Stripping down to your business basics with a Renewable Enterprise.

Today, we are going to talk about what we at Capgemini call a “renewable enterprise” and how everyone wants a piece of it in their business but mostly doesn’t follow through with the practical steps needed to achieve it.

Post the global pandemic, all organizations know that they need to upgrade and make themselves future-proof for more uncertain times such as these. However, the fear of scope, scale, time and cost freak them out and they keep limiting their business to the legacy ERP landscapes with multiple integration technologies and cumbersome customizations. So the question remains: how does one simultaneously upgrade their ERP while still running their business as well as growing future-ready at the same time?

The answer lies in a “renewable enterprise”. Powered by SAP S/4 HANA. But how?

Moving from traditional SAP architectures to SAP S/4HANA is not simply an upgrade. But rather a major transition to building a “Renewable Enterprise” with SAP S/4HANA® as the digital core – and a necessary response to the digital transformation of business. The renewable enterprise will enable you to anticipate and address customer needs while evolving with constantly changing business and market conditions. And unleash the power of new digital technologies to unlock business value of your processes.

So what should you do?

For starters, don’t panic and give up already. This is just a wonderful scope to assess, simplify and standardize to renewably adapt your enterprise framework to a constantly evolving digital world.

Assess: First, take stock of what you already have, and of what needs to be part of your protected core. Start with an assessment to understand the transformation impact of the SAP S/4HANA migration on architecture, business processes, data, applications, developments, integrations, interfaces, roles, and change management. This process should be driven by the needs of your individual organization, and informed by the market or markets in which it operates.

Standardize: Then follow the SAP Model Company-based standardized implementation approach, to start a project with preconfigured processes and data for your industry and/or your line of business. Or access localized, preconfigured content that covers experience and expertise in your industry or line of business, including workflows, reports, business process hierarchies, end-to-end scenarios, process diagrams, roles, and more.

Clean core & Innovate: For both new implementations and migration to SAP S/4HANA public cloud edition, we advise you to stick to standard functions of the core ERP platform and performing extensions on either the SAP Cloud Platform or any open platform. The extension model allows us isolate modifications from the core and drive and safeguard agility for cloud deployments. This means that rather than modifying the core code, enhancements are put in a “safe” environment so that innovation packages can be easily applied. The core SAP S/4HANA system remains “clean” and can be quickly and easily modernized when innovations are added. Innovation can be built on the SAP Cloud Platform or on any open platform.

Microservices: And for modifications and bespoke solutions or software you can rely on microservices. Ideally, these small software components can be implemented across different apps without going for an overhaul of complex apps. SAP offers its customers a microservices concept through SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factory that allows multiple apps to take advantage of and scale each microservice as needed.

Renewable Enterprise strips the core of your business to its bare basics

Central to all your effort to prioritize, to engage, to create and sustain momentum in your ERP transformation, I’d argue that SAP S/4HANA is part of something bigger and deep-seated within your business vision. For us at Capgemini, it’s part of our Renewable Enterprise, which strips your business core down to its essentials; to inject innovation, insert dynamic intelligence; to assess, standardize, and protect its key elements; and to integrate it to the cloud. Thus it brings together the technology, the process, and the operating model to sustain digital transformation and quick innovation.

In a real-world scenario, while organizations are implementing SAP S/4 HANA, they cannot afford things to stop, or processes to modify offline. It only increases output while organizations are running their business, while exploring new revenue models and at the same time strengthening the drive in new levels of productivity at a lower cost.

Toward a future of sustainability

What’s more, done correctly, the renewable enterprise transformation can make a large contribution in helping organizations, cities and nations better meet their sustainability goals. To put it simply, an efficient enterprise always has an enhanced waste management system and tackles its pollution footprint better. It does not only reduce risk and ensure a fully operational business during the project, it also prepares the business for a more sustainable future by:

• Reducing implementation costs
• Standardizing the solution
• Reducing complexity

This implies lower maintenance and running costs, less training needs, and easier adoption of new functionality. More importantly, the renewable enterprise architecture integrates the organization, vendors and customers in a positive mutual reinforcement through digital transformation. It enables ways of making business smarter, more agile with better logistics processes, supply chain integration using Blockchain, Big Data, Analytics, etc. This in turn gives us the opportunity to create a more sustainable business and reduce our environmental footprint. IoT, intelligent automation and machine learning technologies also play a key role in building smart homes, buildings, factories, and cities with the potential to significantly improve energy efficiency.

When your business runs better, the environment runs better…

If you want to know how we do it, write to me here.