What this book covers

This reference book on RISE with SAP is both an overview and a detailed look at several topics related to trend evolutions and business challenges, and how organizations can build business cases to justify the adoption of RISE with SAP. The book also deep dives into RISE with SAP as an offering, explaining its different services and the dos and don’ts involved to prepare for the right service delivery. The structure of this book will guide you from a strategic level to a practical level, explaining each of the levers and different components to be considered. On an ongoing basis, you can pick up different chapters as needed and still learn about all the required details by reading through a chapter. You’ll only need to jump to other chapters if more details are needed. However, we recommend that you start from the beginning and work through the chapters in order because some topics are built upon in later chapters to avoid the repetition of certain topics. Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 will provide you with the full context needed for the rest of the book.

To make the learnings more relevant and interesting we have introduced a business case: a hypothetical global electronics brand Spark4Life, facing unprecedented challenges due to the recent global upheavals. Every chapter helps you to go through the due diligence required for the pivotal decisions that need to be made at every stage of the transformation that Spark4Life sets out to take on. While doing so, we have given numerous examples and use cases helping solve the business challenges step by step. To ultimately bring it all together in the last few chapters to help you see how all the decisions (related to people, process and technology) taken in the previous chapters has helped turn the tide for Spark4Life and to reveal how the holistic transformation is greater than sum of its parts.

This book is organized into three parts; here’s a quick overview of each:

In Part I, Overview, you will understand the need for innovation and the patterns evolving in the market both pre- and post-pandemic, along with the risks that businesses and clients need to prepare to face to survive in the market. We will then look at persona-based journeys for CXOs and businesses to identify how different LOBs need to evolve and how to manage expectations throughout this evolution. Furthermore, this part will set the context of how RISE with SAP, along with the industry solutions built around it, can help you achieve the objectives and the vision that you have initially set out. This part includes the following chapters:

• Chapter 1, Truth and Dare: The CXO Challenges

This chapter provides an overview of various challenges faced by the CXOs in terms of the current market, financial aspects, regulation compliance, evolving technology, evolving customer perspectives, operational aspects, organizational aspects, and environmental aspects. You are given a glimpse of each of these ambits and how they impact the business operating model, with examples.

• Chapter 2, Faith of Four: Vision of the Masters

Chapter 2 builds on the challenges mentioned in Chapter 1 by walking you through the levers of change and various decisions to be made by CXOs to overcome these challenges in the context of a business transformation. This chapter goes through the perspective of CEOs, CFOs, CTOs/CIOs, and CSOs. It then sets the context of actual business challenges and the key objectives to address in both the short and long term. It then takes you through the typical issues within the landscape of an example organization and the different steps to go through to achieve what is needed, applying different levers such as S/4HANA adoption, the journey to the cloud using RISE with SAP, process mining/discovery, best practices, industry solutions, the relevance of data migration, and the adoption of different intelligent workflows, along with automation.

• Chapter 3, Eureka Moment: The Missing Link

In Chapter 3, we expand upon one of the key components mentioned in Chapter 2 – what RISE with SAP is, why RISE with SAP is useful, and the different options available within RISE with SAP, along with other alternate options beyond RISE with SAP. You will understand in detail how RISE with SAP as an offering can address business challenges and help achieve an organization’s vision and objective, enabling value-driven outcomes. We will also dispel various myths around RISE with SAP to ensure that the right decisions can be made along the way. We will wrap up with a sample journey map for how a customer organization has evolved over different stages by leveraging RISE with SAP.

Next is Part II, The Journey with RISE with SAP. This part includes the following chapters:

• Chapter 4, Intelligent Enterprise and Sustainable Design

Chapter 4 provides you with details about what steps can be considered by CXOs and how organizations can use the tools and services offered by RISE with SAP to help pave the roadmap toward becoming a sustainable enterprise. The chapter walks you through the basics of BTP, the design principles to follow from a shift-left POV, insight-driven approaches, the adoption of a clean core, and sustainable, intelligent workflow-based solutions.

