Consider this: your business implements new software intended to speed up processes but finds out that your processes are instead stalling. Why? Because your employees never fully adopted the solutions. Now you may ultimately decide to stop using that software. To avoid this scenario, more and more software vendors are turning to an adoption-focused mindset that empowers customers to make the most of their software investments.

In fact, . Yet, only one-third of software vendors on the market have a documented adoption framework to assess how well specific customers are adopting their technology. Enter telemetry, which can help organizations make more informed decisions, optimize business processes, and realize the full potential of emerging technologies.

Telemetry Helps Us Help You

Telemetry often refers to the automatic collection of data measurements from physical equipment. Telemetry has had profound impacts on Industry 4.0, as it’s adopted by not only manufacturers but also by any business that uses virtually any kind of equipment. But with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) and its seamless integration into many cloud applications, companies from all industries can consume AI-driven insights and capabilities. These innovations are transforming the way businesses operate, creating new opportunities, and driving efficiencies.

Increasingly though, telemetry is also helping software vendors gather data on the performance and use of their customers’ deployments of their software. This includes SAP. Just like Industry 4.0 data analytics help your business optimize equipment, telemetry from your 51·çÁ÷software helps us see where you could best use our solutions to meet your unique goals, how it can be optimized, and where further enhancements may be necessary.

The ever-expanding landscape of intelligent software and next-generation technology has opened many new doors for businesses, but all these opportunities can be overwhelming and even confusing. Telemetry empowers software vendors – including 51·çÁ÷– to help their customers understand the full potential presented by new software solutions.

Telemetry-Driven Customer Success

Telemetry is a game-changer in the realm of customer success. It provides a more accurate, near-real-time look at how software investments are performing. For software vendors, telemetry’s greatest advantages to help our customers include:

• Identifying user patterns: Telemetry can provide a real look at user behavior with our software. By tracking navigation patterns and time spent on specific tasks, we can gain a comprehensive understanding of how your users work every day – and how they should work instead. With this insight, businesses can make data-driven decisions to enhance user experiences and drive greater adoption, which drives greater value.
• Optimizing business processes and performance: Using telemetry, we can see how your software is performing across environments. It helps us discover process bottlenecks, frequently occurring errors, and system resource usage. With these insights, we’re better prepared to help you find out what processes simply aren’t working and why.
• Analyzing feature use: Find out what features are most popular among your users – and which ones aren’t. Using this information, we can encourage users to take advantage of the features you’ve implemented or implement new ones that help users work more efficiently.
• Predictive analytics: Telemetry data can be leveraged to create predictive models, anticipating potential issues or opportunities before they arise. This can help businesses stay one step ahead, ensuring smooth technology adoption and minimizing disruptions.

Telemetry serves as a source of 360-degree signal interpretation, and it provides you with opportunities for intervention in the moments that matter most. Building off the above benefits, you can use telemetry to take advantage of predictive analytics for feature development, feedback-driven iterations, and customized user training.

Bridge the “Hype-Reality” Gap

Telemetry and data analysis are helping us help our customers solve arguably the greatest threat to solution adoption: the “hype-reality” gap. Often, businesses hype up their latest software investment to users, claiming they’ll save employees time and effort. But when users don’t see results, they get disappointed – and they stop using the new software. Telemetry, by providing insight into how real users have been using your new software, is a critical way to show real-time results and get the entire business on board.

In addition, telemetry builds on the increasing value of partnership between software vendors and their customers. By harnessing the power of real-time insights right from our customers’ own deployments of our software, we’re better prepared to steer the future of our software toward outcomes that support our customers. As organizations combine telemetry with advances in generative AI, they have a powerful tool at their disposal to drive customer technology adoption and success with data-driven insights.

Claudio Muruzabal is chief business officer at SAP.

That’s where clean core comes in. With a clean core strategy for your business technology – starting with your ERP – you can stay focused on what matters most to your business.

Operating with Greater Control and Agility at Your Core

Clean core is a concept designed to keep your organization’s core ERP systems transparent, flexible, consistent, and efficient. It provides the foundation for igniting innovation in the areas of your business that matter the most, allowing your systems to keep up with your business needs more easily, enable innovation, and even support a transition to the cloud.

