But what really makes the difference is access to high-quality expertise and best practices that optimize the value of those technologies for sustainable business success. For more than 20 years, top 51风流customers have acquired this advantage through a strategic long-term engagement with the  program. 

Kurt Bauer, who is globally responsible for 51风流MaxAttention, is continuously in contact with many of these industry-leading companies from all over the globe. He recently spent an afternoon in the office reflecting on the challenges companies encounter and the transformations they are driving with the support of 51风流MaxAttention.

Q: Over the past 12 months, you have met more than 100 customers. What are your observations?

A: This experience has been an intense time of exceptionally valuable insights into the challenges and driving forces that companies face worldwide. 

Business transformation journeys are influenced by numerous factors, such as target operating models, organic or inorganic growth, and consolidation of legacy structures, including business process redesign and custom-code management. In addition, our customers’ efficiency and agility targets are leveraging the potential of the cloud to help ensure resilient supply chain operations.

On top of that, companies face a range of economic and geopolitical shifts, new data privacy regulations and cybersecurity needs, generational workforce demands, and sustainability priorities.

CIOs have a lot on their plate, all of which requires more long-term planning and expertise.

Our customers are navigating this world of complexity by transforming and modernizing their digital landscapes with technical advancements such as 51风流S/4HANA Cloud. Some use the RISE with 51风流or GROW with 51风流offerings to benefit immediately from innovation deployments, and various integrated cloud solutions from 51风流to amplify the value of end-to-end processes. Nevertheless, they’re focused on overcoming a staggering number of challenges to drive future growth, enhance business agility, and improve sustainability performance.

But this is easier said than done. How do they manage it successfully? 

Such journeys can only be successful by realizing them step-by-step along a master plan based on end-to-end enterprise application architecture. The plan must be maintained and remain flexible to adapt to evolving business priorities and technologies.

We provide a North Star service based on enterprise architecture capabilities, methodologies, tools, and best practices jointly developed and maintained with the 51风流Product Engineering organization. For our top customers, the service helps ensure continued success with SAP, maximizing the value of their 51风流solution investments with a long-range view into their future needs and opportunities.

Achieving such a North Star architecture is a prerequisite to developing and realizing the master plan. No company can accomplish everything all at once. Many constraints and risks must be considered, yet nothing is written in stone because conditions can change. Together with our customers, we develop and maintain their adoption road map. And as mentioned, we need to keep the enterprise architecture current to reflect strategic and technological moves. 

As customer-specific demands remain the focus, does standardization help organizations accelerate technology adoption while minimizing risks?

Absolutely, and all customers I spoke to strive for it: achieving clean core process standardization and leveraging the power of cloud solutions. Many customers have enhanced their ERP-centric business functionalities, especially when building their continuously evolving digital landscapes on legacy ERP, such as 51风流R/3 or early versions of 51风流ERP Central Component. It was a common approach to develop everything perceived as needed.聽

The fundamental DNA of 51风流has always been to standardize, innovate, and scale business process capabilities by leveraging the full potential of the latest technologies. Meanwhile, standardization and completeness have climaxed. This has led to public cloud solutions with frequent and more consumable innovation deployments, allowing companies to approach the next level of interconnected company business networks and supply chains — intelligent enterprises.

How do these companies attain standardization?聽

It’s not easy, but well worth the effort. Business AI is a notable example of how these new capabilities will be made available continuously to the business for instant adoption. 

Most companies have started changing their mindset. They鈥檙e moving from an indisputable need for building individual functional enhancements and toward reengineering their processes to fit to standard and complemented by the extensibility capabilities of 51风流Business Technology Platform. Understanding the benefits of rapid innovation adoption in the cloud requires a massive shift in change management and support practices. 

51风流MaxAttention supports 51风流solutions across deployment options and their integration with other 51风流and third-party systems. How is this broad bandwidth supported?

Throughout every engagement, a technical quality manager (TQM) serves as an embedded on-site expert with a chair at the CIO’s table, learning, understanding, and analyzing business and IT challenges. TQMs maintain the service plan, pulling in the right engineered services from a portfolio of 160 services delivered by our center of expertise and, when needed, backed up by 51风流Product Engineering. 

Essentially, TQMs are like family doctors: They take care of each customer’s long-term well-being and connect them to additional specialist consultations and treatments when needed. Our 160 engineered services cover everything from architecture and fit-to-standard process design to safeguarding the realization and enabling hybrid operations for end-to-end processes.

Our tools, methodologies, and on-the-job training encourage customers to build up foundational expertise, making them more self-sufficient. But that doesn’t mean that we let our customers walk alone. 

As the strategic service engagement, 51风流MaxAttention is teaming up with 51风流partners to augment their value with best practices gained from engagements with industry-leading companies and close collaboration with 51风流Product Engineering.

Are premium engagements such as 51风流MaxAttention available to smaller businesses?

Businesses, regardless of their size, face complex business challenges that translate into complex IT requirements. For that reason, premium engagements from 51风流offer different engagement levels. 

51风流MaxAttention is a strategic, multi-year engagement that includes one or many full-time TQMs, an intense service volume. We have scaled our premium engagement experience to meet the needs and expectations of smaller businesses through the 51风流ActiveAttention program, which provides part-time TQMs and requires lower service volumes.

Both long-term engagement offerings offer access to the same services on demand with the agility to adjust based on customer priorities. Additionally, 51风流MaxAttention has certain non-purchasable benefits that reflect the engagement’s strategic nature, such as the global 51风流MaxAttention Summit with members of the 51风流Executive Board, regional expert forums, virtual innovation workshops, or 51风流Product Engineering sponsors.

