How the customer benefits from SAP RISE

RISE with SAP just turned one. There was much to celebrate on its first anniversary. A rapidly growing number of customers have put their trust in RISE and have helped us deliver impressive numbers in 2021. See https://www.sap.com/investors/en/investment-story/recent-results.html?pdf-asset=7c7dad34-147e-0010-bca6-c68f7e60039b&page=1. ?In the process, we have gathered valuable insights into what RISE means for our customers and more importantly, what it should mean for those that are poised to embark on their RISE journey or are considering it. The most important insight I have gleaned is that we could do better with this afore-mentioned group, with a clearer & contextual understanding of RISE. I will therefore attempt to articulate RISE’s value from the perspective of net new customers as well as for existing SAP customers (installed base) considering RISE.

RISE provides many benefits to a customer. In this article, I’m going to focus only on the five that ?have appeared to matter the most, based on my involvement with RISE customers & prospects:

·??????Speedy transition to the cloud – Transformation (digital, business, enterprise etc.) is synonymous with a transition to the cloud, for many organizations. Implicit in this is the expectation of a rapid one that is (preferably) non-disruptive. This need has been accentuated to the level of an imperative due to the havoc Covid-19 has wreaked on business operations of conceivably, every business. RISE with SAP provides enterprises the ‘path of least resistance’ to the cloud. Acceleration is provided by RISE’s many bundled components including, most notably, applications, tools, and infrastructure.

?·??????Business process efficiencies – Organizations want to maximize efficiencies in their business processes so that they can operate in a lean, agile manner. Thanks to Covid-19 again, there’s tremendous pressure on organizations to improve and optimize their supply chains and stay ahead of the tight labor market by optimizing human resources processes, to take two examples. RISE enables customers to run efficient & optimized business processes out-of-the-box. These are based on SAP business Best Practices. They incorporate our learnings from helping hundreds of thousands of businesses run better and smarter for fifty years with our business applications. RISE applications (such as S/4HANA Private Cloud Edition and S/4HANA Public Cloud) come embedded with significant automation thereby reducing manual effort, boosting worker productivity, and process efficiencies overall.

?·??????Leverage data as an asset – There is hardly an enterprise that does not want to utilize its data for real-time analytics and decision-making. But far too many organizations are struggling to make this happen. Reality is that data often resides in silos and identifying a ‘single source of truth’ is a challenge. Real-time self-service analytics seems like a pipe dream in such circumstances. This is a fairly common occurrence. RISE provides businesses the capabilities to become data-driven organizations by providing a single source of the truth that is accessible for consumption and analysis in real time. Furthermore, ‘embedded analytics’ enables effortless self-service & real-time analytics thereby engendering data democratization. This is an important step towards a ‘data-driven organization’, a holy grail for a lot of enterprises I have worked with.

?·??????Landscape simplification – Organizations have in general, amassed complicated, spaghetti-like IT landscapes over time, due to a combination of acquisitions, tight budgets that favor status quo over replacement, and expediency-based decision-making that sacrifices enterprise architecture standards for achieving short-term and potentially one-off needs. Such landscapes are replete with redundancies, are hard to manage, and result in heavy maintenance overheads. In short, they are a primary contributor to CIO insomnia. RISE provides businesses the ability to rationalize, streamline, and modernize their IT landscapes with technologies that conform to robust enterprise architecture standards. RISE will help you emerge from this transformation with a modern, simplified (eg:- no more point-to-point interfaces), scalable, and high-performing IT landscape.

?·??????SAP’s full involvement & support – Organizations want their vendors not only to be sellers but also their partners and trusted advisors before, during, and after their transformation journey. With RISE, every customer can be assured of SAP’s continuous and consistent support in this journey. There’s a high degree of organizational alignment in SAP ?designed to deliver customer satisfaction and success. This helps to significantly mitigate risk and instill confidence in the customer that they are in good hands. A continuous feedback loop between customer and SAP creates a virtuous circle of transformation excellence.

I hope I have piqued your interest in SAP RISE. To start your RISE journey or to continue with it, please check out the following resources:

·??????SAP RISE portal at https://www.sap.com/products/rise.html

·??????RISE FAQs at STUD039-RISE TPs FAQ v010.pdf (sapjam.com)

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