Inside the Value Framework of RISE with SAP

Three years since its launch, RISE with SAP continues to gain traction among SAP customers, while others are still probing its potential benefits. 

If you’re among those still weighing the merits of RISE with SAP, you’re probably seeking answers to the ‘why,’ ‘what,’ and ‘how’ of this solution. I hope to demystify the 'why' of RISE with SAP and illuminate the business and IT value it could add to your organization by walking you through the unique, incremental value delivered by the cloud capabilities that RISE with SAP specifically enables.

Navigating a VUCA World

Geopolitical changes, supply chain issues, and evolving consumer behaviors are creating a VUCA environment: volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. To thrive in this environment, companies must adopt another kind of VUCA approach: vision, understanding, clarity, and agility.

The COVID-19 pandemic facilitated rapid adaptation, with businesses pivoting to direct-to-consumer sales, adjusting to remote work, and managing supply chain disruptions. Technology played a central role in enabling these changes. Cloud transformations and AI are key components of digital transformations, with McKinsey estimating a combined potential value of nearly $8 trillion for the global economy.

In our experience, however, technology is not the only factor in successful adaptation and change. Three key organizational competencies are crucial for thriving in a VUCA world: continuous digital transformation, agile operating models, and resilience.

Achieving a state of continuous digital transformation involves embracing innovation, infusing intelligence and automation into processes, and democratizing innovation throughout the workforce. Agile operating models free up IT resources to focus on innovation and strategic initiatives, while resilience builds security, compliance, and responsiveness within all functions. Research by McKinsey and BCG also corroborates that businesses that have embraced these competencies have seen higher returns and outperformed their peers.

With ERP at the core of operations, businesses need to pivot to a future-built mindset that aligns with these competencies. This involves moving away from traditional on-premises systems and embracing cloud-based solutions that support innovation, flexibility, and speed.

SAP introduced RISE with SAP to help businesses address the challenges they face in their digital transformation journeys. The offering provides a comprehensive solution with outcome-driven services, unique business capabilities, industry-leading resources, a foundational business technology platform, and a special focus on AI and sustainability capabilities.

We reviewed the significant business outcomes that hundreds of customers have achieved through RISE with SAP over the years, and we present them here as a Value Framework.

Understanding the Value of RISE with SAP

Here’s how RISE with SAP is driving value-based business outcomes through these competencies.

Accelerate digital transformation – RISE with SAP enables customers to consume unique and updated business capabilities more frequently and build the necessary readiness for this change in the following ways:

1. Accelerate innovation through access to unique capabilities, such as SAP Sustainability Footprint Management, SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Central Finance, SAP Analytics Cloud for planning, and SAP Green Ledger. Persistent innovation cycles further enhance this by having an instance that is up-to-date and up-to-standard. A clean core further accelerates the pace of innovation consumption by reducing complexity in the innovation lifecycle. Hitachi High-Tech, an organization in the high-tech industry, achieved 18x faster handling of solution updates.
2. Deliver intelligence at scale by leveraging embedded AI to improve process efficiency and decision-making across business functions. All RISE with SAP customers will now have access to Joule, SAP’s generative AI copilot (provided they are on a recommended release version), which revolutionizes how users interact with SAP business systems by making work faster and providing smarter insights. Organizations will also benefit from embedded AI use cases that follow SAP’s expertise and rigorous processes for AI use case development and ethical review. Accenture, a professional services organization, achieved a 54% automatic payment clearing hit rate.
3. Empower business users to ensure the adoption of digital modalities. Initiatives driven by those who truly understand the challenges and opportunities on the ground are primed for success. RISE with SAP democratizes participation in this process by equipping business users with enhanced visibility into the business process and its performance. It encourages the reimagining of future processes and provides low-code/no-code tools, enabling users to take charge of realizing their vision. Pif Paf Alimentos, a food products supplier, went live with a mobile application with SAP Build Apps in three weeks.

