This path will not be an easy one

The other day in the "Pittsburgh" meeting room: an appointment with the CIO of a global player in mechanical engineering. The IT boss describes the status quo of his process and system landscape. He reaches for the conference cookies and crumbles them. We discuss.

Nineteen ERP systems, including seven SAP systems, on which three business units and 80 legal entities conduct their business. The processes, too, are a patchwork quilt: overarching, inter-company and local versions, sometimes more, sometimes less close to the SAP standard.

Uniform governance, global master data management? Not a thing. And now: Board initiative. A new, uniform process platform for digitization is needed. Global perspective.

More control competence and transparency in the Group. Consolidation of ERP systems. Harmonization of business processes - but with a sense of proportion. Enabling digital innovations. And: Don't we need S/4 for this?

Not an isolated case, a typical situation.

Many surveys confirm what we are experiencing: Major change projects of this kind, the combination of digital transformation and globalization, are the focus of many industrial companies. A digital business platform, the "One Global Corporation on SAP S/4 Hana" - that is the formula for the future.

What belongs to it?

Digital end-to-end business processes: a template-based enterprise solution, rolled out worldwide. Speed is important: a short, efficient path is to be found into a newly consolidated, global system landscape.

This includes the move of the SAP ERP platforms to S/4: to the new digital core, according to SAP-speak. It forms the core of a hybrid architecture, completed by complementary line-of-business solutions and proprietary solutions from the cloud.

Building on this, the aim is to drive the development of disruptive solutions: Innovate, create new business processes and models, agile, in the digital enterprise garage. One of the main drivers for more speed.

The road to a globally consolidated, digital process platform is long and often rocky. Many aspects have to be taken into account.

What are the building blocks of One Global Corporation?

First, the One Strategy: How do I arrive at a business-compliant process and SAP system strategy for digitization in the shortest possible time?

Necessary for this: target picture, corporate roadmap, functional changeover approach, technical migration path. We will talk about how to successfully combine the topics of transition to S/4 and delivery of the One Global Corporation.

Future-proof business processes are a topic. It is about building a global SAP template under S/4. One Process means designing digital end-to-end processes in the new Digital Core and beyond.

Many CIOs ask themselves: How do I design the extended, digitally networked customer supply chain, how do I integrate processes in hybrid landscapes, how do I supply digital scenarios in the IoT environment?

Perspective of the SAP community

Another task: creating the basis for data-driven business models. No one will be able to avoid enterprise-wide data management. This implies that the quality of the master and transaction data is assessed and that these are prepared and made available globally by suitable means in terms of organization, processes and technology.

In the Landscape area, the focus is on the goal of successfully managing the transition to a harmonized and consolidated S/4 system landscape. In addition, there are other fields such as One Digital Architecture, the globalization of One Solution, One Finance and One Logistics with S/4, which we will highlight in this column.

From the consultant's point of view, reflecting the customer's perspective, i.e. always also from the perspective of the SAP community. There are enough exciting topics. The start has been made with this.