For over 50 years, SAP has been building software to help businesses run better.
However, amid recent technology innovations—including those propelled by SAP S/4HANA adoption and cloud migration—SAP customers have struggled to cope with ever-changing requirements and challenges, according to Wassilios Lolas, Global VP of Field Excellence at SAP Signavio.
Combined, SAP Signavio, SAP LeanIX, and WalkMe—the software company’s solutions for business transformation management—aim to address this issue and help customers to drive their approach to digital transformation. All acquired by SAP in recent years, the trio of technologies help customers drive and manage their business transformation efforts with a new approach:
- SAP Signavio helps manage change as it applies to optimizing processes.
- SAP LeanIX assists with visualizing and assessing the application landscape to help achieve a future-focused state.
- WalkMe drives adoption of these new applications and processes by guiding people within their workflows.
Together, they’re an integrated set of best-in-class solutions that enable organizations to establish their transformation capability. And SAP Signavio, SAP LeanIX, and WalkMe are system-agnostic, a feature that helps businesses manage and drive adoption of their processes, applications, data end-to-end, with their SAP solutions and beyond, Lolas said. “No company in the world is a pure SAP shop," he added. "Even SAP is using lots of non-SAP applications, and therefore business transformation management must be holistic.”
Lolas and Mathew Love, Principal Product Marketing Manager with SAP LeanIX, will discuss these solutions for ASUG members during a pre-conference seminar at SAP Sapphire & ASUG Annual Conference. (Register for ASUG Pre-Conference seminars and attend their session: "Business Transformation: From Daunting Projects to Winning Capability.")
At a high level, SAP's business transformation management solutions help organizations transform, to work in a better or different way in the future; beyond individual upgrades, these solutions are designed to help organizations develop the ability to continuously navigate change, such as adapting processes to address evolving business needs.
Processes are supported by tools, machines, or—in SAP’s case—applications. “If you change the applications or systems that people use, you should also adjust and optimize the processes that determine how they work,” Lolas said.
The two SAP professionals believe in the importance of also considering the people who are executing processes and using applications, as well as staying focused on the data that the business needs in order to run. In short, a successful business management transformation requires that applications, data, people, and processes all transform in tandem.
Process Transformation with SAP Signavio
SAP Signavio aims to support SAP users by providing analytics around organizational processes, identifying which processes are working optimally within a business and which require modification or rethinking to enable future growth. Data-driven decision-making ensures that efforts are appropriately allocated and directed to optimize those processes.
At businesses adhering to the best practices for their industries, certain processes are generally consistent with those found at other organizations; often, these processes are standardized through enterprise software, such as SAP. Companies leveraging SAP software as such benefit from numerous best practices, reference architectures, and content for training purposes.
However, for many SAP customers, other processes in place at their organizations can be heavily customized, especially those that have existed across years, as mergers and acquisitions have broadened technology footprints and underlying IT investments have grown in complexity. This often remains the case despite knowledge that customization can drive up total cost of ownership (TCO) and increase both business inefficiencies and security risks.
In the instance of SAP ECC customers, running on-premises ERP systems, process complexity can be particularly prohibitive in terms of enabling technology upgrades or even break-fix interventions, varying significantly across departments and workflows. Process standardization, to this end, can support enterprises in becoming more agile, cost-effective, and strategic.
Throughout business process management, it's important for SAP users to keep in mind the distinction between processes that can be standardized to reflect industry best practices and those that are differentiating for their businesses and must be tailored to their specific business models—and for them to remember that, as technology evolves, new opportunities to standardize emerge with it.
“In areas where a company is set up in a way that makes them unique in their space and that’s a competitive advantage, they need to take a different approach,” Lolas acknowledged. For those more unique processes, SAP can support customers in convening company-specific discussions that identify what best practices can be put into place to keep things running optimally.
For example, at a multinational enterprise with various types of operations and warehouses, business performance can vary wildly between different subsidiaries and locations; without a business process management toolchain, it's difficult to determine what processes in various parts of a global business are working optimally, and which are in need of further development. SAP Signavio can allow users to examine various regions and determine which processes are working best, further allowing customers to build compelling value cases that support future change initiatives, design internal best practices, implement processes and applications across organizations, and continuously monitor performance for continuous optimization.
SAP Signavio similarly leverages AI to support end-users; through natural language search, users asking how to perform a certain activity in a system will be shown best-practice models. Further queries can allow users to identify the root cause of problems in selected processes. Even those employees who lack process-modeling expertise can engage the AI capabilities of SAP Signavio to map out workflows and build their own process models.
Optimize Enterprise Architecture with SAP LeanIX
Many IT budgets are taken up by maintenance and upkeep for various applications, leaving few resources for innovation or transformation initiatives, even those critical for driving future competitive advantage. With this state a reality for many SAP customers, optimization of technology infrastructure and the business processes that it enables is all the more vital.