Clean core has long been the primary goal of enterprise resource planning. After all, the point of having an ERP system is to keep your business running smoothly and adapt quickly to changing market conditions. Yet somewhere along the way, many businesses got lost – they adopted sprawling technology stacks with significant customizations and redundant integrations that negate the purpose of a modern, intelligent ERP system. Why? Too often, businesses believe they are so different that almost every process warrants a nonstandard approach.

In reality, most businesses have more in common than they realize. In terms of finance, accounting, HR, procurement, and many other core business processes, you’re probably very similar to your competitors and others in your industry. Clean core identifies those parts of the business that are standard and enables you to focus on your technology needs related to the nonstandard processes that set you apart from the rest.

Setting Your Business Apart with Strategic Differentiators

Take a luxury fashion brand and a fast-fashion retailer, for example. They both have the same core business goal – and related processes – of designing, manufacturing, and selling apparel and accessories. However, the luxury fashion brand likely focuses more on customer service and the procurement of high-quality materials, while the fast-fashion powerhouse probably places greater importance on rapid design and production cycles. 

Despite their differences, both these businesses would benefit from using the same standard ERP and best practices designed for their industry. Doing so empowers them to focus on the strategic differentiators that make them unique, whether that’s creating custom solutions for the customer experience or innovating ways to cut costs.

So, what are 51·çÁ÷customers doing to differentiate themselves from the competition? , investing in 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA Cloud. With a two-tier public and private cloud model, using a side-by-side development approach on 51·çÁ÷Business Technology Platform (51·çÁ÷BTP), HHT reduced 9,000 custom code developments to 472, allowing it to facilitate major upgrades every year and minor updates every six months. Moreover, it’s adopted a clean core mindset as part of the strategy going forward. By embracing the change, HHT moves from a legacy approach to a future-ready intelligent enterprise.

The Clean Core Journey: A Starting Point, Not an End

The industry is sending a clear message: cloud is the default, and it’s rapidly becoming the new normal. However, to truly future-proof their business, organizations should adopt a clean core strategy, a concept that is revolutionizing the way businesses innovate. For many businesses, upgrading to a cloud-based ERP system is the natural next step.

But there are steps you can take to get closer to a clean core and prepare yourself for the future, even before you are ready to make the jump to the cloud. To start, determine what parts of your ERP drive value. Create two categories: one for differentiating elements that deliver value to your business and another for basic functions that don’t create value but keep your business running. By determining which parts of your business set you apart – and whether they’re locked behind fragile integrations and custom code – you can begin thinking more strategically about whether your core ERP system is helping you achieve your goals. You can build on this foundation, enriching your systems to incorporate your competitive differentiators and create a business platform that sets you apart in the marketplace.

The future belongs to those that embrace the clean core and leverage it as a launchpad for innovation and growth. The time to embark on this transformative journey is now.

Claudio Muruzabal is chief business officer at SAP.

But what about a personal guide to navigate the complex realm of enterprise technology? The future of process optimization is closer than you might think, and it’s being powered by AI.

Leading business software providers are making significant strides in embedding personalized guidance and strategies for enhancing business processes directly into the enterprise solutions that companies already use.

Looking to grow your business? Streamline specific processes? Or maybe derisk your supply chain? Imagine the future where the software itself could tell you how to best use it to achieve your specific business goals. In fact, are hard at work embedding personalized guidance and strategies for improving business processes directly into the enterprise solutions you already use. And they’re putting AI up to the task.

Realizing the Art of the AI Possible

Your phone can tell you how much time you spend using it, providing insight into how often you tap into specific apps. But capabilities like these leave you to analyze and act on that usage data all by yourself. For example, if you’re scrolling for three hours a day on a social media site, your phone probably is not going to tell you that’s too much time, let alone suggest steps for taking a social media detox.

Future enterprise software will be much more intelligent than this. Right now, you can likely tap into that same sort of data on how often employees use individual enterprise software solutions, or even how much time they spend on specific processes. However, it is hard to know what to do with these data insights other than wonder why your workers are spending so long processing invoices, onboarding new employees, or completing any number of other tasks.

