Kathy Gibson reports – SAP has launched a new offering designed to help customers transform into intelligent businesses – Rise with SAP business transformation as a service.
Christian Klein, CEO of SAP, points out that companies around the world have recognised the need for digital transformation. “It is no longer a nice-to-have; it is a must for organisations that want to remain relevant.”
The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the need to transform, he adds. “Transforming into an intelligent enterprise has never been more important than today.”
However, while everyone recognises the need to transform, it is becoming clear that it’s not that easy to achieve, Klein says.
“Before we designed our new offering, it was key to listen – with empathy – to our customers. It became very clear that the main challenge in transformation is the how.”
While the CEO aims for growth, and the chief financial officer looks for margin, Klein explains that no-one around the boardroom table is really looking to the simplification or standardisation of the business processes.
“Too many stakeholders are on the sidelines and believe that digital transformation will happen with IT in the lead.”
However, a one-dimensional model is not going to be sufficient to drive the new business direction, Klein says.
Instead, transformation needs to start at the top, and drive through with a cultural change throughout the business.
“You need to redesign business processes end-to-end and reduce complexity, with IT working as an enabler hand-in-hand with the business.”
The new offering is based on the feedback from thousands of customers and partners, Klein says. “It is a new offering where we, together with our partners, connect your business process with technology and data to deliver the desired business outcomes.”
Rise with SAP offers customers at all stages of digital transformation a completely new way to redesign processes for better business outcomes.
Offered on a subscription basis, Rise with SAP features one responsible party for service-level agreement, operations and support. The holistic approach will help companies truly transform their business, going beyond a technical migration to the cloud to enable continual transformation.
SAP and its partners will guide companies through their business transformation by:
Redesigning business processes
Business process intelligence is built on SAP’s business model and process expertise gained from working with over 400 000 customers across 25 industries.
Customers can continuously analyze how their business processes perform, benchmark them against industry standards and easily adapt them to new requirements and business demands.
Intelligence can be embedded in business processes thanks to a direct connection to SAP’s workflow, robotic process automation (RPA) and other artificial intelligence (AI) services.
Enabling technical migration
SAP tools and services support the entire technical journey with fast time to value, augmented by offerings from SAP’s strong ecosystem. This includes automated services to aid the move to modular and standard solution landscapes for faster consumption of innovation in the cloud, as well as support from technical architects to help enable smooth migration and high adoption.
Customers’ cloud infrastructure of choice runs in an SAP data center or with a hyperscaler of choice to benefit from infrastructure-as-a-service capabilities without data and system lock-in.
Building an intelligent enterprise
SAP Business Technology Platform delivers one semantic layer across an enterprise, providing the foundation for a holistic business transformation. This approach helps keep the core clean and allows for easier consumption:
Easily complement, extend and integrate with SAP, partner, and third-party solutions using the same data model and platform services as SAP applications.
Access more than 2,200 APIs to help ensure integration to on-premise, cloud and non-SAP systems.
Steer and plan across the enterprise in real time, and provide high-quality data for analytics, planning and AI scenarios thanks to one semantical data layer.
Gain superior low-code or no-code capabilities to extend SAP solutions, , intelligent RPA to drive automation and a world-class workflow service to change processes on the fly.
SAP S/4HANA Cloud has embedded AI, RPA, advanced analytics and flexible deployment options, depending on customer complexity.
Unified access is provided to one of the world’s largest business networks, including SAP’s supplier, logistics and asset intelligence networks, allowing companies to manage their complete supply chain to react faster to changing market conditions.
Acquisition of Signavio
SAP also unveiled plans to make a strategic acquisition of Signavio, a leader in the enterprise business process intelligence and process management space.
Combining Signavio with the Business Process Intelligence unit of SAP will strengthen SAP’s capacity to help companies quickly understand, improve, transform and manage their business processes at scale. The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2021, subject to regulatory approval.
“In today’s dynamic world, companies of all sizes need the ability to rapidly adapt their business processes to fast-changing market conditions,” says Luka Mucic, chief financial officer and member of the executive board of SAP SE. “I cannot overstress the importance for companies to be able to design, benchmark, improve and transform business processes across the enterprise to support new capabilities and business models.
“The combination of business process intelligence from SAP and Signavio creates a leading end-to-end business process transformation suite to help our customers achieve the requirements needed to gain a competitive edge. SAP and Signavio are a great cultural fit and share the same values, and we are excited about joining forces with them to deliver on our Intelligent Enterprise strategy.”
Signavio’s integrated cloud-native process management suite perfectly complements existing business process intelligence software from SAP.
With the addition of Signavio, SAP can now provide a holistic suite of flexible process transformation solutions for customers to transform their business processes end to end. That includes business process design, benchmarking, gap analysis, improvement and process change management. The suite will also allow customers to monitor the long-run success of these process changes.
The combination of SAP and Signavio will bring together standardised process KPIs, broad benchmarking data, process mining, user behavior mining and customer experience analysis to give customers a 360-degree view of every business process. It will also provide tools to fully understand and transform the processes.
Pictured: Christian Klein, CEO of SAP, launches Rise with SAP, the company’s new business transformation as a service offering.