DXC Technology has a 35-year partnership with SAP. Collaborating on innovations that include work for 850 customers in industries such as health care, energy and the public sector, DXC recently introduced DXC Fast RISE with SAP, leveraging its expertise, along with best practice tools and accelerators, to reduce the complexity and compress the timeline for migrating to SAP S/4HANA.
In opting for the DXC Fast RISE with SAP approach, SAP users can achieve faster time-to-value, simplify their business, and lower their total cost of ownership, while reaping the myriad benefits of cloud ERP, from increased agility to scalability.
The company continues to build on this journey and accelerate strategic partnerships to bring value to customers in the era of AI and cloud modernization. DXC’s focus is on helping to solve client challenges and deliver outcomes with speed.
As business leaders seek to adapt, move at speed, and rapidly scale to stay competitive in today’s innovation economy, IT modernization efforts are rising to the top of every company’s agenda. For organizations with IT infrastructure running on SAP, one of the most high-priority initiatives involves migrating from legacy SAP ERP systems to RISE with SAP S/HANA for business transformation and innovation.
However, the SAP ERP cloud journey can be complex, time-consuming, and expensive, which poses a challenge for both enterprise customers and those in the mid-market sector.
Delivering mission-critical IT services for global companies, DXC Technology is focused on designing and implementing solutions that embed engineering skills, AI and industry expertise to capture opportunities in an expanding addressable market. With deep engineering and industry expertise, the company is helping drive mission-critical operational excellence at scale with security, reliability, performance, and compliance.
An SAP Global Partner, DXC provides a spectrum of SAP-based solutions to empower businesses to simplify IT, modernize applications, and accelerate processes. In conversation with ASUG, Keith Costello, General Manager and Global SAP Lead at DXC Technology, dives deeper into how DXC Fast RISE with SAP can transform the way companies approach digital transformation, the unique advantages this service offers, and what he foresees for the future of SAP implementation.
This interview, which you can also download here, has been edited and condensed.
Q: DXC is strategically more focused than ever on SAP. What does the growth of this business mean for your customers?
DXC Technology helps the world’s most innovative businesses flourish in the era of AI, delivering the services and solutions that customers depend on. Our engineering and consulting experts are the enablers for helping clients unlock AI’s full potential, manage their most critical workloads and operations, and put security at the forefront. We have more than 50,000 engineers and deep industry experts who understand our clients' business processes and are dedicated to delivering success alongside nearly 3,000 security experts who ensure strong data governance and integrity.
A significant part of this effort involves our consulting and engineering services division. We have restructured the company into two main parts: our infrastructure business, and our consulting and engineering services — where our SAP practice resides. Our consulting and engineering experts are the enablers for helping clients unlock AI’s full potential, manage their most critical workloads and operations, and put security at the forefront.
All of this is organized into a five-by-five matrix, encompassing five industry focus areas—Financial Services; Automotive & Manufacturing; Healthcare & Life Sciences; Airlines; and the Public Sector—and five service lines. One of these global service lines is our SAP business, which stands alone as it represents a substantial growth opportunity for us. Every client I engage with has strategic initiatives leveraging digital capabilities, often involving SAP, making this a tremendous growth prospect.
Upon joining DXC in 2023, I consulted with several leading analysts to identify our first-mover advantage and areas that differentiate our services. Their feedback highlighted the importance of speed. While SAP invests heavily in accelerators used widely to de-risk projects, we emphasize speed in delivering customer outcomes. Unlike competitors who allocate resources to lengthy blueprint and strategy phases, we focus on rapid deployment.
Our priority is to get clients into productive use swiftly, modernizing their extensive estates, including SAP and other content, and migrating them to cloud or hybrid environments.
This transition allows them to take advantage of innovations in simplifying processes and optimizing data models. In the process, we help clients understand and utilize the full functionality of SAP S/4HANA, often reducing unnecessary customizations.
Building on a 35-year heritage, DXC and SAP continue to offer a proven approach to IT modernization.
Q: Tell us about a few specific cases in which DXC has delivered significant business value through SAP implementation.
We recently completed a project in Australia within six months for Whitehaven Coal, a leading coal producer that supplies metallurgical coal for steelmaking in developed and emerging Asian economies. We implemented systems at two newly acquired Whitehaven Coal mine sites that allowed Whitehaven to double its size in record time.
