As organizations navigate increasingly competitive markets, the need to attain new levels of agility has increased proportionately. As a result, more and more organizations are turning towards cloud computing to fuel their journey to digital transformation.
Business leaders have been making cloud computing a business priority in recent years, and for good reason. A cloud-first strategy has proven business advantages both in delivering various cost-saving opportunities as well as increasing efficiency.
Investments into cloud are being made across three available cloud service models, namely – –software-as-a-service (SaaS), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), and platform-as-a-service (PaaS). As the modern world gravitates towards the cloud at a rapid pace, cloud is set to soon become a key technology delivery mechanism.
Several organizations are shifting their core business processes to the cloud and adopting SaaS initiatives across the enterprise. Organizations are hosting even mission-critical applications in the public cloud.
A 2018 IDG Cloud Computing Study focused on measuring cloud computing trends among decision-makers revealed intriguing insights. This study included their usage and plans across the different models of deployment and service models.
- More than three-fourth of the enterprises run one or more applications in the cloud.
- Enterprises believe that they will be investing at least 3.5 million USD on different cloud apps, platforms and services this year.
- More technology-dependent industries including manufacturing, high-tech, and telecom are being led by executive management to become 100% cloud.
It is evident that all industries are being disrupted by this rapid adoption of cloud computing, making it more important than ever for business leaders to prioritize creating an ROI-driven strategy in order to gain competitive advantage. A cloud-first strategy will also facilitate creation of new revenue streams, improved customer service and significant cost savings, which may not have been possible before.
In a business environment where cloud first is the way forward, SAP S/4HANA Cloud, an intelligent cloud ERP, is enabling digital transformation and delivering significant innovation and expertise. SAP S/4HANA is enabling organizations to grow rapidly while still maintaining a real-time view of their business with the ability to make instant and insight-driven decisions.
In this blog, we’re going to discuss top five ways SAP S/4HANA Cloud is driving value creation for enterprises:
1. Gain Faster Returns
Given the cutthroat environment businesses operate in, value creation should be a critical area of focus for business leaders. They need a solution that only drives value, but also speeds up the time to value, so they’re not merely surviving in the market, but thriving. A significant number of executives think that in the next few years, IT will increasingly shift from being viewed in a primarily support role to one of business value creation. This has made it more critical than ever that both IT and the business teams strategize the path of the digital transformation journey in partnership.
SAP S/4HANA enables faster time to value by allowing you to move your IT at the speed of your business while still enabling standard best-practices across all your key business functions. It allows for rapid deployment throughout the organization – you can even consider a two-tier deployment approach for various subsidiaries and divisions.
SAP S/4HANA also facilitates increased automation through the digital assistant, which allows you enable zero-touch processes, as as well drive meaningful but instant actions and decisions by leveraging machine learning. Further, SAP S/4HANA, with its intuitive and responsive design, provides rich user experiences, which drastically cuts down time to learn and helps organizations achieve accelerated user actions and decisions. This results in significant increase in productivity and employee buy-in with ready-to-use applications.
2. Improved Business Agility
What businesses need in the digital age is a platform that facilitates rapid growth and evolution. Ongoing process innovation and enabling greater agility are key to becoming a key contender in a competitive business environment.
S/4HANA Cloud offers a myriad possibilities. It supports various blends of cloud delivery models, that is, a hybrid approach, that includes on-premise systems, other cloud models, all of which function together seamlessly across the business. It also offers the ability to scale up and down as required, and supports merger and acquisition activities by offering feasibility analysis,
business process consolidation, and seamless integration of IT systems.
In terms of seamless integrations, you can easily integrate to existing SAP and non-SAP products, as well easily manage customer-specific integration scenarios that involve various customizations, all with the assurance of minimal impact to existing system functionalities.
A very important benefit that SAP S/4HANA brings to businesses is also the rapid delivery of innovation. This is primarily due to the agility it brings to organizations which enables rapid addition of new features and services in each cycle, which help customers achieve their business goals faster. There is minimal time and effort required to keep the application up to date with the latest software releases. This contributes to broadening the value generated at the end of each innovation cycle.
