Business Transformation Blog Posts
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MatthewTGrant
Associate
Associate
1,261

business transformation management.jpeg

In the Experience Center at SAP Sapphire in Orlando and Madrid, we presented our full set of business transformation management capabilities. We did it by walking attendees through a scenario in which a company wanted to take full advantage of the SAP Business Suite, SAP BDC, and SAP Business AI by transforming a core business process. 

In the scenario we laid out, the company starts by using the Business AI embedded in SAP Signavio Transformation Advisor to recommend process improvements. Subsequently, through Signavio’s integration with SAP LeanIX, the company discovers that phasing in a successor application to support the transformed processes would also be beneficial.  

As the analysis progresses, the company decides on a plan of action, leveraging Signavio’s analysis and mining solutions to quantify the value they seek to realize in their transformation. They then take advantage of Signavio’s transformation management capabilities to collaboratively initiate, plan, manage, and execute their planned initiatives. 

Since their envisioned transformation involves changes to their enterprise architecture, including extending SAP S/4HANA with Ariba, the company plans their enterprise architecture roadmap in LeanIX. They also document this architectural decision there and record the changes by synchronizing everything with SAP Cloud ALM 

Finally, to facilitate employee enablement, the company uses WalkMe to track and analyze adoption as well as to provide employees with in-app guidance.   

The power of an integrated toolchain for business transformation management 

As the scenario illustrates, an integrated toolchain makes business transformation a whole lot easier. It makes it possible to smoothly move from insight to planning to action to analysis, drilling down into the most relevant details and connecting those details to the broader business context.  

For example, the toolchain described can reveal manual steps in key processes, help you establish that the culprit is a poor functional fit between the process and the underlying application, and then plan for its replacement. 

Once you’ve phased it in, you can manage adoption of that application while also confirming, on the process level, that your changes are really delivering the value your initial analysis suggested you could achieve. 

In both Orlando and Madrid, customers, prospects, and partners (and even some of our SAP colleagues!) were uniformly enthusiastic when we showed them what our business transformation management toolset, supported by AI from start to finish, could do. 

As SAP LeanIX product marketer, Seth Lippincott put it, “There was no ambiguity in the responses we got. No one said, ‘Meh.’ They all wanted to know more.” 

Which is not to say that no one had questions. In fact, quite the opposite was true. In fact, there was one question that came up again and again: “Where do I start?” 

The answer to that question, as with so many questions in the complex world of enterprise software and leading-edge technology, is: It depends! 

Option 1: Start with a focus on your enterprise architecture 

So, what does the answer to this question depend on? Well, it depends first and foremost on your starting point.  

Let’s say your situation is this. You are relatively new to the SAP universe, and you just purchased SAP LeanIX and SAP Signavio Process Intelligence. You want to transform your business by streamlining your business processes and modernizing the underlying enterprise architecture. In this scenario, it will probably take less time to create an inventory of your applications and, using the reference architecture content in LeanIX, map these applications to your business capabilities.  

That simple step can be quite revealing, showing you quickly where you have redundancies (i.e., more than one application supporting the same business capability), where you have gaps (unsupported capabilities), and where, for example, what applications you have on premise and what you have in the cloud.  

With this information, supported where possible by WalkMe’s insights into application usage, you can begin rationalizing your landscape, retiring or replacing applications that deliver no value, and ensuring future support for your critical business capabilities.  

The beauty of this approach? You can use the budget freed up through rationalization to fund your transformation efforts going forward.  

It also means that, as your business process management practice matures, you can design your to-be process landscape around a consolidated and optimized set of applications.  

That it’s easier to seamlessly enable your employees on a simplified application landscape? Icing on the cake.  

Option 2: Start with a focus on process excellence 

The scenario we presented in the Experience Center started with sourcing and procurement processes. One good reason for this was that the customer in the story had already embarked on their RISE with SAP journey. Based on that, we could assume that the customer was an established SAP ERP customer and already had key solutions from LeanIX, Signavio, and WalkMe in place.  

In many ways, your business processes are your business; they are the way you do things. If you want to bring costs down or accelerate time to market, it just makes sense to start with this operational reality–in other words, to dig into what’s actually happening and focus on what you could improve, optimize, and transform.  

Process transformation can deliver substantial, measurable impact. It also represents the centerpiece of any true business transformation, which, after all, means “changing the way you do business.” For this reason, starting with processes can provide you with a very practical lens through which to view things when you then turn to the transformation of your enterprise architecture.  

If the search for ways to optimize your processes uncovers the need for a new application, for example, you automatically have the business context and rationale for it. This then allows you to make the case and even quantify the value of the recommended architectural change. 

Option 3: Start wherever you can 

As we said above, where you start with transformation depends. It depends on what type of transformation you want to pursue. It depends on the solutions you have in place. And it depends on your organization’s capacity for transformation, or, putting it another way, how much transformation your organization is capable of.  

If your organization has developed a mature business process management practice, if you have an established enterprise architecture practice, if digital adoption is built into the way you use technology, then you have what we call a robust transformation capability. If that’s the case, you can start wherever you think you can generate the most value. 

That might mean that you start in several places at once. You can work on transforming business processes, modernizing your architecture, and enabling your entire organization to incorporate AI in every workflow. So long as the solutions you use are well integrated, and you coordinate your plans and roadmaps, you can be opportunistic when it comes to transformation.  

The challenge at this level of maturity is not figuring out where to start, but how best to orchestrate your efforts so they reinforce and amplify each other.  

When to start, not where to start, is the real question 

Where to start your transformation efforts can depend on myriad factors, as we have shown. 

When to start, however, only depends on one thing: Will successful transformation make your business better, more innovative, more competitive, more valuable?  

If the answer is yes, start today.