Sub­stan­tial efforts in the last year to increase brand aware­ness, height­en vis­i­bil­i­ty, and ulti­mate­ly increase SAP Sig­navio use are pay­ing off, with new and long­stand­ing SAP cus­tomers tak­ing on the suite and attest­ing to rapid, pos­i­tive results.

And while those efforts will only inten­si­fy this year, a high­ly enthused Rou­ven Mora­to, Co-Gen­er­al Man­ag­er of SAP Sig­navio, recapped recent progress and described strat­e­gy adjust­ments, expan­sions, and tech­nol­o­gy inno­va­tions that are in the works for 2023 in a recent ASUG interview.

An edit­ed ver­sion of the inter­view follows.

Ques­tion: What you have been hear­ing from the cus­tomer base regard­ing their busi­ness and tech­nol­o­gy chal­lenges cur­rent­ly and in the past year?

Answer: I think it’s quite homo­ge­neous across the world, to be hon­est. In North Amer­i­ca specif­i­cal­ly, we hear a lot about sup­ply chains break­ing down and hav­ing to find resilience. Cli­mate change is anoth­er area; every cus­tomer now focus­es on this, and we see the end con­sumers plac­ing more val­ue on sus­tain­abil­i­ty. The pan­dem­ic also hit many com­pa­nies hard. 

The net-net is that cus­tomers all see the need for dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion to take advan­tage of dig­i­tal busi­ness mod­els and move toward more agili­ty and the abil­i­ty to adapt quick­ly and react to changes in the mar­ket. That has become more rel­e­vant for all of our customers.

At SAP and SAP Sig­navio as a busi­ness unit, cus­tomers are ask­ing: How can we increase the util­i­ty of our over­all orga­ni­za­tion? What do we need to build, giv­en this? We call this the need to devel­op the ​‘trans­for­ma­tion mus­cle,’ which means that cus­tomers can con­tin­u­ous­ly evolve busi­ness process­es and how they inter­act with cus­tomers, pro­duc­tion facil­i­ties, and the sup­ply chain. How can they react faster? How can I react faster? 

Cus­tomers under­stand this all relates to tech­nol­o­gy, the abil­i­ty to change things
in your sys­tem and then change how peo­ple oper­ate the sys­tem. We are at the cen­ter of grav­i­ty for this now with SAP Sig­navio. We see this in the con­text of SAP S/4HANA trans­for­ma­tions in the mar­ket. Many cus­tomers are wak­ing up and real­iz­ing that they have lost con­trol, or at least par­tial con­trol, around how they oper­ate, and they don’t real­ly know what’s hap­pen­ing on the ground any­more. How are peo­ple real­ly exe­cut­ing their work? They are now try­ing to get their arms back around it, using trans­for­ma­tion to define a new way of oper­at­ing their com­pa­nies. That’s the net-net of what we see and hear in the market.

Q: Have any of those chal­lenges, in par­tic­u­lar, increased or decreased?

A: The sup­ply chain remains rel­e­vant these days. With the war in Ukraine and infla­tion pop­ping up, the need to react to mar­ket changes is extreme­ly rel­e­vant. The pan­dem­ic chal­lenges have reduced a lit­tle; how­ev­er, I think the aware­ness remains high. Peo­ple under­stand things like that can come back at any point and that they must pre­pare bet­ter next time. Now you know that this abrupt change can hap­pen, and now it’s your fault, as a senior leader, if your com­pa­ny is not prepared. 

Q: In light of those chal­lenges, from a busi­ness and tech­nol­o­gy stand­point, what have your pri­or­i­ties been in the last 12 months?

A: 2023 is a con­tin­u­a­tion of our strat­e­gy — noth­ing rad­i­cal­ly new is com­ing. RISE with SAP was a very big top­ic in 2022 and will remain a very big top­ic in 2023. How­ev­er, we are adjust­ing our approach a lit­tle on RISE with SAP. The phase where cus­tomers need SAP Sig­navio is actu­al­ly pri­or to RISE, pri­or to the imple­men­ta­tion of S/4HANA, because our tool­ing helps cus­tomers under­stand the weak­ness­es in how they oper­ate today and helps cus­tomers cre­ate the busi­ness case to trans­form. We help cus­tomers define the pri­or­i­ties in the trans­for­ma­tion because we spot­light the process weak­ness­es and where they are. We ana­lyze their cur­rent data out of their cur­rent sys­tem and help them define the way toward RISE, how to do it, what to tack­le first, and where to improve the most.

That’s why we are shift­ing the SAP Sig­navio focus to six to 12 months ahead of a RISE trans­for­ma­tion, an S/4HANA imple­men­ta­tion. Cus­tomers should be using Sig­navio to plan for this trans­for­ma­tion, and then once the trans­for­ma­tion starts, they know the exact process­es they want to change: Where do I want to go back to stan­dard; where do I need my spe­cial com­po­nents; where are oth­ers bet­ter than I am; where should I change to some­thing else that SAP has? We must com­plete that prepa­ra­tion work much earlier. 

Q: Look­ing for­ward, what are the strat­e­gy high­lights for 2023?

A: We are expand­ing beyond the ERP land­scape, mov­ing into the HR trans­for­ma­tion space. With SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors, if a cus­tomer moves from a non-SAP sys­tem or an on-prem HCM SAP ver­sion into Suc­cess­Fac­tors, we help cus­tomers ana­lyze their HR process­es and trans­form them. This has become a more impor­tant com­po­nent. SAP Sig­navio Process Insights is also avail­able for Suc­cess­Fac­tors dur­ing 2023.

Talk­ing about prod­uct inno­va­tions, we are expand­ing on the tech­ni­cal com­po­nents. For exam­ple, there will be a new SAP Solu­tion Man­ag­er API so that [cus­tomers of] SAP Sig­navio and SAP Solu­tion Man­ag­er can eas­i­ly upload and down­load process mod­els. This is very impor­tant for large cus­tomers in sup­port of trans­for­ma­tion. Many have built a big lega­cy of process mod­els in Solu­tion Man­ag­er. That was how IT depart­ments did the process mod­el­ing on the IT side. But now there is Sig­navio, which is much more com­fort­able and user-friend­ly for a mod­el­ing envi­ron­ment. You need a kind of exchange­abil­i­ty between the Solu­tion Man­ag­er and Sig­navio because that is the mar­riage between busi­ness and IT — right where the busi­ness is mod­el­ing its process­es. A seam­less link makes life much eas­i­er for trans­for­ma­tion projects. This was the feed­back we received heav­i­ly from our large cus­tomers in North America.

Q: Any oth­er strat­e­gy or tech­ni­cal enhancements?

A: One, which is still in the ear­ly phase. But I want to share it with you because it’s tru­ly excit­ing. You might be aware of SAP Sig­navio Process Insights, the tool for ERP trans­for­ma­tion, so you can get insights very, very quick­ly. In Orlan­do, at our event last year, we showed how the cus­tomer imple­ment­ed it in 14 min­utes live, on-stage. That’s the fast side of the house. 

What we are doing is expand­ing fur­ther so that you’re not only able to see those process KPIs and the rec­om­men­da­tions for improve­ment, but you can also derive the true process details and the dif­fer­ent process flows out of that. So, in process min­ing, with those spaghet­ti dia­grams where you see how the process­es are flow­ing, with all the vari­ant, that’s what we will also get out of Process Insights.

You can reverse engi­neer process mod­els by that, which means with­in a few hours with Process Insights, you will get these nice, beau­ti­ful KPIs, you get all the vari­ants of process­es, and you will then see the process mod­els that a cus­tomer has ​‘as is.’ So next to these KPIs and bench­marks on where you’re not so great we can put the best prac­tices and tell the cus­tomers where they devi­ate from the best prac­tices and high­light the weak­ness­es of the KPIs to the exe­cu­tion — how they’re run­ning it.

If you do this with­in a day, you can imag­ine how much this col­laps­es the time spent to get an idea of where and how to start the trans­for­ma­tion. We have cus­tomers who have done this type of prepa­ra­tion work for a year: just col­lect­ing the data on how they oper­ate today, the per­for­mance of it, and under­stand­ing the mod­els and the process flows. We can now bring this down to a few hours or days. 