By combining your software usage data, existing processes, and business goals, AI will be able provide you with actionable steps toward better business processes that help achieve those goals. All this, embedded right into the solutions you already use. It’s this combination of human and artificial intelligence that adds the most value and enables your organization to become an .

Creating the Intelligent Enterprise

Say your company implemented 51·çÁ÷Concur solutions to help employees book and expense business travel. For many businesses, processing travel expense documentation is not a core competency so the opportunity to streamline the process creates efficiencies for the business. Using AI and machine learning, 51·çÁ÷Concur taps years of expense user data that helps identify hard-to-detect spend issues and anomalies. That same technology powers , a self-serve audit function within the solution, that is then augmented with a team of human auditors to create great accuracy.

The same can said about generative AI use cases that enable leaders and recruiters to create job descriptions and find ideal candidates or help employees find personalized learning recommendations to fuel their career progression. These efforts help organizations hire and develop employees at scale, creating a future-ready workforce.

Or perhaps you need to anticipate supply chain issues impacted by incoming weather — AI can enhance supply chain efficiency by predicting demand, optimizing inventory levels, and identifying potential disruptions before they occur. According to McKinsey, implementing AI-enabled supply chain management solutions has already compared to those who do not use them. No matter the business problem you are trying to solve, the potential for process optimization with AI is endless and, combined with human intelligence, can deliver better results than either could independently. 

Unlocking an AI Guide to the Cloud

The future of process optimization in enterprises is an exciting landscape, and . Often, the first step for businesses on the path to digital excellence is embarking on cloud transformation. The futures of the cloud and AI are intrinsically linked. As business software providers embed the power of AI — such as our generative-AI copilot Joule — into their offerings, it allows for data-driven insights that are relevant, reliable, and responsible. 

If you have already begun a digital transformation in the cloud, AI can equip you to optimize your processes for cloud-based operations. Modern core business technology, such as 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA Cloud, serves as an innovation engine that enables you to take advantage of next-generation technology virtually without limits. In the future, when you integrate AI-enhanced software solutions with 51·çÁ÷S/4HANA Cloud, you will ideally be able to optimize processes from end to end across your entire software landscape.

It’s akin to the way modern luxury vehicles can tell you how to drive in more fuel-efficient ways by analyzing all the parts — and their individual functions — that come together to move you forward. But good business practices shouldn’t be a luxury. As AI technology continues to advance, it promises to revolutionize various aspects of enterprise technology, creating a more connected, intelligent, and optimized business environment.

The AI-powered guide to the world of enterprise technology is already here, and it’s taking businesses to new heights.

Claudio Muruzabal is president of Cloud Success Services at SAP.

With , it is clear that customers are increasingly demanding sustainable products. Investors are incorporating environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors into their investment decisions, with an estimated . And employees are also taking an active interest in their employers’ ESG efforts, with .

Faced with this reality — and pressure from multiple stakeholders — sustainability has become a critical topic for organizations worldwide, prompting businesses to adopt more sustainable practices.

The Sustainability Execution Gap

The above statistics clearly show that sustainability is not just about compliance with regulations, it is about creating a holistic vision for an organization that supports the strategy and creates a rallying point for employees. Regulations and legislation are increasingly focusing on environmental impacts, making it imperative for companies to have a sustainability strategy in place. Sustainability is about creating a business that is environmentally and socially responsible that can thrive in the long term.

Sustainability is a journey, not a destination. Businesses need to develop a road map that will allow them to advance their business transformation toward a sustainable intelligent enterprise. That starts at the top and the bottom so that everyone within the organization has a role to play in guiding the approach toward success. An overall culture of sustainability needs to be created to ensure participation at all levels.

However, even when the companies understand the need for more sustainable practices, a challenge remains for many on how to close the gap between their sustainability strategy and execution, transforming the whole organization while creating sustainable business value. Understanding the role emerging technologies play and leveraging them is a powerful enabler to close this gap and accelerate sustainable business growth and positive impact.

