S/4HANA & ServiceNow!

Gain control over your ERP upgrades and maintenance while building and extending innovation for your ERP-dependent processes.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) modernization is a huge undertaking. ERP environments are laden with customization that can increase technical debt and impede maintenance. Organizations need to achieve a clean core while delivering a consumer-grade experience that bridges various systems of record without missing a beat.

ERP environments are complex and always evolving. They’re messy and busy. They require many manual processes and span multiple, siloed systems. There’s no single source of truth, and visibility is often lacking. Plus, ERP systems aren’t known for providing exceptional user experiences—they’re designed for power users, not casual ones.

Customizations and extensions may seem like the right solutions to these and other ERP challenges, but they weigh organizations down. These add-ons are “stuck” to the ERP system. During maintenance or upgrades, each customization must be preserved or updated. Security patching is also tricky.

This all contributes to one dreaded thing: technical debt—the rework that comes from quick fixes or shortcuts. It’s what most organizations struggle with and want to avoid. Technical debt is the endless stream of menial tasks that burden IT teams and hamper business agility.

After decades spent building, maintaining and expanding these ERP ecosystems, customers are facing a few critical challenges that are impacting their way forward.

• Customers struggle to transform their processes fast enough because process transformation requires changes to the core, which is complex and risky
• The user experience is too complex for most enterprise users which represents an overall tax on the entire enterprise
• Deadlines to upgrade to new platform versions creates unwanted cost and risk.?For SAP in particular, all customers must move their core by 2030 and their business suite applications by 2027.

Getting to a clean core is not that easy…especially after so many years of building up that clutter.

The primary option for a clean core has been a series of manually driven processes that can take thousands of man-days to execute. You have to manually find and remediate custom code, manually associate and understand dependencies surrounding that code and manually prioritize migration tasks. But even with all that work, the time intensive and error prone manual processes still won’t provide enough precision needed for a low risk/low cost migration.

With this manual approach, the question becomes is the plan you come up with, the RIGHT plan??

ServiceNow enables a better way!

The ERP scanner first extracts log data from the targeted ERP system and exposes ERP data objects such as sales orders, master data records, purchase documents and others as data pills using Remote Tables. It then consumes the extracted log data and analyzes it for possible migration candidates. This is the scanning technology that allows you to assess and pinpoint the custom code targets within the ERP core. The scan finds customizations that meet predefined criteria for packaged workflows and low-code apps, while helping organizations to prioritize candidates based on:

• Portability to ServiceNow
• Best fit for Finance & Supply Chain Workflows and App Engine
• Most custom code eliminated
• Customization usage
• Fastest development time

Once you have those insights in hand, then you can focus on the best options to modernize those targeted workflows.

For non-core customizations, you can potentially replace many of those with modern best-of-breed ERP solutions, such as out-of-the-box SaaS solutions.

Where out-of-the-box capabilities may not meet requirements, you can opt to re-platform those with App Engine.

Your core ERP modules remain in SAP, readily available for easy migration.

When your requirements can’t be effectively met with out-of-the-box options, you can re-platform the rest of those workflows to ServiceNow using the Creator Workflow capabilities of App Engine.

So the Clean Core ERP scanning technology provides an automated way to transfer data fields from those SAP customizations to the ServiceNow Now Platform. Once done, you can then quickly build new SAP functions against those transferred fields – even if you are not an experienced ERP developer!

You can also build new function all day long without adding any additional technical debt to the core.

And you can build those new functions within a much simpler experience for casual users of ERP data so they don’t have to navigate the complexity of ERP solutions that they are not trained to use.

So to summarize, ServiceNow makes ERP modernization easier than ever.

• You start with a cluttered SAP core that is limiting the pace of innovation…
• You then scan customizations and processes, and in a matter of days, know exactly what needs to be targeted.
• Then you can automatically transfer the associated data fields from SAP to ServiceNow allowing you to jumpstart the migration process.
• And finally you re-platform workflows using either out-of-the-box or build custom workflows without any required SAP skills.

This leaves you with a lean and high-performing ERP environment to fuel your growth.

Here’s an example…

• A customer builds a custom order app in SAP. Over time, that app required coding by over 60 developers over the course of 15 years.
• Recently the customer was experiencing too many invoices being paid late.
• With ServiceNow, the customer analyzes the process and finds that casual SAP users were making too many errors due to a complex UX in SAP.
• To mitigate the issue, the customer decided to modernize the workflow. So they automatically identifiy and move all necessary data fields to ServiceNow.
• A business analyst, with no coding skills, develops a new workspace on ServiceNow, transforming the user experience in just weeks.
• The customer now has on-time invoice payments and an improved experience that was built outside of SAP…all while leaving a clean SAP core.

Creator Workflows provides a unique advantage as your digital foundation for ERP modernization:

• You can quickly build tailor-made automation for your SAP migration – with customization mining to save time and cost and automated insights for optimizing your migration success rate.
• You can re-platform and build new functions with 4 times more efficiency using a low code development process…
• And you can create the modern experiences workers need on a well-governed platform - and you can do it at scale to complement your ERP systems without friction or clutter.
• Drive the ERP innovations you need today with a proven agile low code platform that leaves your SAP core clean and ready to deliver adaptive workflows for the future…

Here are three key ways, including a use case for each:

• Purpose-built apps?– The pandemic stress-tested supply chain operations and accelerated our understanding of the inherent deficiencies within legacy systems. With?Sourcing and Procurement Operations, we’ve automated processes for more streamlined purchasing and case management—and gained end-to-end visibility into procurement processes.
• Predefined workflows?– With no unified way to interact with customers, accounts receivable (AR) was struggling to track and manage collections efficiently and cost-effectively. Our AR case management solution, built on the Now Platform using App Engine and Integration Hub, helped us improve productivity by 70% and reduce cycle time by about two days.
• Low-code development tools?– With manual, email-based cost center management, we had no way to track approvals and were burning excessive time and resources. By creating an approval workflow and spend management dashboard with App Engine, we now have a digitized, audit-tracked process and faster cycle time.

ERP systems change as an organization evolves. ServiceNow is no exception. But with the right tools and strategies, we’re continuing to work toward a clean-core ERP environment and reaping measurable benefits along the way.

I would love to close off with this great ERP Mining Demo from UMANG GOYAL