• Chapter 5, The Cloud with a Silver Lining: Busting the Myth – Part 1

Chapter 5 walks you through all the dimensions and parameters to be considered when building a business case for both the adoption of S/4HANA as part of the RISE with SAP offering and the different services under consideration. You will also get more information about the different industry trends to consider, as a follow-up to Chapter 1, and how RISE with SAP addresses these. You will then get insights into the architectural patterns of RISE with SAP, along with what is possible and what is not possible with RISE with SAP. We will wrap up by providing possible alternatives to RISE with SAP in case you are not yet ready for the journey to the cloud or the move toward S/4HANA but are still looking for managed services temporarily.

• Chapter 6, The Cloud with a Silver Lining: Busting the Myth – Part 2

Chapter 6, as a continuation of the previous chapter, dives deeper into the different types of variants available within RISE with SAP and what they mean to you. The chapter then walks through the roles and responsibilities made available by SAP, defined as Standard, Additional, and Optional services, allowing you to make the right decision around the scope of services to select. You will also be given information on how to handle rollouts and upgrades as part of RISE with SAP and how daily life will change in terms of the application management services within the RISE with SAP offering. We will wrap up the chapter by introducing the Cloud Application Service (CAS) packages offered by SAP as part of RISE with SAP and how they complement the Standard, Additional, and Optional roles and responsibilities mentioned earlier.

• Chapter 7, Back to the Drawing Board: Reimagined Processes

Chapter 7 provides an overview of how the design inputs across the different levers mentioned so far will influence the overall design and enable you to simulate and model new processes for future customer and employee experiences, changing existing processes and considering and introducing new processes. The chapter provides insight into how SAP Signavio Journey Modeler, for instance, can be used to design the user experience (UX), along with an organization’s operating model and the relevant workflows. You will also see how the data within the landscape can be leveraged to generate value-driven insights for your business. You will then get information about how these insights can be consumed to orchestrate relevant, intelligent workflows that can eventually solve the challenges that we have previously identified.

• Chapter 8, The Exodus: Data That Matters

Chapter 8 provides you with details on how important it is to plan your data migration to a target S/4HANA instance based on the type of migration activity planned as part of the move to the cloud (RISE with SAP). The chapter also provides an overview of why data governance and data quality are important aspects when it comes to safeguarding your investment in AI and intelligent workflow-based solutions. We finally wrap up the chapter by looking into SAP Activate Methodology and the adoption patterns available when it comes to data migration.

We’ll conclude this book with Part III, The Way Forward: Art of Possible, which includes the following chapters:

• Chapter 9, The Pilot: High-Stakes

Chapter 9 brings forward all the practices and best practices mentioned so far in the book to enable you to understand how these can help accelerate your transition toward becoming an intelligent and sustainable enterprise. You will be provided details on how the implementation/migration effort can be shifted left using the ready-to-use content from SAP and its partners. You will also be informed about the key dimensions of the UX strategy to be considered to achieve the desired business outcomes. Finally, we will wrap up the chapter by talking about the change and release management to be considered when deploying a pilot for either a region or a representative business unit before proceeding with a global rollout, which is termed “all in.”

• Chapter 10, All In: A Leap of Faith

Chapter 10 is about how to convert a successful pilot implementation into a global rollout, considering multiple localization- and regulation compliance-related requirements to make sure the solution is globally ready, including those of various processes that might be unique to certain countries. This chapter will provide you with insights into the factors to be considered when defining the instance strategy and the rollout strategy.

• Chapter 11, Innovation Unleashed: A Hunger Game

Chapter 11 takes you beyond the initial implementation, providing information on why continuous innovation/improvement beyond the initial iteration is important for an organization to continue to evolve. This chapter will provide insight into how the cultural shift toward innovation within an organization plays a key role in this cycle. It will then provide a walk-through of the importance of enterprise agility and scalability as the key aspects to support an emerging operating model as trends progress. We will then explore the Web 3.0 and Industry 4.0 models, along with their importance to organizations driving intelligent solutions. We will wrap up the chapter with information on different business and commercial models to consider.

• Chapter 12, Digital Supremacy: The Path to Sustainable Growth

In the final chapter of the book, we will summarize the findings from each of the chapters, along with the ongoing vision organizations can plan to differentiate themselves. You will also understand the steps you need to take to achieve the vision you have laid out and what to consider at different stages.