Common Pitfalls in SAP Transformation Journey and How to Overcome Them

Where do you begin with SAP transformation journey and how many detours you take to reach the final goal?

SAP transformation journey, usually, does not follow astraight forward path for most enterprises. The vast spread of apparently interwoven and complicated routes seem daunting. You are left with mounting costs and an over-stressed IT team, running against time to get the project off the ground. Strategy to execution, and governance to daily management, are often distributed workflows, delivered by different teams and multiple third-party vendors. And, you are caught in project management conundrum, straying from the focused agenda of SAP transformation.

Strategy Design, An Exercise In Search Of Direction

Let’s begin from the beginning. You onboard a large reputed consulting company to delve in to the strategy and build transformation use cases aligned to your business goals. The well-meaning exercise proceeds at its own pace, while your functions and processes keep making small tweaks of their own, to meet daily operational needs. At the end of a few long weeks, you have sheafs of strategy documents, and a bunch of neatly designed presentation decks, replete with ‘if then’ scenarios and a vague strategic direction. The strategy in place, or presumably so, you move to the next milestone.

Implementation, Putting Strategy to Work

You search for the implementation partner who can take strategy to action. The implementation partner relies on your IT and business teams to build a clear understanding of the execution. While the SAP transformational projects revolve around SAP S/4HANA, there are other critical lines of business also being transformed, e.g., finance, supply chain, procurement, travel, master data, human resources etc. to name a few. To make things more complex, these processes will be deployed on different cloud platforms, public or private. Organizations tend to leverage multiple partners to accomplish these massive objectives. And, as they bring more partners onboard, the in-house teams are running the day to day operations, struggling with different SLAs, moving from one issue resolution to other. Meanwhile, the project cost continues to move north.

Efficiency and Compliance, the Next Milestones

Now, you have an evolved enterprise architecture and your teams are adapting to it. But your compliance requirements pose a new set of challenges. You may need to look for another set of partners to keep your processes compliant. Your process efficiency in the meanwhile, is a parallel project, underway in another silo. Intelligent automation for stand-alone processes or sporadic functions work within narrow confines, often delivering suboptimal impact.

Is Your Digital Transformation Still On Course?

The digital transformation of an enterprise is meant to deliver high productivity, greater efficiency and ease of management. The traditional approach with disparate projects tied to narrow goals, do not often add up to deliver desired outcomes.The siloed, fragmented approach often delays, if not derails SAP transformation projects. Beyond the cost implications, the onus on your teams is far greater. The best minds in your teams spend more time project managing, than actually adding value to your overall digital transformation vision. The common pitfall for any transformation program, and more so if it is business critical ERP, is lack of holistic vision and meticulous execution. You need not learn it the hard way, there are precedents to make you outsmart the possible challenges.

Many Streams, One Destination, One Partner

Dealing with a network of partners, taking separate routes to the same destination, is not the best approach. What you need is complete ownership, from strategy to execution and operations. A multi capability partner, with end to end expertise, right from the strategic direction to implementation, governance and day to day operations, keeps you in command. Your focus on the business remains unswerving, while your IT landscape is modernized to meet the stated goals.

Getting a partner with same depth of experience and breadth of expertise, across the SAP transformation journey is a tough ask. There aren’t many who can deliver automated cloud management with 99.9% application level uptime, an implementation and a migration factory based on principles of DevOps, an application management practice based on AIOps, tightly coupled by business process automation services for all your business departments. And all this with avant grade security with most advanced tools - all as one managed service, governed under single SLA. Certified multi-technology experts, ready to deploy frameworks, geo specific and industry aligned regulatory compliance readiness, become a must in delivering successful projects, on time and with cost advantage.

Cloud4C is your only partner of choice in this journey.

Connect with us to steer your SAP transformation journey to success.