The world is changing. Businesses are seeing disruptions and questioning what it takes to succeed. How do you prepare?
To outperform your competition, you need the right information at the right time and the right place. SAP S/4HANA provides that access, and the business case for Consumer Industries is compelling.
Change is Good
Companies adapt or die. Just look at Radio Shack, Toys R Us, and Blockbuster.
Shouldn’t business leaders see a clear path to success? Why do they refuse to change? Are they surrounded by ‘Yes Men’ who fear challenging the status quo?
Or maybe it’s less about leadership abilities and more about how they are driving critical decisions with obsolete data?
What Do Industry Leaders Have in Common?
True leaders:
- Create a transformation culture.
- Focus on solutions, not problems
- Are masters at simplifying the issues
- Know what to change and when
Who best to inform us than customers? And by customers, we mean all of them, internal as well as the end-user. Are we providing them with the best experience possible? Or are we causing them frustration?
No Magic 8 Ball, But Almost as Good
There is no replacement for the human element in business, yet there are ways to improve through technology. Technology is crucial for your business to work with real-time data while maintaining a robust digital presence.
Companies must adapt their business models, yet many can’t access necessary data on their current platform.
If you are on SAP’s Business Suite on HANA or SAP’s legacy ERP, moving to SAP S/4HANA lets you eliminate the frustrations for your employees and your customers and grow your bottom line.
The move is about about removing technical roadblocks and barriers of the past, and then taking advantage of new opportunities due to a more agile technology backbone.
How do you pull this off?
Based on our experience with SAP customers, we know a migration to SAP S/4HANA can:
- Improve business flexibility: Predict, accommodate, and tackle challenges today tomorrow. SAP Analytics Cloud will allow users to build predictive models with automation and access a wide variety of machine learning algorithms. No coding required!
- Be your early warning system: Anticipate and alert the business to supply disruptions, and product demand changes. AI-enabled forecasting enables data-driven decisions. Users spend less time exploring data and more time acting on it.
- Provide real-time updates: See activities from employees, customers, distributors, vendors, and suppliers, so course corrections can be made.
What Do the Numbers Tell Us for an SAP S/4HANA Business Case?
In September of 2019, Forrester published an economic impact study of moving to SAP S/4HANA through interviews and surveys of over 100 customers. They found that, on average, the ROI achieved was 134%, and the payback was just over 13 months. Incremental revenue was up close to 3%, and incremental net profit reached 1.5% after three years.
Here’s how the benefits broke down in that Forrester study:
- 66% of benefits came via increased revenue from functionality enabled by SAP S/4HANA
- 22% came from increased customer retention due to capabilities enabled by SAP S/4HANA
- 6% of benefits are the result of increased end-user productivity due to reduced run times
- 3% derive from accelerated collections due to simplified accounting capabilities
- The last 3% of SAP S/4HANA benefits come from a combination of increased IT productivity, accelerated cash flow in managing customer orders, and avoided cost of previously licensed software and hardware
Don’t Be a Statistic
A 2020 Business Insider article listed 6,300 store closures including JCPenney, Victoria’s Secret, Tuesday Morning, Bath & Body Works, Nordstrom, Sears, Forever 21, and Walgreens.
If you’re facing a similar situation, or want to grow in a competitive market space, arm yourself with the ability to react quickly.
Start by introducing tools like SAP S/4HANA and the complementary SAP Analytics Cloud to build your business transformation. With SAP’s user-friendly and mobile-ready Fiori apps and a simplified ERP, you can concentrate on the business.
Now is the time to make the data work for you in determining root causes for challenges and visualizing relationships with customers and end-users. Build momentum and optimize your business today.