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. 

Busi­ness AI Fol­low­ing the ​“Three Rs.” 

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.