Determining the value of digital transformation

I’ve seen business cases that would knock your socks off. If you believe them, you will be able to reduce your financial cost by 80%. My view of this is that anyone who improves finance cost by 80% has a pretty poor financial process to begin with. SAP sells business software, so it is somehow seems logical that we can create a tool which makes building a business case easier. Well we have, and not just one. Our value engineering team has a vast template of tools and services to help understand how a software investment will generate business values.

We also have the SAP Transformation Navigator (www.sap.com/transformationnavigator) which answers the why?, what? and how? of digital transformation by industry. The way you use it is first you build a model of the products you have and capability you desire. Out of this product model, the appropriate next software solutions are selected based on the SAP and SAP partner roadmaps. If you have a cloud strategy or on-premise, both are covered in the TN. The result is a set of documents which provides a clear view the what and how of your specific digital transformation journey.

The next step would be to identify the value drivers you intend to priorities. The tool will tell you how well the product model addresses the value drivers. It also provides a guild to how much a value driver was effected by an actual digital transformation based on experiences from other customers. This was by far not the promised help to build a business case for digital transformation. The tool never asked about actual revenue, employee, margin and other cost data to create an actual case.

Our teams have over the summer, linked the SAP Transformation Navigator to the Quick Value Assessment tool from our value engineering team. The QVA (Quick Value Assessment) is a tool in which you enter your business data into, and it will create an initial business case for your company, based on your company specific business metrics.

So you can forget the pie in the sky numbers previously generated by the SAP Transformation Navigator. The QVA provides in my opinion a good first draft of a business case for digital transformation. Should you require help with the QVA, or require additional support constructing your company specific business case for digital transformation you can easily reach out to our Value Engineering team through the tool.