Emerging Technologies Are Key for Businesses Looking to Become Sustainable Intelligent Enterprises

Technology can help companies improve efficiency in business processes, utilize renewable energy, adopt circular economy practices, increase transparency, and make more informed decisions by providing real-time data and analytics. With the increasing stakeholder expectation for companies to operate sustainably, technology can enable companies to agilely adapt to changing market conditions and customer demands and build trust with their stakeholders. Ultimately, employing the right technology can lead to cost savings, new business opportunities, and a reduced impact on the environment.

Cloud technology can provide real-time monitoring for the usage of sustainable technology, while facilitating remote work and collaboration, reducing the need of scattered physical servers and hardware, and helping cloud providers invest in renewable energy sources to power their data centers. This will help organizations achieve their zero-emission goals while improving operational efficiency and reducing costs.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning can help many organizations optimize their waste management processes by using predictive analytics to identify potential areas of waste, forecasting demand for recycled materials, optimizing waste collection routes, and automating the process of reporting to track and comply with regulatory requirements. If the “business as usual” scenario is allowed to continue regarding the use of plastics, . There is a huge opportunity to reduce waste through reuse and recycling processes, as well as building a more sustainable design process for many industries. Internet of Things (IoT) technologies such as sensors and smart meters provide real-time data that can be used to reduce waste and identify recycling opportunities.

Renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, and hydroelectric power can reduce reliance on fossil fuels and mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. Blockchain provides a transparent, secure, and efficient way to track and verify emissions, encourages sustainable practices, and facilitates renewable energy trading. Electric vehicles (EVs) can reduce transportation emissions, while IoT devices can help monitor and optimize energy consumption in buildings and processes. Additionally, advances in carbon capture and storage technologies can enable organizations to capture and store carbon dioxide emissions, preventing them from entering and adversely affecting the atmosphere.

The mindset shifts in the organization — and their role in the business network — also impacts the success of the sustainability efforts and uptake of processes. No single company can achieve sustainability alone. Collaboration among governments, business, technology partners, and industry players bring the necessary capabilities and perspectives to enable this collaboration. There is no need for businesses to walk this alone. Rather a joint and collaborative effort is needed to tackle this issue.

Welcome to Your Sustainability Journey

Sustainability is a strategic opportunity for companies. Whether it be the focus on creating sustainable products, services, and business models for long-term growth, or embedding it into business processes to make sustainability profitable and profitability sustainable, there is no downside. By doing this right, facilitated by the right technology, businesses can earn customer loyalty, attract funding or investment, maintain a committed workforce, and enhance brand image and reputation.

Sustainability requires collaboration as well as a deep understanding of the business and its wider impact, with a commitment to continuous improvement. Companies that can close the gap between their sustainability strategy and execution — and identify opportunities for sustainability in the business — will be well positioned to succeed in the long term.

Claudio Muruzabal is president of Cloud Success Services at SAP.
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Together with our customers and partners, we are happy to celebrate the 10^th anniversary of the . The awards extend the cofounders’ vision to create positive economic, environmental, and social impact, help the world run better, and improve people’s lives.

From the very beginning, the awards have recognized the achievements of future-minded organizations and individuals with fresh perspectives that have harnessed the power of the latest 51·çÁ÷products and technologies to achieve:

• Sustainability and purpose by creating opportunities to accelerate climate action, regenerative economies, and prosperous communities
• Optimization by reinventing how resources are managed, including people, products, raw materials, and capital
• Data-driven decision-making by enabling effective business processes and real-time information flows across business networks, supply chains, and value chains

The 51·çÁ÷Innovation Awards celebrate customers and partners that are exploring new ideas and business models to deliver real-world innovation:

• Empowering women-owned businesses – helps women-owned organizations gain access to over US$3 billion in global purchasing power.
• Digital transformation scales equitable opportunities – automates and enables its new hire processes to efficiently onboard 1,000 new hires each month.
• Scientific predictions to increase sustainability – is committed to forecasting the hourly customer demand of products and rolling it out to hundreds of stores.

