Rise with SAP: A Shift In Approach To Transformation

SAP | 3 MIN READ

PODCAST VERSION

https://www.birlasoft.com/company/podcast

By Rajesh Nair, SAP Practice Head, Birlasoft

In a rapidly changing business landscape, enterprises must embrace transformation, leverage the power of technology tools, and enable rapid innovation to tackle the shifting market demands. The introduction of RISE with SAP program enables enterprises to accelerate their ERP transformation journey through intelligent, integrated, and immediate digital cores that enhance operational efficiency, increase agility, and improve flexibility to meet current & future challenges. However, the recent changes in the SAP environment present several challenges to enterprise subscribers, specifically those running on the ECC.

These organizations must rethink transformation with three key options:

• Should they stay with ECC and expect SAP to stretch support beyond 2027,
• Should they prepare for a migration to SAP S/4HANA
• Should they consider shifting to a different ERP service?

While a delayed sunset on ECC remains debatable, shifting to an entirely new ERP can make IT and business complexities undesirable in today’s environment. The migration to SAP S/4HANA may be the most viable option. Even though SAP’s latest enterprise version brings speed, agility, and scalability, each organization's approach must be thoughtfully evaluated.

Are The Enterprises Ready for A Conversion?

Rise with SAP addresses the complexities across core industries, including manufacturing, finance, and life sciences. SAP S/4HANA enables enterprises to save on upgrades, mitigate ERP incompatibilities, and reduce costs on hardware. The robust platform supports the ERP system to modify operations and streamline processes to drive positive business outcomes. The primary differentiator of SAP S/4HANA is its flexible architecture and the in-memory that processes data faster, providing near real-time analytics to accelerate decision-making.

Rise with SAP offers a holistic ERP transformation to intelligent enterprises with customized terms and scheduled delivery times. It eliminates migration complexities through a simplified engagement and a guided route for transformation. Additionally, enterprises can leverage SAP’s robust partner ecosystem to accelerate value and transform every element across the business lines. Moving away from ECC, S/4HANA focuses on end-user support, data-driven insights, and data security to ensure data availability and accessibility, making it the need of the hour for modern enterprises.

Moving to S/4HANA: Key Considerations

While several organizations have been with SAP for over two decades, Rise with SAP program reforms the ERP transformation through a different approach and planning. The program brings new modifications along the three core processes of transformation:

1. Procurement

Rise with SAP program introduces FUE* (Full User Equivalents) licensing over the previous one license per user. The new licensing system enables enterprises to allocate user package types for multiple users in the same ecosystem and change the allocation duration per use.

2. Approach

The enterprises can now adopt any of the three approaches (Green Field, Brown Field, and Selective Data Migration) to migrate ECC to S/4HANA. Each of these approaches will impact the project timeline and costs. However, while mapping the To-Be process, the shift from Fit-Gap analysis to Fit-To-Standard approach can positively impact timelines and help keep custom code development to a minimum.

3. Operations

Rise with SAP program takes the enterprise to the cloud through a single contract to manage cloud instances and S/4HANA licenses and support. This impacts the basis and security teams, requiring them to learn new skills, including managing SAP as a services provider and tracking their SLAs.

Enterprises can implement SAP Activate methodology for more agility. The solution is now tailor-made for S/4HANA implementations with continuous innovation at its core.

Conclusion

Moving from the ECC to S/4HANA requires an intensive evaluation of transformational elements and the approach to change management specific to the SAP programs to maximize benefits from migration. With several business benefits to consider, enterprises must mandate a move towards ERP transformation through RISE with SAP to enable modernized and successful business transformation.