RISE with SAP

LinkedIn Blog by Adil Zafar, Global Leader for RISE with SAP at IBM

SAP announced its long awaited RISE with SAP on 27th January. It comes with a promise of Business Transformation as a Service with One Contract, One Offer and One Price, putting aside commercials what does it mean to our customers who are looking at taking the next step in their Business Transformation journey.

What is RISE with SAP?

It’s an SAP S/4HANA Software as a Service (SaaS) Cloud based Subscription offering which enables customers to move their existing SAP ERP systems to S/4HANA on a choice of Cloud Infrastructure providers. To help customer’s, accelerate that journey to the Cloud it has bundled 6 Service Offerings within RISE with SAP:

1.????Cloud Infrastructure Providers

RISE with SAP provides the broadest Cloud Infrastructure Providers which include Microsoft Azure, AWS, GCP, Alibaba and IBM.

2.????S/4HANA Cloud

S/4HANA Public Cloud (previously known as S/4HANA Cloud Essentials Edition) and S/4HANA Private Cloud Edition (PCE) are the only two S/4HANA Cloud offerings which are applicable for RISE with SAP. PCE, offers the broadest range of Scope, Industry Solution, Line of Business, Country Version compared to its Public Cloud offering.

Note: S/4HANA Cloud Extended Edition is not part of the RISE offering, but customers can still avail this deployment option.

3.????Tools and Services

To help customers start the transformation journey from SAP ECC to S/4HANA, SAP are offering, a basic set of tools and services, which may need to be augmented by additional services, the basic offering includes:

-???????SAP Readiness Checks

-???????Custom Code Analysis

-???????Access SAP Learning Hub?

4.????SAP Business Technology Platform

SAP Business Transformation Platform (SAP BTP) (previously known as SAP Cloud Platform Enterprise). As part of the Clean Core strategy, BTP offers Integration and Extensibility (development) with any other SAP, partner, or third-party solution.

5.????SAP Business Process Intelligence

Even though there is a focus on keeping the Core Clean and Extending outside the Core of S/4HANA, SAP Business Process Intelligence (SAP BPI) provides insight through discovery reports by identifying and recommending business process improvements.

6.????One Business Network

To complete the offering SAP is now providing access to the world’s largest business network including SAP’s supplier, logistics, and asset intelligence networks to foster cross-company connectivity and collaboration.

Why should you care?

In late December, I wrote about my expectations in 2021 from a Digital Transformation perspective and I set out 4 conditions which were necessary to provide organisations with an Enterprise Platform which was underpinned by an Agile, Flexible, Consumable and Innovative Technology Platform. Please take a few mins to read my blog. RISE with SAP provides customers with a Business Transformation as a Service and fulfils those 4 conditions.

Agile

Rise with SAP is based on the fundamental principle of keeping the core clean, moreover, SAP BTP provides the agility in extending the business processes and integrating with other SAP, partner, or third-party solution without disrupting the core S/4.

Flexible

With Cloud Infrastructure, it inherently provides flexibility on services that are on offer. That flexibility goes further into the application layer when you want to increase or reduce the services being provided. This becomes even more critical when you want scale as the needs of the business changes.

Consumable

Rise with SAP is based on subscription model or pay as you consume. The consumption-based pricing is based on the full Business Transformation as a Service stack, discussed above.

Innovative

Innovating at the speed of innovation has been a challenge and customers have never been able to truly master this, as it caused untold disruption to maintain business as usual and at the same time bring in new enhancements and innovation, due to the modifications and customisations endured in the past. Rise with SAP and in particular the Clean Core mantra, you can be assured that keeping up to date with the latest innovation in S/4HANA releases with minimal disruption is a reality.

How can IBM help you Rise with SAP?

IBM is in a unique position to help customers adopt to Business Transformation as a Service. Here’s how:

Delivers Technology Value

Our services help our clients explore a diverse set of topics and build the fact-base they need to confidently move forward with their critical transformation decisions. These include:

• Understanding and impact of your migration to SAP S/4HANA value driven outcome using various tools and services which would include things like SAP Readiness Checks, Custom Code Analyser, Remediation Effort estimator, Integration Impact Analyser and HANA Optimization Tool to name a few
• Cloud Assessment Discovery designed to help our customers begin their cloud journey and understand their requirements. The scope ranges from educating the customer on the cloud services relevant to SAP and to help them with their migration strategy.
• Adoption Assessment is sometimes an afterthought when considering moving to S/4HANA, this assessment helps customers to identify which of the 3 approaches when moving to S/4HANA provides the greatest value, e.g. preserving existing development investment, adopting new Business Processes and selective data migration.

Delivers Business Value

The value from a Technology standpoint delivers the transformation of the Core S/4 which is essential when considering how best to enhance the solution where it can start delivering real business value. The IBM/SAP Evolution Partnership is built on the Essentials Platform which provides the foundation for the business transformation. This is underpinned by SAP Business Technology Platform, so the RISE with SAP announcement simply re-enforced our long-standing partnership in delivering business transformation for our customer. Our Assets are developed on the latest offering from SAP and benefit customers with:

• Delivering Intelligent by Design to help customers become an intelligent enterprise
• We drive the Data Conversations to deliver the intrinsic value which becomes the foundation of AI and Automation, infused into the process to deliver the business benefits
• We look to improve our customers business processes by gathering intelligence through process mining.

Delivers Strategic Value

The strategic value of any transformation is when Technology becomes an enabler rather than a barrier to Intelligent Enterprise. When the ability to deliver End-to-End Procurement, solution enhanced by embedded AI/ ML when the ability to source products gives you the ability to cast the net wider than just your own supplier network but go beyond.

Becoming an Intelligent Enterprise would mean ensuring any supplier providing goods e.g. Covid-19 vaccine can be traced back to it source in case there was a faulty batch and you have the ability to remove it from the supply chain in a matter of minutes rather than days.

To deliver strategic value on S/4HANA, IBM has built responsive, resilient next generation solutions:

• Which delivers Intelligent workflows on the IBM Essentials Platform to enable process orchestration across all applications and deliver continuous process improvement.
• Deliver industry and business process innovation at scale by embedding automation and AI in its Intelligent workflows to drive new ways of working and improve user experience.
• We have developed Industry specific solutions and processes with Intelligent Industry Outcomes in Telco, IM&C and Life Sciences
• IBM augments the existing One Business Network with its own Block chain offering to extend the strategic value to its customers.

ONE Contract + ONE Partner with IBM

To summarize, RISE with SAP is a Customer centric Partner driven offering which means IBM is in a unique position to help customers adopt to become an Intelligent Enterprise by combining IBM’s Cognitive Transformation Services underpinned by RISE with SAP offering.

You can learn more about our IBM Offerings for SAP

If you would like to know more about how IBM is helping customers RISE with SAP, please reach out to me at [email protected]

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