Business Process Matters Most of All

Every business, no matter how large, is really the sum of its business processes, which are executed on a daily basis. A company has have a stellar reputation and brand-value, but if processes start to break down, it is only a matter of time before that reputation plummets. It takes years to build trust and only moments to lose it.

Niche vendors sell solutions to help with challenges, but companies that buy these solutions eventually pay an extraordinary price. It is easy to get lured into yet another purchase — the problem to solve seems small enough to use a bandaid to fix it. The easy-to-ignore truth is that eventually, all these little fixes, all these new apps, must work together to achieve maximum value to the enterprise. The complexity of having 500 or 1,000 or 1,500 different applications and technologies working together to serve your customers and interface with your suppliers creates a huge friction cost.

Systems Integrators such as Deloitte, Accenture, EY, Capgemini, Tata, Infosys, Cognizant, HCL, Wipro and others earn billions annually to “integrate.” It is a thriving business.

Here’s the single most-important truth: Unless the niche solution can be “operationalized” — fused into the actual daily business process — it will only be of limited value to the company.

SAP, through the technologies within our Business Technology Platform, offers a precisely engineered path to operationalize new capabilities and make them part of the business process. From Order-to-Cash to Hire-to-Retire to Procure-to-Pay to many more, your technology must become part of the fabric that people use in a seamless manner.

My easiest to understand example is stand-beside analytics and dashboards. If you have to move and transform data, load it into another database on another server, to then serve the dashboard to constituents, it will never become as relevant and real-time to your business process as using (1) modern analytics that (2) combine real-time data where it resides in the enterprise.  SAP has engineered this scenario to flawlessly become part of your processes. Part (1) is accomplished with SAP Analytics Cloud while (2) uses the unique power of HANA to effectively federate data from around your enterprise.

Lots of companies will try to sell you a stand-beside solution. Only SAP can effectively operationalize new capabilities directly into your business processes.

Regards,

Bob