We are witnessing the fourth wave of industrial revolution, Industry 4.0 in which disruptive digital technology trends are revolutionizing the way companies are doing businesses.
Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things, Cloud computing and Robotic process Automation are technologies that can help organizations achieve not just enhanced productivity but also transparency, agility, automation, and better decision making. ERP has a major role in integrating all these technologies into the organizational value chain and in being a platform for accelerated digital transformation.
RISE with SAP
RISE with SAP is a bundle of products, tools and services covering various components of digital transformation and hence offered as ‘business transformation as a service’. The purpose of this blog is to provide an overview of different layers of RISE with SAP and the transformation scenarios for customers.
Business Network
Ariba Network, SAP Asset Intelligence network, SAP Logistics Business Network(with separate license) are hosted by SAP and offered as a Cloud software service for RISE with SAP customers so that their supply chain partners can access the latest information on relevant transactional data and seamlessly collaborate in real time with transparency. This can bring the benefits of integrating the transactions across suppliers, logistics partners, OEMs, asset owners, operators, regulators, and service providers.
For example, a manufacturing customer can automatically update its maintenance partners on the usage of the manufacturing equipment through SAP Asset Intelligence Network and proactively procure parts and service staff for predictive maintenance rather than waiting for reactive maintenance.
Business Process Intelligence
SAP Process Insights
To successfully transform businesses using digital technology, it is very important to understand the pain points of customers. SAP Process Insights provides a free report that provides process insights based on the analysis of data records from existing SAP ERP or S/4HANA.This report was earlier called SAP Business Scenario Recommendations. It helps companies to benchmark processes indicators against industry peers based on data collected from across customer base and provides customer specific recommendations on how to transform the current operations to reach the performance targets. A customer with high Days Sales Outstanding can view the industry benchmark values and start working towards better management of receivables based on recommendations such as setup of dunning procedures, credit management or automatic matching of incoming payments and invoices.
Process mining, modelling and process governance using Signavio
Digital transformation strategy boils down to business objectives and specific KPIs related to business processes.
Signavio offers functionalities such as Process Modelling, Process Intelligence, Process Management, Collaboration Hub and Workflow Accelerator that can help customers take decisions based on the analysis of data loaded from SAP to Signavio. Customers can identify the target values for process indicators and manage the existing process flows at a detailed level to reach the KPIs using process modelling and process management. KPIs can be shared across the organization using Collaboration Hub and the Decision Assistant functionality helps in setting up decision models in process flow to simulate and identify right values to reach the KPIs. Using simple drag and drop functionality, Workflow Accelerator helps to automate repetitive workflows, share task list to relevant stakeholders across the organization and send email reminders.
The image from Signavio Business Transformation Suite covers all the product functionalities mentioned.
Experience Management
Qualtrics as an Experience Management tool captures the experiences of customers, employees and other stakeholders. Data from SAP applications and Qualtrics can be analyzed with SAP S/4HANA embedded analytics steps for improving the experiences of various stakeholders.
Application
Intelligent Suite and Industry Cloud form the application layer.
1. Intelligent Suite
Intelligent Suite is the digital core of SAP S/4HANA that captures end to end processes in Finance, Logistics, Human Resources and Project systems. Based on the complexity of the processes involved, customers can either standardize their processes in SAP S/4HANA Cloud or customize complex processes in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition. Intelligent Suite can be integrated with external applications or native cloud offerings such as SAP Ariba, SAP SuccessFactors and Hybris.
2. Industry Cloud
While the Intelligent Suite provides the foundation for efficiency, Industry Cloud is about deploying vertical solutions for specific industry advantages such as in Automotive, Consumer Products, Manufacturing, Retail, Public Sector and Utility. Customers can apply leading-edge industry best practices based on SAP Model company content and extend current business processes. Partners can also build vertical specific solutions with open integration layer on the Business Technology Platform.
Cloud deployment options in RISE with SAP
RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud (earlier known as SAP S/4HANA Public cloud) is standardized based on best practices content and covers selected LOBs and industry scenarios, and a comprehensive ERP scope. Third party integrations and native integrations are possible via APIs, customizations can be done for business objects, CDS views, analytical queries, UIs and forms. As the business logic is based on best practices and regularly updated for innovations, heavy custom code enhancements are restricted to ensure agility. The deployment is on a multi-tenant server.
RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud private edition has full SAP S/4HANA on premise scope where customers have full access to the on-premise extensibility framework, supporting in-app and side-by-side extensions in addition to code enhancement and modification .Private edition covers extended line of business processes and 25 industries. SAP S/4HANA Cloud private edition is deployed on a single tenant server.
Transformation scenarios with RISE with SAP
1. Green field implementation to RISE With SAP S/4HANA Cloud
New customer open to adapt standardized industry and LOB best practices delivered by SAP can opt for this route. Due to the quarterly release cycles of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud, customer will be regularly updated on the regulatory changes, innovation, and best practices. Customer can opt to activate newly released related scope items from quarterly updates based on their discretion. Customer enablement and Organizational Change management are key success factors for these projects as this deployment mode will lead to process redesign and standardization. RISE with SAP provides one contract in which a customer can utilize Cloud solution, technical services, and enablement tools(such as access to SAP Learning Hub). Based on the assessment of cloud readiness of the customer, SAP provides accelerators to support OCM.
