Is SAP clean core a business case in itself

I believe that the move to SAP S/4 with a clean core and an agile PAAS platform can provide a business case for the implementation by itself, all along we have been looking for improvements during month end closing, or new business process enablement etc., but can the actual act of moving to a clean core be the answer?

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If I look back at my personal journey to the clean core PAAS and SAAS…

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Back in the day I always looked for standard solutions from SAP and was very suspicious of whole changes to core processes and doing unnatural things with SAP that should have been done outside of it, but really if you wanted to change SAP you had to do it in the core, there was no choice.

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Then in 2016 when S/4 started to move, a client I visited decided it no longer wanted to have all the technical debt in their SAP systems that had accumulated over the years and wanted to move it into a PAAS platform outside the core, to make their migration to S,4 easier. I saw this as a purely technical exercise, but it worked, and my employer developed a lot of nice analysis tooling to work out where to put the bespoke and if it was needed at all. This Approach worked fine.

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Then as the Hyperscalers and SAP launched BTP and other PAAS platforms, it became far more standard as a way of building innovation and extensions, and we proved that complex traditional issues such as local tax reporting could be moved from the core to PAAS and SAAS application.

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Then we moved our whole approach to implementation approach for brown, SDT and Green field so that we build in standard solutions as the preferred approach. This required a lot of training for our teams, and a lot of work with clients to convince them of the approach, i.e., less testing, and more microservices, scrum teams and multiple teams (roll out, enhancement, fix, continuously improve) all using the same scrum teams and microservices.

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Once these were live, we started to feel very confident that the SAP BTP and other solutions could scale that interfaces could event driven, and all reporting would not need bespoke developments etc. and that standard could work in most cases (this is a change issue).

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Then, and this is where things began to freak me out a bit, we saw far greater results:

·?????? Shorter delivery cycle approx. 33% (less testing)

·?????? Massively reduced upgrade times 30-40% (less testing)

·?????? More frequent releases, for example once per week

·?????? Improvements in data quality

·?????? Reductions in data base size

·?????? Faster deployments on rollout (less testing and teams work in parallel)

·?????? Less Down Time

·?????? Fewer P1’s

·?????? And then achieving better engagement with the business, 20% improvement

·?????? More productivity from the support and implementation teams with continued improvement

·?????? Functions moving back to SAP (who saw that coming) and it becoming the digital platform of choice

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So, if you are unsure why you should upgrade, if you get 20% more value, greater agility, reduced support and hosting costs, and faster and cheaper delivery, isn’t that a business case?

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Why not have a chat?