Tasks and challenges for consulting companies

Tasks and challenges for consulting companiesTo be as innovative as Apple or Google, SAP alone now introduces innovations in six-month cycles. To avoid disruptions, the core, i.e. financial accounting, human resources, order management or factory planning, remains in place. Companies as well as consultants have to filter exactly which technical innovations make sense for whom and when.

One of these new products is Leonardo, for example, which SAP is using to provide applications and microservices for the IoT, machine learning, blockchain - a continuously expandable list of data sets - and Big Data analytics.

Accelerator packages are available to match. The accelerators help companies to achieve their business goals with the help of SAP Leonardo. The price for the various accelerator packages varies depending on the business area and scope of functions.

The scope of services also includes design thinking workshops as well as the necessary cloud licenses and the development of prototypes through to the final solution.

Other innovations include so-called API programming interfaces, additional functions in existing solutions, and better consulting services from the teams at SAP Digital Interconnect, formerly SAP Mobile Services.

On the online marketplace, the SAP App Center, partners can offer their own products and access solutions, microservices and plug-ins. Consulting firms are also currently looking at the Hana Enterprise Cloud (HEC).

This is a managed service with which SAP delivers the infrastructure and simultaneously provides and controls the required applications. With the Managed Private Cloud, customers and consulting firms provide Hana applications, SAP ERP, CRM and BW, among others.

With HEC, the customer can minimize its capital expenditure and depreciation and thus has resources to fall back on consulting services. Companies have taken their first steps into the cloud in the area of recruiting, for example, with SuccessFactors.

This applies above all to core HR processes, talent management, HR analytics, and even collaboration. SAP SuccessFactors offers an HCM suite that enables companies to network employees, processes and physical objects.

Incidentally, companies conspicuously often introduce the cloud in the HR area, as they are less differentiated from each other here and the market can be saturated with "one" solution. Basically, the entire SAP area faces the challenge of finding suitable experts, promoting employees in a targeted manner, and boosting networking among themselves. Support comes from Learning Management, the learning platform in the cloud.

But it is not only the demands on staffing that are increasing. For consulting companies, the cloud movement means that the range of tasks for specialist departments is also increasing. In the future, they will have to take on more and more responsibility, as managed cloud approaches focus more on processes than comparable on-premise solutions.

The main activity of the consulting firms is primarily the definition of processes and their implementation. In addition, the board and management in particular must be convinced of the HR cloud strategy. Experience shows that individual managers show little interest in changing anything in their applications.

The governance model can be a solution to this problem: It creates the necessary commitment for a uniform approach. Roles, goals and responsibilities are clearly defined so that all decision-makers are committed to the new model.

The new EU General Data Protection Regulation is also a challenge. It regulates how the personal data of all EU citizens is to be protected against unauthorized or unlawful processing.

The regulation significantly changes the way data is handled within the European Union and the European Economic Area. Compliance requirements define the liability for data controllers and data processors, for example for the DaaS service Digital Consumer Insight, which provides insight into consumer behavior at physical points of sale.