3. Lower Total Cost of Ownership
Businesses are starting to see that making hefty investments into hardware and platforms tend to take up a considerable chunk of capital that can be used profitably towards other business priorities. Therefore, business leaders are looking for solutions that enable them to run their business functions smoothly without requiring big budgets. Maximizing ROI requires adopting cost-effective solutions.
SAP S/4HANA is a great fit to help businesses achieve this because it helps facilitate rapid deployment and efficient operations, in the matter of a few weeks – thereby, saving organizations significant costs in project and deployment costs. Further, it also helps minimize costs that would otherwise be spent on support and training. This enables your team to spend more time on value-added tasks.
SAP S/4HANA’s subscription based model also helps you save costs by shifting from upfront costs and hefty initial investments to a license/subscription based model that allows you to pay-as-you-use. Making the shift from capital expense to operating expense enables businesses to free up business funds for other business priorities.
SAP S/4HANA also features a simplified architecture with virtualized infrastructure. This reduces ownership and maintenance costs and requires very little investment in terms of time and resources to handle infrastructure and platform.
4. Improved governance and compliance
Increasingly organizations are considering the option of hosting their data outside the confines of their spaces. As a significant majority of organizations are starting to keep their sensitive data in public clouds, it has intensified the conversation around improved security measures in order to prevent data loss. Amidst this journey to better security, governance of data solutions has been become an important subject as organizations are actively narrowing down on cloud solutions that they can trust.
S/4HANA Cloud offers both local regulatory and legal compliance. With SAP S/4HANA, businesses can be rest assured that their data is safe as it meets all legal requirements and addresses key privacy concerns with respect to data protection. Further, it also features a built-in disaster recovery to ensure business continuity leaving no chance for any risk to your mission-critical financial processes.
Cloud governance enables an intuitive dashboard for identity and access governance capabilities and also helps reduce both costs and complexity in these business functions.
5. More Intelligent Cloud ERP
Digital transformation is an ubiquitous phenomenon right now. As business requirements evolve, businesses need a simplified digital core that allows them to run their business processes both with efficiency and efficacy. The need of the hour is a cloud solution that facilitates end-to-end business processes and enables fast-paced innovation and an intelligence that allows for self-service, thereby reducing costs and contributing to increased productivity.
According to IDC research, by 2020, at least 50% of net-new IT spending will be cloud based, shrinking non-cloud enterprise applications by 20%.
S/4HANA cloud facilitates accelerated and Intelligent innovation by leveraging the power of machine learning. It also enables self-service intelligence with its powerful built-in analytical capabilities which help generate actionable insights that drive quick and effective decision making while also freeing up resources for more productive work, and driving increased profitability. Increased visibility across the organization as well as rapid improvements in end-to-end business processes further enable businesses to successfully achieve digital transformation across the enterprise.
How you can get started
Now that you understand the business value that S/4HANA can create, here is an action plan to help you embark on this migration journey:
- Realize the vision for your business. Begin with understanding your goal and what business objectives you hope to meet.
- Find an implementation partner that understands the nuances in your organization. Work closely with the partner to map your objectives with capabilities of SAP S/4HANA.
- Start small. Let your partner implement S/4HANA cloud first for the functions that can provide your business with more immediate value.
- As you continue to experience fast ROI, make your transition to SAP S/4HANA cloud migrating all your business functions.
With S/4HANA, you drive a new approach to your business altogether. Real-time actionable insights coupled with automation redefine the job roles and open up new business opportunities. With an SAP certified implementation partner, you can embark on a more guided and optimized transformation journey.
As an SAP Gold Partner, we have closely worked with industries such as retail, manufacturing and hospitality. Understanding how your organization works, we come up with an SAP S/4HANA conversion roadmap that aligns with your business outcomes. With our activate methodology, we improve time-to-value while ensuring a smooth implementation.
Please feel free to reach out to one of experts to further explore the business value that you can create with SAP S/4HANA.
