To evaluate the priorities, attitudes, and progress of the ASUG community as it pertains to business transformation, ASUG and SAP Signavio recently collaborated—for the second year in a row—on research measuring the current and future state of members’ SAP S/4HANA journeys, as well as their knowledge and embrace of related SAP business process management solutions.
In order to contextualize the findings within the larger SAP product roadmap for this solution suite, ASUG sat down with Dee Houchen, Head of Market Impact for SAP Signavio and LeanIX at SAP.
In our conversation, Houchen discussed how SAP aims to support customers throughout the digital transformation lifecycle, the company’s vision for an integrated business process transformation suite of solutions, and more.
This interview was conducted via email.
According to our recent research with SAP Signavio, most SAP customers describe themselves as progressing into early stages of business transformation with SAP, while fewer indicate they’re stuck in the planning phase in 2024. 50% of those surveyed note that SAP transformation initiatives are distinct from other transformation projects, primarily due to the vast scale of change required. How is SAP helping organizations at both of these stages reach their desired end goals?
Our conversations with customers have indicated that they want more guidance from SAP. To that end, we are developing options for both SAP and our partners to deliver. One such initiative is offering business transformation via the clean core.
Together, we take as many processes as possible back to standard, to reduce custom code. For differentiating processes, we convert the custom code into extensions on the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP). Customers gain speed, agility, and better access to the latest innovations.
How does SAP Signavio play into this effort?
SAP Signavio, SAP LeanIX, SAP Enable Now, SAP Cloud ALM, and SAP BTP are fundamentally part of the toolchain which delivers this approach. SAP Signavio specifically helps customers with three different processes:
- Analyze – Understand the application landscape and business process complexity to plan confidently toward a clean core. SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX help customers gain full transparency into their SAP landscapes, dependencies, and the business process context of extensions. With this in place, customers can better evaluate business value, set the scope, prioritize, and plan their clean core journey.
- Get clean – Plan, drive, and track the transition to a clean core. Every “get clean” initiative should start with a business process view. By connecting process design, architecture definition, solution implementation, and people enablement, SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX—together with other components—ensure a successful transition to re-designed processes and architecture as part of the clean core journey.
- Stay clean – Keep your core clean with continuous monitoring, meeting new defined standards. SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX jointly ensure a proper process and architectural governance; this ensures a standardized and modern ERP by avoiding unnecessary extensions and complexity. By linking the business processes and solutions along the transformation toolchain helps customers efficiently manage the entire lifecycle of extensions.
ASUG members report that realizing benefits from transformation has in general become more challenging. Competing business priorities (59%) and change management (46%) remain the most common challenges customers face as part of business transformations YOY. The largest challenge respondents reported when rolling out new technology is resistance to change (62%, up from 54%). What is driving this trend?
The pace of technological change is outpacing the pace that humans can adopt and consume these changes. This obviously drives resistance, but it’s not going to slow down. If anything, it is increasing. As companies, we need to recognize this trend and help with adoption.
How is SAP empowering its customers’ change management efforts as they embrace next-generation technology?
This is why SAP have invested in WalkMe, a digital adoption platform that helps employees and consumers learn new technology by overlaying cues and other content on top of enterprise applications and websites. WalkMe’s approach is effective because it embeds guidance into the user’s session and workflow. The application is designed to increase user-adoption rates of the underlying applications and improve returns on investment. On the back end, it provides data to help track and measure technology use.
As SAP, our strategy is to embed these capabilities into each of our solution areas but also offer a premium solution along end-to-end processes that cross systems.
Most organizations are laying the groundwork for AI by exploring AI’s role in overall business strategies with the expectation that its role will grow in the future. Eighty percent of customers have integrated (19%) or are exploring integrating (61%) AI into their business strategy. How is SAP working to continue developing use cases that will drive more customers to its AI solutions?
AI is critical to SAP, and our goal is to be the number one enterprise application and business AI company, powered by our leading platform. We offer a unique value proposition for our customers and partners.
SAP Business AI works out of the box, since it’s embedded natively in our business applications. For their own generative-AI-enabled extensions, customers and partners have full choice which leading model they want to use—including models from OpenAI, Google, and the best open-source alternatives. SAP Business AI comes with our leading enterprise standards and is deeply integrated with our security and data models.
