SAP Services: Putting Skin in the Game
Let’s say you’re interested in the impact SAP HANA might have on your ability to deal with the complex data your company has, and despite all the information you have no idea where or how to begin. Let’s say your organization has its field using mobile applications and devices, and you think you might be able to do more than just support sales – but where can you do something with mobile capabilities that would have real and strategic impact? Or let’s say you’re getting market pressure from to innovate to stay ahead of competition while driving down costs, to take a landscape that your team has worked long and hard over the years to keep it stable, supporting the myriad of business applications your company uses – and the idea of messing with something that works gives you night sweats- It looks like a dead lock situation? Well we go the key to unlock it for you
These are simplified scenarios that we’re seeking to address with the launch of two new professional services offerings on October 11, 2012 – the Innovation Stewardship for Next-Generation Businesses, and the Lifecycle Management for IT Operational Efficiency services. Both offerings look to SAP Consulting to provide a greater level of engagement, focused on the strengths and unique perspective SAP consultants bring with a clear focus on helping customers achieve a clear goal. The Innovation Stewardship for Next-Generation Businesses focuses on strategically identifying and prioritizing SAP innovations in a top down view; Lifecycle Management for IT Operational Efficiency is the foundation for innovation. It focuses on how readying IT to accommodate ongoing innovation, meanwhile optimizing it to lower the cost of operations. Here’s what these respective offerings bring.
Expert Guidance by an Innovation Steward
A one-year long exclusive engagement, Innovation Stewardship for Next-Generation Businesses begins with an assigned innovation steward, a senior, highly experienced consultant – you can view it like a hotel concierge or a wine steward – who engages with C-level executives and heads of lines of business. The innovation steward leads you through a structured, approach designed to help identify, prioritize and validate an innovation strategy, what we’re calling an “innovation highway”.
To get underway, the innovation steward will lead a customer through some of the options to discover use cases – for instance, discovery services or a design-based thinking workshop. And after this stage, they can choose up to three from a range of high value innovation assessment and roadmap services, leading to a custom-tailored prototype proving the feasibility. It should be very clear from this point how the customer can begin moving forward on their plan. Because this service addresses the business strategy elements, creating a long-term plan specific for the customer’s business – It’s not about IT – this offering brings the enterprise to a new level of competitiveness and business value.
IT Readiness with the Lifecycle Management for IT Operational Efficiency
Whereas the Innovation Stewardship for Next-Generation services is about strategy, Lifecycle Management for IT Operational Efficiency is about IT – helping to execute IT operational task, supported by IT out tasking, achieve operational stability while reducing complexity. An assigned “efficiency advisor” works with the customer as part of the mult-year engagement with the understanding that innovation is an ongoing process. This single point of contact helps to create an operations efficiency roadmap that includes the “build” and “post-go-live” phases. This offering allows customers to out-task their IT operations to SAP with a fixed SLA. The Efficiency Advisor also tracks and measures improvements in costs and performance against KPIs to provide tangible results including reduced complexity, more scalable IT infrastructure, and improved IT-enabled business agility.
Customers who engage both services will be underway for end-to-end innovation, creating a strategic approach towards identifying where their business can benefit from SAP innovations while ensuring their IT landscape is able to support and make best use of these innovations and maximize success impact. Both services were launched October 11, and will be represented at SAP TechEd Las Vegas (15-17 Oct) and SAPPHIRE NOW Madrid (13-15 Nov).
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