The CCoE experiment

If an existing SAP customer believes the Rise with SAP promise, then neither a CCC nor a CCoE will be needed in the future: However, this is merely marketing and an empty promise from SAP. Numerous existing SAP customers and partners from the SAP community have reported in recent months that the opposite is true: those who signed a Rise with SAP contract usually had to expand their SAP Basis team (Customer Center of Expertise) or outsource additional tasks to service providers. Rise really does create a lot of work!

As a result, SAP's idea of the CCoE became a testing ground for SAP Basis support. Why? With an SAP ERP system in the cloud, not a single problem from the previous ERP/ECC 6.0 system has been solved. System copies, authorization management, user administration, monitoring and automation, batches and program updates, etc. are still on the agenda of the in-house IT team. Some tasks can be delegated to SAP via a Rise ticket system, but SAP itself does not act proactively within the framework of a Rise contract – existing SAP customers must create a ticket for each job. S/4 expertise, IT administration, and enterprise architecture therefore remain the responsibility of a CCoE.

Existing SAP customers are thus facing a historically unique turning point, the core of which is not only the inevitable migration to S/4 Hana by 2033 at the latest, but also the fundamental shift from a monolithic, on-premises-centered IT world to a highly complex, hybrid cloud architecture that is ultimately not managed and secured by a Rise contract. This transition is therefore much more than a technical release change.

The S/4 Rise conversion is highly challenging in terms of business management, organization (the CCoE experiment), technology, and licensing rights. At the heart of this profound change is the organizational unit that has traditionally ensured the stability and smooth running of the company's „crown jewels“ – the SAP ERP systems (S/4, new SAP Business Suite, and SAP Cloud ERP): the Customer Competence Center (CCC), currently renamed the Customer Center of Expertise (CCoE).

At the beginning of this year, SAP and DSAG e. V. asked: To what extent are the following topics relevant to your investment plans for 2025? n=243, source: DSAG

The CCC has a long and successful history. It served as an organizational operating model and certified competence center within the IT organization of SAP's existing customer. The CCC's main task was to coordinate internal IT with SAP support, optimize the overall performance of SAP operations, and serve as a hub for collaboration between IT and the business units. In the new S/4 Rise world, characterized by agility and shorter update cycles, the CCoE is set to become the guarantee for success.

The role of the CCoE is twofold: on the one hand, it must keep the highly complex S/4 Rise operation up to date and, on the other hand, drive forward strategic digital transformation. From a business perspective, CCoE managers and CIOs must work together to organize the operational running of SAP applications. Given the limited maintenance windows and the need to keep systems available 24/7, the CCoE must demonstrate efficiency gains through automation. This involves cost and resource savings, which must be significant thanks to the full automation of processes.

Automation and tickets

From an organizational perspective, the CCoE is the focal point that is feeling the shortage of skilled SAP Basis administrators, exacerbated by retirements, labor shortages, growing Rise with SAP project workloads, and the Rise ticket system. Automation would be the logical answer to relieve employees and free them up for higher-value tasks. In addition, the CCoE must structure the cloud orchestration role of the IT department, for which SAP assumes no responsibility within the scope of Rise. In selected cases, SAP „gives away“ an enterprise architect with LeanIX experience. A key new focus is clean core governance in the S/4 world, where the CCoE must ensure enablement, governance, and communication – here, too, existing customers are on their own with the CCoE.

Technically, the CCoE must manage a hybrid system landscape (ECC 6.0, S/4 Hana, SAP Cloud ERP, and non-SAP). This requires handling complex maintenance (patches and innovations in many parallel system landscapes). Routine tasks that are still performed manually or using complicated scripts are numerous and prone to errors: SAP kernel patches, rolling out authorization objects, adjusting profile settings, creating sandboxes, and system copies.