RISE with SAP also gives access to SAP Cloud ALM(Cloud based Application life cycle management) tool that helps in tracking the implementation of cloud projects as well as the day to day business operations in the cloud environment.
2. Brown field implementation to RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition
ECC customers can move to SAP S/4HANA cloud, private edition with brownfield approach .This approach involves Selective Data Transition to SAP S/4HANA using DMLT and gives flexibility to customer in terms of choosing the required organizations, master data and transactional data which need to be migrated to SAP S/4HANA.Customers can retain their functional scope and customizations in this process of migration to cloud and plan for innovations at a convenient pace. Hence organizational change management and customer enablement are gradual in this approach.
An example is that of a customer already using SAP Credit Management in ECC can opt for implementation of SAP Collections and Dispute management to further track and manage their receivables after brown field implementation.
Readiness Check Report is a detailed analysis of the ERP system and highlights the implications of migration from a functional and technical perspective. It highlights the changes in simplification item level for functional topics to recommended Fiori apps and results of business process discovery including potential candidates for process automation. From technical perspective, it covers system sizing, hardware requirements and custom code analysis.
Custom Code Migration app displays the list of custom objects that are incompatible in SAP S/4HANA so that the technical team can remediate or extend the objects for SAP S/4HANA.
All the images shared above are from SAP S/4HANA Cloud Implementation Learning Room of SAP Learning Hub.
3. Green field implementation to RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition
This approach is for the customers who want to redesign business processes and yet retain or create custom developments. Customer must evaluate and understand the areas in which the targeted process improvements fall into.
For example, in finance if the changes are required in SAP Credit management, Asset Accounting, Trade finance or accrual processes, customers need to analyze if the new functionalities in SAP S/4HANA can be achieved even with a brown-field approach as these functionalities are different in SAP S/4HANA.
While performing an evaluation between public and private cloud deployment options, customer must evaluate whether processes can be standardized or if they need to be customized as-is.
For example, a customer with consignment processes can go through the best practices content and identify the current gaps to evaluate if there is a process modification for any specific business benefit. If the answer is yes, customer can opt for the similar process in SAP S/4HANA with the private cloud option with extensibility. If the process deviation is due to redundancy, it is advised to adopt best practice. Such an evaluation of the processes can help in identifying whether the customer can opt for RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud or RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition.
Sustainability management
For transformation of customers to intelligent sustainable enterprises, SAP is offering end-to end Sustainability management solutions. Some of the sustainability management solutions are SAP Product Footprint Management, SAP Sustainability Control Tower, SAP Responsible Design and Production.
SAP Product Footprint Management is part of Climate 21 initiative from SAP. It collects master data such as quantity structure of materials and transactional data such as material movements, travel information from Concur, data on emissions from EH&S. Using this information, SAP Product Footprint management calculates data footprint related to carbon, water, land usage across value chain based on inputs from scientific data bases such as Lifecyle Inventory Database and companies can take corrective action to reduce the footprint. This application will be launched in Q3 2021.
Circular economy is based on the solution SAP Responsible Design and Production. It tracks the usage of harmful plastics and other components across the value chain so that the producers can focus on using more sustainable inputs, reducing toxic inputs, and recycling the waste from production process.
SAP Sustainability Control Tower is planned for release in Q32021 and is offered as the holistic tool for sustainability reporting. SAP Product Footprint Management, Performance and Profitability Management, SuccessFactors, SAP Analytics Cloud and other solutions will be the sources of data for reporting the details of not only economic impact, but also the impact on environment, society and governance. Financial reporting standard makers such as GRI and SASB have highlighted the need for ESG reporting (Environmental Societal Governance) and financial markets are reiterating the same with lower cost of Capital and better valuations for adhering firms.
Business Technology Platform
Business Technology Platform is a unified, business centric open platform where customers can integrate their applications, extensions, databases, analytical application, and intelligent technologies. This gives customers opportunities to build extensions to third party software, utilize intelligent technologies such as ML, AI, RPA from the data on the SAP cloud and perform data analytics with solutions such as SAP Analytics Cloud hosted on BTP.
If a customer wants to use Multibank Connectivity for communicating with Banks and other financial institutions, the integration is done via BTP. Credit rating information can be pulled from external agencies in real-time based on the extensions and integrations done in BTP.
Manufacturing companies can perform quality checks with sensors or track movement of parts with RFIDs and collect data in SAP. Such information captured across the value chain with help of developments in IOT. Analysis of the data with ML and AI in BTP with minimum coding. Customer can opt for automations in iRPA or process improvements based on the data analysis.
Infrastructure
Infrastructure for RISE with SAP can be a SAP Data center or that of a hyperscaler .In case of private cloud option, customer is free to choose their data center whereas in Public cloud, customer can choose between SAP Data center or those of 4 preferred hyperscalers – Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure
