Joshua Green­baum, Prin­ci­pal at Enter­prise Appli­ca­tions Con­sult­ing, authored the fol­low­ing guest per­spec­tive. The views and opin­ions expressed in this per­spec­tive are those of the author.

Pre­dict­ing some SAP cus­tomer chal­lenges in 2024 is easy. That’s because many of last year’s issues remain unre­solved, both those endem­ic to cus­tomers’ busi­ness and tech­nol­o­gy require­ments and those result­ing from the con­tin­u­ing evo­lu­tion of SAP’s strat­e­gy and prod­uct plans. 

But fear not: 2024 won’t be a rehash of 2023. With a new year comes the promise of new chal­lenges, as well as new oppor­tu­ni­ties to make the most of the SAP prod­ucts and tech­nol­o­gy head­ing our way in 2024. 

It’s clear that any resid­ual con­fu­sion around RISE with SAP—what it is, what it isn’t, who it’s best for, and its rela­tion­ship to cloud migra­tion, inno­va­tion, and AI—should be a pri­or­i­ty for SAP to address, espe­cial­ly on the heels of SAP adding new ​“pre­mi­um-plus” mod­els to the mix of options already avail­able to cus­tomers pur­su­ing a move to the cloud. 

High on the list of real-world issues is the plan­ning and exe­cu­tion of cus­tomers’ migra­tions to SAP S/4HANA and the cloud—a prob­lem that RISE with SAP is intend­ed to help solve. How­ev­er, these are com­plex ini­tia­tives in mul­ti­ple respects. The prob­lems are less about SAP tech­nol­o­gy strat­e­gy, per se, as the three dif­fer­ent modal­i­ties for SAP S/4HANA offer cus­tomers a sig­nif­i­cant amount of flex­i­bil­i­ty in their deploy­ment options. The more salient prob­lems cen­ter on the cur­rent state of cus­tomers’ infra­struc­ture and busi­ness require­ments. It’s com­pli­cat­ed out there on the road to SAP S/4HANA: lots of lega­cy process­es and cus­tomiza­tions, lots of sub­stan­dard and poor­ly gov­erned data, and lots of con­flict­ing agen­das around busi­ness transformation. 

Rolling the clock over to anoth­er year will put even more pres­sure on SAP cus­tomers to move for­ward with these plans, both to reap the much-need­ed busi­ness and tech­no­log­i­cal ben­e­fits of the cloud and to stay ahead of SAP’s dead­lines for end-of-main­stream maintenance. 

‘A Clean Data Movement’

For many cus­tomers, 2024 will involve fig­ur­ing out how to nav­i­gate the myr­i­ad changes in data, process, and tech­ni­cal archi­tec­ture that need to be set­tled before pulling the trig­ger on deploy­ing SAP S/4HANA. Solv­ing a host of insip­i­ent data prob­lems will get a boost from the con­tin­u­ing inter­est — though, in my view, most­ly overblown and pre­ma­ture — in deploy­ing gen­er­a­tive AI in the enter­prise. Indeed, per­haps the best out­come of the hype around gen­er­a­tive AI has been that loads of impec­ca­bly clean data are need­ed to build and main­tain large lan­guage mod­els. That real­iza­tion is now dri­ving a much-need­ed, long-over­due renais­sance for SAP S/4HANA and cloud upgrade plans. 

This grow­ing ​“clean data” move­ment isn’t just for exist­ing SAP cus­tomers run­ning com­plex, hybrid cloud envi­ron­ments. Many net-new cus­tomers, par­tic­u­lar­ly those eye­ing a move to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, pub­lic edi­tion, and its ​“fit-to-stan­dard” process mod­els, are find­ing that the age-old prob­lem of data qual­i­ty doesn’t go away just because a cus­tomer is doing a green­field SAP S/4HANA implementation. 

Round­ing out the prob­lem still on the table in 2024 are the peo­ple and process issues that have recent­ly dom­i­nat­ed the glob­al econ­o­my. SAP cus­tomers’ chal­lenges with find­ing, train­ing, and retain­ing the right per­son with the right skills for the job and then deploy­ing them in the most effi­cient ways pos­si­ble won’t be any eas­i­er in 2024. The employ­ee expe­ri­ence — and hence the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence — that every com­pa­ny want­ed to deliv­er in 2023 still hasn’t reached its apogee, so there’s still work to be done to opti­mize sub­op­ti­mal process­es and experiences. 

