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yutakaharano
Associate
Associate
  • In today's competitive & rapid changing business landscape in the cloud era, delivering the value to customers is essential.
  • Since 2023, SAP has started to explore with customers on the flamework Customer Value Journey and attempt to maximize customers' value.
  • For enterprises, investment for ERP is one of the biggest IT investments, therefore enterprises usually build a business case and decide investment plan with expected value.
  • In order to define an accurate and detailed business case, and also to reap the value, it is necessary to grasp the ASIS situation with data.
  • In this report, let me share SAP Japan's attempt "Business Case with Signavio(ProcessInsights)" to build an accurate business case.

1. What is Business Case and why needed?

    • Business case is a written document that provides the justification for starting a new project or business initiative.
    • It includes detailed information about the reasons, expected benefits, risks, and costs associated with the decision.
    • Business case is required for several reasons shown as below when enterprises decide investment.
      • Justification: It provides reasoning for why a project or investment is needed, outlining the benefits and how it aligns with wider business objectives.
      • Planning: It helps in planning and preparing for a project, highlighting key steps, timelines, and resources required.
      • Transparency: It creates transparency, allowing stakeholders and team members to understand why certain decisions are being made.
      • It should be defined with consideration from not only from executives' view, but also from the fieldworker view.
    • Starting point or expected value can be set from financial state perspective from executives view, shown as image1.

Image1: V-model of value definition

yutakaharano_1-1706866102471.png

2. What is missing in many business cases?

    • The expected value is generated by improvement, automation, organizational streamlining etc, which is connected to each process.
    • But usually it is difficult to discuss process topics shown as Layer3, like how to improve processes, which process includes crucial problems, because of complexity of data and analysis workloads etc.
    • Therefore, in phase to build a case, issues of each process is not discussed in detail, consequently, granularity of expected value is not high.
    • So, dive-into discussion about each process is set in requirement-definition phase.

3. How Signavio(Process Insights) can solve

    • Signavio is able to visualize and analyze each process as PPI(Process Performance Indicator) and Blockers(Process Flow Detailed Metrics) based on extracted data from SAP ERP, from field view to management view, with easiness.
    • Some of PPI have Benchmark population data and they allow to compare with other companies' data.
    • PPI can indicate Value Driver's performance and even underpin & substantiate Value Drivers, like as top-down analysis as image2 or LoB(Line of Business) analysis as image3.

      Image2: Definition of Business Value Tree

      Screenshot 2024-02-02 at 18.35.31.png

      Image3: Core Value Drivers & PPIs

      Screenshot 2024-02-02 at 18.37.09.png

       

    • With that analysis, easy to define pain point or points which are required improvement.
    • Consequently, the reliability of business case can be improved.

4. Further advantages provided after go-live

  • Signavio provides further advantages and benefits through providing continuous tracking and improvements.
    • By gathering data before implementation and after implementation, so-called "Before-After" analysis is available, and the value is easily calculated and compared.
    • When pursuing cause of issues, it is easy to refer to the fact data of each process and easy to define the root cause.
    • When process change for improvement is requred to be scaled, easy to manage to scale to whole entities.  

Based on my experience, each activity of business case, implementation, reaping the value after Go-live is not connected perfectly.

But, thanks to Signavio in this cloud era, that connection can be established.

I strongly believe that this certain connection generates more value for customers, more rapidly, more clearly.