To move or not to move... to SAP S/4HANA? That is the question

With the end-of-life support for SAP ECC not so far in the future (it’s T minus 6 to 2025), many customers wonder how they should prepare themselves for the inevitable change without simply jumping on the bandwagon.

To appreciate and unlock the value SAP S/4HANA brings, in this blog I look at two typical customer scenarios I’ve come across in the Switzerland market.

Customer situation 1: You are a mid-size Swiss firm with growing European or global ambitions, with a non-SAP or SAP ECC backbone

You implemented SAP ECC or an equivalent non-SAP backbone a few years ago and are now faced with the conundrum of whether to roll out SAP ECC to your new regional offices or put all SAP deployments on hold and start the SAP S/4HANA journey. You know about SAP S/4HANA, and have even met SAP, but are unsure of how it fits in with your current business and IT goals. You have also invested in other technologies such as Salesforce and wonder what the overall IT roadmap ought to be. Also, should you embark on (another) redesign of the processes while moving to SAP S/4HANA? What is the business case? Is it worth the time of your business community, who is already strapped for bandwidth on multiple other (digital) initiatives?

Customer situation 2: You are a large global company with headquarters in Switzerland, with a massive SAP ECC footprint with heavy integration with multiple other applications

Your total cost of ownership is high due to a complex IT architecture and the high cost of application maintenance. Each release to business takes time. You worry about how your IT can add increased value to business in today’s complex world, fully leveraging IoT integration and cloud capabilities. You think about becoming a truly digital player in your industry. Your competition consists of startups that are a lot more nimble and agile when it comes to servicing the business. Can innovation POCs add value and excite the business with the “art of the possible”? Will bringing in S/4HANA herald a change in ways of working, and can it be used to simplify and redesign business processes? You wonder how you can start small with a few quick wins. You also have offices in far-flung countries which are too small for an on-premise SAP S/4HANA solution, so should SAP S/4HANA Cloud be the choice here, with a “two-tier ERP” setup?

The challenges mentioned above probably resonate with what you face in your business on a daily basis. These scenarios are not “watertight” and there are multiple variations that you, as customers, face.

With our experience as one of the global leaders in SAP S/4HANA roadmaps and implementations, we are confident that SAP S/4HANA is the right choice, for three reasons:

• It provides a high-performance platform that is cloud enabled, with a smart Fiori-based UX/ front-end, and multiple analytics/ dashboards
• Enhanced and new process-level functionalities that make operations simpler and faster
• The ability to rapidly build innovation POCs to re-imagine business solutions.

In summary, I think SAP S/4HANA cannot be ignored for long. Is SAP S/4HANA the “magic bullet” to solve how you deal with the increasing complexity of your industry and the plethora of technology advice you receive every day? Perhaps not, but it has a strong semblance to the proverbial Swiss army knife! It makes sense to have the tools handy and your strategy defined now rather than later to be able to reap maximum benefits of this “future-proof” technology platform.

To begin your journey, we can craft your IT roadmap and business benefits case on the back of SAP S/4HANA with our “Highway To SAP S/4HANA” assessment to lead you on your journey to the renewable enterprise! To know more, view our Digital Core, Highway To SAP S/4HANA and Intelligent Enterprise offerings and drop us a line at sap.ch@capgemini.com!

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