This year, we received and published over 220 submissions that were filled with inspiring and innovative use cases. And now, the judges selected across 10 categories from among the that were announced last month.

With immense pleasure and pride, I’m excited to announce the 30 winners of our 10^th Anniversary 51·çÁ÷Innovation Awards for 2023!

We thank all the individuals and teams who participated in the 2023 51·çÁ÷Innovation Awards, along with our judges. Innovation, digital transformation, and agility continue to play a big role to help manage successful outcomes for our customers. I personally look forward to the road ahead with our 51·çÁ÷ecosystem of customers and partners to positively impact this ever-changing and often unpredictable market.

Visit the to read more about the winners, honorable mentions, finalists, and participants and to learn more about the 51·çÁ÷Innovation Awards.

Claudio Muruzabal is president of Cloud Success Services at SAP.

This is especially true in the current fast-moving market when businesses are still facing material sourcing and supplier challenges triggered by the international pandemic. Yet are moving forward with expansion despite economic concerns and supply chain challenges.

As the COVID-19 threat accelerated, SAP’s longtime client examined its operations and saw that there was an overwhelming opportunity to improve how the business runs and come out of the pandemic as an even stronger business.

Freudenberg’s vast footprint – its presence can be found in 35 countries – was both a blessing and a curse. Different regions, as well as business areas, utilized dissimilar planning approaches and sources, limiting the ability to gain an overall picture across the entire company. Some of these planning processes were carried out manually, with employees relying on hundreds of different spreadsheets to compile reports. Often, comptrollers had to be personally consulted during this period to confirm data and statistics, slowing the pace. Yet, even with confirmed figures, discrepancies between financial and production plans remained.

Franco Giacomini, vice president for big markets in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, stated, “In a rapidly fluctuating market…forecasting is crucial for us. We need it to ensure we produce enough of the right products at the right time and understand the financial impact of various planning scenarios.” Clearly, a new – and fully digital – approach was needed to bring business processes into a single platform to anticipate, understand, and meet customer expectations to keep the company thriving.

Remodeling a Long-Established Business

Based in Weinheim, Germany, the Freudenberg Group’s legacy goes back more than 170 years. Of its diverse branches, Freudenberg Home and Cleaning Solutions produces everything from floor cleaning systems to laundry care products to household cloths and rubber gloves.

SAP’s relationship with the company began in the 1990s, when the Freudenberg Group first adopted 51·çÁ÷software. In an early example of the type of platform that would later be required as the pandemic intensified, Freudenberg Home and Cleaning Solutions merged multiple applications into a global, centralized pricing scheme in 2003.

Fast forward nearly 20 years, that remains in use, but now a new platform was created to deploy a hybrid architecture consisting of data and analytics solutions based on . Using consolidated finance and supply chain data, and integrating it with a cloud planning tool that operates in real-time across multiple regions and product categories, Freudenberg is able to simulate best- and worst-case scenarios to grasp operational impact, along with potential profit and loss. A definite game changer for the disparate business unit planning that had been taking place.

Digital Legend

As ambitious as this project sounded, the architecture was deployed when it was needed most and when much of the world was locked down in 2020.

Forging through the start of the pandemic paid off for Freudenberg. The single-source repository has revolutionized how Freudenberg runs, harmonizing the planning and forecasting processes across the consumer products division, regardless of international boundaries.

The enhanced knowledge allowed planners to quickly scan details about product volumes, available raw materials, and sales value, closing gaps that might have otherwise remained open and undetected.

“The smart combination of sales plans, forecasts, and operative plans in one integrated global simulation and planning platform truly accelerated decision-making,” said Andreas Hass, Freudenberg’s corporate IT manager for Analytics Processes and Systems.

Through this innovative method of scenario planning, and the deeper understanding of profits and loss, planning transparency and accuracy increased. What decreased was inaccurate, manually derived figures and time spent on repetitive report preparation tasks, freeing up teams to evaluate new trends and engage in other high-value work that could lead to increased growth in current and potential markets.

Most impressive though was how, despite the massive amount of data acquired for analyzing and processing, planning occurred at a rate that was 10 times faster than in the past.

