SAP RISE – How high will it take you?

Actually, the simple answer is “a lot”, so let’s take a look at the six layers.

Source SAP

What if you could model all of your business processes and measure them with the right KPIs? You could then revise your Business Strategy and ERP Strategy, or perform real business process improvement.

Sounds like the right place to start, but some upcoming Resulting research that I’ve had early sight of shows that 80% of SAP ERP customers don’t have an up to date list of their business processes. And if you want to be first in line to read that research drop me an email so I can add you to the release day mailing list.

Anyway, SAP aims to help here and have recently acquired the leading business process management vendor, Signavio, in Germany.

SAP already has a set of tools and services to help customers migrate from ECC to S/4HANA on premise/any premise (S/4HANA for simplicity) and S/4HANA Cloud, called the MOVE program.

This has been enhanced to include credits for the on-line SAP Learning Hub. Also included here are 3 optional consulting service packages, called RUN, OPTIMIZE and INNOVATE, which are all geared to S/4HANA Cloud.

The Resulting FusionGraph visualization tool can greatly help customers in this migration, by simulating roadmaps and helping to build business cases.

If you haven’t seen it yet you can book a demo here.

The RISE contract offers a migration from on premise ECC to the cloud. This can be ECC to S/4HANA Cloud on either a private cloud (e.g. IBM) or a hyperscaler public cloud (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, etc.). SAP claims up to a 20% TCO savings over 5 years for this migration.

SAP intends that existing S/4HANA customers should further migrate to S/4HANA Cloud, which I will discuss below. Another surprising option is a short-term migration from ECC on premise to ECC on the HANA database, on a hyperscaler.

SAP’s elusive technology strategy has been so confusing over the years! Let me sum up its evolution for you here in one straightforward timeline: Basis –> NetWeaver –> Cloud Platform –> Business Technology Platform (BTP)

The RISE contract includes credits for customers to use the powerful BTP to integrate SAP and non-SAP solutions, as well as to extend them. BTP also includes newer technologies for analytics, AI/ML and process automation, etc.

This allows you to create digital connections to your trading partners, via the SAP Business Network and allows you to start to collaborate with suppliers, shippers and carriers. It also allows you to share asset usage information.

The whole focus of RISE is to move/migrate more installed base SAP ECC customers onto S/4HANA Cloud, which is SAP’s strategic ERP SaaS offering - where SAP directly runs and updates your ERP processes for you. Subject to sizing constraints, there are extra services to remove customisations, re-implement interfaces and minimize business downtime when migrating from ECC.

I know what you’re thinking now: “How will SAP RISE help me”?

If you are an SAP installed base customer your options depend greatly on how much ERP you currently use and need.

If like many of SAP’s 36,000+ ERP customers you run your order fulfilment, manufacturing and logistics business processes within ERP, you are what I call a “Big ERP” user. Big ERP means that your ERP systems(s) form critical systems of record. If, however, you just run financials and procurement, I would term you “Small ERP”, meaning less critical back office systems.

Big ERP users often have hundreds of special interfaces, huge databases and have built too many customisations. Big ERP users typically need to control their individual application configuration, plus its change control processes and timing. In general, Big ERP users currently prefer to migrate to S/4HANA on premise/any premise, but this can be hosted on private or public cloud. However, in the January 27th launch of RISE, Siemens, one of SAP’s oldest ERP customers with hundreds of big SAP systems, declared their intention to migrate to S/4HANA Cloud. So we need to watch this space.

Small ERP users, plus net new SAP customers, find it much easier to migrate to S/4HANA Cloud, as they don’t have the constraints faced by Big ERP users.

SAP claims there are currently about 16,000 licensed S/4HANA customers, with 8,700 of these actually in live operation. It is not known how many of these are S/4HANA Cloud, but I would estimate less than 20% of the 8,700.

Heard that before? Oh yes you have! To date thousands of SAP ERP customers have already started their journey to the cloud, but in a careful, stepwise approach. Most of these run either SAP ECC or S/4HANA on cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). They include Big ERP and Small ERP customers and most of them have achieved substantial operational cost savings already.

The majority of these IaaS customers are on the AWS hyperscaler, followed by Microsoft Azure, then Google Cloud. In the January 27th launch SAP announced a closer partnership with Microsoft, including a planned integration of Microsoft Teams collaboration tools.

As many SAP IaaS customers have found, each of the major hyperscaler vendors also offer their own easy to consume, modern, development and integration tools. These can be used to build smart systems of differentiation to extend the SAP ERP systems, including AI, ML, RPA and IoT technologies. SAP needs to control its installed base of customers by “persuading” them to use SAP technologies (like BTP), or risk losing control of them.