The challenges of a successful business transformation
Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch once remarked, “If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.” A lot of today’s leaders came to the same conclusion during the global COVID-19 pandemic. On their SAP S/4HANA transformation journeys, they faced and continue to face many questions:
- How do I identify where to start – what matters most?
- How do I get the support of my team members?
- How do I establish efficient communication throughout the process?
- How do I get organizational buy-in?
- How do I ensure strategic alignment?
- How do I gain a human- and experience-centric focus?
These challenges can massively derail your business transformation if they are not addressed promptly. What usually follows is a waste of budget, extended time to completion, reduced value of transformation projects, and possibly reduced customer and employee trust.
The key to success of complex business transformations is properly trained people, equipped with the right tools and placed in the environment needed to do the job right. However, none of these challenges can be properly resolved without defining the question you want to answer first.
Gaining insights into your processes
To help you navigate your path to gaining insights into your processes, we’ve summarized the most important steps for you.
SAP S/4HANA Transformation steps:
Step 1: Define the questions you want to answer.
The first step on your path to data visibility is to define your objective – the “problem statement.” Start the process by asking yourself this: What problem do I want to solve? For instance, perhaps your SAP S/4HANA transformation is currently stuck in the “prepare phase.” Knowing this, you could hypothesize that the different stakeholders of the initiative have a hard time identifying inefficiencies in existing processes. Could this be why the transformation is stuck?
To pin down the correct problem statement for your transformation project, you might want to ask all relevant stakeholders of your SAP S/4HANA transformation for their input.
Step 2: Create a strategy to collect the data.
Once you have established the objective of your initiative, you should set up a strategy to collect the data. A key part of this step is to determine which data you need: sales figures, quantitative (numeric) data, or qualitative (descriptive) data. Once you’ve collected the data, your main focus should be to get it ready for the analysis. This includes removing errors, duplicates, and unwanted data points, as well as structuring your data and filling in gaps.
Step 3: Analyze the data.
Let‘s start the analysis of your data. Keep in mind that the results should be beneficial for the different stakeholders of your SAP S/4HANA transformation – for example, business executives, process owners, and your transformation center. In the optimal case, your stakeholders are able not only to get insights rapidly but also to drill down to find issues that are holding them back and ideas on how to remove the bottlenecks.
Understanding your business processes is the key
In the end, a successful journey to SAP S/4HANA relies on you understanding your business processes. Using a software solution to follow the steps listed in this blog post can help you gain even faster insights into your processes. If you want to learn more about how to gain such insight, watch for our upcoming step-by-step guide. This guide is designed to highlight the steps you need to take and give you an understanding of how the SAP Signavio Process Insights solution helps you to get started with your SAP S/4HANA transformation.