Introducing RISE with SAP – Business Transformation as a Service

At SAP, staying close to our customers and their needs is crucial. Talking to many CEOs and decision makers during the last months, it became clear that only companies that can transform and adapt quickly to today’s volatile environment – just think COVID, climate change, and geopolitical tensions – will win.

While the why and the what of digital transformation are clear to everyone, the question of how to transform remains a challenge to many. Digital transformation will not happen by just performing a technical migration to the cloud, talking about the power of Artificial Intelligence or by buying new technology.

Take vaccine logistics as an example: Working with all leading manufacturers, they do not ask us to make their IT more efficient or provide a piece of technology, but to help them make the process up to vaccination as short as possible and to scale the production of the vaccine. They want us to help them transform their business processes holistically - for maximum business outcome.

So we asked ourselves: How can we help our customers change the culture and mindset of their enterprises, redesign their business processes, reduce internal complexity end to end, ultimately enabling them to adopt new business models and stay ahead of their competition?

Our answer to this is RISE with SAP. Together with our unique ecosystem, we are bundling what companies need to holistically transform their business for a fast time to value - at their own speed and terms, regardless of their starting point. It simplifies our customers’ journey in three simple steps. 

Step 1: Redesigning Business Processes

• Our business process intelligence solution makes use of best practices and builds on SAP’s unique data treasures. We are adding a business process intelligence layer, allowing customers to continuously analyze how processes perform, benchmark them against industry standards and provide tailored recommendations how to adopt new business models, automate and standardize processes. Thanks to a direct connection to SAP’s workflow, RPA and other AI services, intelligence can be seamlessly embedded in business processes.

Step 2: Technical Migration

• Embedded in RISE with SAP are technical services to smoothen the migration to a standard, modular and flexible solution landscape with a consistent data layer – key to react quickly to new business demands. This includes essential services by SAP and partners to get rid of modifications and custom code and to support them in harmonizing and governing their data layer so they can run and steer your company based on ONE source of truth.

Step 3: Building an Intelligent Enterprise

• The basis is the cloud infrastructure. Customers will gain a reduced Total Cost of Ownership compared to their existing landscapes, by running the workloads in an SAP data center or via the hyperscalers, always with the best operations costs in the industry. And no matter which infrastructure they chose or who the operations partner is, SAP will be their single point of contact.
• Also part of rise is SAP Business Technology Platform – the foundation of the Intelligent Enterprise. Customers and partners can quickly develop innovations to easily complement SAP solutions – thanks to one semantical data model, one AI and analytics layer, one identity and authorization concept, and the same application business services, such as ONE workflow management. Additional low code no code capabilities make it even easier to expand our solutions. And our platform enables out-of-the-box integration – SAP to SAP, but also SAP to non-SAP.
• Access to the Business Network is also included. Times when companies are managing their business within the four walls of their companies, with one-to-one connections to the stakeholders across the supply chain, are over. From now on, it is all about managing your complete supply chain in real-time - to react faster than anyone else to changing market conditions.
• And finally, as you need intelligent applications to truly change how your business runs, we will include our market leading intelligent ERP, SAP S/4HANA Cloud. Customers not only can pick their deployment of choice depending on their level of standardization, but also benefit from embedded Artificial Intelligence, Robotic Process Automation, and advanced analytics. And as we all have realized how important it is to run a frictionless enterprise, we will integrate Microsoft Teams across our solution portfolio to bring collaboration to the next level. 

In short: RISE with SAP provides our customers with the basic components of an Intelligent Enterprise in one bundle, complemented with premium services and tools. One offer. One contract for SAP-related services. One responsible party for SLA, operations, and issue handling. It’s as simple as that.

And building on this kickstart, companies can tailor their Intelligent Enterprise to meet their respective business needs. Customers and partners alike can easily complement, extend, and integrate with any other of our Line of Business and industry solutions, partner or third-party solution, using exactly the same data model and business services as our own SAP apps. This allows them to run their core and industry-specific processes – seamlessly, end-to-end and top-to-bottom, with a full 360° transparency.

Eager to learn more? Make sure to check out the blogs by my colleagues Thomas Saueressig, Uwe Grigoleit, Juergen Mueller and Jan Gilg, and see what our partners have to say.