Transforming Towards Agile, Resilient and Sustainable Enterprises

The journey to evolve into an agile, sustainable, and resilient enterprise involves a process of transformation. Regardless of their size, companies must be prepared to embrace change.

Becoming agile means:

• Being able to promptly respond to shifting market trends.
• Adapting to new business models as they emerge.
• Reacting quickly and effectively to changes resulting from mergers and acquisitions.
• Embracing and integrating new technologies such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and automation.

Becoming resilient means:

• Proactively addressing challenges within supply chains.
• Effectively managing and navigating unexpected disruptions, such as pandemics or regional conflicts.

Being sustainable means:

• Achieving and advancing Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) goals.
• Operating with reduced waste and a focus on sustainable practices.

Embarking on a transformation journey, even if it doesn't encompass the entire business, can prove challenging and disruptive. You are often stepping into an environment filled with many uncertainties, compounded by layers of complexity. For instance:

• Companies often find they have no clear visibility into their current processes and applications.
• It becomes tricky to pinpoint the potential value because there's a lack of understanding.
• Fears run high due to unawareness around the risks involved in instigating change.
• Identifying a starting point may be difficult due to all the complexities involved.

Adding to these difficulties are the inevitable shortages that come into play. Everything you deal with is finite. This includes:

• Capacity constraints such as time and resources.
• Skills shortage, which becomes dire when key personnel exit the company.
• Lack of insights related to data, roles and responsibilities.
• Budget limitations that restrict balancing between routine operations and innovation initiatives.

Compounding these issues are inconsistencies. Business and IT stakeholders often have differing needs. There are often:

• Difficulties in aligning and fostering collaboration between the business and IT, due to different language and disciplines.
• Hurdles in gaining buy-in from stakeholders and management.

Ultimately these barriers can lead to decision paralysis, or decision-making that relies more on gut instinct than meaningful data. The potential outcome of these issues is:

• Progress is slow and delayed.
• Expenses are high.
• The risk of a failed transformation looms high.

This is where business transformation from SAP steps in:

• SAP brings together the key dimensions necessary for successful business transformation in a consolidated, streamlined approach.
• Processes, applications, people, and data are what drive transformations, taking you from business strategy to execution.

It's important to have the right solutions that connect across these dimensions. It's not just the tooling but also:

• The end-to-end methodology to guide you every step of the way.
• Best practice content, for example, reference architecture from SAP and process value accelerators.
• Automation that helps accelerate workflows.
• Integration capabilities that bring this all together.
• And of course, powerful Business AI underpins the value acceleration throughout the journey.

The holistic end-to-end approach of SAP sets the standard for transformation, highlighting the necessary ingredients for success - from establishing visibility to operating the enterprise at a higher level:

• There are key categories to consider which impact the transformation.
• These are all interconnected, and meaningful insights should be exchanged across categories to effectively initiate change.
• Only SAP can piece this puzzle together.
• SAP collaborates with market leaders in process analysis, mining, and process management.
• SAP also brings in experts leading the enterprise architecture domain.
• SAP considers the entire enterprise stack, from business architecture to individual IT components, and how each one is affected through change.
• In instances where no SAP solutions are in place, SAP teams up with ecosystem partners, like Collibra, to cover essential parts of its narrative, particularly for Data Quality and Observability.

Now, let's delve one level deeper into this category view to understand the solution level that SAP offers.

Following the categories, levels, and phases previously outlined, our SAP best-of-suite solution portfolio is geared to guide you through each step of the key categories for consideration. Some solutions are solution-led, while others are purely consulting or partner-oriented. Regardless, you can rest assured that with SAP, all layers of your organization are covered by market-leading solutions. These include SAP Signavio, SAP LeanIX, SAP Cloud ALM and Tricentis, which are designed to efficiently drive your business transformation step by step, from discovery to operation.

In this Unit, you will not be guided through the entirety of SAP's offering, but rather focus on key pillars: how SAP Signavio, SAP LeanIX, and SAP Cloud ALM can work together to enable an end-to-end, data-driven transformation approach.

This integrated transformation approach, during the discovery phase, enables you to:

• Gain a digitally powered and data-dense view of the present state.
• Strategically assert the need for transformation and decide on the optimal approach.

During the analysis phase, you'll be able to:

• Analyze application and process dependencies from a unified source of truth.
• Utilize best-practice content from SAP as fit for standard.

In the design phase, you'll:

• Draft the future state and examine the impacts on processes and applications.
• Collaborate on a comprehensive roadmap to the target state.

During implementation, you'll:

• Execute the agreed upon transformation plans and document changes.
• Establish data-driven change management, including enablement.

And finally, in the operation phase, you can:

Continuously monitor and track your processes and application landscape for business continuity, future optimizations, and value realization.

By utilizing SAP Signavio, SAP LeanIX, and SAP Cloud ALM at every step of the transformation journey, organizations can effectively accomplish key tasks. These solutions complement each other, providing value to both the business and IT departments. This shared approach ensures visibility across the enterprise and emphasizes thorough analysis. It fosters collaboration between business and IT departments, facilitating the vision of the target state and ensuring effective implementation.

What sets the SAP offering apart is that SAP can unlock additional value in ways that no single solution or competitor can. None can provide quick insights into the current SAP process and application state, offer best practice process content and reference catalogs for the SAP landscape, or possess the same breadth of capabilities across all project phases with such a high level of integration.