The pace of digital transformation is only accelerating as the business world continues to seek ways to improve business outcomes and competitiveness in a tough global market. Solutions like SAP S/4HANA Cloud public edition are coming up to meet the current and future needs of enterprises and are playing a pivotal role in driving efficiencies and business success.
The SAP S/4HANA Cloud public edition is a ready-to-run cloud ERP that delivers the latest industry best practices and continuous innovation. This intelligent enterprise platform is powered with analytics, AI, and machine learning capabilities and helps organizations adopt new business models, orchestrate internal and external resources at speed, and manage business change with ease.
The SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud is hosted by SAP and does not need enterprises to install it on their own servers. This Public Cloud has various modules that support different business processes such as financial accounting, sales and distribution, production planning, supply chain and human capital management, CRM, and asset and plant maintenance, etc.
SAP HANA public cloud offers great support to enterprises as they digitally transform with real-time analytics, advanced modeling capabilities, integration with other systems, and greater security. It helps enterprises run with industry best practices while allowing them to grow without limits and added complexity.
The benefits of SAP HANA Public Cloud are amply clear. Organizations should also note that the readymade modules and industry best practices need to be adopted as it comes standard with cloud solutions. There can be few customization considering local or specific processes to the relevant business which can be delivered SAP BTP Platform.
Therefore, having a cloud mindset becomes a critical contributor to implementation success. Having such a mindset ensures that organizations don’t fall short of the ultimate goal of improved agility and efficiency when adopting cloud data platforms.
What Is Cloud Mindset?
Migrating to the cloud is not just a technology or process challenge. It is a significant change that starts with adopting the right mindset that ensures the right planning and implementation strategy while accounting for all the variables at play.
Having a cloud mindset is a prerequisite for the successful transformation of current and/or future business processes since it helps in charting a clear direction for successful implementation.
Traditional legacy processes do not move fast enough in a highly customer-centric and digital world. Evaluating the cloud mindset for implementations of cutting-edge solutions like SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud becomes crucial since it helps organizations become more responsive to customer demands.
The Importance of a Cloud Mindset
Solutions like SAP S/4HANA solve this challenge and offer a much faster time to value by using a guided implementation process, fast technical setup, and role-based, intuitive interface for everyone who uses them. But the success of this journey begins with developing a cloud mindset.
A cloud mindset helps organizations adopt simplified and standardized business processes. More profoundly, it:
Gives them a checklist and an assessment to evaluate where they stand on the cloud maturity index.
Assesses organizational readiness for the cloud subscription business model.
Creates awareness for organizational change management.
Determining the Cloud Mindset
A cloud mindset is not an amorphous concept but is rooted in data. The cloud mindset assessment asks five key questions which help determine adoption readiness, functional scope, and the implementation roadmap for SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud. The cloud mindset score is on a scale of 1 to 5, with 3 being neutral.
The Number of Applications Running on the Cloud
The first step in assessing the cloud mindset for SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud is to evaluate the number of applications that your organization wants to run on the cloud. Those enterprises that have most of their applications running business-critical functions such as core business processes in Finance, HR, Procurement, and Professional Services on the cloud have a better cloud mindset than those running few to no applications on the cloud.
Identifying the Desired Pace of Innovation
Identifying the desired pace of innovation of the organization is another key measurement area to determine the cloud mindset. The S/4HANA Public Cloud allows enterprises to redefine work on the fly and helps them to add customers, markets, and products without adding complexity to their IT infrastructure.
The built-in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), robotic process automation (RPA), analytics, and ready-to-go APIs with supporting tools and documentation allow easy integration and drive innovation.
The enterprises that want rapid innovation and see themselves innovating approximately four times or more annually stand higher on the cloud mindset score.
Customized or Standardized SLAs
Assessing the willingness to accept standardized SLAs also influences the cloud mindset score. Some organizations demand customized SLAs from their cloud vendors to meet their organizational requirements. The SLAs define the quality, availability, and performance of the service, as well as the metrics, penalties, and remedies for non-compliance.
S/4HANA Public Cloud offers comprehensive yet standardized SLAs and covers all key aspects of performance, security, and governance. Enterprises leaning towards the standardized commercial SLAs here score better on the cloud mindset assessment.
Willingness to Handover IT Governance
IT governance is a critical aspect to cover when adopting any new technology or solution. The SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud identifies all the restrictions, opportunities, and challenges for the business with Cloud ERP.
Enterprises that want to have a mix of both in-house and SAP IT governance rank in the middle meridian. Those willing to hand over the IT governance to SAP have a higher score, and those wanting to keep it in-house are lower in the cloud mindset ranking.
Willingness To Rethink Business Processes
Blueprinting and customizing business processes have been the hallmarks of traditional ERP implementations. These are also more effort-intensive and time-consuming and can impede organizational agility. These are also some of the key reasons why traditional ERP implementations become lengthy.
Dated business processes also need to be constantly optimized to meet the growing business demands. High levels of customizations over time can make future upgrades complex, time and effort intensive, and expensive. This flattens the curve of value creation.
Those enterprises who want to simply migrate their business processes to the cloud rank lower in the cloud mindset score. This is because upgrading and implementing these processes into the cloud ecosystem becomes complex. These also need to be reconfigured to leverage the power of new tech such as APIs, AI, machine learning, etc.
Enterprises that are willing to take the greenfield implementation approach rank better in the cloud mindset scorecard. This is because legacy processes amass complex workflows and heavily customized code which becomes complex to manage over time. Greenfield implementations result in lower total-cost-of-ownership and faster time-to-value. The higher the willingness towards Greenfield migrations, the higher the cloud mindset score.
Adding up the values from these data points provides the cloud mindset score of the customer. A score ranging from 5 to 12 shows a low cloud mindset, 12-18 shows a moderate mindset, while 18-25 shows a mature cloud mindset.
To Sum It Up
Once the organization’s cloud mindset score is identified, it becomes easier to create the estimates for the product features and roadmap, do the product-fit analysis, and identify the integrations and APIs, the data migration needs, and the delivery capabilities required. Assessing the implementation team’s knowledge, experience, and availability factor deeply in driving successful implementations.
SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud provides a complete suite of services needed to navigate this modern business world. It enables IT and business to work as a joint force and enables businesses to leverage new technologies and create broader business value.
A cloud mindset becomes essential because it helps in creating a clear direction for innovation, automation, and simplification of processes to increase the speed of action. A mature cloud mindset allows enterprises to:
Leverage SAP standardized best practices.
Use white-listed APIs for necessary integrations.
Ensure adherence to local laws and regulatory needs.
Standardize business processes while creating a solid operational base.
Connect with us to see where you stand on the cloud mindset assessment today and kickstart your journey into SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud.