In the not-too-distant past, preparing for a transformation would normally require weeks to months of workshops, research, alignment calls, discussions; all accompanied by hundreds of slides and Excel files documenting processes and changes throughout the organization. This typically also involved an assessment of existing processes (as-is) and what future processes would look like (to-be), including how the new system would support the new process (gaps) – of course this is an oversimplification.
There are typically a lot more components that go into the design and implementation of a system including master data, workflow, testing, transition or cut-over, and go-live. But, a large part of the system implementation involved an understanding of the as-is, to-be, and the gaps.
A lot has changed since.
With the advent of cloud software, systems are now being deployed with pre-built, ready to use content that allow users to utilize and adopt software faster than ever. Think about the existing design thinking templates in Mural, professionally designed presentation templates in Canva, guided analytical capabilities in your statistical software package, and the list goes on.
Within SAP Signavio Process Transformation Suite, the body of pre-built content is a much broader concept, going beyond standard templates. These sets of content, aptly named value accelerators, help organizations accelerate their transformation and/or continuous improvement journeys. SAP Signavio Value Accelerators used or integrated with SAP Signavio solutions include one or more of the following:
• Capability maps and reference architecture diagrams
• Business process models
• Ready to use metrics, dashboards and data transformation templates
• Innovation and correction recommendations
• Best practice, deployment details and localization requirements for SAP products
• Connectors, integrations, templates, and other technical enablers
The content delivered supports an organization’s end-to-end transformation and improvement journey. In particular, SAP Signavio Value Accelerators can help you to:
• Scope your project: With business capability, solution maps and reference architecture diagrams, you are provided with a starting point to enable the understanding of current and future-state process and technology architecture. This equips you to understand your global IT landscape and processes rapidly, facilitates discussion and allows you to initiate conversations around your organization on what is coming, akin to having headlights that move with your steering wheel.
• Accelerate your time to analysis: With data extractions and transformation templates, best practice solution process flows, metrics, and benchmarks, the content will speed up your connectivity efforts and fast-start your process mining experience. Ultimately you will accelerate your time to insight and achieve a deep, fast understanding of your end-to-end processes.
• Design your processes efficiently: Process models enable you to quickly adopt best practices but also allow flexibility in ensuring that the processes are fit-for-purpose. Process models work as foundational templates when transforming an existing process or when introducing a new business model. You can now get access to a digital version of the process diagram, which – when imported into SAP Signavio – can be manipulated based on your company’s requirements and used as a blueprint to design and run the process.
• Accelerate time to action and deployment: By applying product best practices and innovation recommendations as well as solution processes with links to executables, configurations, test scripts, set up instructions and more, users are able to orchestrate components they will later use in the setup of their systems.
Benefits of Value Accelerators
There are a wave of benefits that organizations will achieve by leveraging SAP Signavio Value Accelerators.
Reduce time and effort: SAP Signavio Value Accelerators reduce time and effort needed to research, assess, and document standard process content by starting with SAP best practices. They provide direction and guidance, avoiding the complexity, time and costs to start from a blank slate. Efforts for your implementation and delivery teams are reduced, you can get ahead with pre-built content that can be adapted to your own requirements.
Mitigate project risks, avoid errors and costly reworks: To be elevated to the dimension of “accelerator”, all accelerator assets are tested and enriched by many. By adopting SAP Signavio Value Accelerators you can act confidently, and you are always exposed to the latest and greatest practices. This also ensures that implementation time and costs are more predictable as you apply proven best practices that are a best match to your solutions.
Draw on the experience of SAP and partners: SAP Signavio Value Accelerators represent the collective knowledge from thousands of transformation projects delivered by SAP and its ecosystem. They can be delivered by SAP or by partners who are innovators in their specific domain. By leveraging this forward looking knowledge you can understand, and anticipate future innovation roadmap items to prepare for upcoming changes.
Collaboration: When well designed, value accelerators leverage both IT and process expertise and can serve as the lingua franca across the organization, facilitating knowledge sharing and alignment among departments, organizations are able to quickly builds critical mass in process understanding and adoption through internal collaboration.
Customer Success
In Europe, a large logistics provider had existing process models that were documented between a word processing and a vector/diagram processing application. They were going through a S/4HANA transformation and needed to harmonize the various processes across business divisions. Easier said than done, since this required merging multiple word and vector documents to create a global view. Setting the foundation with SAP Signavio Value Accelerators, the logistics provider was able to orient users on the future state processes and as a template for implementation for one business division before moving to the other business divisions.
In France, an industrial manufacturing company realized that there were opportunities for efficiency gains in its finance, manufacturing and supply chain processes. Through the usage of standard accelerator content using SAP Signavio Process Insights, the company uncovered an unhealthy level of maverick purchasing, late and early payments in various regions, long cycle times for invoice processing, inventory that had not moved in more than 6 months, and even production orders that were unconfirmed. Through this initial assessment, the company took the opportunity to increase automation rates, standardize master data to ensure greater production and supply planning accuracy, and reduce stock levels to avoid excessive stock. In addition, they were able to harmonize business processes effectively across continents replicating best practices from their better performing markets and from industry peers.
In Summary
Starting a project and system implementation with resource-consuming activities is a thing of the past. In an age where cloud software is standard, there are new ways to approach systems implementation that are time and cost efficient and that lead to better outcomes. Documenting and researching processes from a blank sheet is not a good use of any organization’s time and costly resources, not when there are pre-built value accelerators readily available to catapult your organization’s business transformation progress. In an age where technology is leading the way, your approach to transformation shouldn’t be stuck in the past – not when you can front run an implementation using value accelerators.
To learn more about SAP Signavio Value Accelerators, visit our website and stay tuned for my next blog on the topic.
