The digital economy has created a breadth of opportunity for organizations to transform, shape, and scale everything within their businesses – from supply chain to operations and customer experience.
It has also created fiercer competition among industry peers and growing expectations from customers. While most processes have become digitized and data has become abundant, the most successful organizations are the ones that know how to leverage this technology to drive real-time intelligence and insights that will not only meet customer expectations, but also fuel the transformation to the Intelligent Enterprise.
At the core of an intelligent enterprise is an intelligent enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. SAP understands the importance of a flexible and scalable cloud-based system and therefore has encouraged customers to make the move to SAP S/4HANA. The comprehensive intelligent ERP suite covers more than 25 industries and spans across capabilities including procurement, sales, supply chain, manufacturing, research and development (R&D), finance, service, and asset management.
SAP S/4HANA helps customers unlock value for their businesses and enable better customer experiences in the age of intelligence. With intelligent insights and analysis, automation, and increased transparency across the business, SAP S/4HANA delivers an end-to-end view of the business that can drive intelligent decision-making and quick, informed actions. With real-time visibility into actual business results, organizations can move faster while making smarter decisions in order to forecast and plan with more accuracy. From supporting day-to-day processes to growth strategies and new business models, SAP S/4HANA aids business transformation across the board.
Making the Case for SAP S/4HANA
Over the past year, SAP has launched the SAP S/4HANA Movement program, aiming to encourage customers to make the move to next-generation ERP and provide them with the tools, assets, and services needed for an easy and seamless transformation. Just in 2019, the company has conducted and supported approximately 170 events dedicated to partners and customers, held numerous webinars, and developed extensive white papers comprising all best practices for SAP S/4HANA implementation projects – all with the objective to mentor and guide customers on their journey to SAP S/4HANA. SAP has also set up and deployed various collaboration and engagement models across user groups to maintain a constant stream of communication and help field any questions or concerns.
As with any business decision, the move to SAP S/4HANA is not one that is taken lightly. Beyond educating customers on the benefits of this intelligent ERP, the company has created personalized tools that can help IT and business executives deliver a comprehensive business case and technical deployment plan to executive leadership.
Customers can build their business case with SAP Business Scenario Recommendations (next generation), by identifying the organization’s existing business processes that can be improved and transformed with SAP S/4HANA. The report also compares an organization’s legacy ERP system to industry peers and offers additional recommendations on how to enhance productivity. In combination with SAP Transformation Navigator, which allows customers to access the new SAP product portfolio and license models, it provides the business and IT perspective on SAP S/4HANA transformation.
Along with these recommendations, SAP has developed and introduced SAP S/4HANA Adoption Starter Engagement, a free virtual six-week course delivered by an SAP expert that takes place within a classroom setting. The course provides customers and partners with clear and prescriptive guidance and support in the design and development of a road map for the move to SAP S/4HANA. Participants can gain access to decision-making tools as well as peer-to-peer knowledge from other SAP customers in an immersive and collaborative setting. Individual guidance can also be provided through SAP S/4HANA Value Discovery Engagement or Premium Engagements.
The SAP Readiness Check 2.0 tool for SAP S/4HANA also provides customers with the information and technical requirements they need to convert their systems to SAP S/4HANA.
Making the Move to SAP S/4HANA
In order to account for the different customer business objectives, SAP extended the standardized SAP S/4HANA framework and added three different scenarios, with services, assets, and tools optimized and focused on the expected outcome:
- New Enterprise Core: For customers looking for functional and technical upgrades to their existing ERP system with minimal business disruption, this tool allows them to simplify business and IT operations and establish platforms for innovation and growth.
- Extended Enterprise Core: For customers looking to automate or improve the efficiency of existing processes to meet the latest industry needs.
- Enterprise Transformation: A complete end-to-end ERP transformation to enable business change while reacting to evolving markets and competitors, or to offer a new customer engagement model.
While transforming a legacy ERP system may seem daunting, SAP has made it easy for all customers, whether they choose an SAP deployment or a partner-led deployment. To help partners, the company has created the SAP S/4HANA Integrated Delivery Framework, a go-to-market framework that helps simplify project engagements, reduce deployment risks, and accelerate time-to-value while also promoting the key strengths of each partner and SAP.
SAP has also developed a range of supporting tools to help plan and deliver customers’ migrations. These tools include functional and technical assessments, maintenance planning, an updated analytics interface and custom coding creation, migration cockpit (the migration of business operations data to a new system), software updates, and business-to-business and application-to-application integration.
Helping Customers Along Their Journey
Since launching the SAP S/4HANA Movement program, SAP has seen a significant acceleration in adoption. With over 14,100 SAP S/4HANA customers, more than 6,700 are already live and over 7,000 are currently in the process of implementing the application.
SAP has already seen great success with customers that finished the journey. Naturipe Farms migrated to SAP S/4HANA to innovate its supply chain and is now benefitting from modern technologies that help support a digital supply chain. Pladis, a global confectionary, is using insights to understand consumer needs, which helps inform the company on how to develop and deliver its products and services.
As SAP continues to invest in the tools and services required for a fast and simple transformation, we are also excited about the feedback and results given by partners and customers concerning the positive impact of our assets on programs and business growth and the innovation and continuous improvements achieved with, and after, go live.
