How to be different in the cloud

“Cloud” is the word wherever you go. The question is, whether or not you will move to the cloud. But what does this mean and what does it mean for your critical business processes? What does it mean to the way of working employees are used to? Will this be just another upgrade with all costs and efforts which accompany this? These are just a few examples of questions which arise.

When you look at the SAP menu offerings, there is a sense of that overwhelming feeling you get when there are too many choices available. SAP S/4HANA Cloud or on premises? Should it be on a private, public, or hybrid cloud solution, or should it all be hosted on your own servers or by a supplier? What does it all mean? Should we wait until the first adopters have some experience, or should we do it now? Not to mention the experiences from previous technical upgrades and implementations – why should this be any different? Of course, when talking to a consultant it seems easy: clean the core, move to the cloud, and off you go. But what concerns are there and are they recognized by the supplier?

First of all, moving from ECC to SAP S/4HANA is not an upgrade. It’s a transformation in which the company should take a good look at their processes, the IT landscape, and the data model. It’s not the transformation that should drive the investigation but the objective of the company to become agile. In other words, the objective is to become more flexible in order to adapt and grow with external changes. The current situation in the world makes it obvious that companies need to be able to adapt quickly to high-impact changes, such as working from home or sales moving online. Companies that are able to adapt to these changes quickly are what we call Renewable Enterprises.

Does the transition to SAP S/4HANA make a company more agile and adaptable to change? The answer is – no. Instead, legacy environments are mostly built with extra custom code and logic to make the system support the processes. Rebuilding the legacy into SAP S/4HANA would be the same as buying a Ferrari and using only the mirrors. This means that the processes need to be reviewed, and choices need to be made to either change the process itself or add fields and logic via the appropriate extensibility options that are provided by SAP. SAP also created best practices for all processes, so that could help to change the business processes.

This also means that it’s not only an IT implementation but also a business implementation to understand where the deviations from that standard best practice add value to the process. These added values can still be supported in SAP S/4HANA and have a clean core. SAP S/4HANA offers more than just support of the process. It also offers data collection and analytics. When following the news, data is the new gold. The more data the better, because that can help predict consumer behavior. The next question is how to deal with data storage, governance, compliance, security, etc. This is where cloud comes into the picture. From our perspective, the combination of SAP S/4HANA and Microsoft Azure, deals with these questions.

So why is Azure the best fit for SAP S/4HANA? Just like SAP, Microsoft Azure continuously improves their technology. Supporting artificial intelligence, the internet of things, and machine learning to complement SAP S/4HANA. It takes care of security and compliance and invests to maintain the certifications on these topics. From a SAP perspective, it is the preferred supplier for their deep industry enterprise knowledge. SAP and Microsoft Azure have aligned their roadmaps and information sharing.

To accommodate this, Capgemini developed EMBRACE, a journey to SAP S/4HANA on Azure tailored to your specific business requirements. With this journey, Capgemini has structured the path to innovation, at speed and without risk. It starts with a business assessment, where pain points, transformation readiness, and adoption culture will be addressed. The current process, use of data, and solutions are measured to identify the starting point of the path. Then, the current landscape is assessed to determine the optimal SAP S/4HANA architecture. And finally, a transition plan and services are delivered containing a combination of SAP, Microsoft and Capgemini services. The last question is, why to go for SAP S/4HANA on Azure? If you need a platform to host your digital core and applications in a scalable, secure and compliant environment, and with a preferred supplier that has extensive industry enterprise knowledge and experience that speeds up your transition, a combination of Azure and SAP S/4HANA is the answer.

So why wait? Get Embrace-d and start your Cloud SAP S/4HANA journey today.

Mariska Blasweiler

I listen to the customer and their challenges in this high-speed developing SAP world. I translate the questions and roadmaps into solutions that fit the SAP standard best practice where it can deliver the highest value against the lowest costs. I aim for the best User Experience to accommodate the processes, since it is not about features or IT but about processes.
I am a SAP consultant with experience in S/4HANA and C/4HANA. I am certified for SAP on-premise and cloud. My expertise is SAP Sales and Marketing but I have expertise in other processes as well.