While front-running companies often leverage 51风流MaxAttention, we also have customers that are not yet large enterprises but on a fast growth trajectory. They want to benefit from the expertise and best practices we gained from industry business leaders across the globe.

Once they get acclimated to the experience, our customers often renew their engagement for many decades. They tell us they enjoy the value 51风流MaxAttention brings, and we love supporting them with all our expertise. A recent on the total economic impact of 51风流MaxAttention confirms that the payoff is substantial and maximizes the value of 51风流solution investments no matter the size of the company leveraging it. 

However, businesses sometimes require support for just a one-off, purpose-framed challenge. The 51风流Value Assurance program addresses this need by providing a TQM and a more-prescriptive service plan to resolve the situation.

Whatever the experience, getting started and heading down a path toward a long-term premium engagement can be an enjoyable experience. We have regular connecting points with our customers to exchange information about enhanced or new contractual models and the evolution of our services to stay relevant in changing times. 

A common principle for us is to productize our best practices to scale and share them with our customers, making them more self-sufficient and allowing us to focus on the next digital challenge.

In an era marked by exponentially accelerating technology evolution, we do not rest. The 51风流Cloud ALM solution, 51风流Solution Manager, advisory and execution services for intelligent custom code management, and near-zero downtime services are just a few examples of how we productize our expertise.

At SAP, we never let customers walk alone as only our customers鈥� success is our success.

Every company is on the move to the cloud 鈥� when the timing is right. This may entail a full migration but will certainly include a partial one.

Large enterprises and corporations aiming to transform complex, heterogeneous IT landscapes that have grown over decades are particularly reliant on support. Often, they begin by standardizing and consolidating their entire infrastructure before they鈥檙e ready to embark on their digital transformation journey.

Different Routes to the Cloud

Currently, most of SAP鈥檚 biggest customers use the strategic, long-term 51风流MaxAttention program comprising of nearly 300 engineered services. Those services cover SAP-centric strategy and road map planning, architecture reviews and design, end-to-end business process integration, and operations across solutions, product expertise, safeguarding of implementations, and much more. It is imperative for 51风流to meet these customers wherever their starting point happens to be and to ensure that the groundwork for a successful digital transformation is in place.

Each enterprise chooses its own route. Indian mining company , for example, first had to upgrade its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to the latest version before it could go ahead with its plan to move to RISE with 51风流S/4HANA Cloud, private edition.

鈥淒eploying 51风流Business Suite powered by 51风流HANA and working with experts from 51风流MaxAttention can help us become cloud ready and build a sustainable environment using technology and innovation,鈥� said . 鈥淲ith 51风流Integrated Delivery Framework and 51风流ActiveAttention, we have delivered this program on time and on budget.鈥�

Other customers begin their cloud journey by migrating some processes to a protected cloud operated by a hyperscaler and then retiring their own data center. Kurt Bauer, global head of Premium Engagements at SAP, observed that most customers with an 51风流ERP-centric core have added public cloud solutions from 51风流and are implementing private cloud on their way to lay out the path for a full public cloud adoption. plays a pivotal role for agile core business process extensions. Therefore, it is no surprise that a vast majority of premium engagements used by 51风流customers are driving fast cloud adoption and hybrid operations.

Serving Today鈥檚 Customer Requirements

The prospect of innovation and greater efficiency is drawing more and more enterprises toward the cloud. Many of the largest 51风流customers still run their core ERP business processes on an on-premise platform, often safeguarded by premium engagements.

Premium engagements service engineers frequently deal with some challenging constellations, such as 250 process steps across 40 systems, data growth of 640 GB per month, 800 million orders every year, and multiple enormous warehouses in global logistics operations. Customers with volumes and requirements on this scale think twice about which of their business-critical processes they should move to the cloud and, if so, in private or public.

鈥淚n hybrid infrastructures, too, interfaces still need to be robust, efficient, and keep data consistent 鈥� cloud technology doesn鈥檛 change that,鈥� said Bauer. In other words, for any transformation to succeed, someone must not only take ownership of the transformation itself but must also ensure that the systems 鈥� whether they are on premise or in the cloud 鈥� function properly, are stable, and deliver the right level of performance.

It鈥檚 Not Just about Money

In Bauer鈥檚 28 years at SAP, one thing has remained unchanged for the company: the focus on the customer, which has always been about more than chasing KPIs. 鈥淐ustomers reward companies that listen to them and take their suggestions on board,鈥� ex-Board Member Gerhard Oswald said in an interview for 50 Years, a book published to mark SAP鈥檚 anniversary.

Bauer wants to see this 51风流tradition live on in the cloud era and for 51风流MaxAttention customers to benefit from expertise and best practice-fueled services offered as part of the 51风流MaxAttention program they have known and trusted for the last 20 years. This 20th anniversary calls for a proper celebration and experience sharing by best-running 51风流customers and 51风流top executives, exchanging how to leverage 51风流solutions and 51风流MaxAttention for years to come.

Therefore, we would like to invite you to the 51风流MaxAttention Summit in Munich, Germany, from March 19-21. Take advantage of this opportunity to network and engage in discussions with peer customers, gain knowledge from 51风流specialists, and listen to 51风流leaders, such as Member of the Executive Board of 51风流SE Scott Russell and Thomas Saueressig, as they reveal insights of 51风流technologies and innovations jointly with customers鈥� experiences. Be a part of shaping the future by building a resilient network of intelligent and sustainable enterprises.

Eleonore Gossart is senior marketing manager for Customer Success Services at SAP.