The calculation of TCO is not done without careful consideration of integration cost with your existing platform, and how to fill all the gaps and disruptions in your business processes that are caused by agnostic applications and an inflexible and insufficient architecture. More often than not, you leave a lot of money on the table due to the untapped potential of process optimization for a particular line of business or the entire company.
One of the objections frequently heard about SAP Business Suite is that it is a comprehensive solution offering where implementation projects take too long to deliver tangible value for a line of business. Ideally, customers are looking for a state-of-the-art implementation technology providing implementable steps that require only short timeframes of 1-3 months and that deliver tangible business value in 9-12 months.
To safeguard exactly that, and to fully leverage the horizontal and vertical integration capabilities of SAP Business Suite, SAP has introduced the concept of end-to-end processes. End-to-end processes enable seamless horizontal integration and therefore optimization of complex business processes across lines of business and even across company borders.
End-to-end processes integrate four different perspectives: Customer strategy, industry-specific requirements, the SAP product offering and how all this helps meet the business goals of a particular line of business. In the terminology of end-to-end processes, implementable steps describe the scope of an implementation project that has a clear business owner, which is the line of business addressed in this part of the process.
Finally, the scope of an implementable step is given through multiple realized processes, which refer to the realization of a business process in the software. Concrete implementation guides (e.g. IMG activities etc.) are associated at this stage.
All that is supported by a multitude of tightly integrated assets from the underlying SAP NetWeaver technology platform and the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio and complemented by a comprehensive portfolio of partner-built applications.
SAP has identified a set of seven core customer strategies, called themes, and a catalog of end-to-end processes, assigned to these customer strategies. A representation can be found at the Large Enterprise Executive View pages at sap.com. Apart from that, well-defined implementation content is available for end-to-end processes in SAP Solution Manager and in the Scenario Component Lists, accessible for SAP customers and partners on SAP Service Market Place.
The most detailed source of information which is accessible to everyone is the End-to-End Processes Wiki, available at the SAP Community Network platform. An overview graphic helps you find all relevant end-to-end processes assigned to a certain customer strategy and/or leading line of business. For each end-to-end process there is a separate page available with detailed information on its value proposition, involved business roles, implementable steps, enabled key business processes and their industry relevance.
As a special recommendation, you may carefully check the section “Adoption of SAP Technology Platform” that is part of every end-to-end process page. This section explains in detail how the multitude of assets from the SAP NetWeaver and the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio help implement business processes in the most efficient way, leveraging existing capabilities of the underlying technology platform.
As a complement for technology-savvy people such as system administrators, an in-depth graphical process flow across all involved system instances and a table-style release view with detailed information of all SAP Business Suite application component versions is provided.
