Digital Transformation Should be Led by Business Requirements

As more SAP legacy ERP users embark on their digital transformation journey before 2027, they face two crucial questions. The first is whether their organization can adopt digital transformation, and the second, related one, is how quickly they can complete this adoption process given the tight timeline of their journey.

In the final part of an interview with SAPinsider, Bimal Soni, Senior Vice President of enterprise applications at Resolve Tech Solutions (RTS), gives insights into how organizations can answer these key questions and why implementation partnerships matter.

The journey to digital transformation

According to Soni, an organization’s digital transformation journey begins with three key questions:

• What will I get for the investment I’m making towards this migration?
• How long will this take, and what does the implementation roadmap look like?
• How much will this journey cost, and is my organization ready for it? If not, how do I align my entire organization with our transformation objectives?

“Many times, when leaders are reviewing the information available in the public domain or if they talk to the partners, they hear things like ‘Oh, you need to go to SAP S/4HANA, you need to go to the cloud’,” Soni observes. “They don’t hear that this will be a multi-step journey that has to be made at their own pace.”

He adds that RTS allows customers to make the digital transformation journey according to their budgets and organizational preparedness. The company does this by breaking down the digital transformation roadmap for organizations.

Two steps to migration

Soni elaborates, “We give our customers two options. The first one is a one-step process where a customer transitions from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA in the cloud in one phase. This is possible and practical for some customers.”

For customers who don’t find a direct migration to the cloud possible or practical, “we give them the two-step process, wherein the first step is to migrate their on-premises ECC system to the cloud. In the second step, we transition from ECC on the cloud to S/4HANA.”

He adds that these journeys can also be broken down into multiple phases according to the customers’ ability to execute the project within the organization. “So, the path forward for them is to look at your journey, plan it, break it down into smaller deliverables that the organization is ready to adopt, and then execute those steps in the journey,” Soni says.

Why advisory services matter

Soni recommends advisory services for customers who are still unsure about how to complete their digital transformation to the cloud. He notes that migratory advisory is primarily centered around helping customers define their transformation journey and customize it according to their geographical or business needs.

“We also believe that migratory advisory services can help customers to align their organization to the digital transformation journey,” he adds.

For RTS, the migratory advisory service consists of the following deliverables, according to Soni:

• It starts with understanding the company’s business objectives for three to five years.
• This leads to the second step, which is to examine the organization’s current system and architecture and its capability gaps and pain points.
• RTS then conducts a workshop to help align the entire organization using a design thinking principle. The workshop engages executive leadership, operational managers, and end users.

“This process helps us to deliver the enterprise architecture of the new system that is aligned with the company’s business objectives, according to the priorities defined by the three stakeholder groups within the organization,” Soni explains. “Once the primary stakeholders are aligned [in their thinking and objectives], it is easy to spread [that alignment] to the rest of the organization.”

He adds that ERP advisory services help customers plan and prioritize their transformation journeys based on business capability rather than technical transformation.

Soni concludes: “My only recommendation is that customers take that first step and start having conversations with a trusted partner. Ask for a plan, and make sure that the business executives and other stakeholders are engaged in defining the journey so that it doesn’t become a technical transformation but one that is led by the business requirements.”