Can SAP win the fight for the Newco from the get go!
In my travels and conversations with many ‘leaders’ in large clients, I find that their plans for SAP S/4 include delivering a new business model that will potentially transform their operations and be their platform for growth for the next 30 years. Examples would be:
?
An EV production unit in a traditional automotive OEM
A green energy company in the traditional utility
A company delivering a service rather than products
A company manufacturing with a batch of one
A new Company that trades in data and information rather than services
Go from B2B to B2C
Deliver drugs directly to patients not hospitals and 3rd?parties
?
I think you get the picture… These are all new business models driven by new digital ways of doing business that offer a higher margin, having a deeper relationship with their clients and fight commoditisation of what they do.
?
What I also observe is the want to grow these business at the same time as keeping their traditional businesses running and they don’t want the new to disrupt or jeopardise the new.?They also accept that the new business may fail and need to be very agile as they develop. They may also need a lot of new capabilities that are not available in the existing estate and may even have different ownership, i.e. managing/leasing/connecting to and asset is much harder than simply manufacturing one.
?
But I have a slight frustration… Often I see these businesses as a perfect use case for end to end SAP, for example, our solution and architecture or a new service business uses a lot for SAP components, but I believe is the only single product set that can do everything from PLM, Planning, Manufacture, Sale, Support and Service along with all the connectivity and data required to make it sing, but really these clients want to share with their SI and Software partners the risk of making it their new business a success and allowing them to grow as they grow.
?
For example a new co EV manufacturer probably makes nothing at the moment, and so has no legacy and probably wants to buy software per vehicle or customer served from end to end, they don’t want to buy lots and lots of separate product, they also probably want to be able to scale up their footprint and costs as their business scales and flex as it changes.
?
So what I observe is that whilst clients are moving their main legacy businesses to SAP S/4, with an expectation that they will eventually move their new co onto a common platform, or will inevitably find as they scale that they need SAP capability, they often start their pilot new co on less capable technology ranging from excel to legacy solutions that are badged as cloud or a series of unintegrated products.
?
RISE from SAP holds out the possibility that a new co can buy all of SAP as a subscription and with a little imagination between SI’s and SAP scale as new cos go and take a stake in the newco’s success and risks. My call for action is to stop allowing newcos to be establish on tier two solution and work collaboratively to provide imagination that allows newcos to scale on SAP.
So can I challenge everyone out there to look at using SAP S4 as their platform for their new co and then demand that SAP and the SI, come up with a commercial model to support a new start up in growth mode
Managing Director - Global CTO for Enterprise Applications and Industry Managing Partners
2 年Can SAP compete with Workday for small scale backoffice processes? Let's help them turn around the perception from the most expensive to the fastest on reaching tangible business outcomes with #s4hanacloud
Chief Delivery Officer (CDO) at apiphani
2 年Well considered and articulated as usual!
Global Lead - SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud at Westernacher
2 年They go best of breed to get the best point solutions without really understanding the power of an integrated solution not just for now but for the next 10 years. If you are at startup and have the vision for a business system that grows with you then you can’t go far wrong with Sap S/4hana public cloud. #vision
Senior Manager at PwC | SAP Sales & Service Consultant
2 年The public cloud version of S/4 is often overlooked but if you're starting a new business with no legacy baggage and keeping it separate, it could actually be the perfect solution. It's pre-configured with best practice processes, there are very few process/configuration decisions to take, it works out of the box, and critically is very fast to implement (potentially even weeks in the right circumstances). It has plenty of functionality now and is getting better with every release. You keep the core clean because you have to, so you can innovate in BTP where you need to using the the many APIs available in S/4 public cloud. This gives you a cost-effective solution for both implementation and operation, but importantly gets you on standard S/4 processes from the start. If your oldco then moves to S/4 and does it right (ie a back-to-standard approach) that potentially gives you a route to integrate the newco back in later. Even if oldco is on extended edition, the public cloud processes are potentially close enough to migrate across, depending on what you're running. Or you can just keep your newco separate but probably still achieve the consistency of reporting and operation that you need to run both in parallel.
Finance Digital Transformation Expert and Founder Trustee NaviDisha.org Charitable Trust (Transforming Lives Encouraging to Achieve Dreams).
2 年By tightening the purse strings, the start-ups expect financial support from investors (THE Product/Service they pitch to), and they expect financial aid from SAP too. In the NEW-WORLD, what should be remembered --> include subscription cost in Start-up's Product/Subscription costing itself? ERP/IT is no longer a back-end or support system, it's THE life-line of BUSINESS Tech-savvy Investors and Valuation-Experts are closely evaluating not just business models but also the expansion execution speed, tech support, and capability to handle any crisis situation. Two years ago, I evaluated IT-Plan for an upcoming start-up and shared my observations. The start-up owners gladly agreed, however, did not implement it. Today when we compared their IT-spend and current situation, they have ended up spending on a bunch of non-scalable IT products, much time and energy interfacing these, and yet are far from what we term a REAL-TIME INTEGRATED CORE Solution.