We define Business AI following the “three Rs.” SAP Business AI is relevant, reliable, and responsible, delivering real business results:
- · Relevant – Everything is embedded into our leading enterprise applications and business technology solutions. Customers can count on their SAP systems to be equipped with the most relevant AI experiences in the context of their business.
- · Reliable – Based on the unique business data and the business process context, we can deliver the most reliable business AI. AI is only as good as the data it is trained on. SAP has the most important data and is the only one that can keep business data context intact.
- · Responsible – We deliver AI with the highest levels of concern for security, privacy, compliance, and ethics. Our customers trust us with their most critical data and processes, because we know how to build and run powerful, and trustworthy solutions, including AI that touches their most vital data and systems.
For years, SAP has built AI with security, privacy, compliance, ethics, and accuracy in mind. Our ethics policy was established in 2018 and clarifies how SAP’s guiding principles relate to AI use cases; this policy applies to SAP and all its employees worldwide, defining intent, expectations, and obligations for employees involved in the development, deployment, and sale of AI systems. Our core principles ensure transparency and human oversight.
What challenges are customers facing as they explore how to integrate AI into their business strategy?
Customers understand the tremendous value AI can unlock for their businesses. The majority of customers do give consent to SAP to use customer data to develop our own AI features and models. The usage of customer data in this case follows very rigorous and strict processes, as well as terms and conditions laid out in the SAP Product Development Schedule, such as applying anonymization techniques. Providing this level of privacy and security is essential to retaining our customers’ trust.
We use AI technology to innovate, for example to reduce biases in written text, because we know that AI models have biases (in terms of age, disability, gender, and race). But like with human biases, you can do something about it, which is why SAP introduced text analysis for business. SAP text analysis is capable of removing 30-95% of biased terms in all categories. This will help users get recommendations for improving their language in an easy and intuitive way.
Closer to home, within SAP Signavio, we are just about to extend our AI capabilities with “text to process,” enabling users to have models generated from descriptive text that can then be refined by users.
SAP made a number of acquisitions over the last year. 52% of surveyed ASUG members stated they are willing to use these solutions beyond SAP-related work and see benefits in using them across their entire enterprise. What are the benefits of SAP Signavio, SAP LeanIX and WalkMe for customers as they approach their digital transformation projects?
The benefit of SAP Signavio, SAP LeanIX and now WalkMe lies in the very fact that they are offered together: a combined, integrated package of solutions that helps customers transform their business quickly, easily and with lasting effect.
Fundamentally, SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX work together to enable an end-to-end, data-driven approach at each step of the transformation journey, covering the four key pillars required for successful transformation: people, processes, applications and data.
SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX empower organizations to discover, analyze, design, implement, and operate optimized business processes and their related technology applications. They also complement each other and mirror value on the business and IT level, facilitating collaboration and ensuring that there is visibility throughout the enterprise stack.
WalkMe’s innovative technology adds to this by enabling seamless workflow execution across business software applications as part of any transformation initiatives, improving overall user experience and driving the adoption of new tools and solutions.
How is SAP working to communicate the relevance of SAP Signavio, SAP LeanIX, and now WalkMe, to its customers within the SAP Business Transformation Suite?
With SAP Signavio, SAP LeanIX, and now WalkMe, SAP is essentially defining the business process transformation market, which includes the creation, management, and analysis of end-to-end business processes to more closely align business outcomes with underlying operational systems.
We have a range of ways to communicate the benefits and relevance of this end-to-end, holistic approach, including but not limited to an expansive customer reference program, supporting organizations to learn from each other about the most effective ways to deploy our solutions — and, of course, a hard-working and dedicated presales team, supported by detailed demos and real-world examples showcasing the crucial importance of our solutions to any effective transformation.
Of course, we also rely heavily on our worldwide user groups to provide feedback and engage with customers and prospects on our behalf, and we've found that approach to be very effective in moving beyond the “hype” of things like AI integration to ground our communications efforts in the lived experience of our customers.
Read the key highlights from the ASUG and SAP Signavio research here.