Highlights
- Every Homo sapien investing their resources expects an outcome to be appreciated and the margin of error to be as minimum as possible.
- Similarly, organizations invest heavily in SAP implementation/migration projects, and the success of these projects directly impacts shareholder value and reputation.
- Choosing the right approach for SAP platform setup lays a foundation for successful SAP implementation/migration programs.
- We employed a dynamic 3Ps approach, combining process improvisation and automation to proactively connect with diverse customer stakeholders. This encompassed collaborating with leaders in applications, infrastructure, security, procurement, legal, etc.
Setting up SAP
Business owners and shareholders look for a return on every dollar invested, and the key to achieving this is to have end-to-end visibility of every business process followed within an organization. For example, a car manufacturer will aspire for visibility from the requisition of a bolt to the lifecycle of a finished car—sales, service, and resale. The third industrial revolution, especially ERPs, gave birth to such possibilities. SAP is one such leading Tier 1 ERP software.
Multi-year, multi-million-dollar large SAP programs focus on utilizing product capabilities to standardize and improvise existing business processes and lower operational costs. This is a long journey, and the first step is setting up the right underlying platform. Many questions arise about cloud or on-prem, which cloud, which model Platform as a Service or Infrastructure as a Service, and so on. Finally, a decision to align with the broader organizational strategy is made, but still, a million-dollar question remains. How do you achieve this and whom do you trust to make this happen? After all, the platform will host your organization's critical business processes.
Simple 3Ps approach
With a decade of experience building SAP platforms covering multiple SAP products, we understood varying customer expectations across industries, regions, sizes, etc., and the need for a robust approach to satisfy these varying customer expectations. We formulated a simple 3Ps approach combining process improvisation and automation to achieve early alignment with multiple customer stakeholders, including the head of applications, infrastructure, security, procurement, and legal, to name a few. After all, every business requirement is different, and these stakeholders know their business better than anyone else.
Demystifying 3Ps
Plan
In this step, technical consultants create a build sheet covering each application's details. This includes architecture (single, distributed based on the application's criticality), size, parameters, etc. These build sheets undergo extensive review and approval workflow from all major stakeholders, ensuring the requirement is early aligned.
Plug
After the building blocks are firmed and agreed upon in the build sheet, they are plugged into an automated code. Automation makes the realization of agreed-upon building blocks faster and error-free.
Play
This is the final step, where the code is fired up, and the resources, as per the build sheets, are deployed. It then undergoes a thorough internal quality check, runs through all security prechecks, and is finally released for application configurations.
Adding AI to our approach
Things have evolved in multiple facets from the decade back of on-premises setup to private cloud and now public cloud SAP infrastructures. Technical configuration, setup complexities, maintenance cost, security, legal, time to market, and many more. Every evolution taught us a lesson to learn and adapt. The latest is the AI revolution, which will continue bringing up new art of possibilities. Our focus would now be to add an "A" and "I" to our 3Ps approach and continue exploring the art of possibilities with our customers.
About the author
Rakesh Mishra is a sales and solutions lead at ERP on Cloud (MENA region). In his current role, he oversees a large SAP on-cloud implementation for a major retailer.
About Tata Consultancy Services (TCS)
Tata Consultancy Services is an IT services, consulting and business solutions organization that has been partnering with many of the world’s largest businesses for the past 50 years. We believe innovation and collective knowledge can transform all our futures with greater purpose. Visit tcs.com to learn more.