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Author's profile photo Sven Denecken

Co-innovation leads to co-validation (Part2) – the value lever of SAP S/4HANA

By Sven Denecken & Bert Schulze

Last time we talked about the paradigm shift of the subscription economy and the increasing relevance of co-innovation coming along with it. We also pointed out that Co-Innovation is a state of mind, not a single group or a single program.  You can find the 1st blog here: Co-innovation leads to co-validation (Part1) – the relevance of co-innvation


Today we will focus on Co-Innovation in action and talk about customer driven and validated value levers for the post-modern ERP solution SAP S/4HANA.


Complexity and habits are the beasts be domesticated

Co-Innovation always starts with the market and customer point of view. To stay competitive in today’s fast changing business environment, enterprises are urged to innovate, react and transform quickly. But many companies struggle due to high complexity. Within large organizations up to 80% of business time is spend on non-value-adding activities (BCG, Complexity Report), just because scattered and duplicated information create different versions of the truth and complicate the decision making process. If this issue would have not been tackled sooner or later, the problem will only get bigger.


According to our customers, the ideal contribution to solve the challenges is a digitized core. It gives back a company the much needed flexibility. With the help of the regained agility even the biggest enterprises is back where it can change, grow with disruptive technologies and build on innovations easily – without losing automation or scale.


The vision and strategy we co-innovated with our customers is to drive towards the perfect enterprise. To deliver on this mission, we worked with customers on use cases and scenarios to proof value creation in a digital, networked economy. Serving both masters, the classical IT approach of high automation and changing the company build on new disruptive technologies at the same time has been a gordian knot in the past.

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Here is where Co-Innovation with customer´s created a “System of Me” and help system user to focus on exceptions rather than daily business. See also http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-is-the-solution-not-built-for-me/


With all Co-Innovation customer engagements, once thing has been clear: if we are able to help companies with a new architecture to speed up the signal to action, it will change the effectiveness of companies´ dramatically.


The technical ingredients we bring to the table:

  • Embed analytics within the transactional system (merge OLAP&OLTP)
  • Design new role based dialogs
  • Recommend, steer & monitor execution in real time
  • deprecate extract, transfer, load processes and related delays

Summary and Outlook

With the help of Co-Innovation we started digitizing the core. Organizations are now able to respond to the new digital transformed world and make better use of disruptive technologies like cloud, business networks, big data or mobile.


The ability to adopt and change is the key to success and the Co-Innovation process will lead the way. Stay tuned for further blogs in this series, where we will get into some examples of Co-Innovation done right.


…and follow us for frequent updates @SDenecken and @BeSchulze





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