Over the coming years, more and more organizations will be switching from SAP ECC to S/4HANA. Although this migration can be considered as a technical upgrade, the real benefits of S/4HANA can only be discovered if migration to the cloud and the business transformation are also examined. In order to help organizations with this, SAP recently launched RISE with SAP; a collection of products and services for business transformations. Together with Powered Enterprise, KPMG's transformation solution combines our years of knowledge and experience gained worldwide with SAP implementations and business transformations. Your organization will have everything needed to successfully migrate your business to the cloud.
S/4HANA Cloud
RISE with SAP is not a new product but a new proposition. It is a collection of existing SAP products and services to help organizations make the switch to the cloud while improving and further automating business processes.
With S/4HANA Cloud ERP solution, you can choose between the Public Cloud or Private Cloud editions. Both versions have their advantages and challenges. The choice mainly depends on the degree of flexibility and control that an organization wants to have over the design of S/4. This is considerably larger for the Private Cloud, and usually comes at the expense of a higher total cost of ownership (TCO) and potentially less standardization. A good scenario analysis linked to your organization's wishes and ambitions is important to help you make the right choice.
The S/4HANA Cloud collection also includes IaaS services via the SAP data center. For the Private Cloud edition, SAP also offers the possibility to house it with a hyperscaler such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
A major advantage of RISE with SAP is the single contract that includes software, services and infrastructure. This means customers receive all bundled products and services for one price under one contract. This gives organizations the opportunity to manage SLA, operations and issue management without having to sign separate contracts.
Business transformation
The S/4HANA solution and infrastructure alone is not a business transformation. RISE with SAP includes the following components:
- S/4HANA Best Practices – standardized business processes and S/4 design as the basis for a 'fit-2-standard' design.
- Migration tools and services – to support a smooth migration, including readiness checks and migration dashboard.
- Process Intelligence – process analytics and a mining environment with the Signavio solution to guide and continuously monitor the transition to standard processes.
- Business Networks – access to various networks, including the Ariba business network, for better integration and more efficient collaboration with external parties such as suppliers.
- Business Technology Platform – SAP's PaaS environment for integration, data management, app development, application of new technologies, and more. Note: the scope and depth of the use of BTP depends on what is agreed in the RISE contract.
A migration via RISE with SAP is carried out using the RISE Adoption Framework, a methodology based on SAP Activate, including allocation of the activities to be carried out by your organization, SAP and an implementation partner.
Powered Enterprise
RISE with SAP offers a comprehensive collection of products and services for the transition to the cloud and business transformation. However, this collection alone does not guarantee a successful migration. Business transformation also means organizational change and good business processes include more than just process steps and S/4 design. Without strong project governance, a transformation is doomed to fail.
KPMG offers the necessary complement to RISE with SAP with KPMG Powered Enterprise. Powered Enterprise encompasses our years of knowledge and experience of SAP implementations and business transformations gained worldwide. We provide transformation and change methodology as well as supporting best practices and a project governance toolkit for a successful migration.
Powered Enterprise is set up with SAP best practices as a basis and is therefore fully compatible and enriching. Our methodology is compatible with the RISE Adoption Framework and SAP Activate, and offers a broader toolset for project implementation. KPMG Powered Enterprise also offers a fully integrated change methodology.
It is down to the organization to let Powered Enterprise take the lead or to see it as an addition to RISE by making smart use of best practices, tools and accelerators from the Powered Enterprise approach.
A clear vision
At its core, RISE with SAP is all about facilitating standardized processes in a cloud environment. In its purest form, this takes place via the Public Cloud with a greenfield design. More complex environments are usually migrated over the Private Cloud to give companies the necessary flexibility and control over design. This may also be the case with a brownfield implementation. In very complex environments, RISE with SAP may not be applicable. When applying RISE with SAP, various choices must also be made that affect not only the success of your migration, but also the license costs e.g. the extent you plan to use SAP BTP.
The most appropriate strategy varies from organization to organization. It is important to think carefully about your vision of S/4HANA in advance, your ambitions for migration and business transformation and the application of RISE with SAP. KPMG helps you to make the right choices and monitors them during the migration.
If you would like to know more about applying RISE with SAP and KPMG Powered Enterprise, please contact our specialists directly. We are happy to answer your questions.
Flexible and future-proof with S/4HANA
Many organizations are facing an important choice. Do we migrate to SAP S/4HANA, and if so, when? From a technical perspective, the end of support for SAP ECC has been postponed to 2027 (and under certain conditions until 2030), but this deadline should not be the main reason for migrating. From a business perspective, there are also opportunities for transformation. And if you do transform, how do you make sure that you, as a company, get the most out of your SAP investments?
In the “Flexible and future-proof with S/4HANA" whitepaper, we discuss this, among other topics, and explain our vision on business transformation during an ERP migration.
