#S4HANA Cloud use case series: 3 – The new value lever: Agility

Welcome back to the third part of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud use case series. In the last two weeks we took a look at two of three dimensions of value levers that are important in the digital economy. In order to make the digital transformation of businesses a success, it is necessary to understand what has changed and what is essential going forward. As we have already discussed the “efficiency” dimension in the first blog and the “effectiveness” dimension in the second blog, we will focus on the last dimension “agility” today.

Understanding the new value levers

Let us begin with a short recap of the three dimensions of value levers that help with the reduction of complexity in a classical enterprise core.

Generally spoken there are three dimensions that drive every organization, and measure the impact of the digitized core on the organization and indicate how much the processes has developed, to the positive or negative. These dimensions are:

• Efficiency
• Effectiveness
• Agility

We examined the value levers of the “efficiency” dimension, “accelerate execution”, “automate process steps” and “digital out-tasking”, as well as the value levers of the “effectiveness” dimension, “Speed up signal to action”, “de-layer processes” and Raise process intelligence”. Now let us examine the value levers of the last dimension.

Dimension 3: Increase agility

With the agility, the target is to have an Organization flexibility and the capability to adopt change fast, and in other words, how long does it take to adopt change.

In this dimension, we will have 3 value levers:

Increase process flexibility.

Flexibility can be defined as the ability to respond to a change in the environment, without disappearing or being replaced.

If we transfer that to business processes we now talk about the ability of a particular process to adapt to changes.

This can be an easy example where a Line of Business sees the need to change an existing process so that the business goals are better achievable. Or for instance a report that worked pretty well in the past is not good enough anymore.

Changes like this were only possible through effort and deep involvement of many people in the past. And it simply took time. Time that we don´t have any more.

Now with the new ingredient of the digitized core, processes or reports or patterns or alerts can be adopted on the fly and on any device.

Increase organizational agility

This describes the ability to easily change the organizational structure without having to deploy huge IT project. In an ever changing environment, the task is simple: How can I build up the reality in my systems as good as possible. I want the discrepancy between physical world and system to be small.

Usually the representation of the structure of an organization within an IT system is lagging behind actual structure, since organizational changes have actually immediate effect.

Especially when dealing with company mergers or demerges, affected processes and structures will be adjusted within less time.

With today’s capabilities and innovation available in the core a flexible collaboration both on business and IT levels and in between different LoB´s is available. With new business insights and with blurring borders between LOB applications it is now easy to introduce new organizations and employees to the new processes and adopt quickly.

Assimilate process innovation

Digital economy constantly pushes and forces organizations to change and overthink their processes and inflexible and stiff organizational constellations make it a complicated matter.

Process changes needed to be made and tested by IT, causing a huge effort and this makes it a long road from the idea to the actual adoption and use.

Now, with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, changes can either be made directly by the user himself, or deployed as a whole. Then the intuitive and flexible SAP Fiori design speeds up the adoption by the end user.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud use case series

To explain this dimensions and value levers a little deeper, we developed several use cases to show you the innovations done with SAP S/4HANA Cloud to cover the new challenges driven by the digital transformation.

In the next blog we will begin with the first use case, which focuses on Finance.

And follow me via @SDenecken to stay on top of the latest…

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#S4HANA Cloud use case series: 4 – Machine Learning with SAP S/4HANA Cloud