This will be an enor­mous impact on the mar­ket. It’s still in the ear­ly phase, but that will come in 2023. It will be a huge expan­sion of what we offer today with Process Insights.

Q: Any idea of gen­er­al availability?

A: It’s still too ear­ly to say. Process Insights, obvi­ous­ly, is gen­er­al­ly avail­able. This will be a kind of pre­mi­um ver­sion. At Sap­phire, we will prob­a­bly have some beta ver­sions. I would say [gen­er­al avail­abil­i­ty is antic­i­pat­ed for the] sec­ond half of the year.

Q: An ASUG goal is to help our cus­tomers and mem­bers get the most val­ue from their SAP tech­nol­o­gy invest­ments. How do you and SAP Sig­navio aid and accel­er­ate that?

A: We are a prime exam­ple of that because it’s our exact mis­sion. There’s noth­ing worse than an IT imple­men­ta­tion that does­n’t dri­ve a true process trans­for­ma­tion because then you get the same — maybe a lit­tle bit faster, maybe a lit­tle bit nicer from the UI — but you get the same. 

So, it’s our mis­sion to help our cus­tomers trans­form from how they oper­ate today to how they want to oper­ate, lever­ag­ing the lat­est SAP tech­nol­o­gy and non-SAP tech­nol­o­gy, of course. We have that at the heart of our end-to-end trans­for­ma­tion suite. If cus­tomers apply it, then they clear­ly will see the ben­e­fit of hav­ing one suite that allows you to tru­ly under­stand that end-to-end view of your process­es — from your own data, from the KPIs, from the bench­mark­ing, over to the mod­el­ing, to the com­par­i­son with best prac­tices, and then down­stream to the imple­men­ta­tion. We are the umbrel­la around val­ue real­iza­tion out of SAP sys­tem landscapes.

Q: Is there any­thing else that you would want to con­vey to the ASUG community?

A: Maybe a few remarks about some cus­tomers. We are work­ing with Gen­er­al Motors, right, which is a great exam­ple of how they oper­a­tional­ized their way of work­ing using SAP Sig­navio. We are now ful­ly embed­ded into the way they oper­ate, with all the tool­ing that we have, from how they ana­lyze and use work­flows to trig­ger change and col­lab­o­rate with the affect­ed end users. It’s a great exam­ple of how we can tru­ly become part of how the orga­ni­za­tion oper­ates, not a tool on the side that you look at every third Fri­day of a month. You want to be inte­grat­ed in the way cus­tomers operate. 

I recent­ly did a lit­tle bit of a world tour and col­lect­ed a few sound bites. One of the cus­tomers said when he looked into Process Insights for five min­utes, he found improve­ment work for two years. It’s so quick to see. But then you have a list, and you need to man­age this work. That’s where our end-to-end suite kicks in. It will tell them rec­om­men­da­tions on how to improve. With the rest of the port­fo­lio, the mod­el­ing, and the Col­lab­o­ra­tion Hub, we bring it to life and help them to do it right. 

That’s what I think would be great — if the ASUG com­mu­ni­ty gets into that mind­set of, if we want to become that agile orga­ni­za­tion, we need to under­stand that it’s a com­bi­na­tion of process, sys­tems, and data. We need to get our arms around all of it. If we only imple­ment SAP S/4 but don’t tru­ly dri­ve trans­for­ma­tion, it won’t real­ly bring the busi­ness val­ue we expect. I know that a lot of cus­tomers have crit­i­cized SAP and asked where the val­ue of S/4HANA is because exact­ly that hap­pened. Cus­tomers just imple­ment­ed S/4HANA and thought the val­ue would sud­den­ly come to their fin­ger­tips. That is non­sense; you need to adapt how you oper­ate and work, and that’s what SAP Sig­navio does.

Vis­it our Busi­ness Trans­for­ma­tion Man­age­ment and SAP Sig­navio foun­da­tions Con­tent Col­lec­tion to learn more about SAP Sig­navio, updates, and more.