The earned Freudenberg Home and Cleaning Solutions the unique and well-deserved distinction as a 2022 51·çÁ÷Innovation Award winner in the 50^th Anniversary Legend category. More significantly, like companies everywhere that have benefited from digital acceleration, Freudenberg has begun rethinking the future, using the current momentum to extend its solution to other business functions.

Claudio Muruzabal is president of Cloud Success Services at SAP.

Now in its ninth year, 51·çÁ÷Innovation Awards honor and celebrate the achievements of forward-thinking companies and individuals that have harnessed the power of the latest 51·çÁ÷products and technologies to disrupt industries and, more importantly, make a positive impact that benefits our world.

This year, we received nearly 200 submissions. Finalist judges reviewed each applicant pitch deck to select the 60 finalists — . From that ocean of excellence, 25 were chosen by our .

It gives me a great pleasure and pride to announce the 2022 51·çÁ÷Innovation Award winners:

To learn more about the 51·çÁ÷Innovation Awards,  as well as the winners and finalists, or even participating in next year’s awards, visit the.

We thank all who participated in the 2022 51·çÁ÷Innovation Awards, and our judges for evaluating our 25 winners. I personally look forward to what 2023 has in store for our  community — and the world.

Claudio Muruzabal is president of 51·çÁ÷Cloud Success Services.

As a partner to countless companies undertaking digital transformations, 51·çÁ÷is constantly delivering best-in-class solutions to help unlock that value for customers. A key element of this process is listening to – and taking seriously – the needs expressed by customers. As a result, 51·çÁ÷is now reimagining, simplifying, and sharpening its services and support portfolio by pivoting to focus heavily on adoption and consumption.

is built for the cloud, designed to help customers realize value fast and achieve lasting success. To achieve customer lifetime value is the central goal behind all the changes. It is designed to support customers throughout their journey with SAP, in cloud, on-premise, and hybrid environments. The portfolio also includes services built specifically for partners, to help them supplement and build their capability and capacity and help ensure customer success with 51·çÁ÷by their side. The new services and support portfolio from 51·çÁ÷combined with services from the ecosystem can help customers receive the best of 51·çÁ÷and its partners.

With the introduction of the reimagined portfolio, which is characterized by , , and , it has never been easier to engage with 51·çÁ÷and to take advantage of project-specific services and mission-critical support. The new portfolio follows the establishment of the Cloud Success Services organization earlier this year.

An Experience for Every Customer Need

51·çÁ÷introduces success experience levels, which consider the needs of each customer, their desired business outcomes, and their growth timeline. They address the fast and successful adoption and usage of the solution. This is achieved by combining the existing portfolio with new services to create a holistic and comprehensive experience across the customer journey.

With the subscription to a cloud service from SAP, customers can receive a unique experience. The new portfolio offers the possibility to choose the level of intensity of interaction and support from 51·çÁ÷while also adding in additional services to help customers with the exact need they have wherever they are in their adoption journey.

Existing and well-established offerings, such as , , and , will remain and continue to evolve, serving as the basis of these success experiences. For example, 51·çÁ÷Preferred Success will cover private cloud deployment models in addition to public cloud. New offerings are also being added, such as or .

51·çÁ÷offers three new success experience levels, considering customer needs and deployment approaches.

Essential Success Experience

Centered around , 51·çÁ÷provides all customers with a rich foundational onboarding and support experience focused on proactive mission-critical support, fast time to first value, collaboration, innovation, application lifecycle management, enablement, self-paced educational offerings, and best practices. Embedded launch activities are included in a cloud service subscription from SAP. This will help customers prioritize and launch the functions that add value, so they and any partner they choose can focus on results, instead of reinventing what’s already been done.

Advanced Success Experience

Leveraging 51·çÁ÷Preferred Success, the advanced success experience level delivers a personalized solution and process expertise for cloud solutions from 51·çÁ÷backed by enhanced support service-level agreements. It is a personal road map for everything from workflows to user experience to culture. 51·çÁ÷Preferred Success provides advanced focused guidance to help customers yield more value from 51·çÁ÷solutions and continuously improve business outcomes. It is a customized vision that can convert metrics and milestones into a tailored success plan. A customer success partner helps customers take full advantage of their 51·çÁ÷solutions.

