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The key to finding the right measure of success for your digital efforts – and your business as a whole

Yathish Kumar
4 Oct 2022

How leading organizations are methodically and effectively appraising the business impact of their SAP digital programs to get the most out of their investments

Whether you’re considering consolidated SAP instances, migration from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA, modernizing legacy applications with SAP S/4HAHA, or any other variation of these scenarios, one essential question that all IT organizations have to answer is – what business value is delivered by their complex multiyear SAP transformation programs?
 
With a significant initial outlay for the project (and the expected disruptions from organizational and process changes), the business case for these transformations must be built on realizing business value – not just reduced ERP operating costs or improved technology performance. However, organizations frequently lack the capabilities necessary to measure the impact of these changes on the business.
 
As organizations embark on their SAP digital journeys, evaluating progress and the business value created is crucial. An SAP digital journey is expected to deliver the optimization of existing business and/or drive new business from digital sources. However, SAP digital initiatives in many enterprises are typically measured against project-level KPIs. In fact, these project-level KPIs may not demonstrate any insights other than on-time and on-budget delivery.

Shifting from key process indicators to key value indicators

Leading organizations are moving beyond traditional metrics to create KPIs that measure both tactical delivery aspects of their SAP digital journey – and the business impact being realized by leveraging Enterprise Business Process Analysis (EBPA) tools and Capgemini Business Insightful Services.

Invariably, not all organizations have an application landscape that enables the measurement of business process efficiencies due to application ecosystems that have grown disjointed through M&A activity (or are populated by legacy applications). Hence, EBPA tools (such as SAP Signavio) are helpful in laying the foundation for the business value measurement of SAP digital initiatives.

Key EBPA principles are centered on a “holistic view” and an “awareness of the value network,” which prioritize visibility across the enterprise, along with how the components of the application landscape work together to help clients realize business value. Together, these principles help define a model that goes beyond process understanding and connects the dots within the value network across the entire ecosystem of clients, suppliers, and business partners.

As enterprises accelerate their SAP digital IT adoption, digital business KPIs serve as leading indicators of enterprise performance and help drive executive decisions, while providing enterprise-wide transparency into the benefits gained from digital investments. At Capgemini, we’ve helped a host of companies leverage EBPA tools to drive business process efficiencies through multiple different use cases. These include simulating new designs before making a significant investment in implementing new processes, documenting more than a hundred future processes in a few months with decentralized teams and heightened collaboration, and building foundational BPM pieces such as modelling, approval workflow, process simulation, and mining. 

ADMnext and Capgemini Business Insightful Services: Actionable insights for getting the most out of your SAP initiatives

While EBPA builds a solid foundation for SAP digital journey value tracking, Capgemini Business Insightful Services (BIS) within our ADMnext offering complements EBPA with actionable insights. BIS measures the success of IT services from a business perspective, enabling clients to understand the value of their SAP digital initiatives – and ultimately lead their industries.

BIS helps you better understand key business value metrics that correlate most directly with your core organizational objectives. BIS then distills these business objectives into component parts, developing an understanding of the discrete, quantifiable performance factors driving the achievement of key metrics. By identifying and providing visibility into performance within these tactical measures, BIS helps establish the specific components affecting performance, which enables your teams to prioritize the highest value transformation opportunities.  

Examples of value delivered by Capgemini’s Business Insightful Services include helping a large energy and utility company realize 30% improvement in their order management cycle, along with achieving 98% forecasting accuracy within labor capacity management. We also enabled a global beverage company to achieve a 100% reduction in redundant outbound shipments, and an 8% reduction in PO cycle time.

To find out more about maximizing your business KPI measurement and monitoring, and attaining the most business value from your SAP digital journey with Capgemini Business Insightful Services, you can check out ADMnext and Capgemini’s wider SAP capabilities – or contact me here.

Author

Yathish Kumar

Digital Transformation Director – ADM Services
I lead Capgemini’s North America ADM Center of Excellence in India. As an enterprise application expert with more than 22 years of experience, I help clients build future-ready digital enterprises that cater to their continuously changing business needs. Throughout the majority of my 22 years in IT, I’ve focused primarily on SAP technologies and services, where I’ve delivered a wide variety of consulting, design, development, and maintenance services globally.