Scale at Speed with S/4HANA Business Transformation

Scale at Speed™ is Tech Mahindra's promise to help enterprises transform at speed, bringing agility, resilience, and efficiency to their businesses.

This blog continues the discussion from Scale at Speed with S/4HANA Business Transformation from Strategy to Execution, which explored strategies for effectively scaling S/4HANA implementations to derive value by bridging the gap between business strategy and technology execution.

Building on that foundation, this blog explores the transformation challenges and outlines how businesses can accelerate S/4HANA implementation for key business and IT transformation levers.

By focusing on these levers, businesses can overcome the challenges of implementing SAP S/4HANA while ensuring that the technology aligns with overarching business objectives in a rapidly changing environment.

SAP S/4HANA Transformation Challenges

The major business and IT transformation challenges in migrating to S/4HANA include:

• Complex Legacy IT Landscape: The legacy landscape consists of many ERP and non-ERP systems, third-party applications with custom solutions, and country-specific localizations. This complexity hinders visibility into business capabilities, end-to-end processes, data flows, and interface inventory.
• Build Enterprise Shared Vision: Insufficient data often results in the inability to build a robust business case. The application dependencies and data transformation concerns may deter stakeholders from committing to extensive transformation exercises required for SAP S/4HANA transformation success. ERP transformation requires clearly defined business objectives and transformation roadmaps across business functions. It needs an enterprise-wide shared vision for successful implementation through cross-functional teams’ ownership and accountability.
• Future State Architecture: ERP transformation necessitates mapping, optimizing, and implementing new application deployment models with reliable future state landscapes. Without adequate governance and guiding principles, organizations might risk making uninformed decisions.
• Insufficient Change Adoption and Management: The IT landscape is always in flux as application lifecycles change with business requirements. Introducing a new ERP system without tracking dependencies and monitoring processes and data flows can lead to low adoption by business users.

Key Levers for Business and IT Transformation

To thrive in volatile markets and geographies, organizations must become more agile to adapt to rapid, unexpected changes. The key transformation levers are:

Migration Objectives

A successful business transformation requires a clear understanding of an organization’s business and operating model, opportunities related to business agility, adapting to market demands, and long-term goals.

• To achieve optimal results, a comprehensive bottom-up analysis utilizing ERP system diagnostic tools, evaluating the as-is process, and conducting value stream analysis is essential.
• The discovery phase and pre-projects help clarify migration objectives and align technology decisions to validate the latest SAP offerings for business needs.
• Enterprise architecture frameworks and tools provide a system-based approach to managing complexities at scale and maintaining a continuous innovation cycle.

Business Process Management

Organizations looking to migrate to SAP S/4HANA transformation must ensure agility, future readiness, and scalable operations. At the same time, they should preserve differentiation throughout the solution's lifetime, with a focus on clean extensibility on the digital platform.

• Business process management allows organizations to adapt swiftly to enable required capabilities to deliver business outcomes, whether launching new products and services, responding to customer needs, or complying with regulations.
• A well-designed ERP capability map identifies and prioritizes areas where technology should support business objectives, ensuring maximum value.

Business Transformation Execution

A well-aligned program structure ensures effective collaboration between business and IT teams. The speed of transformation depends on clear accountabilities and stakeholder engagement. This explains transformation needs and brings together processes, data, and business users.

• Early demos of the solution validate expected business goals, anticipate challenges, and provide input for pain points, thereby increasing confidence in the final products.
• Agile frameworks enable teams to work iteratively and adapt quickly to changing conditions. This encourages a culture of continuous improvement, where feedback is actively used to refine processes and solutions, ensuring the organization remains responsive and customer-centric.
• Business transformation tools expedite the time-to-market for S/4HANA implementation. Integrating SAP Signavio, SAP LeanIX, SAP Cloud ALM, and SAP Business Technology Platform, including SAP Build, accelerates execution through a holistic project implementation tracking and monitoring experience.

TechM Offerings for S/4HANA Transformation to Enable Scale at Speed

Tech Mahindra offers a host of solutions to meet the transformation challenges for large enterprise customers. Some of the key offerings are:

• Enterprise Architecture for Business Transformation: We provide a roadmap for business capability modelling, application portfolio management using EA tools, and architectural governance framework & guiding principles. Our offering establishes interdependencies in the interim state to manage the complexity of transition architecture scenarios for the deployment period. This includes assessment tools for S/4HANA discovery and establishing business KPI benchmarking against competitors to provide a future state vision and benefits to move to S/4HANA.
• Industrialized Deployments: We offer accelerated S/4HANA transformation services with micro-vertical alignment of industry and intelligent enterprise solutions enabling end-to-end process improvement, competitive advantage, and company-wide digital transformation.
• Integrated Change Management: We offer digital integrated change engagement (a proprietary tool), which integrates change assessments into a web-based platform. This allows for real-time dashboards, feedback loops, and access to change metrics along the path.
• Technical Debt Management: We offer SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) Development & Integration Assessment Framework to evaluate and plan the extension and developments over SAP BTP. We enable transformational opportunity by providing a clean digital core through rapid prototyping, developing custom applications, and allowing the BTP Enterprise agreement model to scale up and down the application demand by increasing & decreasing the assigned entitlement at the sub-account level. 
• GenAI Offerings: We leverage cutting-edge GenAI offerings to push the boundaries of innovation by developing AI solutions tailored to specific needs and requirements of business functions.

Rise Together for a Sustainable Future

Focusing on the business and IT transformation levers allows businesses to take a holistic approach to scaling up ERP transformation quickly by improving business processes and systems.

At Tech Mahindra, we help enterprises transform for resilience and relevance with solutions powered by next-gen tech, enabling successful customer transformations.

Successful S/4HANA business transformation, from strategy to execution, enables organizations to gain new business direction, launch new products and service offerings to market much faster, and ultimately lead to a competitive advantage. It also gives organizations the necessary agility to adapt to change continuously, ensuring their viability in the future's changing landscape.

Scale at Speed™ is our promise to be a trusted partner and collaborator across industries. We work together with our customers to chart new frontiers and be the catalyst that enables innovation and delivers true transformation.