Select Success Experience

The select success experience level is tailored to the customer’s individual transformational needs and outcomes. It’s a complement to the ongoing, solution-specific essential or advanced success experiences from SAP. It helps drive optimization and value realization of end-to-end, multi-solution business landscapes. Customers can choose a full multi-year strategic engagement with 51·çÁ÷based on 51·çÁ÷MaxAttention, shorter-term engagements focused on key compelling business events with 51·çÁ÷Business Journeys, or a combination of both.

To address specific business challenges, 51·çÁ÷offers , which combine expertise and insight from across 51·çÁ÷into targeted packages with a specific scope, timeline, and cost. 51·çÁ÷Business Journeys can address different aspects of business challenges – from planning to execution or from quality assurance to education and guidance.

In addition, within the select success experience level, 51·çÁ÷MaxAttention is available, which is the most comprehensive, transformational, and strategic engagement experience 51·çÁ÷offers. It can deliver hands-on, in-depth expertise designed to help build a long-term innovation plan – working to tackle the complex challenges that span the systems, teams, and processes a customer’s business depends on.

Success Extensions and Success Services – Tailor Your Experience

In addition to the three success experience levels, 51·çÁ÷offers that can be combined with different experiences to help provide additional pre- and post-go-live and cloud optimization services for overall success with solutions at scale. With this, the customer can adjust to create the optimum customer experience at any given time for their business and on their journey.

In addition to success experiences and success extensions, customers can handpick individual to address the needs for larger transformations, highly complex scenarios, or introducing new technologies. 51·çÁ÷can also provide extension services to the ecosystem to help enable and enhance their customers.

Success in the Ecosystem

The new portfolio represents a huge leap forward in understanding the needs of customers and how to help them achieve the outcomes they need to be successful. It also focuses on the success of the entire 51·çÁ÷ecosystem, which is more important in the cloud than ever before. 51·çÁ÷is developing partner success services that will enable partners to support customers throughout their lifetime experience with SAP.

This next-generation service and support portfolio will evolve over time, taking a transformation journey itself. It will be an exciting time to be part of the 51·çÁ÷ecosystem, marking the start of a new era of working together to create continuous value for customers, right from the start.

Claudio Muruzabal is president of Cloud Success Services at 51·çÁ÷SE.

The challenge of modern life may not be a scarcity of technology, but a failure to make full use of the capabilities already available to us. This holds equally true in business as it does in our personal lives. Consider that, by some estimates, organizations 7.7 septillion (that’s 7.7 trillion trillion) gigabytes of data every day but analyze a mere 10% of it. How much value is left uncaptured when data accumulates unexamined?

With the shift from on-premise systems to the cloud, many businesses are beginning to find out. Particularly as organizations navigate the ongoing disruption associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, the trend toward cloud-based platforms has unlocked tremendous value – and unparalleled visibility – across the interconnected operations of trading partners.

Cloud technologies enable access to integrated digital business networks and the data-driven insights they reveal, typically reducing many of the costs associated with core business processes ranging from procurement, supply chain, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) to finance, payments, and external workforce management. But the ease-of-use with which cloud technologies lend agility to these operational processes can actually obscure the immense scope and scale of the digital capabilities they make possible. After all, if the average smartphone is a than the Apollo Guidance Computer that landed men on the moon, then imagine how transformative the cloud-based systems that shape the digital infrastructure of today’s global enterprises are.

Most businesses have yet to uncover the enormity of value inherent in the cloud-based networks that facilitate many of their mission-critical operations. That’s why, to deepen competitive advantage to its fullest, businesses seek out not only robust, integrated digital solutions but also unmatched services, support, and expertise to ensure their optimal application.