DXC rolled out SAP S/4HANA at the new mine sites, aimed at modernizing the HR, Finance, Procurement and Payroll functions within six months. We managed the full implementation, including business analysis, organizational change management, and security services. We transitioned a workforce of more than 2,000 and systems running over 150 applications onto the new platform, with minimal disruption to production.
For Energy Harbor, a large nuclear power provider in the Ohio Valley area serving millions of clients, DXC executed a migration from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA on RISE with SAP in nine months. The project helped accelerate Energy Harbor’s objective to become one of the largest fully integrated retail providers of carbon-free electricity. In recognition of this achievement, Energy Harbor was awarded the title of Purpose-Driven Utility at the 2023 SAP Innovation Awards. I like to say this was Fast RISE before we even announced Fast RISE.
Discover the value of SAP S/4HANA with DXC Fast RISE with SAP.
Q: DXC introduced Fast RISE with SAP in early 2024, with the ambition to deliver 12-month implementation timelines for enterprise customers selecting RISE with SAP S/4HANA. How does this service enable customers to achieve faster time-to-value while reducing complexity?
The DXC Fast RISE with SAP service enables customers to rapidly unlock the extensive value of SAP S/4HANA. In streamlining the implementation process, the service is designed to enable not only speed but also scalability, so that clients can adapt and grow as their needs evolve, with minimal disruption. These three factors—speed, adaptability and scalability—make it possible for customers to significantly reduce the total cost of ownership associated with SAP adoption.
The concept behind DXC Fast RISE emerged from those early discussions I had with analysts and clients, and the thought process began with a key question: How can we assess whether a client is ready to achieve significant goals within a year or less? Doing so would require the client to be committed to moving quickly.
The program is particularly relevant when certain conditions are in place. For instance, many of our clients are engaged in mergers and acquisitions (M&As) and need to act swiftly to prepare for an acquisition. At Energy Harbor, M&A activity was near-certainly ahead, so they had to act quickly to be ready.
Other clients may be planning to spin off a business. In this situation as well, strategic success is contingent on having the target operating model in place within, say, eight months. This allows clients to spend the remaining months realizing the value of the acquisition or divestiture. We encounter these scenarios repeatedly.
Another segment of clients that benefit from rapid SAP implementations and migrations are in the mid-market. Despite their smaller size, many of these companies have levels of complexity that are similar to those in place at larger organizations. These can be companies in the $2-4 billion range, companies that don’t have the luxury of extended timelines. Often, leaders at these organizations have evaluated SAP S/4HANA but have elected not to implement all its functionalities upfront, opting instead to rapidly migrate their existing systems to S/4HANA, where they can optimize and fine-tune them to then determine what transformations are truly necessary.
That is not to say that we don’t see demand for DXC Fast RISE from bigger customers. Several large clients have approached us to accelerate the modernization and optimization of recently acquired divisions. Recently, we worked on a $600 million revenue division that was growing at 4%, and the leadership team set a goal of increasing that growth to 50%.
Other cases involve a divisional migration from ECC to S/4HANA, which is used as a template for broader transformation across the company. These clients often tell us they’ve already spent over a year working with one of our competitors on blueprinting and are now wondering if we can help them bypass that and achieve their goals faster.
Connect with Keith Costello on LinkedIn.
Q: What is the implementation methodology that enables DXC Fast RISE?
First, we begin by conducting a DXC Fast RISE assessment for our clients. This involves evaluating the extent of custom code that needs remediation, the level of integration required, and the number of business processes targeted for optimization.
If a client seeks to overhaul their entire operation, that’s not typically a fast project. However, if the focus is on optimizing two or three key processes—whether in finance, supply chain, or another area—we can deliver rapid results, enabling our clients to realize value quickly.
Once the assessment is complete, we leverage DXC’s partnerships with specialized firms that offer acceleration capabilities. For example, to enhance our ability to execute efficiently, we have collaborated with smartShift for code remediation and Syniti for data migration.
Our sweet spot lies at the upper end of the mid-market and the lower end of the enterprise spectrum. We take a very prescriptive approach in our upfront qualification process, working closely with SAP to align with their market strategy. Our collaboration is tightly integrated, and SAP is fully supportive of this approach.
We focus on industries where we have deep expertise, including automotive and manufacturing, financial services, healthcare and life sciences, airlines, and the public sector. For these clients, the key considerations are when and how to migrate. When large companies approach us about DXC Fast RISE, they’re not looking for prolonged, disruptive transformations. They want the process to be seamless, quiet, and uninterrupted. As I mentioned, in some cases, we partner with firms that might otherwise be seen as competitors because they have areas of specialization that bring immediate value to the client.