Unlock an agile operating model – By implementing this model, enterprises can spur IT and overall business innovation in the following ways:

1. Focus resources on value creation by reducing IT involvement in tactical tasks. RISE with SAP offers named SAP resources for key administrative tasks, freeing internal IT resources for innovation. Ballance, an organization in the chemical industry, reduced resourcing to support and maintain the SAP software environment by 10% and reduced the workload for managing hardware and resource upgrades for SAP by 70%.
2. Ensure transformation success by relying on SAP to run SAP. Enterprises can benefit from a unified application service-level agreement of 99.7%, with SAP overseeing the ERP core’s management of incidents, tickets, and application lifecycle. The RISE with SAP Methodology brings together tools, best practices, and services, complemented by a dedicated enterprise architect, who provides guidance through the methodology, enhances the onboarding process, and ensures transparency throughout the project. Key milestone checks, quality gates, and checklists are incorporated to maintain consistent quality and predictability in timelines throughout the implementation process. ADB Safegate, an organization in the high-tech industry achieved nearly 100% system availability since go-live.
3. Optimize IT costs and flexibly align to business needs. RISE with SAP enables a flexible operating model that significantly optimizes IT costs and aligns with business needs. Conares, an organization in the mill products industry reduced TCO by using RISE with SAP by 10%-20%. The operating model allows for rationalization of:
   1. SAP software and maintenance cost through reduction in underutilized user licenses, reduction in shelfware, and rethinking of landscape requirements including elimination of non-productive instances
   2. Infrastructure and stack costs through rightsizing
   3. Technical support costs through a cleaner core and reduction in tools and contract elements with third parties associated with technical support
   4. Internal governance costs through simpler and faster incident resolution and reduction in overheads involved in driving procurement processes for multiple stack components separately

Building business resilience – By securing core systems against external threats, enabling compliance at scale, and providing the ability to navigate an organization’s lifecycle with simplicity and ease. Enterprises that prioritize improved business resilience can accomplish the following:

• Reduce technical debt by pursuing a clean core strategy with SAP-recommended best practices for custom extensions. While organizations can achieve clean core in their on-premises instances, RISE with SAP is key in enabling regular upgrades with shorter project durations. Enterprises also get access to the Clean Core Dashboard to keep track of the status of their landscape and SAP support during technical upgrades. The RISE with SAP Methodology especially focuses on enabling a cleaner core with embedded quality gates.
• Secure against incidents at scale through proactive monitoring, incident management and patching. SAP’s experience of managing over 100,000 systems through RISE with SAP provides opportunities for network affects to take hold and insights learned to be applied universally. CMP, an organization in the mining industry reduced the total cost of ownership and carbon footprint and increased cybersecurity.
• Improve compliance and governance. Whether organizations are expanding their operations to a new territory, serving a new industry, or simply keeping up with the changing pace of today’s environment, compliance and governance are surely a top concern. Following a fit-to-standard approach with RISE with SAP (and SAP S/4HANA) significantly improves best practices embedded from the very beginning. Lexmark, an organization in the high-tech industry considered RISE with SAP offering as an ideal fit for their complex needs as it enables an enhanced security environment and compliance reporting.

Unlock the Value of RISE with SAP

The specific value of RISE with SAP differs from organization to organization, based on an enterprise’s starting point and the complexity of their ERP environment. However, SAP provides several tools and assets to help enterprises understand specifically how RISE can spur innovation and improvement, widening their perspective to consider multiple business outcomes and value areas while evaluating their case for change.

RISE with SAP is not just a solution; it is an enabler of the future-built mindset that reimagines the entire design-to-operate lifecycle of the ERP landscape. Our extensive customer engagements demonstrate that organizations can achieve continuous innovation adoption, pivot their operating models, and become resilient while improving the effectiveness of their IT spending.

With last year's launch of the RISE with SAP Migration and Modernization program, SAP can help enterprises navigate their journey to cloud ERP. Whether you're running SAP ERP or SAP S/4HANA, this program also supports you with the ‘what’ and ‘how’ questions of RISE with SAP.

Organizations can collaborate with SAP and its partners to quantify the full potential value that RISE with SAP can unlock for them using SAP Value Lifecycle Manager. Reach out at valuemanagement@sap.com to learn more.