“It’s less about having a finite budget or increasing this budget, and more about how much room you can make in that budget to dedicate to innovation and transformation,” Love explained.
Enter SAP LeanIX, which can assists enterprises with enhancing their IT landscapes, optimizing IT costs, and reducing risks by providing visibility into which applications are technically or functionally fit for an organization's landscape. The software aims to enable organizations to manage complexity, remove redundant applications, and leverage space in existing budgets to enable better investments in innovation. SAP LeanIX can also support the planning of any IT modernization efforts that may then be approved in response to the visibility that its services can provide.
SAP is working on providing CIOs with better visibility and transparency of the TCO of their application landscape, so that they can have more informed conversations with CFOs and other C-suite leaders to make the best possible investment decisions for their technology assets. “That undertaking can empower that entire budget conversation going forward from the IT side, ensuring that investment or consolidation decisions are backed by data,” Love said.
Lolas added that SAP LeanIX and SAP Signavio help organizations better articulate the business value that their individual technology investments allow. With these solutions, both business and IT stakeholders can identify opportunities where optimizations can be made and quantify those, not only from a cost perspective but also from an overall customer-benefit perspective, making it easier to secure necessary budgets for technology investment.
Guidance in Real Time with WalkMe
As organizations go through the process of change management, implementing new technology and working to drive adoption of those solutions internally, they often struggle to bring the entire business along with them, ensuring they can adapt to new processes and applications while also adopting established best practices.
WalkMe assists end-users working with various business processes and applications, by providing live, on-screen guidance on correctly using the software. Rather than making end-users comb through documents or videos for training, WalkMe shares best practices in the context of their workflows and at the specific moment when they're needed.
The program also keeps application owners informed as to how various people are using those applications in their workflows. While an owner might have a certain idea in mind initially around how their colleagues will use applications, the reality could be completely different; WalkMe informs application owners of actual use, so they can rethink application design or invest more time in education, Lolas said.
An Integrated Journey, and Embracing the SAP Business Data Cloud
The value of these solutions coming together into one unique offering from SAP lies in technical integration points that exist throughout the business transformation journey, Love said.
Use cases that demonstrate this might include, for example, SAP LeanIX aiding in application rationalization and portfolio assessment, connecting with SAP Signavio to understand the impact of IT decisions on important business processes. Insights from the software can help power some of the decisions around either consolidating or making investments in the enterprise’s application landscape and ensuring it can continue to meet business needs.
With WalkMe and SAP Signavio, companies can identify inefficient process flows, using system data to identify roadblocks or challenges. WalkMe can then potentially create an automatic workflow to help overcome those challenges and to make processes smoother or adjust them, based on insights from SAP Signavio, in a way that supports overall KPIs.
Especially when using SAP Cloud Application Lifecycle Management (CALM), users will encounter clear integration points that make sense for a larger transformation journey, such as using SAP LeanIX and its integration through SAP Cloud ALM to perform automated discovery of an enterprise’s SAP landscape. SAP Signavio similarly helps with process modeling, which is then handed over to SAP Cloud ALM to be initialized through the systems.
Together, SAP Signavio, SAP LeanIX, and WalkMe form an integrated SAP toolchain, going beyond the sum of their individual capabilities but driving even greater value to the businesses that use them in tandem to manage business transformation.
Ultimately, these solutions are all poised to integrate with the SAP Business Data Cloud to bolster data-informed decision-making and AI-driven automation, the speakers said. SAP unveiled its collaboration with Databricks in February, establishing the SAP Business Data Cloud as a central platform that will unify enterprises' SAP and third-party data. SAP Business Data Cloud makes it easier for solutions to use data intelligently and surface it to stakeholders as needed.
“It makes the accessibility and availability of reliable data from the business a lot easier for our customers, and I think it’s going to better facilitate how our solutions integrate and work together going forward,” Love said.
Advice For Customers
Moving a business through a holistic transformation takes more than effort on the part of IT departments.
“If you do this exclusively as a technical transformation, it does have some value," Lolas said. "But doing so would miss the huge opportunity to lift the full business value potential." Alone, an IT department might be able to reduce their TCO and increase process standardization, but the focus should ultimately still be on furthering business transformation in a way that brings greater return-on-investment (ROI) to the entire company.
“Transformation is not a single project or initiative; it’s a continuous capability the organization needs to establish to survive and thrive in today’s market,” Love added.
He recommended breaking transformation down into stages and providing insights to stakeholders at every step, to ensure that decisions are data-driven and potential value is communicated along with small wins. Each initiative should be seen as compounding the value of the one that came before it.
“When you see transformation from this perspective, you realize how important it is to prioritize developing this organizational capability to constantly navigate change,” Love said.