This is where specialized automation suites such as the Empirius Planning and Operations Suite (EPOS) come into play, acting as a central point of management for SAP IT infrastructures to perform these recurring tasks in a fully automated manner. Tools such as Ansible from Red Hat support the automation of SAP workloads (deployment, configurations, housekeeping) and are increasingly able to automate ongoing SAP operations (e.g., rights management).

In terms of licensing law, the CCoE—as the unit responsible for contract management—remains in a constant state of tension. The SAP price list for S/4 is complex, with over 300 lines and 200 pages, and creates uncertainty among existing customers. Even the move to the cloud (Rise with SAP) offers no guarantee against incorrect licensing. Existing SAP customers remain responsible for compliance. The CCoE must therefore develop calculations and strategies to manage the complexity and the associated technical, contractual, and commercial risks.

Critical gap in cloud ALM

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), which encompasses all methods and tools for managing the SAP landscape, is the central work area where the transformation is most evident. With SAP Cloud ALM (CALM), SAP has created the strategic successor solution to the established SolMan (SAP Solution Manager), primarily geared toward cloud-centric solutions such as S/4 Cloud, SuccessFactors, and Ariba.

However, a critical analysis shows that CALM is not currently a fully-fledged alternative to SolMan. While SolMan offered extensive functions for project management, monitoring, incident and change management, and test management, and was used centrally in large IT landscapes, CALM can currently only partially unleash its full service potential for on-premises or IaaS/private cloud environments. A serious shortcoming from the user's point of view is the lack of IT service management (ITSM) functions in CALM.

Although CALM supports test management and operational automation by providing mechanisms for automated response to fault situations and integrating with SAP Intelligent RPA and SAP Workflow Management (both on BTP), actual transport control is performed via external services such as the Cloud Transport Management Service. In addition, CALM does not provide the necessary analysis data for the adaptation or further development of Fiori apps, which is why external analysis tools are still required.

SAP for Me: The Self-Help Portal

SAP for Me is SAP's comprehensive self-service portal designed to help customers manage their SAP system landscape and licenses. For license managers, it offers functions such as API usage and performance monitoring and maintenance planning. However, it is important to note that this portal, which is an important IT tool for CCoE employees, repeatedly suffers from operational disruptions and outages. This leads to frustration and unproductive work in the CCoE. Given the future requirements of AI agents and SAP BDC, which require 100% availability, this lack of IT stability and reliability is sharply criticized by CCoE managers.

The acquisitions of SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX strategically position SAP in the areas of business process intelligence (BPI) and enterprise architecture (EA). SAP Signavio is primarily used for process transformation (business process redesign/reengineering). Process mining and AI-supported tools (such as task and communications mining) are used to perform a data-based, objective analysis of the actual process flows in the SAP system (as they really happen). Signavio thus identifies process cost drivers, complexity, and automation potential, which creates the basis for determining which processes need to be standardized and then tested.

SAP LeanIX, on the other hand, covers enterprise architecture. It is understood as a tool for transparency across the IT landscape and as a model for future architecture (in the course of S/4 and cloud ERP transformation). The critical analysis of these IT tools from a CCoE perspective focuses on the bipolar challenge: The tools are strategic instruments that are used at the beginning of the ALM process, whereas automation and monitoring are operational tools for later operation. Existing SAP customers must organize the simultaneity of process mining (Signavio) and automated testing in operation (CALM, basis automation).

Critics question the direct business and organizational value of LeanIX and Signavio if SAP does not provide a clear strategy for orchestrating these complex tools.

SAP has acquired WalkMe to strengthen user support. WalkMe, the Digital Adoption Platform, aims to increase productivity and reduce risks by identifying where friction occurs and providing tailored support and automation directly in users' workflows (across all applications involved, including non-SAP). WalkMe is designed to help users adopt new features quickly and efficiently, improving user acceptance—a critical success factor when introducing new SAP systems.

