Transform Confidently: RISE with SAP Methodology

Today we’re introducing a new customer onboarding experience and quality check enhancements in RISE with SAP Methodology. After April 1, 2024, all customers subscribing to RISE with SAP for the first time will go through this improved experience at no additional cost.

RISE with SAP is a managed cloud offering that can enable customers to unlock continued innovation and transformation by modernizing their business-critical systems and processes in a highly collaborative and measurable way. This offering includes the newly announced RISE with SAP Migration and Modernization program that helps bring renewed focus on the cloud transformation journey by enabling smooth, secure migration of on-premise SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC) and SAP S/4HANA customers to the cloud. The key pillars of the program are the RISE with SAP Methodology, transformation incentives, and the innovation road map. The program features offerings tailored to each customer’s unique starting point. Its components are differentiated for SAP ECC and SAP S/4HANA customers and can run with a clean core approach, taking advantage of the latest innovations in RISE with SAP.  

The cornerstone of the program is the RISE with SAP Methodology. The methodology captures the best practices of successful implementations from thousands of RISE with SAP customers over three years and is designed to provide a consistent approach – from planning to go-live to ongoing operations and evolution – that can meet customers’ business transformation goals. Whether through SAP or partner-led engagements, customers can get a clear path with specific implementation stages and success KPIs to be able to take advantage of speed, agility, and all the benefits of the cloud.

Today we’re adding enhancements to the RISE with SAP Methodology, including a new onboarding experience and quality checks throughout the project implementation phases. All new RISE with SAP customers will go through this onboarding experience at no additional cost. The new experience provides guided enablement by SAP-assigned onboarding advisors and related tools and services to help customers implement their cloud ERP solutions with clarity and confidence. The onboarding advisors can guide customers through the overall process aligned with the RISE with SAP Methodology and prepare them to get started with their implementation. The new experience also helps simplify best practice implementation of the clean core, helping to make it a more central, actionable, and measurable standard of all implementations. This helps ensure all RISE with SAP customers can benefit from business agility, faster innovation cycles, and improved value realization. 

The new improvements to the RISE with SAP Methodology include:

• Expert onboarding guidance through embedded launch activities: A dedicated SAP advisor can deliver 1:1 enablement sessions to help educate customers on the RISE with SAP Methodology, clean core strategy, and related tools for implementation. Also, there are role-based, recorded enablement sessions covering business process best practices, solution architectures, and other strategic topics leading up to the go-live milestone. Check out this blog on embedded launch activities to get a full view on what enablement resources are delivered through this new onboarding experience with RISE with SAP. 
• Clean core-focused success plan, runbook, and quality checks: We’ve developed a clean core success plan with clear milestones and KPIs. The clean core success plan is now added to the SAP Activate road map viewer, where customers – with the support of SAP advisors and partners – can review the recommended actions in uniquely created road maps, aligning their needs with best practices to help continually unlock business value faster. We’re also adding new quality gate checks to validate that the actual implementation is in line with recommended clean core best practices before customers proceed to the next project phase. The outcome of the quality gate is the SAP clean core report with feedback and recommendations on how to implement the clean core strategy. These recommendations are recorded and tracked via the updated runbook in the SAP Cloud ALM solution. To learn more, read a blog post on this topic. 

We’ll continue to deliver more tools, templates, training, and oversight to help make it easier for customers to execute an optimal migration or transition to the cloud and achieve their business objectives. Coming later this year is the RISE with SAP system transition workbench. This tool will help the technical implementation of migrating to cloud ERP by providing digital access to SAP-approved best practices and guidance for migrations, automation of tasks, health, and system checks. Stay tuned as we get ready to share more on this in the coming weeks.   

To learn more, join us for our upcoming webinar on May 23, where we will go deeper into this new onboarding experience in the RISE with SAP Methodology. Register here.

Panda Priyadarsana is SVP and GM of Customer Services & Delivery and head of Cloud ERP at SAP.

Photo courtesy of SAP employee Juelma Guerreiro.