“We take a very prescriptive approach
in our upfront qualification process,
working closely with SAP to align with
their market strategy.” — Keith Costello, General Manager
and Global SAP Lead at DXC Technology
Q: How does DXC leverage its talent and its industry-specific expertise to tailor SAP solutions for clients?
With more than 50,000 engineers on our team and deep industry experience, our engineering expertise is unparalleled. Our technical skills are second to none, and we excel in execution. We’ve demonstrated this capability on the largest scales, successfully completing implementations within tight timelines. It’s our engineering strength and technical expertise that make this possible.
We’re also committed to deepening our industry knowledge. As part of this effort, we’re actively hiring professionals with specific industry experience into our SAP business. These are individuals who can, for example, walk into an automotive or manufacturing company and immediately pinpoint their critical business challenges in detail.
Q: How can clients balance the need for differentiating customization with the benefits of standardization in SAP implementations?
Our clients often face challenges with custom add-ons that are deeply integrated into their existing SAP implementation. These custom solutions are often viewed as critical competitive differentiators, influencing aspects like pricing—or how they operate on a commodity exchange, as an example—that is tailored to very specific needs and circumstances.
While these customizations are seen as key to their competitive edge, they’re usually written by people no longer with the company. With the people who truly understand the customization gone, few organizations are willing to trust anyone else to touch these applications.
When our customers encounter such a situation, they need to modernize the codebase by extracting an understanding of the original designs and potentially rebuilding them within the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) framework, where they can be fully supported by SAP and tightly integrated into customers’ future-state environments. DXC has both the deep industry expertise complemented by the SAP technology knowledge to help customers navigate through the modernization process efficiently and effectively.
I am not opposed to customization—in fact, I recognize its importance—but it must be done intelligently and in alignment with SAP’s strategy. These systems must be integrated into modernization and ongoing maintenance initiatives, and they must adhere to patching and upgrade processes to stay current with certain releases. If you’re deploying the product in a different way, the conversation might shift slightly, but long-term supportability remains a key consideration.
Q: How does DXC stay ahead of the curve with SAP innovations around generative AI, and how do you incorporate new SAP features and technologies into your service offerings?
DXC has built AI capabilities with a focus on how we can solve the big challenges across automotive and manufacturing, financial services, healthcare and life sciences, airlines and public sector — both with solutions developed by our industry experts and engineers, and by leveraging the expertise and work of third parties. We now have the opportunity to rapidly expand this core capability by co-innovating with SAP in a unique way to better support our clients.
Since I joined DXC, SAP has expanded its AI use cases from around 800 to nearly 1,400. They’re rapidly innovating, and after meeting recently with Philipp Herzig, SAP’s Chief AI Officer, it’s clear they are accelerating their pace of development. The key question now is how can we simplify this increasingly complex AI opportunity to help clients identify the solutions so AI can deliver impact in their business, from productivity to operational effectiveness, increasing speed to market and creating better product experiences. While ensuring every solution meets necessary security, governance and compliance, responsibility and reliability standards.
We’re approaching this with an industry-first mindset, starting with automotive and manufacturing, where we have clients eager to co-innovate with DXC and SAP. There is an immense opportunity to help these clients identify solutions for their specific industry needs from existing use cases and then move quickly to capitalize on the most promising AI capabilities to drive business growth.
Visit the DXC Technology website.
About DXC Technology
DXC Technology (NYSE: DXC) helps global companies run their mission-critical systems and operations while modernizing IT, optimizing data architectures, and ensuring security and scalability across public, private and hybrid clouds. The world’s largest companies and public sector organizations trust DXC to deploy services to drive new levels of performance, competitiveness, and customer experience across their IT estates. Learn more about how we deliver excellence for our customers and colleagues at DXC.com.
About ASUG
ASUG is the world’s largest SAP user group. Originally founded by a group of visionary SAP customers in 1991, its mission is to help people and organizations get the most value from their investment in SAP technology. ASUG currently serves thousands of businesses via companywide memberships, connecting more than 130,000 professionals with networking and educational resources to help them master new challenges. Through in-person and virtual events, on-demand digital resources, and ongoing advocacy for its membership, ASUG helps SAP customers make more possible.