The S/4 base architecture requires specific measures in monitoring and automation. Migration to S/4 Hana requires a large number of integrations. IT systems are often no longer monolithic, but hybrid (on-premises, private cloud, public cloud, non-SAP systems). This fragmented environment makes holistic monitoring complex. Despite the increased risk, many existing SAP customers struggle with seamless real-time monitoring for their SAP landscapes. The CCoE must ensure seamless monitoring of interfaces and apps (such as Fiori) in order to proactively identify problems. Solutions such as New Relic offer full-stack observability and business process monitoring via SAP backend and Fiori.

Transition to the cloud and Rise with SAP: Despite the Rise contract, responsibilities remain with existing SAP customers under a new cloud operating model – a CCoE experiment, right? Source: SAP

Observe, Engage, Act

The trend is toward coupling monitoring and automation (observe, engage, act). The goal is self-healing during operation (e.g., automated disk expansion, restarting backups). Platforms such as Avantra use AIOps (artificial intelligence for IT operations) to simplify IT operations and accelerate problem solving in complex environments. However, Rise with SAP restricts access to SAP operations, which makes it difficult for standard automation tools to work, especially when end-to-end processes are being handled. Some legacy interfaces are no longer available. Workload automation solutions must therefore be Rise-compatible and, ideally, operate directly from within the SAP system (such as Honico BatchMan).

The concept of the SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) aims to create a semantically integrated database for the intelligent enterprise. The BDC and related technologies (Databricks, Snowflake as data lake solutions from hyperscalers) are revolutionizing data architecture, as they could potentially replace the classic data warehouse (DWH). This development has a massive impact on the work of the CCoE and SAP Basis:

Instead of monolithic data storage, distributed, hybrid environments are emerging that require data streaming and big data analytics. The CCoE must ensure governance of the numerous APIs necessary for data exchange between SAP Cloud ERP (S/4 Hana) and external cloud platforms. The CCoE must address the issue of data sovereignty. Licensing becomes complex when SAP data flows into external LLM models outside the SAP ecosystem.

In addition, the CCoE must have a comprehensive cloud exit strategy in place, as cloud providers, including SAP, could delete the data when contracts end. The CCoE thus becomes a strategic partner that must establish the connection between Hana and PAL (Predictive Analytics Library) data storage and the requirements of cloud analysis tools (Data Fabric, Data Hub).

The CCoE is the central organizational unit responsible for ensuring security governance and compliance (e.g., SoD, authorization management). Concerns about potential system breaches are justified among existing SAP customers. The biggest operational challenge is monthly SAP patch day management. SAP provides security notes, but manual checks of relevance and implementation of hotfixes are often inadequate due to a lack of resources.

SAP's vision of business transformation: From routine to supporting growth and new business models, but existing customers must take responsibility for proactive action.

Automation (e.g., through specialized software that collects, prioritizes, and initiates actions for SAP security notes) is the only way to ensure security in the long term and drastically reduce troubleshooting times. With SAP cloud solutions, responsibility for compliance and application security remains with the customer (CCoE) despite the Rise with SAP contract, even if the hyperscaler (e.g., Azure, AWS) or SAP itself guarantees a high level of infrastructure security. The CCoE must actively address compliance with laws (such as the GDPR) in the public cloud. The CCoE is also responsible for maintaining up-to-date and transparent authorization concepts; here too, SAP assumes no responsibility under a Rise contract.

In summary, it can be said that in the era of S/4 Hana and SAP Cloud ERP (new SAP Business Suite), the CCoE has become a strategic control center. It must preserve the role of the traditional CCC—the perfect, automated control of the SAP engine room—while adapting SAP's strategy by resolving the bipolar tension between strategic process design (Signavio and LeanIX) and operational IT stability (automation and monitoring).

Without this comprehensive service—in terms of business management through cost optimization and licensing clarity, organization through automation to reduce the workload on skilled personnel, and technology through seamless monitoring and robust cybersecurity—existing SAP customers will not be able to safely and successfully manage the complex S/4 conversion.