‘A Water­shed Year’ for SAP

But 2024 won’t be just a col­lec­tion of glass-half-emp­ty sce­nar­ios on the way to real­iz­ing the poten­tial of cus­tomers’ SAP invest­ments. There are some ways in which 2024 has the poten­tial to be a water­shed year for imple­men­ta­tion and busi­ness suc­cess in the SAP cus­tomer ecosystem. 

SAP’s Cloud Appli­ca­tion Life­cy­cle Man­age­ment (CALM), and its inte­gra­tion with SAP Sig­navio, LeanIX, SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form (BTP), and SAP Data­s­phere, promis­es to dri­ve huge effi­cien­cies for the imple­men­ta­tion and con­tin­u­ous improve­ment of SAP sys­tems. This com­bi­na­tion of tools, unique to SAP, can help cus­tomers and their part­ners improve how key process­es are built and deployed on both the busi­ness and tech­nol­o­gy sides of the equation. 

The result­ing toolset could yield sig­nif­i­cant­ly faster imple­men­ta­tions that, in turn, yield sig­nif­i­cant­ly bet­ter out­comes, espe­cial­ly in com­plex, het­ero­ge­neous envi­ron­ments where core process­es may have to jump between cloud and lega­cy appli­ca­tions as well as dif­fer­ent clouds. As a bonus, this toolset and the add-ons and inte­gra­tions com­ing from CALM part­ners, will effec­tive­ly ​“con­tainer­ize” SAP imple­men­ta­tions and ren­der the ques­tion of which hyper­scaler to go with large­ly moot. 

In a sim­i­lar fash­ion, 2024 will see the fur­ther ascen­dan­cy of SAP Busi­ness Net­work. Grow­ing adop­tion of SAP Busi­ness Net­work can help com­pa­nies thrive in a com­plex, inter­con­nect­ed world defined by increas­ing cus­tomer ser­vice, sup­ply chain excel­lence, and sus­tain­abil­i­ty demands. The process effi­cien­cies, the abil­i­ty to ​“com­ply once” and pub­lish that com­pli­ance to a net­work full of prospec­tive trad­ing part­ners, and the abil­i­ty to expand cus­tomer and part­ner net­works will begin to accrue for a widen­ing set of SAP cus­tomers in 2024. 

SAP For Industries

Final­ly, 2024 will be the year in which SAP’s indus­try-spe­cif­ic capa­bil­i­ties will start mak­ing a dif­fer­ence for cus­tomers. The irony of SAP’s ​“clean core” strat­e­gy is that a clean core is an undif­fer­en­ti­at­ed core, one that can only deliv­er stan­dard­ized process­es that don’t sup­port true com­pet­i­tive advan­tage. How­ev­er, if you add indus­try-spe­cif­ic capa­bil­i­ties — deployed in SAP S/4HANA Cloud or as part of SAP BTP — the advan­tages become clear­er: adding indus­try func­tion­al­i­ty on top of a clean core allows cus­tomers to stan­dard­ize and inno­vate simultaneously. 

Since the R/2 days, SAP has had deep sup­port for indus­tries, and this lega­cy of indus­try func­tion­al­i­ty is becom­ing increas­ing­ly impor­tant to cus­tomers look­ing to jus­ti­fy the cost of mov­ing to SAP S/4HANA, SAP CX, SAP Suc­cess­Fac­tors, SAP Busi­ness Net­work, and oth­er prod­uct lines. 

So sit back, buck­le up, and get ready for one hel­lu­va ride. Hope­ful­ly, 2024 will be the year in which some of the messi­ness we expe­ri­enced in 2023 starts to make sense for cus­tomers still sort­ing through busi­ness com­plex­i­ties and find­ing the right path for­ward for their orga­ni­za­tions. At a min­i­mum, like every year, the jour­ney promis­es to be any­thing but boring. 

Joshua Green­baum is Prin­ci­pal at Enter­prise Appli­ca­tions Consulting.