERP system. But Hilti chose to trust its long-term relationship with experts from SAP to coordinate a variety of moving parts – from architecture planning to project management to infrastructure services. In the end, the company’s successful migration of its software landscapes to the cloud set the stage for adopting future-ready technologies and a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) model.
Steering Innovation in the Right Direction
Hilti’s experience represents the remarkable advantage that our customers gain from our premium engagements delivery: providing the right tools and insights to reset the course of business innovation. And for everyone from executives to organizational managers and users, this can be the reset they need to contribute to a future of ongoing business growth.
With a committed team of SAP experts, our customers can address their business needs and IT demands with confidence. Outcomes include maximized benefits of existing and new solutions, agile cloud migrations, and innovation driven by next-generation technology.
Whether choosing a conversion or clean-slate approach to implement the public edition or private edition of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, companies can benefit from a portfolio of premium engagements from SAP that support outcome-based business scenarios. These business scenarios focus on specific customer needs and help to solve challenges from end to end with a predefined set of services, including:
- The most-frequent transformation topics, challenges, and pain points companies face in the digital age
- Unified customer experiences – from sales to delivery – while addressing business challenges
- Customization of an individual service plan based on the requirements of the transformation journey
Let us shape together your premium engagements with business scenarios that mirror your strategy today and for the future. Check out these resources for more details on existing premium engagements business scenarios that can support and enable your transformation journey:
SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition:
SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition:
- “Take the Journey to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition – Strategy”
- “Take the Journey to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition – Greenfield”
- “Take the Journey to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition – Selective Data Transition”
- “Take the Journey to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition – Brownfield”
- “Run Best on RISE with SAP”
Christian Zitron is global vice president of Customer Success at SAP.