Years ago, when business technology systems were largely self-contained, organizations could rely on a small, dedicated team of specialists to manage their technology needs internally. But the terrain has shifted since then. Today, everyone in an organization requires technology skills to perform their role effectively. Software providers must cater to the varied personas throughout the enterprise. In a cloud environment, where innovations arrive digitally and collaboration occurs likewise, enterprises must decentralize their approach to managing technology infrastructure, aided by services and support offerings from external providers and partners, tailored to match the diverse personas responsible for key operational processes.

The cloud is both a repository for innovation and a means for creating it in tandem with trading partners. Services and support offerings can augment returns on an organization’s investment in cloud software at the same time that they extend the lifetime value it delivers, effectively countering the cycles of planned obsolescence to which enterprise software often fell victim prior to the advent of increasingly integrated digital business networks.

In these uncertain times, when capturing the value bound up in data can mean the difference between growth and falling short on promises made to customers, businesses are wise to explore software providers’ wide range of services and support options aimed at reinforcing the enduring, favorable business outcomes that cloud solutions accelerate.

Claudio Muruzabal is president of Cloud Success Services at SAP.

Cloud

The cloud has become the predominant operating model for IT, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic forced millions of people to work from home and moved key operations and most of daily life online. It caught many businesses off guard and not all companies were equipped with the tools they needed to combat the new challenges. So, for many companies, the pandemic was an accelerator for digital transformation.

At SAP, we know that each customer is on its own unique transformational journey, moving at its own pace, driven by its own needs. Before the pandemic, most businesses had just begun their cloud-migration journeys. Today, the majority of businesses have a defined cloud strategy. However, most of these companies have limited workloads in the cloud.

Companies that understand how digital transformation can support ongoing business processes and drive new sources of competitive differentiation have sped up their digital and cloud transformation. For example, one of our customers, a diversified energy company, was able to significantly boost operating efficiency during the pandemic. The company’s Executive Board decided to halt several initiatives but went ahead with digital transformation because it produced the greatest value. Now the company’s transformational actions and the use of real-time data to inform decision making is what sets it apart in an industry where production planning is a complex process involving numerous organizations, historic data collection, and an intricate process due to uncertain conditions.

Our job in SAP’s Cloud Success Services organization is to assist businesses transition fully to the cloud. As most companies have realized during the pandemic, the beauty of the cloud is that it untethers businesses and their workforces from physical devices and places. Now is also the time to rethink our direction as a society, and to heed the call from consumers for more sustainable practices. In other words, it is our time to be bold, future focused, and unified, and to become — and remain — a trusted partner for our customers’ success.

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Ensuring the success of our customers on the transformation journey requires a balance between functional needs and technological expertise.

For us at SAP, customer success covers every step of the digital transformation journey — from the initial investment in our solutions and services through onboarding, adoption, and consumption and then the expansion of solution reach, ensuring value realization. In doing so, we support customers as they run, transform, and disrupt their businesses.

To achieve this transformational role, we are deploying a new portfolio of services focused on adoption and consumption. We also bring in our partners as we work together to accelerate time-to-value, providing choice and expertise for our customers.

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For the last five decades, the 51·çÁ÷Services organization has been instrumental in supporting customers in transforming their processes and in adoption of new technologies. We are expanding this expertise to serve the needs of today. As a service organization, we build deep relationships with our customers, drawing on the vast talent and unmatched capabilities of our team.

Having more than 22,000 people dedicated to our customers’ success makes us uniquely suited to unlocking value for our customers, and I am deeply honored to be leading this new organization.

We engage and align our talent to be where our customers need us most so they can run successfully in the cloud. Our services begin with a single point of contact, either person or team, responsible not only for safeguarding the customer’s investment but also to ensure its value expands through our dedicated engagement and standardized service portfolio of readily available packaged solutions for the full-cloud era.

Our service centers in support of our regional teams are dedicated to enhancing customer lifetime value of their 51·çÁ÷investments by driving scale, automation, and services together with our partners. We know different customer requirements require different engagement types, as does the partner ecosystem.

I am so excited for what lies ahead for our customers, our partners, and our entire team. We are focusing our organization on what is most important to our customers: realizing value while advancing the digital transformation and cloud journey. Our work has only just begun.

Claudio Muruzabal is president of Cloud Success Services at SAP.